If we were asked whether we would prefer to have our beliefs and opinions comfortingly validated, or whether we would like to experience insight instead… many of us would select insight. This is the question that’s always before us in consciousness, yet we are scripted to select validation of opinion. In nearly all ‘common’ conversations, the goal isn’t insight, it’s the process of curating our position on some topic. Generally, this leads to a degradation of actual or accessible intelligence. This is how we literally ‘get dumber’ nearly every time we make a move.

In this recording I discuss the problem of beliefs, and, at the end, introduce a brief discussion of a game whereby identity is »negotiated in nature. This is a nearly universal game, but few of us are aware of it consciously. What actually happens is that, between, say, two communicators, they not only negotiate a vast array of features of their separate identities… they also negotiate ‘the one we become together’ or the between of their relationship.