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Still Curious
Curiosity is a gift we start with but often lose. So what about those people who are still curious? Grokkist founder Danu Poyner meets people who insist on relating to the world with curiosity and care and talks to them about the red thread that runs through their life story and which ultimately empowers them to flourish as their unrepeatable selves. Find out more at https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast
Still Curious
Deep Thinking, Education, and Freedom in an Age of Distraction - Jon Burmeister | S4E5
What does it mean to think deeply and live freely in an age of distraction? Philosopher Jon Burmeister reflects on his journey from analytical rigour to embodied integration, exploring whole-person education, the history of ideas, and reclaiming attention in a fragmented world.
Conversation Themes
- Whole-person education as liberation: How liberal arts education fosters curiosity, creativity, and self-knowledge while encouraging openness to change and growth.
- Deep thinking and the attention economy: Why reclaiming focus isn’t just about resisting distractions, but about preserving our capacity to care about what truly matters.
- Ideas as living histories: Viewing philosophy as a dynamic, evolving tradition and understanding our role in shaping and inheriting the collective intellectual journey.
- Flourishing through integration: How Jon balances analytical thinking with embodied practices like yoga, meditation, and breathwork to harmonise the mind, body, and emotions, inspired by Aristotle’s vision of flourishing.
- Reimagining technology’s role: Jon’s intentional approach to living in the digital age, from setting boundaries to fostering deeper attention and presence in a world designed to fragment focus.
About the Guest
Jon Burmeister is Associate Professor Of Philosophy at the University of Mount Saint Vincent. His research interests are in philosophy of technology, philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, and German Idealism. View Jon's academic profile and publications.
Full Show Notes
Visit the Grokkist podcast hub for a full digest of this episode including highlights and links to stuff we discussed: https://grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast/s4e5-jon-burmeister
Recorded 4 April 2024
Website: grokk.ist/stillcuriouspodcast | Email: podcast@grokk.ist | Socials: @grokkist
Music: Kleptotonic Swing by Tri-Tachyon
Traditional forms of education tend to shut down curiosity and shut down creativity. liberal education in its best forms is the kind of education that helps to free you from, Your own unhealthy desires and passions and impulses, What someone like the French philosopher might call a kind of internal slavery. and then the oppression of strong people who want to oppress you. those are two ways in which I think a liberal education liberates us. And helps prepare people for that kind of citizenship with self knowledge, the ability to monitor. the ability to be creative, curious, the desire to not just be spoon fed. I'm thinking about the connection between liberal arts and this idea of the attention economy helping people to develop the mental skills that they need to navigate this very unfriendly technological landscape that we're now in, which these very powerful, very persuasive algorithms are vying for our attention.
Danu Poyner:You're listening to the still curious podcast with me, Daniel pointer. The show where I meet people who insist on relating to the world with curiosity and care. The people I call Caracas and talk to them about the red thread that runs through their life story and ultimately empowers them to flourish. As they unrepeatable selves. The voice you just heard belongs to my guest today. John Burmeister, a philosopher and educator whose wide ranging interests include the philosophy of technology and computing. The future and meaning of work and leisure. Philosophy of mind and the nature of freedom in the attention economy. Today's episode is both a story of whole person education and a conversation about liberation of the mind, the body and the self. John grew up in a deeply religious evangelical household. Homeschooled until high school where belief and faith were central pillars of life. His parents were indifferent about higher education wary that college might undermine his religious faith. After spending a few years as a truck driver for a print shop after high school, John did go to college, a conservative non-denominational institution with strict rules about drinking and dancing, primarily attracting students from Methodist, Wesleyan, and United brethren traditions. It was here that John's love of philosophy was sparked. By charismatic professor known for his humor, irreverence, and a gentle ability to question group. Think without making anyone wrong. This professor's approach gave John a glimpse of how people could be well-meaning, but also confused opening his mind to critical thinking. It was also at college where John formed lasting friendships. Including late night philosophical discussions with a friend at his dorm that inspired him to minor in philosophy alongside other disciplines, like sociology, psychology and literature. He described this period as an intellectual, all you can eat buffet where his curiosity took flight. John pursued his doctoral studies in philosophy at Boston college. Known for its emphasis on whole person education. Intellectual spiritual and personal development. Choosing Boston college because of its alignment with his growing interests in Catholic philosophy and the philosophy of religion. John spent these years deepening his understanding of German idealism, existentialism, and the philosophy of technology, while enduring influences from Aristotle Plato and stoicism shaped his views on human flourishing. During this time, John began teaching philosophy, offering courses on topics like ethics, love and desire, human nature, and political freedom. Inspired by his own transformative experiences. John became deeply invested in the philosophy of education advocating for the role of liberal arts in fostering curiosity, creativity, and citizenship. As you heard in the opening, John sees liberal education as a way to cultivate freedom. Preparing individuals for the challenges of a world increasingly designed to fragment our focus.
Jon Burmeister:When information is abundant, as it is now, sustained attention on one thing is harder and more scarce. That's a real problem for human flourishing, because we start to lose the skills of deep and sustained thinking that actually lead to the solution of problems.
Danu Poyner:John reflects on the growing scarcity of attention in a world, saturated with information, emphasizing that without the ability to focus deeply, we risk losing not just the skills to solve problems, but the capacity to flourish altogether. And as a good heck alien, John also views ideas as living structures built over time through the collective contributions of history. He sees engaging with these ideas as an act of participating in an ongoing process that connects us to both the past and the future.
Jon Burmeister:Ideas are historical, they are built up in a way that's similar to, buildings, if you look at a modern day building, it's the result of the learnings of centuries of architecture and engineering. we ourselves as the thinker of ideas are part of that historical process. we are historical beings
Danu Poyner:as John moved through his journey. His focus shifted from purely analytical thinking to a more embodied way of being it began integrating practices like yoga, meditation, and breath work into his life. Tools that helps him connect with neglected parts of himself and cultivate what he calls the skill of, not thinking. For John flourishing means creating harmony between the analytical and intuitive parts of the self. Integrating the mind, body and emotions. This integration of practices. Isn't just personal. It's deeply philosophical, too. John draws inspiration from Aristotle's idea of flourishing as a process of self movement towards a goal. Where the parts of oneself become more harmonized and whole.
Jon Burmeister:The first, 30 years of my life were focused very much on developing my thinking skills in a very kind of laser focused way. more recent years, I've come to see the importance of Learning how to not think and learning how to, pay attention to other parts of my mind, other parts of reality in a, less cognitive, less conceptual way
Danu Poyner:Despite his deep engagement with technology he lives without a smartphone, intentionally creating boundaries that protect his attention and focus. One of the books. John recommended to me before our conversation was stand out of our light by James Williams, which we discussed in the episode, including its key insight that reclaiming our attention is not just about avoiding distractions, but also about protecting our ability to care about the things that matter most. John storey calls us to re-imagine education, not as a checklist of knowledge, but as a process of liberation. To stand out of the light of distraction is to step fully into the light of purpose, connection and integration. So let's dive in. Here's my conversation with John Burmeister coming up after the music on today's episode of the still curious podcast. So, hi John, welcome to the podcast. How are you going?
Jon Burmeister:Hi, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.
Danu Poyner:Oh, it's very nice to have you on. I've been looking forward to talking to you for a while. so we find you today as an assistant professor of philosophy at the College of Mount St. Vincent in New York City, where you specialize in the philosophy of technology and computing, philosophy of mind and German idealism. You have an interest in the future and meaning of work and leisure and the nature of freedom in the attention economy. What would you say is The best way for someone to understand you as a whole and multidimensional person?
