https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JDKM6UXzBqM
Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. The hypothesis of the problematic of paradigm shifts in the contemporary era, where at least by hypothesis we are for the first time conscious or aware of that as a thing, and that in its own terms, the move is not led by theory. It’s actually led by some combination of randomness and changes in the underlying technical layer, like new instrumentations, or anomalies and things that are showing up in the experimental layer, which then gives rise to a set of new kind of larger, less finely tuned, kind of squishier, weirder theories that are native to the new milieu, and then a process by which literally individuals leap from the old theoretical milieu into the new milieu, or a whole new category of people who weren’t even attached to the old theoretical institutional framework, will begin to show up with competence in the new milieu, and then will begin to establish new institutional forms in the context of the new possibility space. Right. For example, you can say that mid-century physics and the Manhattan Project were very closely linked. Yes. There’s something about the military industrial complex’s ability and necessity to provision certain kinds of resources to do the kinds of work that were necessary at the technical and experimental level to actually take nuclear physics from the purely theoretical into the practical to actually be able to expand the frontier of the theoretical. CERN doesn’t, until you get to the Large Hadron Supercollider, that’s a lot of money. That’s a lot of structure. There’s this linkage between all the elements. The point was that we were now sitting in an environment, almost like a rubber band pole, where there’s a big stretched rubber band with a lot of tension in it, where we’re still very grounded in, almost every operating institution we live under is grounded in a legacy set of paradigmatic assumptions, axioms, habits, ideas, theories, approaches, models. There’s clearly a new one that’s sitting here in potentia, but for whatever reason, there’s lots of things we can talk about there, in the sense it’s because of the awareness. We’re in this situation of like the, once you’ve taught somebody that enlightenment exists, the likelihood of them actually becoming enlightened decreases radically. We know the paradigm exists. Everybody’s trying to figure out how to get to the new paradigm while actually still wearing the clothing and staying in the app. I still want to be the department chair of the anthropology department at Harvard, and I also want to get into the new paradigm. She doesn’t work that way, because the valley crossing exercise, a lot of stuff’s going to go, and most of that stuff is actually not just theoretical content. It’s going to be like identity and ways of life, institutional forms and haircuts. Who knows? The whole point is who knows? Until you have humiliated yourself so thoroughly that you can actually dispense of all. You can’t actually make the migration. We’re kind of scummed up right now by that challenge. Can I add something in there, though? In it, yeah. I agree that the Kuhnian model is largely bottom-up. I have some criticism of Kuhn. For example, if you look at John Spencer’s work and you look at the people bringing in the Einsteinian quantum paradigm shift, which is one of the most recent, therefore we have the best history for it, those individuals, and this is part of Spencer’s argument, they’re way more philosophical than the scientists of a previous generation. They are philosophical at even what you might call a philosophical religious level. Einstein is reading Spinoza and being deeply influenced by Spinoza. Heisenberg is reading Vedanta philosophy, and John Spencer points out many of them are reading the Neoplatonists deeply, profoundly. You can see the same thing, of course, around the same time as Galileo. What you have in Galileo is return to the Platonic tradition and that math is somehow the language of the universe. There’s no math in Aristotelian science, and Galileo goes back to Plato and brings that back in. While there is this bottom-up thing, and I agree with you, there’s a lot of thrashing going around, there is nevertheless, it seems to me, also a top-down exploration of the adjacent possible by people doing this sort of cross-cultural, cross-philosophical exploration, as if they’re looking for new vocabulary, new grammar by which they can bespeak. I see it more as almost like a top-down, bottom-up thing happening in an integrated scientific fashion. I think Forrest would actually propose the notion of from the middle out, which is even more interesting. The cycling process where you mix, let’s go with Einstein or Schrodinger or Haydn, where the partitioning of the space of consideration into disciplines, for example, is part of the problem that needs to be undone. Part of the humiliation is actually say, okay, we’re going to break apart these structures, the underlying habits of mind that tell us that physics and theology aren’t the same thing, or that this long-ago Egyptian book isn’t part of contemporary chemistry, whatever. You say, no, no, we’re going to actually have to move into a different mode of a different form. It’s actually the point is to shift into a different form of exploration, a different mode of sensing and grasping. The metaphor that I came up with with Zach, it’s almost like you’re walking through a landscape and you see this object, which we would contemporarily call a screwdriver. The whole point is you just look at it and you don’t even get, you don’t like, and you just pick it up like a primary, just grabbing a rock or a dog grabbing this thing. You just pick it up like, don’t know what this thing is. Seems like it might be something I’m supposed to have. You put it in your satchel and you can’t walk. You don’t know where you’re going or what’s going to be the right tool to go there, but there’s something, there’s some new method that’s discovering itself in you of okay, I’m getting more and more skillful at this. Then you show up the watering hole, and there’s a bunch of other folks with the watering hole. Each one of which has had a similar weird journey and you dump all your satchels out and that guy over there has a ratchet and this guy has a wire cutter. What are we doing here? I think we may be doing plumber or electrician. I don’t know what that means. I’m just going to hang it out there. No, no, the point is that it’s very prosaic in some sense. It’s a very weird mixture of the perfect application of the practical in the most prosaic at the ground level is the edge of the way these things emerge. What that calls to mind for me though is it’s practical, but you also see the return to the center stage of the imaginal because that’s in Corbin’s idea, because remember the imaginal is what’s acted out. It’s imagination acted out in acting rather than in your working memory. Corbin’s main idea is the imaginal is what integrates together the sensual and the conceptual. If what we’re looking at is how people are trying to reconfigure the mediation between the sensual, bottom up from the sensual and top down from the conceptual, they’re actually going to stay in the middle a lot. They’re going to do a lot of imaginal work. I’m thinking even of Einstein imagining himself riding a beam of light and he’s trying to look around and see what he sees, but also using the imaginal to try and rock the change in worldview and change in sense of self that happens with the advent of new technologies, new paradigm. I’m thinking of Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita once the