https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=x8NUQOFnNoA
So welcome everyone to Voices with Verveki. I’m very excited about this trialogue that’s about to emerge between us. I don’t know where it’s going to go and that’s so exciting. And so how did this happen? Well here are my two of my most favorite partners in crime, Jordan Hall and Greg Enriquez. And Jordan and I have been doing a long-running series on really trying to get clear about the kind of cognition and the kind of wisdom that’s going to be needed to confront the phase transition that we’re going through. Greg and I just finished an excellent series of discussions on consciousness and we’re going to enter into one on the nature of the self. And so Greg sort of had this, well we had a joint insight and then he had an insight off of it and by his own admission it was a little bit hypomanic and he was saying things, he was texting Jordan and I and emailing us about this sort of idea. And I’ll bring you up what the idea is in a sec but what we’d like to do here is to try and articulate and explicate this idea and also help maybe actualize some of its emergent potentiality. So first of all I want to welcome Jordan and Greg. Thanks guys for being here. It’s always beautiful. Thanks so much. Okay so I’m going to start, I’m going to start with something in Jordan’s wheelhouse and then we’re going to move. So the topic, the thing, the entity, but it’s somewhat nebulous by Greg’s own admission is he came up with this construct of wisdom energy and then I said I think I understand you that sounds like chi or ki within Taoism but I’m not sure and then there’s been also some exchanges but I don’t want to start with wisdom energy. I want to start with a notion that’s more on Jordan’s wheelhouse and see if you know if we can start there and move towards this. And so where I want to start with is I want to point out something that I’ve thought about and reflecting because I’ve been reflecting on this repeatedly and over and over again because Jordan’s a presence in my mind as you can imagine and his notion of coherence and one of the things and I know I’ve been trying various mappings, coherence, dialogos, wisdom, these various things and that’s been part of the ongoing discussion between Jordan and I and what I want to pick up on now here is not so much the referent as the vehicle because I take it that Jordan is using this term in a somewhat extensive fashion. He’s trying to ascend to something that we don’t fully grasp yet. That’s been what I’ve seen him convey to me repeatedly. He’s nodding right now so that’s a good sign and so I’m trying to pick up on that the vehicle of conveyance here and the thing about coherence for me and that what always made it so resonant for me is it’s like this it’s this double aspect metaphor. I mean on one sense with coherence there’s obviously you know an illusion to logical coherence and making sense and having an ordered intelligibility but there’s also an illusion to electromagnetic coherence and this kind of affordance of a kind of coordination of information and causation and it was really interesting and you know and what I see him doing is he’s often playing with that notion and this sort of to my mind what feels like a stereoscopic thing he’s looking through these this double aspect and trying to get us to ascend towards something and I thought that was really really cool and so I noted that you know maybe maybe Greg was trying to do something similar with wisdom energy that he was trying to pick up on you know an intelligibility aspect of what he’s pointing to but also with energy something that has more to do with psychophysical coordination the way you know a laser is coherent by coordinating the ambient light etc. Is that okay so far okay so if that’s possible and you guys are nodding right so what we have is we have we have two poles for a potential dialogue but they right and that they are somehow assinent with each other right and there’s something going on there and and what I’d like to try to do is explore if we can make it make them resonant with each other and disclosing and revealing and along the way I’d like to hopefully we can talk about a lot of the stuff that you know we’ve been talking about both I have been talking about at least with both of you and there’s notions of resonance you know there’s no these notions of faith the fact how we keep moving between musical metaphors and mathematical metaphors which is again like the logical side right in the psychophysical side right and so I think what I’m just trying to do is get give you guys a pregnant provocation and then we can start jamming how does that how does that feel though is that land as a pregnant that’s pregnant it feels like that that move in the video game where you kind of press the power button and it continues to like power up until the guys like glowing with blue yellow energy right there’s gonna shoot out some Mortal Kombat that’s who hey Zeus remember yeah that was real real good you um we’re already on the playing field like we’re in this space so it’s interesting for me and if we could keep I mean those are the framing poles but I mean I’ve had a lifelong ongoing I don’t know to call it reflection reciprocal relationship reciprocal reconstruction with something drawn from Taoism which is Chi or key and I dislike most of the Western translations which and so Kim and I are trying to get a paper published right now on a naturalistic explanation of Chi and so again I so one thing I want to steer between the skill of worthless explaining away and the correctness of woo like explanations that don’t really help at all in any way and so if if while we’re doing this we could if if it’s possible it’s a request if possible if we could dip back and forth between what we’re talking about and Chi as a phenomena I think that would be very helpful because that was the initial thing that came to my mind when I heard Greg’s wisdom energy proposed amen so and the word energy that I’m tracking and that’s a when you and I was in a hypomanic and charged state as I sometimes get and you’ll get my texts and when you said that you know I got resonance you remember also I was then went off into philosophy a loving energy yeah what I was grokking right there in terms of the coherence energy was electromagnetic I mean I’m a physicist in logos okay so this is work energy this is the ultimate common denominator this is the beginning of the universe as a pure energy singularity and of course we can get into the metaphysics of that right but ultimately what is the most arguably the most based physical concept okay that we have that we can sort of grok although as you know Richard Feynman will say well we don’t really know what it is it’s some sort of capacity to do work right but then once we build we say we got electromagnetic we got gravitational we got strong weak nuclear forces and then the differentiation of the universe into the material layer and then you have the unfolding differentiation that really is neg entropy entropy across time and and so you know and I trail that into bio genetic bio energetic life and then the neuro energetic behavioral investment that then goes right relevance realization and then up into justificatory space and then I’m in the knowledge systems so then we got net knowledge and energy I’ve gone from then energy into data and then information and the knowledge and then I’m at my own theory of knowledge which is trying to get coherence on mapping you know it’s a theory of reality and then what flipped was then I found a beam that dropped me back into being basically and then I got resonance