Jon Burmeister:One of my main goals in life is to be really, really good at thinking and also really, really good at not thinking. Being able to do both of those when the situation calls for it. There's lots of ways to become good at thinking, But the way that I've chosen on a kind of personal and professional level is the study of philosophy and all of the tools that provides in terms of logic and critical thinking and metaphysics and all of that. Uh, and then in terms of building my skills of being good at not thinking, my focus in that is, meditation I'm also supplemented by A very kind of, informal loosey goosey yoga practice. and then sometimes, breath work to, I guess among other things, activate my parasympathetic nervous system and learn to relax and my thoughts down. And The first, probably 30 years of my life were focused very much on developing my thinking skills in a very kind of laser focused way. And then in more recent years, I've come to see the importance of Learning how to not think and learning how to, pay attention to other parts of my mind, other parts of reality in a, I guess, a less cognitive, less conceptual way,
Danu Poyner:okay, I really like that answer and it's definitely a philosopher's answer. It makes me wonder though how that shift. Learning how not to think. It might've influenced your understanding of philosophy itself, especially as a discipline, so deeply rooted in the history of ideas. How did your early years in philosophy help shape your sense of what it means to be part of that larger historical process?
Jon Burmeister:So my first couple of years was just trying to build that general background in the history of philosophy to just to get a first flavor of how ideas develop through history, that ideas are historical, that they are built up in a way that's similar to, buildings, if you look at a modern day building, it's the result of the learnings of centuries of architecture and engineering. And as a part of that, just coming to see that we are historical beings, we ourselves as the thinker of ideas are part of that historical process. The pieces fell into place for me to write a dissertation on Hegel with the help of these professors who had been reading him for decades and gave me a little entryway into his thought. There's all sorts of reasons why you might be such a dense writer. But that question ended up being the kind of impetus for my dissertation, which was on Hegel's philosophy of language. And specifically, what kind of language Hegel thinks we should use to write about philosophy. what I call philosophical language, as opposed to, let's say, poetic language, or religious language, or everyday language. And, Hegel doesn't have a lot to say about it. He does have some scattered passages. about why he writes the way he does and the the way that a philosopher in his view needs to use language to best do philosophy. so I tried to develop those isolated passages and connect it with other ideas in his corpus to try to make sense of What a philosophical language would look like. The idea is that philosophy should as much as possible be presupposition less and should start with assuming nothing and then just start your investigation. What he wants to do as he goes is define each word as it pops up, but these definitions end up being inadequate because he doesn't have the language fully defined things. And so words take on different meanings. It's almost like a big dictionary where you need later, more complex terms to help you define the earlier terms. So I, my dissertation was focused on this idea of a living language, that it was almost like a organic. Organism that was unfolding almost like an embryo growing into a full grown biological organism.
Danu Poyner:That is very interesting, and I note that you have an interest in. software as a living organism, and I'm wondering, what connection you can draw between those two things.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah so my dissertation led me to think a lot about the concept of life and what it means at the biological level for something to be alive, and a rock can move, it can be moved, by gravity, or a person, or an animal. But living things move on their own, in that they are the origin of their own movement. And the internal integration of their parts is the functional integration in which there are parts that make them up interact in such a way as to make that movement possible. And these are not just random movements, but movement toward a particular goal. So how can we apply all of this to software is the question that that me and my coauthor took on in a paper that we wrote a few years back. How can we make software more like a living organism, which means making software more internally integrated. The useful contrast here is, especially when we're talking about software, is, Less like a machine and more like a living being because machines, this weird new thing that we have in the last few hundred years, are starting to look a little bit like a living thing insofar as they have self movement, they have complex internal parts that work together to make that movement possible. so we're starting to have technologies that are starting to take on some of the characteristics of living things. And the question is, how far can we push that? What advantages will that give us? And this is not at all a new thing. It's been going on for a long time in all sorts of engineering fields, biomimicry, but I think we see it now in a most advanced way in terms of Artificial intelligence research, which is mimicking as much as possible, structures of the brain and sometimes called neuromorphic computing and that kind of thing to figure out how to make, intelligent machines more intelligent through applications from neuroscience. So this article that we wrote about making software more like a living being is working in that tradition.
Danu Poyner:Looking at the range of your current work, there's clearly a very deep interest in technology and its implications for society patterns work and relating to technology and systems. I'm curious, a, how that comes about and b, what your view on the stakes for society, how you think about what matters for society,
Jon Burmeister:so my interest in technology, I think. It began when I started to think about machine intelligence. Maybe 2014 or so, starting to read about advances in artificial intelligence. I also came across the idea of the control problem and existential risk surrounding artificial intelligence. how humans will retain control over artificial intelligence once it reaches a certain level of, competence. At first it seemed silly to me, like, how could we possibly lose control of of machines that we make, but then I was encouraged I think, by a podcast or something to read Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence, which I think that may have come out maybe 2012, 2013. I read it around 2015. That book made a really large impact on me. Nick Bostrom is one of these people whose intellect is so large. His ability to weave together ideas from computer science, game theory, mathematical logic, political theory. it's really an extremely impressive book. Reading that book, persuaded me that the control problem is going to be a real one at some point in the future. It may be that the problem is solvable in ways that are, easier than some of the doomers think, but I am persuaded that it is a real problem. The next year a friend was going to apply for an NEH grant to develop a course and then also spin off a series of conferences and then you publish some things that were related to the theme and all of this would have some funding and support from the, the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. Which is a government agency in the United States. he and I were going to work on this grant together and it was going to be on work and play. He stumbled into some other publishing and course development opportunities. And so then I just continued on my own with the application and I end up tweaking the application to be about work and leisure. And then I also gave the application a special emphasis on the impact of artificial intelligence. Because that was very topical at the time, but not very widely known amongst the public, I figured that would be both very cool to work on and useful for the grant application. Boston College Philosophy Department were my institutional sponsor for the grant. I was able to get the grant. I developed the course, taught it at Boston college, then I ended up putting on a couple of conferences in the Boston area on artificial intelligence as related to work and leisure. at that point I became, more and more interested in just what is technology, trying to think about artificial intelligence, made me realize that I had not given serious Adequate thought at all to what it means for humans to build things. And in my current position at the university of Mount St. Vincent. I have developed a course on philosophy of technology. And then also a course called AI and data ethics. So it's the ethics of artificial intelligence and the ethics of data, which includes like privacy and social media and things like that.
Danu Poyner:I'm very curious to hear about what happens in a philosophy of technology course and who comes to it, but before I ask you about that, I'm just curious. What was the adjunct teaching, experience like?
Jon Burmeister:Yeah, I didn't love teaching my first semester, but I think by my second semester, I realized that this was something for me, and In the Boston College Philosophy Doctorate program, they throw you in early. Our second year of the program, we are given our own class, we have to design our own syllabus, we're not teaching assistants or anything like that. I've been teaching my own classes since, 2003. Boston College value teaching. And that's part of this focus on whole person education, that the connection between student and teacher is not just one of information transfer. That it can be much more personal than that. And we had teaching seminars where we would meet with other first and second year graduate student teachers and. It was supervised by a Boston College faculty member who had been teaching for decades. And so we would talk about our teaching. We would talk about how to connect better with the students, how to be more Socratic, how to not ask leading questions that shut down conversation, but to be genuine and asking open ended questions.