bomb goes off. He quotes Krishna, now I become death, the destroyer of worlds. He’s enacting an archetypal myth from Hindu mythology because he’s trying to somehow get that human beings are now wielding the power that previously was only privileged to the gods. What does that mean? The only language that talks that language is this imaginal language. What I see is a lot of people typically in Galileo is imagining things moving on frictionless surfaces and all this weird stuff that’s happening that’s allowing people to reconfigure how they glue together the abstract conceptual and the experiential sensual. You’re right. Somehow that’s talking up, if that’s the right metaphor, to a philosophical exploration of the adjacent possible. It’s also talking down, not in the pejorative sense, to the sensual. People’s ability to perceive is being changed by new psychotechnologies. Let’s remember the scientific revolution is depending on the printing press, all kinds of things that are really bootstrapping cognition. The process of reformation has happened which has radically individualized people. They’re feeling very isolated so they’re trying to find a way to greatly enhance and empower their cognition. There’s all kinds of things going on. I see this pace where people are playing. I’ll call it both the philosophically and the centrally informed imaginal space. That’s where a lot of stuff is happening. Nice. You invoked another term, adjacent possible and imaginal. Maybe I want to present or weave together a vocabulary here. Funny. In the language I’m going to put forward, in my mental image, I’m actually seeing both an individual human and then in some sense an arbitrary complex of agency as the examples. I have the actual. I have some kind of causally competent complex. Then I have the possible, which is the field of possibility in relationship with which the actual is presenting. Then I have the adjacent possible, which is the boundary of the zone that the actual can literally point with the possible and the actual touch. The actual has the capacity to begin to move into an actualization, a conversion of possibility into actuality. I’m going to call it conversion of possibility into actuality. Then if I think about the imaginal, the imaginal represents like a penumbra outside of the actual that extends into the zone of the adjacent possible. How funny. You’ve probably seen, you probably haven’t, there’s a technology that’s a laser. The way the laser works is it changes the galvanic potential of the air through which it moves and thereby increases the local possibility of the forming of what would be a lightning bolt. It actually changes the condition of the shape of possibility in the galvanic potential space to the point where the adjacent possible of some of the conduction of electricity happens, but it’s in a different mode. It’s light, the tonic’s moving that. The imaginal for me is something like that. It’s a field outside of the zone of the actual. It’s an interrelationship between the possible and the actual that has characteristics of both and supports a kind of adjacent possible. The relationship between the imagined and adjacent possible is very rich. That’s all that. Here’s the next piece. I want to talk about it in terms of shape. A very concrete metaphor is let’s say my body has the possibility of singing in its most possible possible, but I just sprinted 300 yards, so I’m out of wind. My current shape, probably 50 yards, but let’s go 300 to make it really for sure. In the possible possible, this body can sing. In the local, the actual possible, in the zone of adjacent possibility of the shape of actuality that is present now, this body can’t sing because it’s currently occupied with a different subset of the actuality. I see it like a shape. My actual has like when it’s in equipoise, it folds out in this direction and the adjacent possible of singing is right there, but when it actually does what it’s doing, it’s almost like shifts its shape. There’s two moves. I used the second derivative, the possible possible, and then there’s the merely possible. These have to do with the temporary, momentary, more fluid or flexible shifts in the state of the actual that are associated with fluid, like less hard-coated. It’s changing configurations. Why did I say that? Oh, so in this notion of paradigm shift, you would say it’s like there’s a pulsing of the moving into the development of the underlying adjacent possible, the imaginal possibility that emerges in the context of a particular paradigm. There’s an actualization into that. It’s a little bit like doing a 300-yard sprint. We’re breathing hard and the shape of our actuality isn’t actually spherical, meaning that it’s optimized. It has real competence in particular characteristics, but the underlying actual potentiae, the actual surface area of the adjacent possible that we could touch is actually not as high as it could otherwise be. The movement that you were just talking about is kind of like a movement of you’ve got your hands on your knees and you’re leaning over breathing hard. This is now Einstein Schrodinger coming out of the 19th century and they’re just kind of like looking around going, whoa, okay, let me just kind of recollect myself, kind of fill back out, find out how much actuality we just carved out of reality. Let’s go back to what is the total actuality that is really within the zone of relatively straightforward. It’s not you don’t have to carve out a whole new piece of actuality. We just need to recover it, remember it, reintegrate it, a healing process, a process of becoming more healed or whole, wholeness, wholesomeness, the holy by the way. That’s why a lot of these things begin to come up. Then as the people move into that new mode and they actually kind of step back, center ground, become more, rise up a little bit out of nose to the grindstone, see more different things, notice all these different things that are living in disciplines that had been partitioned, but the partition is no matter anymore. Then of course, the bigger actuality of where they are, which was in some sense always present, but was temporarily constrained, fills back out. Now the zone of the imaginal extends back out to a much farther perimeter. Then the new paradigm begins to unfold. Then it goes back into starting to run again and starts to begin to reconform its shape and start to explore the actuality into this new imaginal zone, thereby creating a new larger sphere, the volume increases. Then the story starts over, something like that. That’s very cool. Could we integrate into that? I like that. It feels, yeah, I like that model. While you’re talking, I was thinking about the original, you’re sprinting and you’re tired. I was thinking about the machine learning problem where you get locked into, because of the parameters of your state space, you get locked into a zone you can move. Then what you do is you throw in noise, this is also how you generate insight, you throw in noise into the system. You got to get the right amount of noise. Same with insight, moderately distracted from the problem in order to break up and get to new places in the space. One of the things that I like about this is that one of the things that Kuhn talks about, but he never explains how it happens, is a new attitude towards anomaly. The anomalies pile up and they’re marginalized. Then somebody goes and takes the anomalies and makes them central rather than peripheral. There’s a figure round reversal. The thing that always bothered me, and it’s germane to our conversation, is that’s a tremendous act of imagination. It’s an act of sort of imaginatively driven insight or insight-laden