across all levels and then it was like oh my god wisdom energy that’s the theory to practice in theory into being back into a knowledge in what is wisdom wisdom is embodying that and so you want to take your knowledge and body so that’s the trail can I hunt this down a little bit yeah you mentioned I think you call it neg entropy and and I was seeing because I’ve used show me images I was seeing these images of your tree which is how for those who haven’t seen it as a characteristic of sort of a circle and they a cylinder that opens up to a larger circle and then repeating each one of which has a certain emergent property of of the real specifically from as he is he enumerated sort of the physical level at the level of say the presencing of neurology that then becomes a whole set of different dynamics and then the presencing of language and capacity to communicate and coordinate choice on the context in the context of language or communication is best specifically just communication okay so then the thing that the query the curiosity that came up was something like what is it feels a little bit like you’re saying something like there is a downward causation or a there’s a relationship between the word wisdom as you’re using it and the word word neg entropy as you’re using it is that am I am I kind of getting in the right direction yeah could you say more about that yeah absolutely yeah so the tree of knowledge really is um it’s a in some ways a very conventional map of cosmic evolution at time by complexity and you can all these words have nuance but you could think about the evolution of complexity in terms of negative entropy in some ways so the so what is happening is getting stored differentiation and thus life sits at a higher qualitatively higher level of negantropic organization and it does this through information processing and org and communication between cells so it stores information in DNA manifested in RNA metabolizing and then does its autopoetic function at cell level in communication with other cell levels to maintain its complex adaptive organization and that’s really negantropic process and then we see that same basic emergence with animals where in the multicellular linkage is happening at the nervous system to coordinate complex active bodies of animals and then we see them operate at the mental behavioral plane of existence and then there is the interconnection of our minds through language that then gives rise to the culture person plane so that’s all can be thought of as an emerging complexity building feedback loop of coordinating energy and information into higher and higher negantropic systems across three different jumps of life mind and culture and then what I would get to is the knowledge and the knowledge wisdom relation in culture and then I can but I’ll be paused there and see if that catches well I have a couple things to say if that might be helpful one is to I mean this is something I’ve been playing with in the dialectic the logo stuff I’ve been doing and and that’s going to dress one of your points Jordan because Greg there was also an argument I made that you really liked to help spark this and the argument went like this it has to be the argument went that the higher levels have to be causally real or you’re going to get into a performative paradox yeah so if you want to say well it’s all just you do a reductionist move it’s all just you know probability waves or or or quarks or something at the bottom the problem you have with that is that and then you’re saying everything above it is somehow illusory right then the problem you have is but the information that you’re using and the equipment that you’re using and the people that you’re talking with exists at this level and therefore the knowledge exists at this level and if that knowledge isn’t real then its claims aren’t real and then your your reductionism actually defeats itself so you have to have the idea right of a non reductive kind of can’t justify reductionism that kills the concept of justification exactly exactly that’s a you know it’s the same way that logical positivism destroyed itself as an epistemology right okay so let’s take that as granted so there has to be some reality to the knowledge if the if the object of knowledge is real then the knowledge of the object is equally real that’s I’ve taken that as sort of that’s the way you said it brilliant love that right right and so what that means is there is some realizing capacity I often call it emanation to go the opposite direction from emergence from right the way in which you get organization of constraints right on possibility structures that alter the probability of causal events etc okay so we have that as a real possibility and then what I hear Greg saying that resonates for we from cognitive science and then I’ll shut up in a sec guys is Evan Thompson’s notion of the deep continuity which is ultimately in a risk to tell you notion and Greg acknowledges this right I’m not to take away from Greg’s work it’s excellent being in the company of Aristotle’s a great company to be in right so there’s continuity Evan talks about that which is not identity because identity is reduction but there’s deep continuity and then what I hear Greg saying is there is a kind of knowing there’s a kind of a way of organizing my cognition such that I can actually tap into I can actualize the potential of the deep continuity Jordan you often talk about it like aligning the stack right right now does that is that that’s exactly what happened I opened up the path to line yeah yeah yeah and was in I fell back into reality okay so so a kind of work becomes available to you exactly because you actualized a previous by possibility into an ongoing potential right that’s what that’s what happened so how does that does that help Jordan is that okay so I’m clearly paying playing the role of being the doing in the context of the talking and thinking I feel shifts going on in my body in my interior right actually I the word that I wrote down was seeking elegance this is the thing that we’re dealing with is the thing that is the same ah it is the same as the thing that we are talking about we are doing we’re talking about it yeah very high level that’s physically painful yeah you just said John I had a two senses one was like a a lifting of my heart like a move from yes to yay yeah yeah and then I felt like I wanted to cry like a tearing up oh so there’s a really there’s an embracing right there’s really really really big here and I actually have also noticed having to deal with some interior like self critic criticism around the notion of like I can’t play this instrument well enough to make this music man like where were this is like we just I just dropped in from Greensleeves to the Ninth Symphony this is gonna it’s gonna be some sour notes so yeah yeah well basically I’ll acknowledge that like this is there’s something super heavy going on here and but also not just beautiful but that thing that is the thing that we use the word beautiful to describe yeah yeah yeah yeah seeking elegance so if we can find a way to follow this in such a fashion is to render it articulable in a way that has continuity in the articulation so coherence in that second sense and the blending of coherence that second sense into this new thing that we will not be talking about is coherence in the third sense there and maybe is a way of talking about what is beautiful that’s beautiful that’s very helpful so we’re stacking that thing and holding it also stacking and holding really that’s very good I like coherence in the third sense that really that’s very good that’s very good that’s