Danu Poyner:Is it fair to say that having originally approached college with some amount of trepidation and then having had the full liberal arts experience that you're now quite an advocate for a full liberal arts education? Yeah.
Jon Burmeister:almost on the verge of creating a picket sign and carrying it around New York City. Uh, Yeah. Full throated advocate. I like the phrase liberal education better than liberal arts. It goes beyond the arts. mathematics is part of the liberal arts, but it's not an art in the traditional sense. And by that phrase, a liberating educatioN. I certainly didn't make this idea up. It's, I think it, it goes back to ancient Greece, goes back to Plato and Aristotle. I think the standard bearers of this idea of education in the United States is probably, St. John's which has a campus in Annapolis and also one in Santa Fe. That is considered part of the great books tradition. The great books tradition also has centers in the university of Chicago. also some degree at Columbia university. And the idea is that all students read a certain set of books, and they read them together. The idea of a liberal education going back to the ancient Greeks is twofold. so liberal comes from liberating or like free, if you go back to the etymology. So one sense of that term for the ancient Greeks was that this is an education that's available to people who are freE. Free from working 10 hours a day picking rocks in a field, free from the demands of extremely difficult manual labor. Part of the origins of this phrase are quite elitist and aristocratic that a liberal education is for people who don't have to get their hands dirty all day, they have free time to study music, to study poetry, to study rhetoric, to study logic. You can only go to school if you have a lot of leisure. I think the more interesting reading on liberal education is that It is the kind of education that helps to free you in certain ways, to liberate you in certain ways. There's two things that almost all people need to be freed from, which would be Your own unhealthy desires and passions and, impulses, and then the oppression of strong people who want to oppress you. So liberal education is designed in its best forms to help free us from the parts of ourselves that are leading us in the wrong direction. away from our own happiness. What someone like Rousseau, the French philosopher might call a kind of internal slavery. You're a slave to your own unhealthy desires. and then there's the political aspect that you really cannot have. A functioning democracy, unless a certain segment of the citizens have received a liberal education, which means that they're able to participate in a democratic system in some kind of intelligent way. They're not just thinking about their own immediate personal desires, but they have some concept, however general, of the common good. The idea that, okay, I don't like that my taxes might need to be raised a little bit, but that's going to be good because people with less fortunate backgrounds than me could really use it. And that's the just thing to do. I think that a liberal education helps prepare people for that kind of citizenship. so those are two ways in which I think a liberal education liberates us.
Danu Poyner:I read, Stand Out of Your Light a little while ago on your recommendation, which I understood as a half a critique of the way, Technology, and particularly social media, captures our attention for its own ends. And half is just a very beautiful, freestanding philosophy of attention, with these different categories of attention, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the book and your relationship with the ideas, perhaps you can explain it.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. I found the book to be so beneficial for my thinking about both technology and like you said, the psychology of attention. So the theme of this book, Stand Out of Our Light, what he compares in one of the chapters to a monster, and a monster that's not all bad, but it is this gargantuan creature of Google, Facebook, Netflix, TOK, Instagram. These forces that are unrivaled in their power over the human mind. I don't think there's any precedent in human history, certainly not at the corporate level, but probably not even at the governmental level. For an entity to have such granular moment by moment influence over so many human minds as say TikToks or Instagrams algorithms have over human minds today.
Danu Poyner:I like the way he phrases the nature of that problem in saying, tech companies have their own goals that they're pursuing, that are, unlikely to be the ones that you would pursue for your own life, necessarily. And what happens when they diverge? And there's that control influence, and you don't have that. I'm interested in political history, especially, and I would nominate nationalism as the most important, idea in political history in modern times that would give you a similar precedent. I dunno if you know the book, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, which is about where. the idea of nationalism comes from and how it's, invented. And it's possible to have the technology of nationalism as an idea because of the real world technologies of, maps, newspapers, and museums is what he's saying, because for the first time you can imagine yourself as being part of a broader community, for these reasons. And so that's what allows you to then have the group think and everything else. Big Tech, with its granularity and its scale and its speed, seems to offer similar implications, but at a much bigger scale. So that's a connection I would draw.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. That's very helpful. They're both these centralizing forces, because now you have these communities on social media that span the borders of traditional nation states. so now you have people around the world, lobbying the United States government to not ban TikTok and it's almost comparable to the map. If you give people a map, then they can imagine themselves part of this bigger whole. TikTok is doing that with its own technology saying TikTok nation, we have to rise up. We're being persecuted. Yeah, I love that connection. I'm thinking about the connection between liberal arts and this idea of the attention economy in the books stand out of our light in terms of helping people to develop the mental skills that they need to navigate this very unfriendly technological landscape that we're now in, which these very powerful, very persuasive algorithms are vying for our attention. some of the skills that a liberal education gives us, self knowledge, the ability to monitor. the ability to be creative, the ability to be curious, the desire to not just be spoon fed. Traditional forms of education tend to shut down curiosity and shut down creativity. And it's for understandable reasons because the teachers need to teach to some kind of standardized test. I fully sympathize with those teachers in the constraints that they're working in, but that pedagogical environment tends to shut down the kind of curiosity, creativity, student motivated learning. That might help people to better recognize when they've been sucked into an unhealthy vortex of messages and ads where you're, just a purely passive, almost vegetative Consumer.
Danu Poyner:that's where the book was most compelling for me is in, in spelling out the difference. levels of attention, because, we tend to think about what he calls the spotlight of our attention. to be attentionist. It's distracting me in this moment because I'm scrolling and not doing something else, but it's much deeper than that because there's the starlight attention about knowing what direction you're going and where you're headed, lift your head from the, screen, where are you going in life? And then the daylight attention of wanting what you want to want. having the freedom to even be able to have those, thoughts and clarity about wanting what you want to want.
Jon Burmeister:So what are some ways that you think that. Daylight attention and starlight attention can be fostered in us that we can build those powers, from their, normally diminished state.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, that's a great question. I'm very interested in facilitating people towards flourishing and, in this construct, That conversation is a daylight conversation. And I tend to encounter a time when they are, trying to recover their lives from, the path they thought they were on and they've been burnt out or disillusioned by institutions that bear the same name as the practice they care about but actually get in the way of doing the practice and why they wanted to do it in the first place, or trying to figure out how all of the different types of expertise and experience they've accumulated fit together, in some way that's rich and multidimensional and not reductionist in lack of an answer to,, what do you do? To me, it's a relationship of care, that allows those things to take place. acknowledging an other and entering into a relationship. of care and curiosity with them. That is the first thing to do. people set their own direction. Ultimately, I think people are like plants. they want to grow. you don't have to do anything to make a plant grow other than give it the right conditions and stand out of its light as it were. so yeah, this is something obviously I'm very passionate about.
Jon Burmeister:That's really nice. one thing that I'm hearing you say is helping people to feel that they are loved and that they're in a kind of. safe place to dream about different possibilities for themselves. as opposed to metaphorically speaking, head down, just looking at the phone or the ground or five feet in front of you, to think about different possibilities for their lives than they currently imagine. Another point that I, I find to be, incredibly helpful in James Williams's Stand Out of Our Light is a point he makes about information scarcity versus information abundance and the idea that before the information age, information was scarce. You would get a newspaper or people would pass through town. You would ask him like, Hey, what's going on? or you would have a telegraph message or something like that. But the idea that he raises in the book, I found to be so helpful for understanding our own current struggles is that when information is scarce, sustained attention on one thing is easier and more abundant. And When information is abundant, as it is now, sustained attention on one thing is harder and more scarce.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. and therefore the valuing of. both the information and the attention changes.