imaginal. Because most of the time when people do that, let’s be honest, we say, wow, what a kook. Turns out that there’s a relationship between Pluto and the planet Earth. It’s a very, very relationship between Pluto and Australian tin production and the Sique Empire. I always found that a bit of a magic wand in Kuhn. Why do we take them, and I don’t like his answers. His answers are largely sociological. People just die off. That doesn’t explain it. This is analogous to me to our question we’ve explored before. How do people catch virtue? How do people catch this vision, the new imaginal, that does a figure ground reversal and such that people will take it up rather than dismiss it as just an agglomeration of the weird? Well, I don’t want to dismiss it purely sociological just yet, but I’ll put it in the characteristic of the human developmental. I personally, I remember, this is probably about six or seven years ago when I found myself for the first time, frankly, really being in any meaningful relationship with that category known as millennials. My life arc was one where I grew up among genetics, obviously under the on the watching of the boomers. Got married, had kids, always hanging out with people of roughly the same cohort, working, building companies, retiring, and therefore never having any particular contacts to put me into contact with millennials. Then that shifted, and I was taken aback by two things. One, how very little they actually knew about anything. I mean that pejoratively and hyperbolically. Also, the degree to which they were engaging in a, in some sense, it would look like a random walk search of what’s up. I’d be sitting there at this party and just observing millennials talking with each other. The conversation would include almost like this conversation, people just walking through the desert and just picking shit up. I was reading this book on spirituality and then working at this startup company, and then I’m going to this EDM dance party. I think that this esoteric theory is neat. Almost like a promiscuous exploration of relatively random shit because, so now I’m going to throw in not strictly sociologic, but now I’m going to throw in tainter, because the existing structures don’t fucking work. So anomaly, oh gosh, hold on. Let me just hold this. Let me give us a quick mnemonic. All right, so what happens in anomaly space is that as anomalies begin to build up, the signal to noise ratio or the energy to work ratio of existing institutional structures declines precipitously. And so what ends up happening is that as a developing human entering into these environments, you find your own personal existential anomaly thing going through the roof. You’re picking up the anomalies that are ambient in the entire field of your social environment. So this is, let me go back to the mnemonic. This is something that I think is radically missing from the self-referential languaging of paradigm, because Coon talked about it in terms of structures of scientific revolutions. So it’s thought of, I think, improperly as being something that happens inside the context of particular scientific disciplines, like physics goes through a series of paradigms. The anomalies happen across the entire sociocultural milieu. That’s the key. The anomaly is going to be an anomaly like climate change is an anomaly of our current paradigm. The kind of the racism complex that is sitting in our current sociocultural political media environment is an anomaly of our current paradigm. It’s not, for example, specifically an anomalous result in a physics experiment that is the anomaly. There’s all the anomalies. Every event that shows up that can in fact be well-navigated, skillfully, elegantly be maneuvered through by virtue of using the complex of interlocking frameworks and institutional structures and disciplinary boundaries and tools and techniques is an anomaly. It is a sort of a frictional surface inside the machine gears, the stress to throw more and more dysfunction. If you are human developing in that environment, what’s happening is the anomalies in your environment are being encoded in you as shit that’s not working, more work that you have to do because the institutional structure of the culture that you’re operating in is a mess, i.e. you’re challenging your classroom. The notion that you’re now faced with A, 1,500 students and B, the formalism of doing a test that has grades is a non-scalable dysfunctional tool which is an artifact of an old paradigm and is throwing high entropy into your life but also is part of a complex that is almost complete noise and almost no signal in the context of development or what pedagogy or education ought to be for all of these young people. You get this heavy, heavy heaviness in the context of that heaviness to the degree to which a human being has any agency at all. Some portion of their exploration is now looking for anything that could possibly figure shit out. Remember with child’s mind, you show up in a discipline, you show up in an environment as a young person, it’s all novel to you. You don’t already come with a prefigured paradigmatic frame and so you’re absorbing the paradigm like first person and incorporating it. You’re also incorporating its dysfunction, its anomalies, and you’re actually adaptively exploring it. How would I say this? The thing that you’re looking for that thing of like how do we actually gain this insight? I would say that’s just we already have that. It’s actually how does that thing that is more fundamental than the paradigmatic lock-in show up and squeeze around the stuff and then what happens is there’s a point at which the degree to which you’re basically having to route around dysfunction begins to find its own tools and its own smoother path. It’s almost like the water just going around the rock. Does that make sense? That last little fork? It did. Well, this is how I made sense of it. I’ll see if it jives with what you’re saying. So I was thinking what was happening in my mind was the intersection of Timothy Morton’s work on hyper objects and Piaget’s work on developmental change. So Piaget exemplified an insight that he then found sort of in children. So people were doing IQ testing and they weren’t paying attention to the error. Why would they? You want to know how much the child succeeds. Piaget says but wait maybe the errors have a pattern because there’s two types of errors. There’s performance errors and we write off performance errors because they don’t tell us anything about the underlying. This is the distinction from Chomsky, right? They don’t tell us anything about the underlying competence but if there’s systematicity in the errors that means there’s some constraints on the competence in children that aren’t found in adults. That’s how he came up with the idea. And then what I propose, and I think this is consonant and even almost derivable from that move he made, is that what kids do is they go from here’s a mistake, let’s do conservation errors, here’s a mistake I’m making with quantity, here’s a mistake I’m making with numbers, and then what they get is wait, right? There’s a systematicity in the error and instead of having an insight here and here and here and here they find an insight into a kind of problem, right? Yeah. Now what I was thinking is I don’t know if it’s going to work, I don’t know if it’s driving with what you’re saying. So Morton also has the idea that we’re in the age of the hyper objects. These are things like climate change or even evolution, right? They’re objects that are not set up for our paleolithic way of identifying objects. They’re not bounded masses of matter localized in time and space. Where’s