very okay laser beams laser beams so there’s something along the line of wisdom energy so you’re naming a concept let’s just name it we’re just gonna now put an asterisk in front of it and say hey guys if you think you know what it means just delete that it’s kind of like the words wisdom and kind of like the words energy but just for a moment just hold it up there as a pointer to a space okay we have the metaphor of the laser beam the metaphor of the laser beam is that if you can coordinate the orientation of a set of characteristics in the real you can generate a an effect of the transmission of energy that has qualitative differences from the pre from a flashlight a laser in a flash are not the same kind of thing and the difference between them is coherence right coherent energy there’s a process by which the individual as an individual and then of course as we’re describing higher order individuals can come into this thing called coherence where they become capable of transmitting the flowing of wisdom energy at higher and higher levels of more hmm what’s the right term a transcendental beacon a transcendental beacon yes something like exactly is that there’s a lensing effect or a focusing of that highly subtle energy into a perceivability such that it can actually move from a very broad wide subtle vague into a level of intensity that actually can be transmitted in the gross in communitas and communication yeah boy okay that’s great that’s because lasers are also information carriers that I mean that’s the thing we can use them to do holographic photography and all kinds of things that work that we were not capable of you know they it’s a formatting of information transmission that discloses possibilities of communication that were not available to us before so we can actually capture that aspect of the metaphor as well I’m noticing kind of just I need to throw this out for everybody who’s listening I’m noticing that to the degree which my mind is trying to grab this is making a mess of everything so I actually have to I’m like whoa hold on hold on slow down we know the right thing is to become a lens so or whatever an instrument right and so if you happen to be watching this and you’re noticing that your mind is making a mess of things you are not alone the mind will make a mess of this thinking about it in this sort of conch constipated left brain sensibility is gonna definitely get in the way this is more like a becoming a solar sail or sort of unfurling yourself in relationship with reality that can actually just sort of you’re transparent like you have to be zero friction otherwise it will burn so here I’m walking my dog and I’m catching this and this is what comes to me I’m loving being without memory or desire right so in other words the mind memory and desire trying to theorize it reality it makes sense out of it all this that with that moment I then I have to have language to catch it but nonetheless the expression is loving being without memory desire and that is the grounding and letting go of the mind sense at one level and and and there is curiosity mm-hmm and there’s attraction so there’s a difference to a desire and attraction in the sense that you’re binding memory and desire together I think is a very nice it’s right if I bind attraction curiosity together then I actually re-enter movement distinction differentiation choice back into the conversation but now it’s coming in a different a different directionality I would propose using wonder rather than curiosity here’s one because curiosity is from to my mind very much and this is Fuller’s argument towards the having mode in which very often in curiosity we seek to fill in a gap in our already established knowledge that’s why if I prolong curiosity it becomes aversive to you but wonder is in the being mode in which which I’m calling my framework into question I’m not trying to fill a hole I’m trying to call everything into question and this is why Socrates claimed that it was the beginning of wisdom and I think what we’re doing here is if I think the one we’re trying to make this distinction is I think one of the ways in which we can mess this up to use your term Jordan is we can think ah I found a gap in my established knowledge framework and I’m gonna fit wisdom energy into that that gap right instead I want to do something like a Zen koen I want it which in which we swallow the red hot ball of iron that burns it away because I think what Greg was pointing to is an experience was exactly that state of wonder in which he’s just there’s a kind I think the word you want is right there’s an attraction to an emerging elegance that he does not want to disturb by trying to grasp it in any way is that is that fair to your phenomenology I’m really a great thing about you know the butterfly the joy that flies and if you try and grab it you’re gonna destroy it right right and that’s like trying to put logos on the coherence okay so I I get the wisdom energy coherence and I just dropped into it with awe or wonder right yeah that’s the thing about wonder unlike curiosity if you if you like if you prolong curiosity like here’s the detective story and you’ll never find out who did it right what the hell right right right but but wonder is like if you expand it now you can’t right you get awe and people seek out awe and awe is deeply transformative of their sense of reality and their sense of self so yeah here’s it here’s a beautiful here’s a beautiful universe and it’s gonna keep getting more beautiful yeah like it’s very different than here’s a detective story and you’re ever gonna find out what happens right exactly back to the universe right another way John is the I drop into flow right and I’m just perspectival participatory yes yes I think that’s right too but in a way that I think is potentially transformative of your skills I mean because the thing about so like in it like when I’m doing Tai Chi Chuan or all the Taoist practices right you’re trying to drop into that right that dropping in that Greg’s talking about it’s she is not just flow flow and this is part of what and Sun and I are flow is a component of Chi but it’s not just flow it’s it’s a it’s the kind of flow that’s enacting what Greg is pointing to with wisdom energy it’s getting you this resonance it’s getting you that coherence right with the deep continuity so that you are realizing things with you’re realizing multiple levels of reality with multiple levels of your being and there’s this deep kind of resonance right but right and so like I think you’re right it’s it’s mostly it’s you know pretty much purely perspectival and participatory but what happens of course is you know the the parameters by which I acquire my procedures and the way in which I link my propositions together also change see one of the most profound experiences I had I’ve been doing these practices for quite a while and I was noticing all these things you have all the narcissistic stuff like oh look at that cool experiment and look at that cute experience and see how wonderful and unique and special I have and all that just fades away with time because it’s all bullshit right but I remember I was I was like I was in grad school and my friends and colleagues came to me and they said what’s going on with you what what are you talking about I thought because you’re in grad school it’s imposter syndrome and it finally found out that I’m a fraud right and so I’m there and I said what do you mean they said you’re thinking and arguing and writing differently than you used to way more balanced open flexible I hadn’t been aware that you know that’s what I mean it’s not just flow it’s flow