Jon Burmeister:I do think that social media has some real benefits. for example, a lot of my students have some Basic familiarity with mental health terminology. they're interested in the idea of shadow work, or they understand that your sympathetic nervous system can be activated and can make you stressed. and they're not getting this from reading books. They're getting it from social media. So I do think that very skimming surface level engagement that we get with social media has some real benefits.
Danu Poyner:I would offer another concept that goes nicely with that. There's a guy called Victor Meyer Schoenberger, I think, and he has a book. called Delete. And, he's making the point that for all of human history, we have defaulted to forgetting things. But now we default to remembering things. You can see it In technology, no one ever goes through and edits or deletes their photos. You just end up with 14, 000 photos and emails and because it's more trouble than it's worth to go and delete things. So you remember them by default. And so that changes the nature of information and attention also.
Jon Burmeister:Wow, yeah. I totally relate to that. just this morning I was thinking that I need to go through my recent vacation photos, but that before I do that I should go through my photos from last summer. And it's just going to get worse when people start wearing, you know, AI pins that are recording everything so that we have video of everything we do as Ram gets cheaper, storage is cheaper. There's this problem would just get worse and worse. And I think it's similar with the information abundance problem where. you don't even need to have, a bunch of superficial interests, you can have very quote unquote serious, meaningful interests that you set up your phone or your feeds to give to you, and it can be just too much. there's just so much great stuff on the internet now about psychology, about human flourishing, about philosophy, about environmental studies, about AI safety, about neuroscience, you can just be getting thousands of notifications a day, any one of which would be a worthwhile thing to pursue. My tendency then is just to scan very quickly, each one. And then as Nicholas Carr talks about in his book, The Shallows, to eventually lose the ability to read anything because we lose the skill. And then maybe I also forget how to think deeply about one problem over an extended period of time. Marianne Wolf talks about developing this dual reading skill. One skill is oriented towards shallow, quick reading. And then the other form of reading that you want to keep up your skills with is. Deep reading, sustained attention, because both of them have their place. we didn't have to intentionally form this dual form of reading before the internet age, because information was scarce, But now that we have both wonderful books to read and feeds coming at us, it makes sense to take advantage of both. And it makes sense to, in a self-conscious way, switch back and forth to what kind of attention am I gonna give this? Whereas our default tends to be, I just give it the level of attention that feels right in the moment. And what feels right is. My inbox is like overwhelmed. My text messages, I haven't read them all. So then the default mode of attention becomes very shallow. I think that's a real problem for human flourishing, because we start to lose skills of introspection and we start to lose the skills of deep and sustained thinking that actually lead to the solution of problems.
Danu Poyner:Most definitely. And to have, flourishing in that sense, you need to cultivate, the diachronic self, the stable self over time. And if all of your attention is patchy and spotty, and you don't have that starlight or the daylight that it can happen in, then you won't be doing that. And you may not be aware that you're not doing that, just aware that something's not right.
Jon Burmeister:I really appreciate that point there's all this lots of debates right now about the influence of smartphones on mental health and specifically teen mental health. And I wonder if what you just mentioned is not a big part of it. So if you're a teenager, you're trying to form your sense of yourself, and it's already a very difficult thing to do pre smartphone. lots of people joke about, when I was in high school, I was like a goth one day and then I was a prep. And then later I was like in a punk band. So it's natural to experiment with different selves when you're a teenager,
Danu Poyner:Especially when those can be forgotten as well and not defaulted to being remembered.
Jon Burmeister:yes, and photographed.
Danu Poyner:and brought up potentially at any point in the future.
Jon Burmeister:Sure. But then if, The idea of a sustained attention and remembering of your own diachronic self becomes harder because of the choppiness of the TikTok experience. That would be even more disorienting, like continual whiplash. Teenagers would probably be experiencing that more than they Normally would be just based on their neurobiology. When I hear some of my students say that they spend six or eight hours a day TikTok, don't know how to process that would mean experientially or what it would be doing to them developmentally.
Danu Poyner:are the students who you have In your classes, where are they from? what's their background and are their concerns and hopes,
Jon Burmeister:I would say most of my students are first generation college students. So their parents did not go to college. A lot of my students are coming from the Bronx. so for a lot of them, they don't know what to expect from college. They have not been given a series of narratives about this is what college will be, this is how great it will be. Here's what you'll learn. If you're the first person in your family to go to college, it's a lot of, novelty and sometimes can be overwhelming.
Danu Poyner:my, mentor professor, Rob, he came from a very working class background and he was first in family to go to university and he didn't know what to do when he turned up, and. He thought that you were supposed to go to the library and just read all the books. So He did. He started at A and just worked his way through all the books until he got to about F or something That's why he likes Hannah Arendt. It's maybe not a bad way to do it.
Jon Burmeister:That's not a bad way to do it. Yeah. so a lot of students That I teach don't know what to expect. and I mean, to be fair, even when I was teaching at schools where most of the students were coming from the families of doctors and lawyers and surgeons and so forth, they also had no idea what to expect. in Introduction to Philosophy, because unless you go to an unusual high school, you're probably not getting any exposure to philosophy. so yeah, if you're a first generation college student, then it's doubly disorienting. So, the challenge for me is to really not make assumptions about what they might know. But the benefit of that is That helps me to be more philosophical, to not make presuppositions, to not throw in fancy words that I think I know what they mean when maybe I don't know what they mean, or I haven't fully worked it out. to be a good teacher, I need to break things down to their component parts and really connect it up with The stuff of life. otherwise my students, most of them will be confused quite quickly. But again, there's a real benefit to this because when I was teaching at schools where students had gone to prep schools and they had taken all these extracurriculars. A lot of the students are very concerned about looking smart or their idea of what smart is. And so they will hear a word or a phrase and then be afraid to ask what it means because they think they would look dumb. something I really appreciate about most of the students that I teach is that they don't have any of this pretentiousness. If they don't understand something, they'll just be like, I don't know what that means.
Danu Poyner:Now that we've explored John's professional perspective. Let's turn to the personal journey that shaped his approach to philosophy and life. I'm curious when did you first have that desire to be really good at thinking, it sounds like it was fairly early on. did Young John have that as a plan a?
Jon Burmeister:not really. I always enjoyed academics, but I wouldn't say that I wanted to become more skillful at thinking in general until I discovered philosophy in college And really crystallized the theme of thinking in general, like rationality and reason and critical thinking. I was raised in a very conservative, evangelical environment. From kindergarten up through the fourth grade, I attended, Christian private schools. so I was homeschooled from fifth grade. up through high school graduation. My parents weren't super keen on college. looking back at it, I would say that they viewed college solely as a vocational training. So their advice was, well, if you're not sure what you want to do for a vocation, then there's no point in starting college, which, I know in hindsight is, is really bad advice. That's a long way of saying that I just worked for a couple of years out of high school. I was a truck driver for, a print shop, just driving this big truck around, delivering printed materials. It's I got to know the guys that ran the warehouse and a couple of the other drivers. so I got to experience that mode of living, for a couple of years. in many ways, it was a great job. Just like being in a vehicle, independent on your own for a lot of the day, listening to the radio, listening to music. and then eventually I, I decided to go to college to be a high school social studies teacher. That was my goal. So I, I became an education major with a focus on social studies. I
Danu Poyner:What led you to that particular path?