evolution? Well, it’s sort of wherever there’s life, right? And when’s it happening? Well, sort of all the time but not right now, right? And they’re weird, weird objects and part of what he’s saying is they are forcing us and they’re not abstract. He says, you know, climate change means you get more of a sunburn. They’re not over there in abstract platonic space, they’re right on your face, they’re right in your guts. Like you’re saying, they get into your system. Now I’m trying to put the two together like this. What if all the anomalies, pre-paragrahmatic change, are perceived as performance errors and then somebody sees or realizes a kind of systematicity to them so they become a hyper object? Yep. So if this isn’t pretentious, I was seeing the meaning crisis like that. There’s all this stuff happening. Yeah. But wait, maybe these are not all just performance errors in this or this or this or this or this. Maybe there’s a systematic relationship to them and then that brings the anomalies out from the periphery because they’re no longer performance. They’re now considered as revealing something wrong at the level of the competence. So then we kind of kind of pivot with that. So what I would propose, I’m going to use my own first-person experience and imagine that your first-person experience might be similar, which is you’re a whole being going through the whole of life. You’re experiencing all kinds of different sorts of things. You’re eating food, you’re getting married, you’re raising your kids, you’re driving in traffic, you’re buying clothes, you’re paying your taxes, you’re teaching classes, you’re trying to figure out how to navigate a career path. All of it. The whole point is all of it. In the context of all of it, from your first-person experience, you’re encountering things that are showing up as anomalies. Just to say they’re showing up as stuff that is frictional, stuff that is weirdly fucked up or you can’t kind of deal with it and there’s like a pressure to it. And of course, you have lots of them, lots and lots and lots of them all over the place. Now, some of them are happening in places that have more language around them. Some of them are happening in places that are just ephemeral, just flow through your environment. But being a human, just being a natural human, part of what’s going on is you’re trying to figure shit out. And being a person who in your particular case happens to be in a context that has built a certain technology, psychotechnologies for trying to engage in systematic considerations and integrations, you’re noticing all these. You’re doing your practice in meditation, you’re doing your practice in P-Gong, where you’re doing all these different modes. You’re doing therapy and theoretical cognitive science and all of a sudden you’re like, wait a minute, holy shit, my own personal first person pain and agony and grief and also these weird anomalies that are showing up in cognitive science, these weird anomalies that are showing up in other people’s theory. Here’s something that actually unifies them. Click, release. It’s almost like that compression that takes all those things that show up as differential as being more compactly perceived as being of all different manifestations or connected to some sort of larger thing. I would say that’s like an ambient natural human seeking. We’re constantly trying to find that kind of thing in our environment. I would actually say maybe that’s even what’s going on in that imaginal horizon. And then in your particular case, I was saying a variety of just people whose particular life arcs happen to put them into context where it becomes possible for them to find the path. It’s really just a matter of, oh, hey, cool, I just happened to be looking at this, the history of the … I can say something about Galileo and the platonic because I happened to experience. And I also happened to study neurology and P-Gong because these domains happen to hold each a little tiny bit of the overall story, the availability of the discoveries in my adjacent possible and then it clicks. And of course what happens then is we have a conversation, your affordance of the conversation brings my adjacent possible, my actuality, a bunch of insights pop into me, accelerated by virtue of communication with you, then pops me into a new mode, which then creates a dialogical co-creative dynamic. And then we begin to form a larger we that is beginning to participate in this expanding sphere, which has an accelerating characteristic, it’s the third, the cube of the surface area having to do with something like Metcalfe’s law, having to do with something like the super linear exponent on cities. I found this to kind of do the thing, to practice the thing and say, hey, here’s domains that I’ve touched, I’ve touched Metcalfe’s law, I’ve touched Jeffrey West’s scale, I’ve noticed that there’s these certain characteristics that show up in multiple different communicating agents that have perception and expressive capacity, have the ability to engage in signaling processes that are operating in the virtual. And this entirely exists in the process of compressing diverse actuals into abstractions and being able to do pattern recognition and pattern formation that simplifies the adjacent possible, expanding the sphere, the perimeter of the adjacent possible, that’s what we’re doing. And this then creates the kind of the sink, the simplification of the transition that then enables the attractor of the new paradigm to begin attracting things in. But remember the first point, because it is in fact intrinsically natural, oh shit, it’s intrinsically prefigured, it has nothing to do, like the fact that one of them showed up in Qigong, sorry, one of them showed up in a domain that we currently name the domain of Qigong and practice within a context that is associated with the name of Qigong. And another one showed up in your marital relationship, has nothing to do with the fit, right? We happen to have prefigured our experiential manifold according to semantic context and according to sort of some notion where things should properly be partitioned. But our fucking partitions are irrelevant, what happens is they’re part of reality and then as you notice them, the deeper human thing is showing up and going, oh okay, and once it clicks, then you start to actually begin the process of designing new partitions around a new kind of deeper and more profound or more specifically a larger actuality, a larger imaginal space. Oh gosh, that was not clean, but there was a lot in there though, yeah. Okay, so one thing that kept coming out for me, okay, so Dan Champion and I are working on this idea that, you know, we’re studying the scientists using the rovers on Mars and they do all this weird stuff, they do all this imaginal stuff, yeah, and they also, they do it, and one of the ethnographers even calls it like a totem, they’re doing the imaginal stuff but they’re not just doing it individually, in fact more importantly they have this distributed cognition machine they’re using in order to work through the rovers. And part of what we’re exploring is the idea that, you know, things like Mars’s history is a hyper object, like you can’t really get it into, you know, a concept or a set of concepts or even, you know, this experience or that experience. And so, you know, we’re developing this argument that it takes distributed cognition to be able to process a hyper object. Think of what we have to do for climate change, no person can rock climate change, you can’t do it, you have to have all these people and all these machines, so when I say distributed cognition, I mean machines too, right, like, or Hutchins