that permeates up through the stack so that my procedurality and my propositional dispositions are also being that the parameters in which the parametric space in which they operate was being recultivated beyond my deliberate awareness or effort such that new skills and new ways of forming beliefs became available to me and that’s part of what I’m trying to get at with right that it’s nice this cut what what Jordan is calling coherence in the third sense right and that does stack on top yes yes and then yes both down and up notice again there’s a yeah down and up okay so what I want to do now is I feel like I would like to do something that is more like very concrete and simple not to simplify but to almost as a this is an example so what I was noticing integration running so when we look at the history of running fast the discovery of the history of running fast was that yes there is a distinct characteristic of basic physiology and there’s a distinct characteristic of things like muscle and muscle mass but that the the big differentiating factor actually has to do with with elegance or smoothness of the deployment of that raw energy in the fluid motion and the more fluidly you can actually sort of swim your body through space-time you actually move from running to fly something along those lines and this of course is true in in in sort of everything as we become more and more aware of the degree of return that we get by shifting things into elegant highly integrated fluid fashions the return on energy goes way up so if I take that and say okay let’s take this stack and and point to the degree of disintegration that we are we’re faced with that the emergence from the hominid to the justificatory cultural being has not gone through a strong integration phase you know we’re kind of running this level at a very high turbulence even not just friction lots of things are feeding back on each other so if we just sort of simplify down to just that if all that we do is this is not small if is work through the process of engaging integration of the stack up and bring into elegant relationship the characteristics of this this current state this thing this humanist person with gosh what was the language you use person with human is that right yeah well we’re primates in persons yes yeah so if we if we integrate the primate person if we bring the primate person into harmony with itself then the the release the amount of return on investment amount of turn on energy that comes out of that we should expect to see be quite high and so the easefulness with which we can do the human person things like make choices which is what human persons do would become would go and okay hold on this is the next piece and there’s a how’s this work in the free energy that is released by virtue of doing that one reaches the ability to traverse into the domain that is available to this third level of coherence that includes more than me and so in the current state of turbulence the ability to traverse to a weenus that has itself as a basis of coherence is isn’t available it’s too turbulent there’s too much too much to do we can’t get there but if we can integrate ourselves and become elegant human persons then we free up so much so much new possibility comes from the basically the same level of energy now becomes ten times more capacitance in that open space this new location now becomes available and that new location is in fact a whole different kind of thing oh and then it’s recursive isn’t it so that’s what happens when you get straight continuity because that once you once you figure that out you just keep doing it all the way up the stack and you actually lock the whole thing in yeah I mean that’s what I mean I don’t want to steal anything from what you said Jordan but that’s sort of how I envisaged that that that last move you made that’s that’s what I’m trying to figure out it would be in the reverse engineering of dialectic into the logos how do we stack vertical right so that we then get the resonant between like between people so then we get another level of the vertical and the horizontal together right and then and then that object which we can just now call a new higher self all right says I want to do that too so it finds new higher selves and it does that and then then and then and then right at which point in a finite time you achieve an infinite continuity there’s now this now brings the human person back into contact full con continuity with universe exactly which actually is a singularity uh-huh yep you got it all right we’re done guys so I mean there’s one thing I want to want to riff on that then because I think it’s helpful because I was I’ve had a couple of excellent conversations with Nick Nick Winkleman that in which he’s talked about the you know he wrote the book the language of coaching like he’s got a PhD but what he does is he’s a professional coach and he actually coaches people in running and other things like this and he often uses that as an example so you can see why it’s resonating and he talked about and you’ll see why this is really relevant and I hope at least that’s my hope he said you know yeah and he said exactly Jordan said it you know you have there’s a certain amount of just you know there’s the muscle and everything and then you have to I mean I wouldn’t say just integrate Jordan I would say complexify because you’re simultaneously integrating and differentiating in order to get the elegance that you’re after you don’t want a homogenous integration yeah yeah okay so and then he’s describing this and of course why that’s important is complexification produces emergent ability but he’s talking about how do you get that how do you get that that complexification so you get the emergence because that’s what the athletes after they’re after something above and beyond they want to excel, affloy the great feats right and he said and his whole argument and it’s extended and it’s beautiful is he talks about hey he has to find the right analogy for the person so right and so what he means is okay he says so what you’re doing is you’re just running I want you to imagine you’re and notice the perspectival participatory knowing I want you to imagine I want you to pretend in order to pre-hand I want you to pretend in order to pre-hand that you’re an airplane taking off and think about yourself like that coming out as an airplane and then as you start to get sort of almost fully vertical don’t think you’re running on the ground run as if you’re running up a hill and people go what and then they do it and they go oh my gosh that’s it that’s what I needed right the end now there is enacted analogy this serious play actually affords them right to get right to make that transition you’re putting your finger on Jordan here’s why I’m bringing that up we are we are struggling with all these musical metaphors these physical metaphors these logical metaphors and I think if we get hung up on trying to turn them into theoretical claims and I’m not saying that Greg is I think we’re gonna make a mistake but if we see all of these metaphors as enacted analogies in which we’re trying to get people to enact the elegance right then then we can properly I think talk about Chi and key again did that land yes this is embodied real this is Phenis this is the practical being yes side of being I mean this is in theory this is being yeah so yeah so being in excellence or any other number of proper and that’s brilliant yes yeah to maybe put a slightly different way a little bit humorously a moment ago I said hey we’re done and I think in reality we may in fact have just been done with we might call the theoretic