Jon Burmeister:think it was, the fact that history was probably my favorite topic in high school. I just found history fascinating in terms of these general kind of life lessons that you could learn, from seeing people make mistakes and seeing people have successes. And I didn't know what to do with it. So I decided I'd be a teacher. but about a year into my education major, I just got turned off by a lot of the educational methods that were being taught to me and I realized I didn't really connect with, the high school psyche. for 15 or 16 year-olds.
Danu Poyner:Was that cause you'd had the homeschooling experience, What was it like to do observations of high school, in your college degree. Was that surprising what that environment was or what was it what you expected?
Jon Burmeister:It was more a matter of the level at which the students were operating was not one that excited me. and their level of engagement, their level of interest, and then what could be taught to them. That's when I started to think about higher education so I ended up dropping my education major, switching to just a straight history major. Right around the time I took a mandatory introduction to philosophy class, had no interest in taking it, didn't want to take it. took it reluctantly. it's funny now because I'm such a huge advocate for core curriculum, liberal arts education, but in college, I didn't see the point of having to take all these classes that I quote unquote wasn't going to use. So I actually went to the provost office. schedule a meeting with the provost to complain about, like, why do I need to take, four semesters of Spanish et cetera, et cetera, it was good that I was asking questions because I think, my teachers weren't exactly explaining to us students, at least in a way that I can understand, what was the purpose of the classes. To fast forward for a second to today, this really motivates me, like in my core classes, as a philosophy professor, I always spend time with my students in the conversation of what are we doing here? It's a bit insulting to students to have them sit in a three month course and never really give them a chance to think that question through.
Danu Poyner:Absolutely. Did the provost engage with your, questioning or did they just tell you no?
Jon Burmeister:No, remember him being annoyed. Maybe he gave me some rationale, but it wasn't one that my young brain could comprehend. Basically, it was, you need to do this because it's for your own good. so that wasn't very satisfying, but then very shortly thereafter, I came to see the wisdom of that in taking this philosophy class and finding it incredibly interesting, incredibly fascinating. So I ended up minoring in philosophy, I don't think I actually would have done. I If my interest had not continued to be piqued by a guy in my hall who was a philosophy major. So he me continue in these philosophical conversations over the next semester. then at that point I was like, wait a minute, I think I should probably minor in this.
Danu Poyner:Do you remember a particular moment where you went from skeptical to switched on? Was there something about that course Or was it the teacher, or was it the stuff outside the course and the discussion?
Jon Burmeister:There's no concept that really sticks out in my memory. It was really the person of the teacher. that was a lot of my initial attraction to philosophy was who is this person who can talk and think and persuade in the way that this person does. I'd never encountered someone like him before. He was funny. He was slightly irreverent. this is a very, evangelical, pretty conservative school. he was considered the, uh, campus liberal. He sort of gave me this little glimpse of Oh, there's a different way of being that's a little bit, like I said, irreverent, a little bit, ironic. And able to question the groupthink that's so common, everywhere in the world, but especially in that particular environment of a small religious community. It was a non denominational college, but it primarily attracted students from Methodist, Wesleyan, United Brethren, sort of tradition. there was very conservative rules on campus, no drinking, no dancing. It was ungodly. So yeah, my my professor, philosophy professor, Dr. Michael Peterson, had a huge impact on me terms of helping me to see the world a bit differently and to gain a kind of critical distance from myself and from the world I grew up in and be willing to say, well, there may be some cracks here. There may be some things that are not quite right. But without, tossing out the whole thing.
Danu Poyner:Had you been doing questioning of your own up until then, and then this was a lever that could crack that open, or was this the first occasion to be doing that.
Jon Burmeister:I would say that was probably the first occasion.
Danu Poyner:That's pretty
Jon Burmeister:big. yeah, and it was pretty gentle. if I had a class with, I don't know, Bertrand Russell or somebody like that, I probably would have just pushed it all the way and said, this is not for me. But it was just a very gentle introduction into critical thinking into. looking at subcultures and collections of beliefs as, well meaning but potentially misguided. So the idea that people could be well meaning and confused was something that came across in this class very strongly. and then as I mentioned, having a friend in my hall. In the dorms who was on a similar path, but was a philosophy major and asking him about his classes and getting a little sneak peek of what he was studying, that was also really impactful on me and I probably would not have become a philosophy minor without that more personal connection to philosophy that developed through those late night dorm room conversations.
Danu Poyner:Is that the first time you had those deep intellectual conversations with a peer? Is that also a new experience?
Jon Burmeister:That was, yeah, uh, I mean, I had, definitely it had intense conversations with peers about religious and theological questions, when I was younger in my church, but in terms of a kind of a broader philosophical approach and I took a class on sociology and that started to inform my view of the world, took a class on psychology and all of these were completely new to me. These different lenses through which to see the world. As a college student, I was just, like at this, all you can eat buffet and just lapping it all up. And then I discovered literature and almost fit in a literature minor. And so yeah, college is really special time.
Danu Poyner:You said something very interesting about the approachability of the way, Professor Peterson was introducing these ideas to you. I'm curious. what that sounds like in the context that you were in to have this, approachable introduction to questioning groupthink. I wonder if you can give me a flavor of that.
Jon Burmeister:I think, At the time, I was a very conservative evangelical Christian, read the Bible as being infallible. Every word literally true. And I was actually suspicious of philosophy going into it. Philosophy, psychology, Freudianism. Um, I didn't know anything about these things except that I'd heard things about them that they were not a good influence. One of the reasons I chose this school was because it really did align with a lot of my values. But Dr. Peterson was able to crack open a space to think a bit more broadly. And we studied some Aristotle. We studied some Descartes and Dr. Peterson was really good at just kind of disappearing behind the text and saying, this is what this person believes. It wasn't trying to push any ideas onto us. Like you should believe this. It was more of a: these people were really smart. there's a reason why we're still reading them, 500 or a thousand or 2000 years later. So let's see what they have to say. And yeah, that was very non threatening to me. there was no proselytization going on really.
Danu Poyner:so you're at the smorgasbord. you've just decided to do the minor in philosophy. You've made a good friend. what happens from there?
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. So I had taken a bunch of classes in literature. Um, I had a couple of good friends who were literature majors and I had some extra room in my schedule. So they're like, let's take this modern novel class together. It'll be fun. So we read Virginia Woolf, we read James Joyce, we read Hemingway, and it was taught by a fantastic teacher, who kind of similar to my philosophy professor, who was very warm, funny, little bit irreverent. so then I was reading these bizarre books, we read Ulysses and the class conversations were great. started to get excited about literature and I took a class on literary theory. And then we're looking at literature really from a philosophical perspective, like through a Marxist lens or a feminist lens. So by the time I graduated with a major in history, a minor in philosophy, I knew I wanted to do graduate school. I knew I wanted to keep studying, but I didn't know what. I knew it was going to be either philosophy or literature. but given that I had no credentials in literature, that seemed like a tougher road to go. so Dr. Peterson, advised me that I could apply to PhD programs that were funded, tuition free and that would pay a stipend. so it was pretty clear that philosophy would be my best option, and also, I realized that a lot of the questions in literature that I was most interested in ultimately had a very philosophical bent to them. And just in terms of question of the narrator's voice and how poets and novelists impact readers, what's going on when somebody's influencing your mind in a way that you don't quite comprehend. I realized that those kinds of questions were probably better answered by philosophers and psychologists. so yeah, I decided to go the philosophy grad school route. I took a year off and just worked and Studied how to get into grad school. What's the admissions process? and most importantly, worked on a writing sample to submit with my application.