example of steering a large ship, you have a bunch of people and a bunch of equipment to navigate the ship, no one person can do it because the ship and the ocean are bloody hyper objects, right, in power of voice, you can’t get them within the domain of regular human experience. And so what I’m thinking is, when we are looking for what sifts between the crackpot and the profit of the paradigm, is that the profit of the paradigm in some way instantiates, exemplifies the imaginal that gathers together, that somehow collates and curates distributed cognition in a way that can pick up the hyper object of the systematicity of the anomalies in a way that, right, and that, so I’m saying it’s not just an epistemic success, I’m trying to go back to your point about the sociological, right, the imaginal is not just epistemically succeeding, it’s succeeding in gathering together and helping to create and curate a distributed cognition machine that is capable of rocking the emerging hyper objects of the systematicity of the anomalies, because they’re no longer scattered, now they’re together and they’re overwhelmingly, like, what does this, because what happens, right, when you’re on the horizon of intelligibility, you either experience horror or you experience wonder, and wonder is when you’re confronting the hyper object that reality is so much more than you ever thought it could be. That’s what I was getting about how all of your, you know, the cooker cut it, we cut up reality in all these ways and suddenly somebody says, yeah, but look up off the table and look into the sky and we go, holy crap, I didn’t realize it was so big, right, that’s the kind of thing. So I heard you saying that in addition to the imaginal doing this epistemic work, it’s doing this other work, it’s doing something almost like social engineering whereby it’s giving people the glue by which they can come together and share and talk and create a distributed cognition machine for rocking this, and this makes me, this made me think when I was, when Luis was going through me about your point about the next Buddha is a Sangha, right, that the only way to grasp, right, what we’re talking, like paradigms are hyper objects because they’re reconceptions of reality in total. That’s the argument you’ve been making. They’re not just over here in science. They’re comprehensive challenges to our entire worldview. That’s why I made the comparison to like the actual revolution, and the imaginal has to not only reconfigure the conceptual space, it has to reconfigure the socio-cultural, socio-economic space so that new forms of distributed cognition emerge. So I’m thinking about again like how the printing press not only enabled people to do the science, but it enabled a broader community of people to emerge that could do the new kind of activity. Right, right, right, right, and so it’s just we can broaden this. One key point is that it is, it is, you cannot be outside of it, right, by definition. There is no existing hyper agent that has capacity equal to the complexity of the hyper object. Exactly. Any effort to stand outside of it and to grasp the whole of it is intrinsically only grasping the part of it, and therefore not going to work. Yeah, Morton calls the property of hyper objects that they’re viscous. They stick to it. Yeah, and I would actually do the little kind of classic elision, saying they’re both viscous and a bit vicious. Yeah, yeah. Grabbed by the tail and it bites your hand because you’re doing the wrong kind of thing, and therefore this invokes that the only proper way of being in relationship with it is to participate in the inventio of a hyper agent that discovers itself to be competent in the context of the hyper object. That’s beautifully said. That’s what I was trying to articulate. You put it in very crisp words. Thank you. So then what was the other piece? Ah, okay. And recognizing that one must have a deep commitment to humility in the sense that once you accept the premise of what was just said, the next point is to say there is no authoritative position from which you can say not this or must this. It’s a hmm. It’s kind of a you’re humble. You’re asking, you’re listening, you’re learning, you’re practicing, you’re building skill sets. It’s like learning how to juggle, like that kind of thing. Yeah. Hyper juggling and what I mean by that. Oh, so back to our printing press. Scientific exercise involved, for example, the emergence of the printing press as a tech name that gave rise to the possibility of, for example, an increasing utility of literacy in general. It gave rise to the underlying capacity and necessity of being able to procure and produce the underlying resources necessary to actually print books in a volume vastly outstripping the previous period. It feels very prosaic, but it’s not trivial. Somebody’s got to figure out how to actually start mass producing paper and ink. Also, of course, almost immediately thereafter, the innovation of new forms of social institutions in schools and colleges that begin the process of noticing what it means to participate in this loosely bound collection where Descartes and Spinoza are both part of the scientific result revolution sitting next to Leibniz. Leibniz communicated with Spinoza as much as he communicated more than he communicated with Newton. It’s not quite clear. There’s the boundaries of these things. There aren’t boundaries yet. The boundary is actually to be discovered interiority having to do with actual flows and actual what kinds of connections and signals have the right kinds of dynamics to produce the most clear partitioning of the actual territory. The competencies and expertises that can actually achieve, it’s like imagine you’ve got a team of seven people and you enter into a room and your job is to form a team and engage in the process of breaking the problem up into seven distinct challenges that are the right kinds of pieces to fit together well and where that thing learning, what’s called specialisation, has the most efficient ramp. That’s what we’re talking about. You enter into the room, what’s the room consist of? Before I tell you what’s under the side of the room, you don’t have a clue. The whole point is you have no idea. Is it seven different, like a giant pile of Legos? Well, that’s a different problem than it’s 15 different kinds of wood and nine different tools, which is a different problem from a big pile of dirt and 300 plants. Until you know what the domain is, the appropriate partitioning of the domain space into the characteristics whereby specialisation and teamwork can actually connect effectively is intrinsically uncertain. That’s the point is that we enter into that pure Persian firstness and then begin to explore it and as we begin to find the boundaries and the domains, the shape of the field of what’s called the landscape, then we begin to be able to move and accelerate. So again, my point, I just want to keep driving home. It’s the whole thing. It’s your identity. It’s your psychology. It’s the way that you parent. It’s the clothes that you wear. It’s the language that we speak. It’s everything is in it and then we go through the process. So could I try applying this to a concrete example? Sure, and I’ve got another one too. So running off the printing press. So we get the printing press and that means that books are more widely available and so you get the idea that each person could read the Bible and this makes possible the Protestant Reformation. Yeah. Right. So you get that and that means what you have is you shift to the family. The family now reads the Bible, right? And then you get the and you get the idea that daily life can be an