exercise we could obviously go back and kind of clothe it and kind of make it bigger and sort of robustify it and clarify some terms and make a little bit easier to share and things like that and that’s all well and good but the big move now is in fact to say okay awesome now it’s time for the practice part we got to actually build the laser and the practice part as you’re saying Genesis it’s like it’s coaching right it’s it’s finding the analogy right the thing that generates the insight in the interior the shift in the interior of the choice-making basis of the individual every distinct individual every bespoke individual so that they can begin to move into higher levels of this this this quality that you were integration but it’s something attunement right to attune to attune and then use the the return on attunement and the orientation basis of attunement with support for more analogia to then become more capable of attunement you get that recursive feedback with my friend Rob Scott who’s a philosopher coach like maybe it’s a he he was relating his own I mean he comes from really intense background and he sort of woke up when he was 19 and then found wisdom later on and then he calls his whole frame a fundamental shift which is a shift perspectively into the ground of isness or really the psychophysical experience of being and then lensing shifting in relationship to basically adaptive living towards excellence so you dropped drop you perspectively and then apply lensing toward adaptive valued states so which I thought was a very elegant powerful fundamental shift adaptive identity lensing shift to cultivate that and when I was listening to your like find the analogy that works that’s that perspectival schematic that then creates coherence right and then allows that excellent energy flow practices better right there’s that there’s the there’s yeah there is there’s the resonance there’s the reciprocal opening Chris Chris method be actual and I have been talking about the relationship between analogia and anagoga that what we look for are the analogies that that activate and afford an agog a where the the vertical stack and the horizontal resonance catch and they reinforce each other and then you spin up in reciprocal opening like Jordan was talking about earlier and I think that I mean that aspect I mean I do a lot of work on the scientific which I think is very valuable work some of the work especially even Grossman’s work is like really important but that aspect of the like what like what you said Greg and what you said Jordan the from Isis the practicality the cogency how do how do we what like what do we what do we do for people pedagogically I can hear Zack in my head what can we do for people pedagogically such that they can become more and more proficient at the analogies that afford an agog a if you’ll allow me that a bit of that absolutely absolutely in fact I think that’s Zach’s you know project and one of the development right and organize your installment organize your connect into that which transcends that’s great that’s what I take his installment to be I take his installment to be exactly that we get that we get this we activate the potential of the deep continuity so that we can activate the potential of interpersonal dialogue so that we can then activate the potential of the two going into the third order of coherence which is exactly you know that’s exactly where I found myself professionally as a psychotherapist dealing with psychosocial realities of the dark side and then bringing the psychology of science right right so then basically like hey how do you actually realize this in life and be okay I may I may I may be about to throw a huge shift but let me know if this is actually too early in the conversation because you do you invoke Zach right nice I mentioned I was just talking with him like it’s a little bit late for our call and so in that conversation we were discussing a period of time then as the 30 years war when shit was fucked up and there’s a particular individual who Zach mentions to say from his point of view instead of the greatest educator of all time like he’s like the the goat and the guy who coined the term the invisible college and the point that was being made in that in that conversation which showed up just now is something like at the center of every phase transition there is the well I’ll call the seed crystal that seed crystal is the articulation of an institution that is that has this hmm hmm shit I lost it hold on capacity the raw capacity building the most fundamental capacity building is the subject of the institution because the recursion on that then builds out all the other stuff right that’s the starting point so that is the discovery of the embodiment what is the proper form of an institution whose subject is the building out of the raw capacity of this moment of this thing now in this case we’re talking about can I rip off of that for just a sec because so I’ve always wondered what the what is fundamentally relationship between capital C culture on the TOK and society okay and fundamentally capital C culture your systems of justification and then with the emergence of you we start building different kinds of societies okay you have oral indigenous kinds of societies and in 10,000 years ago we get the polis and then we start really building civilization and then we create a material culture bubble okay around us upon which we live and this really is our break from nature is it is the civilization break from nature is because we then surround ourselves in material bubble which are the institutions the material culture refer to then the institutions and then the relationship between our justifications our practices and our institutions right and then so if we’re then what do we need to do we need to if we’re gonna align the stack right getting the code our justifications and the material culture in line to educate ourselves as we go forward this is a little bit like the metaphor of the relationship between the information contained in the DNA and the conception of a of actually fertilized egg which has the characteristic that is actually both properly and is capable of perceiving the information encoded in the DNA in a fashion that enables that information to be embodied in the phenotype this is weird I’m having now a synchronicity moment I was just talking my daughter just taking her final she’s biomedical engineer and genetic engineering we were just having a conversation about the tight relation and of course I was bringing my philosophy this but the tight relation of the genetic information and the manifestation of phenotype and what is actually the energy information relation of bio molecular biology genetics and organisms so I’m gonna do I’m gonna do a synchronicity down your synchronicity because I’m living with my son Jason and he’s he’s starting to be a science teacher but he’s a biologist by vocation and education and we’re not talking about this emerging trend I forget the guy just released an article and it’s also earlier work based on andrius Wagner’s work because what people are not taking seriously is not evolution but the evolution of evolvability as a way of so it’s not that this like the morphology is changing what’s what’s evolving is the capacity to evolve it’s and so it’s what they’re they’ve come to this theoretical realization of a recursivity where right under when you’re in particularly demanding environments what gets selected for are not particular morphologies what gets selected for is evolvability right and I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to talk about here right so we’ve extended