Danu Poyner:I'm curious where your parents in this story, were they supportive of this direction? Or indifferent or something else?
Jon Burmeister:Not supportive. they were kind of indifferent to me going to college. they were concerned that higher education could be detrimental to my religious faith and kind of suspicious of academics in general, but they didn't help me with college. but they also weren't adamantly against it. they assumed, he'll go to college, he'll become a high school teacher and that's a good career. They were not excited about me going to graduate school. they didn't really see the poinT. at that point, I was not at all confident that I would go through the full PhD process, get a PhD, apply for professor jobs. I thought to myself, this seems like a cool route. I'm not quite sure if I'll go all the way to the end. I can stop with a master's if I want to, and I can pursue other kinds of options with that.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, you mentioned your interest in history driving a lot of these choices early on. I'm curious what kind of history were you interested in, a particular period or a particular aspect of history at that point? I'm always interested in what people start with and what lights them up about that and then how it evolves over time and infuses into other things.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah, I didn't have any particular period in history that really grabbed me in high school. It was really just the whole scope of human events. The idea that people had written these things down And then there's so much that's lost and then historians are trying to piece together. What do we have and how do we make sense of it? so going into college, it was just a very generalized interest in history. I remember reading about the medieval period in high school and finding that incredibly interesting where there's, The church has a very different role in society than the present day. Given my very religious upbringing, the notion that, that religion would play such a different role in society, that things hadn't always been this way, where you have a separation of church and state, where you have a kind of nominally, secular public square and just realizing that things used to be so different and that they didn't need to be the way they are now.
Danu Poyner:thank you for that. That's something else we'll come back to, I'm sure. So you've got your writing sample together and you're going into grad school. Keep going.
Jon Burmeister:applied to a number of Catholic universities. I was mostly focused on Catholic philosophy, PhD programs. Because I was possibly interested in focusing on philosophy of religion, I definitely wanted to be in a place where religious ideas were not scoffed at, but were taken seriously by at least some of the faculty. My, um, Philosophy professor, Dr. Peterson, a couple of my literature professors all recommended that I look at some Jesuit universities. And, I was accepted into Fordham in Boston College and ended up choosing Boston College just because of the professors that were there that seemed to be a bit more aligned with my interests. So I ended up there for my PhD and It was an extraordinary time. How much I loved it can be tracked by how long I was there, I think. So I started in 2002 and I defended in 2011. I definitely did some procrastinating as well. I loved the atmosphere so much. and I took on a very challenging dissertation thesis that also took a long time to develop.
Danu Poyner:Did you arrive there and feel like you belonged in this republic of letters and this environment, or was that something that came to you over time? how was that experience?
Jon Burmeister:Yeah, I definitely did not feel like I belonged for the first year. probably the second year as well. I was, only having a minor in philosophy from a very small institution that nobody had heard of. I didn't have a wide range of courses. There were five of us that entered the program that year and two of them had master's degrees already. Were just way beyond me., and so they're going to do just maybe a year of coursework and go right into the dissertation. And meanwhile, I'm like, who is Aristotle? Not exactly, but I had done very little serious deep reading of philosophical texts, but I was super fortunate that some of these people that I came in with as first year students were just incredibly warm and welcoming themselves, even though they were sometimes way beyond me in their philosophical education, they would organize reading groups and they would invite me. it wasn't like, a kind of pretentious thing where it's like, Oh, you need to catch up to us. And I think Boston college to a large degree, really enacts that idea of whole person education, that it's not just about your intellectual development, but it's also about your spiritual development, your emotional development.
Danu Poyner:Now that we've traced the thread of John's journey. Let's discover how these ideas live in his work and reflect his way of being in the world.
Jon Burmeister:I think that, before mass industrialized standardized education, we had no education for the masses. You had tutors for the rich. and then we're like, oh, maybe everybody should be able to go to school. I think it was maybe the 19 teens in the United States, there is a movement for universal high school that everybody should be able to go to high school. And a And then finally you have universal high school built into the system but I doubt that ever would've happened without all of the wealth creation of industrialization that allowed for the funding of these kinds of things, which is incredibly expensive to both to pay the teachers, build the schools, and to take all this labor out of the agricultural workforce. I think that mass standardized education was the best alternative, so these more like bespoke, tailored, seminar style, Montessori, what I'm calling like a true liberal education, this is what's going to be possible with the advent of GPT 5 or GPT 6. So having personalized AI tutors that are free. So that's very exciting to me is the idea of, of having liberal education as opposed to this standardized form of education where you're teaching to the test, where you're encouraging students to not ask things that are outside of the lesson plan because you have to get through the lesson plan. Because everybody needs to know what they're doing to take the test, or you lose your job, or the principal gets dinged by the state. most of the constraints are economic.
Danu Poyner:I think that's a very interesting and complicated thought, by situating it historically in that way and comparing. the deeply flawed and quite damaging mass education experience we have is still a mass education experience that we would not otherwise have brought about by economic power and social conditions, and so what would that look like with the AI leap? But is there also an opportunity to not recreate the same, Inequalities of access or are we, always doomed to recreate that? We would say no, because we believe as in other possibilities and contingencies of history, but perhaps it might happen that way if we don't do something about it.
Jon Burmeister:I was just reading a, um, guy named Jack Clark, who. Is at Anthropic, and who was originally at OpenAI. Jack Clark and what is his name? Dario Amadai. I think those are the two co founders of Anthropic who left OpenAI, some safety concerns. So I subscribed to Jack Clark's newsletter. And the other day he was reflecting on. GPT 2 and he says that to train GPT 2 cost around 50,000 to 100, 000. and estimates that today it would cost, about 250. NGPT2 was the first model that showed signs of general intelligence, because it improved on a bunch of benchmarks that they did not train it for Like we didn't train it to do this, and this, but it's doing better on these things. We did not tailor the training process for these benchmarks. So that was the first model that they said, okay, we may be onto something here with this particular kind of large language model. but the idea that something five years ago would cost 50, 000. Now it would cost 250 to train it. And now we have, the models that are going to be coming out, according to both people from Anthropic and indications from Microsoft, that the models will be using about 10 times as much compute each time there's a new model that comes out. what I foresee is that within five years, we will have such incredibly capable models that are free. So there'll be. Like GBT 3. 5 right now is free for anybody to use, but the models will be, not hallucinating anymore or very rarely, and also incredibly good at what you ask them to do, such as giving personalized tutoring to a particular student.
Danu Poyner:there's a lot of interesting questions about the mechanics of that and how it all comes to be, and the costs and the models and everything. Where I want to go to with that thought is a much more pessimistic view, to be honest, which is not to do with the technology, because it's ultimately not about the technology. I'm of the age where we were very optimistic about The internet, the frothy, view of that as being a great leveling, liberator of all sorts of things. and we all lost our minds about that for a while. I think the best scholar I've come across on this is Evgeny Morozov talking about the net delusion and to save everything, click here. There's nothing about the technology itself that guarantees good, applications or good social arrangements. So we've got commodity face recognition technology in the hands of, bad actors and state actors using it for, identifying Uyghurs and whatnot. And, It's probably not going to go to a good place by itself without a huge intervention, that's what I would say.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah, I definitely agree. Like the technology needs to be shepherded in the right way, it's going to be put to many bad uses. The question is, will it also be put to good uses? People who are also working in school systems and in higher ed, that even though this technology. Tons of scams. imitating your grandma's voice or imitating wife's voice to send you money and all of this, not to mention the bad actors at the state level that we will get some pretty big benefits within educational systems and outside of So like in the way that, so much of my education in neuroscience, psychology, computer science. Has come from YouTube that just would not have been possible pre internet. just because of the ease of access. I think that the sort of person that uses YouTube to supplement their education will be similarly motivated to use a large language model. Is it?