area of sacredness. It doesn’t have to be in the confines of the church. Yeah. Bible in your family home and so you’re moving all these things around and what this means is people’s sense of competence in the sacred increases so that and Luther even proposes inside the church, not outside where there’s all sin and everything, but inside the church you run the church democratically. This is where we rebirth the idea of democracy. Yeah. We rebirth the idea that well look if we’re all equally competent with the sacred, right, then right we should the priesthood of all believers, right? The priesthood of all believers comes out of the printing press putting Bibles in individual hands and individual families and then we get the emergence, right, of the idea of democracy as a way in which possibly society could be configured. I’m trying to use that as an example about how, you know, the printing press does this thing and it permeates out, like this is your point, through life, like through daily life and through individual socio-relations reconfigures the family, reconfigures people’s relations to the church, gets them to explore political organization that was inconceivable to them just a hundred years before and then it permeates out and then you get the and then of course that starts to have, you know, that starts to interact with what you were talking about, you know, Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza because if everybody can get access to books and everybody has, you know, equal authority over what is sacred, you get the possibility of, well, maybe, you know, we should be doing something different than consulting tradition or commenting on the past, maybe we together, you get the radical innovations of people like Descartes and Spinoza and all of this is happening, right, you know, and Spinoza, don’t forget he’s in the Netherlands, which is a Protestant country, right, and that is and they’re, they’re toying with, right, democracy and it’s very close to the time in which Oliver Cromwell, the Protestants, the Puritans are trying to bring democracy into England, so all of this is all reverberating around because of the printing press and the way it impacts on how people can access something that was previously, right, set apart as inaccessible, it means the notion of the sacred was fundamentally changing, but of course we pay a price for that, which is we have lost, as that disseminated, we have paid the price that we have lost the capacity for the reverence of the sacred and we have reduced it to the effects, to the political machinery and the democratic machinery and we have forgotten that what empowered that initially was a reinventio of the relationship to the sacred. Great, right, so let’s, so taking the ball this direction, in every shift of this sort three things happen. One is a whole category of wicked problems find themselves surprisingly effortlessly resolved. Yeah, yeah. The second is a whole new frontier of opportunity emerges and gets explored and the third is a whole new set of problems show up. Now, let me go concrete. How familiar are you with the system that is in the process of being developed in China that variously is called the social credit system or the sesame credit system? Not very much, I just know of it sort of second hand. Okay, so what I want to do is I’m going to do two things. First is what I want to note that the philosopher Gilles DeLois wrote an article called the Post-Crypt on societies of control, 95 maybe, not too early, too right before he killed himself where he described something which is effectively the same as what the Chinese are now implementing and I’ve had a bunch of different conversations with a bunch of different people over the past several years. They keep showing up something along these lines and the point I’m proposing is that what the Chinese are actually developing and implementing and far along implementing is like a topological invariant in the context of the emergent possibility space. So with things like digital computing, ubiquitous computing, internet of things, you know, digital identity, facial recognition, machine learning, like that being the equivalent of the printing press, here’s a thing that shows up. There are many variations on the topological characteristic, there’s this reason for hope, but it gives us some good examples of what the proximal future likely looks like. So I don’t want to go too far into the Chinese side of it because there’s a whole bunch of implications of like the underlying assumptions of Confucianism and the imperial structure and the Mandarin and things like that, which is how their mode most mythopoetically grasps the underlying possibility and then begins to figure it into an actuality. But it looks like this, everybody has a digital identity, you have a singular digital account that represents you, it holds your bank account, it’s the thing that you can do to create, you know, get your email account or all of your social media accounts kind of back onto that digital identity, you can engage in transactions, you call for a car, whatever happens to be, that’s the first part. So second, almost all services, goods and services in the entire economy are digitally aware, they have the capacity to modulate their affordances on the basis of some kind of computational construct. For example, let’s go with Amazon, this is obviously not Chinese, we can say Amazon is an example. I go to Amazon.com, the page that Amazon.com produces is generated bespoke. It’s not like when I go to a brick and mortar building, you and I go to the same building, yeah? And we’re going to see exactly the same physical building, when we walk in, we’re going to see the same walking in. When you and I go to Amazon.com, we see different pages, it produces it bespoke because it is digitally aware, it has the capacity to know who the hell it’s interacting with, and all of the metadata is just with that digital identity, that has the ability to produce itself in relationship with A, the context of who it’s interacting with, and then of course driven by some kind of algorithm, machine learning construct that decides what are the priorities of the design characteristics that it shows up with. And then my experience of going through Amazon is continuously modulated by that kind of underlying dynamic. I click on something, it changes the UI, other people who bought this, it’s constantly fluidly changing the interface. Now more and more and more of my lived reality has more and more and more similarity to that. So if I own a car, that’s old fashioned 20th century, if the way I get transportation is by participating in sort of transportation as a service provided by Tesla, I don’t ever own a Tesla, but rather I just had an app on my phone and it knows where I am and I click and say I want to go here, something shows up, it either shows up as like there for a new sort of, an autonomous drone will drop down and pick you up or fill in the blank. Now in the context of the Chinese social credit system, one of the things that becomes easily identifiable in the zone of Jason possible is we can create a whole score, social credit score, by the way, it could be not just a single metric, it could be a bunch of different metrics that we can use to modulate your access to everything. So let’s say for example, you happen to live, I’m just going to imagine that we implemented this in the US because my ability to do metaphors is a lot easier in the US. So imagine you happen to live in downtown Toronto, actually include Canada as part of my example, and we live in a fully implemented social credit system and you don’t own a car, you want to get from point A to