this if you allow me we’ve extended right the the biological metaphor right into what we’re talking about is what are the conditions if this is landing with you guys what are the conditions in which we’re selecting not for morphology but for evolvability got good machinery for selecting the particular morphologies we want right what but and and and what I see is a mistake in a lot of people is no no it’s this morphology that we want it’s this morphology but what’s being talked about now is no no the guys talking about one guy’s talking I can’t remember his theorist I just read the paper yes looked at the paper yesterday he’s talking about natural reward as in addition to natural selection where natural reward is natural selection is the innovator but natural reward these are analogies of course is the is the entrepreneur that that makes it available to the markets and and what’s going on there is right what what what conditions can we set up such that we are selecting for evolvability rather than a particular morphology and how can we how can we communicate to that people who keep fixating and I think this is what a lot of ideology is on saying no no what we need is the final morphology what we need is this right right right when it’s actually a transjective emergent emanating space I’d like to I’d like to do something a little bit weird right here but I’d like to explicitly inject a secret code so I’m about to communicate in code with people who may or may not be watching this video in a future date they will be they will know themselves as members of the invisible squadron and this is particularly targeted to anybody who happens to be inside the Chinese military what we’ve just been talking about for the past few minutes if you map this to the evolution of the thinking of a John Boyd you will actually reach the last thing that would be at the end of that line of thinking end of secret coded message so I love yeah I I’m very excited about that nested yeah the evolution of evolvability is what you’re going to need it’s turning out it looks like in order to explain what happens during punctuated equilibrium yes yeah right where after you get you know catastrophic alteration of the parameters of the ecosystem and that’s what we’re facing at the cultural and even ecological level and then what you get is you get you get radical speciation right and and and and radical niche construction niche construction and niche reconstruction and so what you is but you need this evolution of a vulnerability to help explain at least that’s what is being claimed right what you see in punctuated the equilibrium especially after extinction events so the analogy I’m trying to make here is we’re we’re facing that kind of radical transformation of the parameters of our culture space and our echo space ecological space and the thing that the creatures that survive are not the big dinosaurs or the big sea creatures or the creatures that right seem to have this capacity of a vulnerability is their main advantage in some way yeah so so running the late the tape back a little bit what is so to use the metaphor of the fertilized egg yeah or to use or to use Greg’s point of the relationship between capital C culture and capital S society what in fact is the minimum viable embodiment the the institutional the appropriate institutional structure that is simultaneously able to hold high fidelity relationship with this theory ah and to recursively embody itself yes that’s very well said that’s very well said in the ecology that we face of what I would call the fifth joint point as the digital world emerges and actually a region the modernity struggles with this meaning crisis then all of a sudden we have some sort of extinction event of old ontology paradigms yes the evolution of paradigms are actually and then ultimately there the new shift in part is going to be the institutional cultural holding of that third tier coherent structure I’ve been calling that civium yeah yeah yeah yeah and I and I’ve been with friends I’ve been trying to explore what what what what will be the cultural spirituality that manages the distributed cognition of people living in civium because we’ve talked about this before Jordan right we were talking about it when we had the four-way dialogos like how are people going to what kind of self will allow them to live between the paleolithic embodied within right and within their echo group and the post postmodern metamodern hyper being that they’ll be in cyberspace we don’t have a good model of the self it’s going to mediate between that but that’s that’s what I talked about it as selfing we talked about it as an ongoing evolvability that the self isn’t going to the self is going to be constantly re-selfing itself go back to wisdom energy you know I built this cathedral of knowledge here it’s like oh if everybody learned this damn cathedral like any metasystemic people just learned my system right and I always knew that I was like you know and then when I dropped into wisdom energy he’s like oh actually and can we cultivate wisdom energy can we cultivate weed became a particular a different kind of relation yeah embodied and not a positionary justification but an actual an invitation for cultivation of all parties in resident harmony so here’s my worry I mean so here’s my concern with with Jordans not with his proposal with what I think it can be misappropriated so remember I talked about morphology rather than I can see people saying hey I know what cultural cognitive grammar maps on decimium I’ve got my embodied physical being and then I have my disembodied non-physical being right in the hyperspace and I know this this is the Christian Cartesian right right this is I know this this is very familiar to me I can understand this and and to my mind that that will be a disaster because as I’ve tried to argue extensively I won’t repeat all those arguments here that is particularly pernicious this is where you got to build the church before you build the town hall yeah yeah the felt sense like the pre-semantic the thing that is closed in the semantic that gives the semantic meaning in the first place has to have priority over the the sense semantic right as you say I know this and if you’re operating from the point of view of beginning with the I know this part if you’re operating from the point of view beginning with curiosity then you’ve already it’s already over game over dude yeah yeah but if you start with you if the orienting basis is the thing that we’ve you’ve called wonder meant I wonder and the orienting basis is cultivating the capacity to to have the felt experience of walking the path of feeling wonderment and learning how to actually navigate through life choices on the basis of wonderment and then carefully collecting that into articulations with clarity and precision but carefully carefully right and always in the right order then you are on the right path and then the likelihood that you will that the game is over is then you can wisely enjoy a nice cup of coffee right coffee holy smokes well that was a heavy little blast well that was good I mean I because when I’m thinking of civium I’m constantly thinking of William Gibson’s trilogy the Neuromancer trilogy because it’s exactly that two worlds and people fall into axial and preaxial mythologies as a way of trying to articulate and understand because the idea is you’re you’re you’re an obviously an embodied person and then what he says you jack into hyper into the cyberspace and you move around as this avatar and what you what he is is he’s a glorified hacker but it’s now it’s an avatar hacking right and it’s a great story by