Danu Poyner:I am that person, and that is already the case. my pessimism is not anti technological, I am a great lover of technology. I'm just very ambivalent about it. To which, just to say I have strong feelings on both sides. Paul Valio says When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck. And I think that's what you get with these new things. You get a lot of both and, as a good hegelian, it's like what's the synthesis of those?
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. I think it's, inevitable that we will have ship and the shipwreck. The question I ask is how big will the shipwreck be? Will it be, civilization ending or will it be something more like a world war, or will it be something like COVID? I know that. a lot of people are critical of open AI and there's grounds for critique, and some people from their super alignment team are leaving and complaining that they're not getting enough compute to work on the problem of aligning the goals of an AGI of an artificial general intelligence with human goals. Open AI is dealing with a very difficult situation, which is they want to get to AGI before. Google does before Microsoft does before Facebook does and before China does, and that makes sense to do because they're not legally beholden to shareholders, given that they're a for profit that's governed by a nonprofit. There's problems with that structure, but in my mind, it's Far more desirable for a company with this structure to achieve AGI first than any of the other Options out there. The question is how do you achieve aGI first without enormous amounts of money? So there is a real that they face in terms of speed of development. Some people are saying, slow down, but then I'm sure internally they're saying, then if we slow down, Google's going to get there first.
Danu Poyner:right at the beginning of this conversation, you said that you see yourself as someone who's really good at thinking and really good at not thinking. And, I wanted to ask you when you came to that formulation and how to know which is which, and what is required when.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. I would say that at this point in my life, I'm pretty good at thinking and I'm very mildly good at not thinking. I've have not been meditating for that long. And, my practice has been, not super intensive. Like I haven't done a lot of retreats or worked with a lot of experienced teachers. But my goal is to become very good at both of those I guess it's something of what Aristotle would call the intellectual virtue of prudence, of being able to judge in the situation, what is the right response? Call for problem solving. That calls for thinking. Other scenarios call for, at least temporary resignation. and you say in a stoic manner, right now this situation is out of my control and I can do little or nothing to solve the problem. it might be a relationship problem. It might be a problem. it might be a political problem, or your Anxieties about an upcoming presidential election. if not much you can do in the immediate present about something that's bothering you, then that's probably going to be a good time to activate the not thinking dimension of your mind. In the sense of, letting it go. But if the intrusive thought is something that's beyond my control, and it keeps coming back and bothering me, that's just not productive. So what I can do in that moment is go into my breath, turn my attention to my body, which in my experience will often really put up a, almost like an isolation chamber around that intrusive thought until it, it loses its power. And then for myself to set aside certain times of day, for thinking and other times for not thinking.
Danu Poyner:you mentioned this has been a hard won Thing for you to adapt to and to learn is the value of non thinking. How does that show up in, John's life? where you've gone from thinking to non thinking and that's been a good move.
Jon Burmeister:An interesting way to illustrate this is that I have, three smartphones. And, two of them cost 40 off of eBay. And one of them is my normal phone. The two 40 phones, are not connected to the internet in any way. one of them is in my bedroom and I use that for my alarm. So I never take my internet connected phone into my bedroom. and I just use this cheap phone as an alarm. it's very important for me to have an alarm clock that gradually rises in volume. Normal alarm clocks are very loud and they shock you out of your sleep. And so your first moment of consciousness in the day is the activation of your sympathetic nervous system, Not the way I want to start my day, at least. So my second 40 phone is in my office and I use that for meditation I don't touch my internet connected phone. I don't look at it in the morning until I have done yoga and meditation. this is the way that I shut myself off from the internet, both right before bed and also for the first to 45 minutes in the morning. These are my times for less thinking or for not thinking. because once I've. I've taken a look at my phone and seen a bunch of notifications. If I do that and then meditate, it's a lot more chaotic in there. The other thing I do is to set times in the day that I look at the news as opposed to just looking at the news when I have a free moment, because introducing that stream of images and to be honest, suffering in my cognitive centers, I can feel the effect it has on me. I use like a variation on breathing where you breathe in for four seconds, you hold for seven, and then you exhale for eight seconds. I do a variation of that when I'm brushing my teeth in the morning, at night and in the day, if I'm feeling stressed, I will do that. And that's a way for me to very quickly shut down my thinking and turn my attention to my sensations to the present moment, and I,find that to be a nice way To turn off thinking just like a light switch.
Danu Poyner:thank you for sharing that. that's a great example and strikes me as that you're taking a very intentional and methodical approach to this kind of integration of ways of being, That makes me have to shoehorn in the question, that I need to ask you about the word grokkist, which is like an integrative way of being, different ways of knowing. I wondered, if that is a term that resonates with you and what it means to you, if so.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah, it does. I think I first came across the term last year and had no orientation to it. The way that I made sense of it is in terms of a distinction that Hegel makes between abstract thinking and concrete. thinking, He has an essay called, What is Abstract Thinking? And in this little article, he talks about the idea that, I can't remember if he says academics or philosophers, but people who think a lot are often accused of abstract thinking. That they're thinking about ideas that are floating, hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth, that don't make any contact with real life. And it's just a kind of a form of mental masturbation where people are just thinking about things for the fun of it, but it doesn't actually produce or generate anything. claim is that true philosophical thinking is the opposite of abstract thinking. And it's what he calls concrete thinking, where you're dealing with concepts, and concepts are by definition abstract. If I say apple, and by definition abstract in a way from the particulars of any given apple, its color, its taste, size, but real thinking or concrete thinking, and what I think of as grokking, is what brings concepts directly into contact with the real world and with the particulars of the real world. He gives this great example in the article about people watching a public execution, and then people thinking abstractly about the person being executed and thinking, this is a terrible person, this person's wicked, this person is pure evil. And not recognizing that this person has a history, that they have a family, we might add on to this and say this person committed this crime, probably a whole host of reasons were involved that they couldn't control. So concrete thinking, he says, is seeing the person that's about to lose their life and seeing them as a real person situated in history and not just as a devil. that's, that's a long winded way of saying for me to grok something is to think concretely, which is never letting the concepts just float around in the ether. It's like always grabbing them and pulling them back down to earth.
Danu Poyner:Yeah. That's very beautiful. I like that connection with concrete thinking. would you consider yourself a grokkist?
Jon Burmeister:I would in the sense that I was just discussing where it's, it's something that, it was close to your heart, that you're connecting with your life, that isn't just a matter of intellectual abstraction. For me, real philosophy is grokking.
Danu Poyner:Nicely put. I like it. so you gave a definition of, life and living earlier, which I was paying close attention to as self movement towards a goal, and the internal integration of its parts. I thought that was really nice. and I thought that it applied also to a person's journey towards flourishing, as being self movement towards a goal and integrating internally all the parts. so I wanted to check in with John the living person, and the journey that you've been on and how you feel you're going as moving towards a goal of some kind and how you have been integrating all of your various parts.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. That's a great question. something's more alive when the parts are determining each other more and more, as opposed to standing in a kind of isolated independence from each other. if we go back to Aristotle, he says that life is self movement towards a goal involving nutrition. think that can be generalized to self movement towards a goal in which the internal parts are becoming more integrated, more unified, less isolated from each other. And that really is my goal for myself in terms of my mind and my body. Trying to make that relationship more intimate through these various spiritual exercises and practices like yoga and meditation. and I should also mention, dancing, raving, music, is another way that I see myself becoming more integrated as a person. I'm actually reading a book right now called Whole Brain Living.