point Z. Well, you can walk or you can access the digital environment to move yourself through space time, but let’s say you have a really crappy score for whatever reason, the underlying algorithm determines your score is what it is. Maybe that means that it costs you five times as much per mile to take a car, that makes it a lot harder for you to move around in space and therefore you’re incentivized to figure out how to get your score better. Maybe you can’t actually go into certain areas of town at all, maybe you can’t actually open certain doors at certain, you walk down the street and kind of an AR overlay shows you certain places that are available that you can go in or the places you can’t go in, you just show up, the door just doesn’t even open because it knows who you are or what time it is or what your job is, it doesn’t matter, the modulation is vast. And of course they’re doing this in the digital virtual environment does this willy-nilly, so we understand how that works and the point is it just percolates out into all aspects of lived realities with this social credit system becomes. Now, backing out, the Chinese are implementing this and they’re pretty far along in implementing it and it’s very interesting because part of what they do is they actually have a distributed computing layer, everybody is incentivized to report on the doings of their neighbors positively and negatively. So I think John’s doing a great job of fulfilling his ethical commitments, give him more points. I think John just didn’t clean up his trash, give him less points and send him a message indicating what he’s doing wrong so he can learn and write himself, like very confused. Well, okay, so back up topologically, I’m going to propose by hypothesis that this is a topologically invariant potential that lives within the contemporary technical milieu. The likelihood that that’s how it shows up is pretty high. It’ll show up differently in different places depending on a large number of different variables, just like the response to COVID varied across different cultures and driven, for example, by COVID, things like vaccine passports and digital UVI checks are part of this construct, but it’s part of a paradigm shift. It’s part of a comprehensive shift in the potential of collective intelligence and the potential of living this that begins. So for example, in the same exact, once this construct is in place, the ability for some kind of distributed computing or distributed intelligence to suggest and reinforce your conversations becomes in the adjacent possible. So you can imagine waking up in the morning and it’s like, hey, John, here’s three serendipitous conversations that we think might be really great conversations for you to have. That’s already happening to me through Clubhouse. Yeah, Clubhouse is already doing that. So just imagine that broadened across like in the West, it’s unlikely there’s going to be one system to rule it all, maybe, but there will be probably more like a confederated set of data sharing applications. And so, hey, would you like to have this conversation on Clubhouse? Would you like to have this Zoom call? Or would you like us to pick you up on a brand new Tesla flying drone to drop you into this physical conversation at this location? And you’re like, I’ll try that. And then you get like a double feedback loop. One is you evaluate your personal subjective, you know, this is what I thought of it, and they’re across a different modes, different modes, and everybody who’s present has the ability to feedback on their experience and maybe everybody else who knows exactly how the data gathering operates. It could of course be entirely biometric, you know, just little AI cameras or watching your vasodilation, your micro expressions and projectively determining what your actual experience is better than you could anyway. And feeding that into a data milieu, right? All kinds of good, all kinds of existing problems that we think are really tricky just evaporate because they become irrelevant in this context. Yeah. All kinds of really good opportunities emerge and a whole new category of problems emerge. Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And I expect, by the way, given things like rate and state, that we’re probably already passed what’s called the bend in the curve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’re not on the downhill slide. It’s funny, you remember being as a kid on a roller coaster? Yeah. There’s like two major points, I guess four. One is you get into the car and it closes. Yeah. And there’s the click, click, click, click, click as the machine is actually dragging up the hill. I love roller coasters. Yeah. And then there’s that point where you see the top of the hill but you haven’t reached it yet. Yeah. Then there’s a point where you crest the top of the hill and actually you feel your energy has moved from being dragged up to being produced down. Yeah. Then there’s the entire moment of the downhill slope, which obviously on occasion involves new uphill slopes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then of course there’s the exit at the end. I would propose that we are now at the point where you can see the top of the hill but you aren’t actually over the top yet with regard to the story. That sounds reasonable. So, I mean it’s an ominous thing that you’re talking about. I mean I’m trying to get the- We call it awful because we have that language. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think you’re right about it having the potential for engendering a paradigmatic shift the way alphabetic literacy did or the way the printing press did. Yes, I think that’s a very real possibility. What remains to be seen is what imaginal will come out of this that will explicate those implicit affordances and attract people to new ways of seeing and being other than just the immediate prosaic differences that are created. I mean because the immediate difference is you know you’re printing press, there’s more print available, there’s more text available I should say, but that’s not what we’ve been talking about. We’re talking about how people grok it in a different way and there’s the imaginal enactment of ways of being that they only intimate, they only have an inkling of, and they’re shaping themselves as they’re trying to call this out, right? And so I guess we’re just ignorant. I don’t know what’s happening in China, how they’re trying to, I mean I suspect that the imaginal they’re using is a rather decadent totalitarian ideological kind of thing infused, as you said, with imperial Confucianism and stuff from their past, and I expect that won’t ultimately, people will find unanticipated exaptations that transcend that in powerful ways. They generally tend to. So if you’re right and if I’m right, and given already the huge degree of instability in the Chinese system, this could be significantly, I mean this could have the opposite effect of what they’re seeking, right? This could be a tremendously destabilizing factor. I mean think about how the printing press destabilized Christendom and launched the religious wars. Yeah, let’s be actually historically precise because the first customer of the printing press was the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah. The Catholic Church were the ones who actually caused the printing press to be capitalized. They’re like, hey, great, this makes our job of producing Bibles a lot easier, thanks, let’s get a bunch of printing presses, and then there was an exactive potential. Yeah. A bunch of printing presses going around going, well I could do more than Bibles, I’ve kind of got this thing sitting