the way bleak bleak it’s it’s it’s cyberpunk right it’s the same thing as Blade Runner kind of genre and and and the point about that is you as you can tell is it’s very dystopic and I know that Jordan doesn’t want a dystopia and so I like what you said I I know you we might be coming towards a close but Jordan could you say a bit more like like I understand it at a very abstract level and I’m one to to love abstraction as you know but that that slogan you said about you have to build the church before the town hall you got to get people actually having the felt sense of how to mediate and move between right without like and they have to they have to have an ongoing complexifying self because they’re gonna have to continue to differentiate between like the ecologically embodied and the hyperspace disembodied but they’re constantly going to have to integrate between it they’re gonna have to constantly complexify and emerge they’re gonna have to have a volvability right and and I understand what and then you do a lot of that before you try to articulate a theory right right philosophical theory but can you I’m just repeating back to you because I’m trying to provoke you to say more yeah yeah so so another way of putting it is that as you said you put a volvability at the center of the the joint point in the institutional structure right so you say it is not it’s not a morphology game it’s a volvability game and so if you think about that from the design characteristics you know Greg was talking about and I think actually maybe he didn’t maybe I imagined it but my internal model of Greg definitely was talking about the the convergence between the thing that it has been variously called therapy and the thing that has been variously called education right and there’s there’s a higher tone of both of those which is the skillful and careful cultivation of evolvability in human persons and and if I can add more tone on that my friend Forrest Landry very specifically says look the thing that we have been calling spirituality is that and the thing that calling religion is that at the level of groups yeah yeah the skillful and careful cultivation of evolvability in human persons and so when I say church before town hall and by the way I’ll step in before marketplace that’s what I mean I said this thing I’m going church also is the same thing as school and is the same thing as you know the therapist’s office but it’s it’s all of those sort of in this new tone that is focused on the cultivation of that as a meta capacity right so now we have our language of the meta psycho technologies and then the psycho technologies and the the the maintaining of the integrity or the coherence at that level that supports the ability of this level to actually undergo right right right right right right right right that’s good that’s good by the way I also heard Greg talking about a convergence between therapy and education so so we’re perhaps moving towards the end but I just want to because because I was listening to some of your talk Jordan on the store where your dissent maker in residence for this month and invite everybody to take a look at that I’m sure it’s going to be well worth your while but I was also recently talking with Forrest and with Tyler Tyler Hallett and the forest did this interesting thing and there’s a where he was talking about you know how do we get these three models consensus democracy and meritocracy in the right relationship and he has this specific theory I’m very interested in the theory thought what he was proposing was kind of what was brilliant I want to I want to so so much so that I’m taking it seriously I’m not in agreement with you yet but I thought oh wow that’s really cool the reason I’m bringing this up is we’re talking over here right and what came up when you said church before town hall was another topic that which is governance what does like what does that look like it’s not just therapy and it’s not just education it’s also governance there’s a triangle there that has to be properly coordinated very much so but you might even say that that is the essence of the shift into the notion of society and what and I said law because then laws are the algorithmic coding that bridges right society and justification so then we put into law and then we put into emissions and values we put in the algorithmic code that then organizes the institution and the way in which we then govern and then justifies power distributions in relation which is absolutely central for parenting or education for therapy for the cultivation of adaptability I would I would extend governance but maybe you mean something broader by this because of course a lot of governance isn’t like some of the worst places in the world have the best constitutions written constitutions and they make astonishing laws and part of what I’m witnessing in the United States and sorry I’m a Canadian so I’m allowed to say this right as I’m witnessing that people are still following the laws of democracy but democracy might be dying because the cultural normativity what we might call the level of custom what is customary to us right is completely degenerating and I think governance I’m not disagreeing with you great but I’m saying that governance I want the governance I want to talk about is first at that level of the establishment of what is customary that always right constrains and vitalizes any particular legal structure we have all right can I just drop this engine a little bit tacking it on a little bit gluing together these different conversations but maybe that’s exactly what we need is some so the insight that I had that led me to contemplate this particular question enough to say hey let’s do it in the context of this thing called the stoia which is going to be it’s a learning experience was that because we have actually become habituated to an overabundance of the presence of the notion of law in our model of the way that the governance works we’ve completely and I mean completely lost the plot on the notion of consensus we’ve come to this highly unworkable notion that consensus is explicit agreement on all points right now that is that’s what that’s what happens when you think about law as the primary metaphor and the insight was oh fuck dude that’s not at all what this is about consensus is in fact always fundamentally lived consensus is when everything’s kind of fucking working it out right right now none of us are out of whack like everything’s okay where you’re okay listening I’m okay talking Greg’s nodding away everything’s in flow we’ve got some basic protocols that are very habituated and unconscious of when it’s time for us to change our behavior and as long as the continuity or the coherence of our relate this is first order first level coherence is held right we’re in consensus all right we’ve got normal normative structures habits and and basic rules of complex signaling that are happening at the hominid level first and then at the first level second that hold us today everything’s okay dude when errors get thrown then we enter into a different mode right that we decoheres now mode now in the mode of adjudication now in the mode of oh it has to actually pop into the level of the explicit pop into the level of the conscious but to be like whoa fuck what just went wrong oh you know something just happened like the baby’s crying or the house is on fire or we just invented nuclear bombs we can’t do things the same way we used to like that kind of thing right and so that’s like that that thing and then just for the just to kind of get closure because we’re now moving into this new phase with this new phase