Danu Poyner:that's the best book I read last year. I will recommend that to anyone.
Jon Burmeister:I'm still in the early chapters, but I think that This idea of there being different networks in the brain that we can work to develop and also to integrate. This is one of the most important ideas that I've come across probably in the last 10 years. It's also developed in, McGilchrist's The bathroom is emissary, which is what I'll be reading this summer. but I'm really inspired by the basic idea of both of these books, which I think also has a lot of wonderful precedent in the history of philosophy. in Plato's Republic, he argues that the flourishing soul is the soul in which there is harmony between its parts. he doesn't use the word soul because he doesn't speak English. He's talking about the Psyche from which we get psychology. the harmonious Psyche In which each part is well developed and is doing its proper function is the flourishing psyche. I see just the general project of thinking about brain networks, the different hemispheres of the brain, cognitive, emotional, and so forth as an extension of what Plato was doing in the Republic and Other psychologists have been doing for thousands of years, through Freud and so forth, trying to think about the different parts of the psyche. so the way that I'm applying this to my own life is I'm thinking about my meditation practice As developing more of my right hemisphere, both the cognitive and the emotional. philosophy as a practice for me is I think developing a lot of left brain analytical thinking, but also brain synthetic, holistic kind of thinking. and then what I was mentioning earlier in terms of. Both meditation and breath work. I want to be able to integrate those into my day. I'm starting to think about it as Oh, I'm waiting in line at the supermarket, this can be a right brain moment. Where I can dial down the thinking and dial up my attention to the present moment. And my attention to sensations and whatever's going on in my mind just to observe what's happening as a kind of impartial observer. So that's one way that I'm trying to think about becoming a more integrated mind to be able to have these two hemispheres talk to each other and to flip back and forth with more skill.
Danu Poyner:I see it as a kind of extension and deepening of what you were saying before about whole person education, because the takeaway here is you've got the mind. is embodied and the body is embedded in a context and, what Jill Balty Taylor's doing in the Whole Brain Living book is doing us a great service of synthesizing some philosophy and psychology and neuroscience together in a, really grounded, way and saying there's not just two hemispheres, but there's a, thinking, right brain and a feeling left brain and they all are in dialogue with each other. we contain multiple characters and so a whole person education is integrating all of our characters and treating them as wholes within hwhole and homes within homes that we're all in. It's all very holistic, I think.
Jon Burmeister:Yeah. And I think that it's very easy for a person to be stronger in one of those four networks that she mentions or one of the hemispheres. And just pursue that to the detriment of the other one. 10 years ago, I was a stereotypical academic who was just super analytical and super conceptual, didn't pay much attention to my body, didn't have embodied practices. And at first it was very unfamiliar to meditate, to do yoga, to spend time on these things. And I was skeptical at first. in the way that I was skeptical of breath work, it just seemed like it was this woo woo kind of hippie thing. but yeah, it's also useful to look back over history and we can see certain periods of history as being more one sided in one direction than the other. you look at the hippie movement and there was a lot of great stuff happening there. But not always quite enough thinking and critical reflection going on. so I think in the same way that we can characterize historical periods as being a bit imbalanced one way or the other, I'm trying to see myself in that way and to correct those imbalances through setting up new practices in my life.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, that's a really nice way of putting it, and helps me understand the story we've been telling today as a story of rebalancing, from one thing to the next and integrating as we go. So I'm very grateful to you for sharing your personal journey and integrating it with us. I have one more question that I ask everyone that comes on the podcast, which is, if you could gift someone a life changing learning experience, what would it be and why?
Jon Burmeister:Wow, that's really difficult. I would say that for someone new to philosophy, the study of stoicism can be life changing in the sense that the ideas are accessible enough that pretty much anybody can grab onto them. having a reading group or somebody to guide you through some of the basic works of stoicism, like Epictetus Handbook, Marcus Aurelius Meditations. that can be life changing when you start to see that your experience of the world is more determined by the structure of your own mind than by the world itself. That realization is shocking. Another reason why I appreciate the Stoics so much is that they recognized that the conceptual realization that I just mentioned that your day to day minute to minute experience is more about the structure of your own mind than about the structure of the world. That realization is not nearly enough to change your life. They didn't know this, but it's because the neocortex is only one part of your brain and what you really need is to start restructuring other parts of your brain as well. And even though they didn't know the neuroscience, they knew that There needed to be exercises, there needed to be practices to take this insight and turn it into, a lived reality through daily, what came to be called spiritual exercises later on. whether it's a morning meditation ritual in the sense of kind of conceptual meditation on reminding yourself of the basic ideas of stoicism or reminding yourself of what might go wrong that day and how you can respond better. whether it's about a memento mori, remembering your mortality, putting things in perspective, but without these regular exercises, the basic insight of stoicism is almost too radical for our brain to deal with it. so I teach a class called the art of living in which the first half of the class is on stoicism and the second half of the class is on the past in a meditation. Some of the definite lacunas and lacks and missing insights in Stoicism are filled in by a study of Buddhism, for someone that has a bit of experience with philosophy, something that for me was pretty personally life changing was doing a year long study of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. For me, that book covers the vast majority of the important topics that humans need to know about in order to flourish. Everything ranging from the vegetative state of your body to philosophical and the role that emotions play in happiness, the role that friendship plays in happiness, the role that community plays, the role that politics plays. What I really wish is that, and maybe someone has done this, is to write a kind of primer that follows the contours of that book and distills the main insights into an easy to read fashion.
Danu Poyner:I don't know if there's that, but there's certainly Christopher Shields Aristotle, book with Routledge Philosophers that does that for all of his stuff, This has certainly been a life changing experience for me, spending a year deep diving on Aristotle. and the ethics as the crowning work in that. Thank you so much for a wide ranging and enjoyable conversation, John. There's lots that we could continue to talk about and I'll have to talk to you again, when AGI comes about and see how that all plays out.
Jon Burmeister:The other thing that, I wanted to mention earlier is, that I think that it's likely that AGA will put a tremendous number of people out of work. And I think the liberal arts will be the main solution to this problem people need to know how to spend their free time in a fulfilling, productive way. in a way that's meaningful for themselves. It's not economically oriented and I don't think our current education system is set up for that. A liberal education will be more important than ever once we've achieved some level of AGI. and so I'm very, Disheartened to see it being cut all over the place. and this I think also relates up to what you're doing at grokkist is having these resources be available in a way that don't get lost when an institution folds. That we can have some like partial memory, we have these resources and they will still be there when we need them in 10, 15, 20 years. So I think that's something I'm really excited about of what you're doing.
Danu Poyner:Yeah, that's a nice thought, actually. I hadn't quite put it together in that way, as sort of maintaining a kind of oral tradition of ideas It's, curating. Curating is the same. word root as curiosity and care, which are our other two favorites. It's cura, it's Latin cura, so it's the intellectual care of selection. so yeah, it all ties together nicely, I think.
Jon Burmeister:Beautiful. I love that. Yeah. Thank you so much for this conversation. I really enjoyed
Danu Poyner:Oh, thank you. Me too, John. It's nice to talk about these things. I hope we will, talk again and talk separately. And this might be the start of a friendship like the friend you made in college.
Jon Burmeister:I look forward to that.
Danu Poyner:Thank you so much, John. Take care.