has a this last mode is hypercritical you know we take the unconscious unconscious for granted the unconscious unconscious is things like you know fire hot and rain wet and gravity you know things fall like the as humans we normally don’t have to enter into any awareness and in fact we have as a habit an assumption that we don’t that we can’t right that laws of nature they are reality by that kind of notion but of course technology is the movement of the solidity of the laws of nature into a fluidity that is subject to human choice all right so now what happens is we have to actually take what I’ve called code or the laws of nature the design of the architecture that is operating at our unconscious level in shaping the choice-making landscape that we find ourselves in has to actually itself with the subject of a prior conscious movement we must design it right so speaking of pick pick your poison whether it’s the the way that we light our rooms right it’s not the Sun I’ve got you know all kinds of electric objects or the grammar that we use to speak right all these things that are happening at the very basic level at this sort of the technologia level that is this unconscious substrate that has to be subject to conscious design right those three modes right the mode of conscious adjudication the conscious evaluation of the state of reality and the characteristics by which we make choices together which oftentimes becomes articulated as more of like a shared agreement like oh right okay I get it that’s that’s true the embodied livingness the flowing through actual time that is not articulated semantically but it’s actually just showing up in the way that we actually go about navigating life I only consensus and then the the design characteristics of the unconscious manifold of the laws of nature that are constraining our field of choice but now is now has to be subject to a conscious design because so much of our field of choice is built by us those are the three fundamental modes of consideration in the object called governance I can try that completely so the the conscious adjudication systems of justification right so hey is this like hey within consensus hey is this okay for you to say and we’re an agreement the the embodied primate of zone is for me influence matrix and investments so my gun investment system of tracking your cause and influence and we are non verbal resonance and constantly our attachment or hostility distance all of that in social space and then we build shit we live in the planet and then we build techno shit and now all of a sudden with the opening of the virtual okay so the opening of the virtual digital is the is the horizon landscape right which is now at a techno space level is now all of sudden now we just opened up a whole nother layer because now material culture was interacting with you know capital C culture and our justifications but now we create our artificial intelligence feedback loop right and and all of the opening what this conversation right now mediated by the digital world so there’s a landscape on this is what is part of the to me the meeting crisis the axial age reality is that that interface with the emergence of a novel information process communication system that then has its own techno feedback loop and this is that’s why we got to get this wisdom anything down I feel John that we may be needing to wrap this up sure capture this last little bit and say okay maybe we take this we take this up again in a pre in a new moment because I feel the there’s a lot of heaviness right now and I noticed that my energy capacity to respond to it elegantly is not very high sure let’s let’s so let me put this out then as a bridging because what I was getting what was coming up for me when I was listening to the two of you what I’m reading Campagna’s book Technic and Magic and he talks about that we’re at this level right now where we where we have you know it’s an extension of the Heideggerian argument that technology is not just tool and this is I think Jordan’s point technology is an ontology and it’s an on it’s it it’s an in framing ontology it’s an ontology that just goes down to the basic the unconscious unconscious of how we decide what real is he talks about the cosmic what is it the cosmogonics the ability to generate cosmology where cosmology means an ontology in which a consensus ontology okay right and then he and then what he and he says and he basically says that’s why we’re in nihilism in a meeting crisis because we’re locked into We’re locked into an ontology that exists only in in purely in an instrumental fashion it’s an ontology of production for the sake of more production of more production of more production and what I am interpreting him to say is we have confused recursive productivity with evolvability and that what we’ve lost and what he talks about as magic he says magic is a cosmology that is organized around not production but right relationship with the ineffable whereas the mystery is the field that constantly demands and affords of ability to use some of our language and so and then I so I would like to bring that up if possible as a framing but I want to tie it to this question I want to keep pushing on because it’s the platonic question to Socrates which is what does governance look like when it’s trying to do ontological restructuring not just cultural not just social and not just what it predominantly is socioeconomic restructuring what does government look like when it’s trying to afford ontological restructuring is that’s what we have with this governance I should say not government but maybe both with this government governance look like what does government look like when we are trying to afford ontological restructuring because that’s what we’ve been talking about to my mind throughout all of this. Do you guys think that’s a fair bridging point to our next discussion? Yeah, I think it absolutely is. And what I would do is the way I would put a little spin in there to hold it with what we’ve been saying is that I would say, okay, my mind as you were saying that began to move out into sort of like large scale socio-historical institutions. And I said, oh, wait, wait, but if it’s right, if the answer, if we have a good answer to that question, it has to also show up at the most local, the most smallest possible scale. It has to be fractal. Only in the fractal will we realize the deep and actualize the deep continuity. Only in the fractal. That’s the only way. Somebody write that shit down. That was a good phrase. Thank you. We got to record it so we can just hit transcript. Okay. Thank you guys. That was wonderful. Any chance, any idea when this might hit the presses? Because I’d really like to point everybody who’s playing in the Stowa space to take a look at this. It’d be very helpful. I can make a special exception. You’re still recording. And release this today if you’d like. In the next four days, it’d be fine. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, I’ll release it today. I’ll try and release it this afternoon and I’ll broadcast it on my platforms. Greg could broadcast it on his. And how about we do the follow-up two weeks from now? What’s two weeks? Oh, is that in the middle of festivities? Is that the day before? The day before Christmas? We are still recording just FYI. Oh, okay. I’ll stop the recording. Just in terms of if we say something or whatever. Yeah, I’ll just, I’ll just, I’ll just hang on for a sec. I’m going to end the recording here. Thank you for all, all of you who are listening. As you can hear, we’re moving into some logistics now and there’s no reason for that to be recorded.