around, anybody got any ideas? And there wasn’t enough control structure in the context of Christendom to monitor the exactive potential, and so a whole bunch of new stuff slipped out and by the time they caught on, the Protestant Revolution was already, you know, deeply happening. Yeah, Luther invents the pamphlet, which is a radical invention. Yeah, exactly. What the heck is that? That’s not a Bible, that’s not a book, what’s that? Well, it’s something that can be easily disseminated and has a huge influence on people’s cognition. So yeah, so we have, pardon? I like the mapping, like, yeah, so there’s a historical isomorphism there, so it’s a lot of- We have a very weirdly recursive collapse in our contemporary environment, and this is what I think is super interesting, you ready? This is like hyper intense, it’s very close to what you’re talking about with regard to machine learning. Right. So we know, unlike the Catholics, the Catholic Church, we know that this happens. Yeah. And the Chinese who are implementing the social credit score are not naive to the exactive potential of what they are doing. So they are to the extent that they are capable endeavoring to engineer and design in different kinds of ways of capturing that exactive potential. So you’re actually operating a second order problem, right? First order is the sort of the ambient exactive potential associated with the social credit system in general. Second order is the space filling potential bounded by the implicit structure of the paradigm that is engaging in designing the underlying technology. No? Also, we have to actually look at is, what is there that is operating within the, at a pace, mutating, evolving at a scope and a pace that is strictly inside the control capacity, the cybernetic control capacity of any possible instantiation of the sort of Chinese design construct. Right. And one of the interesting questions here, and I’ve actually proposed this question directly is, to what happens if China hands off the reins of what they’re doing to a completely AI system? Yeah. So instead of trying to design it with some kind of committee of humans designing it, they’re like, we’re just going to actually run a machine learning system that tries to figure out how to constantly monitor and capture all exactive abnormalities using some kind of meta theory of what that kind of thing looks like. So you’ve got this recursive loop that begins to close. But of course, if you run the recursive loop, you can actually find a reifying structure that identifies the actual underlying topology of the entire space that is bounded by whatever is trying to conserve itself. Right. Whatever is the underlying, who designed the AI? What were the axiomatic implications of the AI design? Then you’ve got like three possibilities. One possibility is that it itself has enough gaps that evolution is going to happen inside those gaps, and that will look like some novelty, some novel, exactive potential. The second is it actually has closure on whatever homo sapiens can do, in which case you’ve now created a paperclip maximizer bad, or you’ve got a Elysium good. There’s basically your three scenarios, most likely scenario one. I don’t believe we’re even vaguely close to an AI system that has anything like closure over the human cognitive, human distributed cognition. So therein I think lies the point. And so then that case, what I think we would see is then from a sociological or sociopolitical perspective, you would see something like a, actually I think both happen simultaneously in China, for example, geopolitically, you’d see a burst of new potential. So the good part happens. There’s a whole new set of capacities that are unlocked. You’d see a burst of destabilizing potential, an exaptation of that. Those two enter into relationship with each other, and one or the other becomes the dominant figure in the historical story. So if the destabilizing power is more fully discovered and explored the underlying possibilities of the novel paradigm, then that becomes the story. It’s like, oh my gosh, this is kind of like the breakdown of China into some new thing. If the more, what would you call it, forces that pull in this direction, forces happened just, I think, somewhat randomly right now, sitting where we are, somewhat randomly, have the characteristics they more fully take advantage of, discover and take advantage of the late potentials of the new paradigm, then it’s more of a, oh wow, this is the emergence of the new middle kingdom that has whatever characteristics. But then here’s the third. This is my underlying, like I think this is right, but I can’t prove it rigorously. Paradigms. At the end of the day, we’re still talking about something in paradigm space. And paradigms have an S curve. Live and die. Like any other exploration, any other kind of intelligence that explores a finite domain. And so what would end up happening is that you would also have a birth and death arc of this new Chinese superintelligence. And my current hypothesis, the model that I have is that it’s bound by bandwidth or rate and territory. So the amount of time of your S curve is bound by the potential of the space that is being explored and the rate at which exploration can take place. It’s pretty simple. The point is that it’s a bounded space and you’ve got a rate. Now, what’s interesting is that precisely because this novel form of distributed collective intelligence is so high, even though the underlying bounded space is also very large, potentially very, very large, like we might see a big tall S curve. Oh, we’re going to get an acceleration though. That’s what happens faster. Yeah. I’m thinking literally 20, 30 years. Yeah. Inside a single human, inside a single human developmental arc, this thing goes from now to call it 2050 and that’s it. It’s lived through its whole life arc in that timeframe with levels of change that we can’t even conceptualize right now because the rate of what’s possible and the shifting at the low levels is so intense. But we can step back and look at it and say, yep, it’s like a mayfly. Yep, it’s going to be born. It’s going to mature. It’s going to die in this timeframe based upon the complexity of the space that it’s entering into and the rate at which we’ll explore that whole complexity. And if it’s closed, if it has closure, then it will intrinsically have this S curve dynamic, if it’s a paradigm at all. We’ve talked about this before and it overlaps with Zach’s work that whether or not human beings have the psychological potential to live through multiple paradigms in a lifetime. And this is going to be the mother of all, like the magnitude of what could happen. Think about Elon Musk. Yeah. We are right now in the process at early, early days in this sort of thing talking about neural link where the cyber genetic transition is part of the story. So we’re not talking about small shifts in the nature of what we’re up to. We’re talking about incomprehensibly large shifts. Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like the design, so this kind of gets to the last piece. I feel strongly that the design characteristics like the axiomatics that are possibly even unconsciously imported into the design are determinative. If we are engaging in human scale design, if everything about what we’re doing is from the very get-go bound by the degree to which it non-traumatically supports healthy, wholesome, metastable individual and collective human development, like if that’s like the design kernel at the bottom and everything is bound by that rigorously, then the possibility is super good to the degree to which we’re either going in, importing the assumptions of late-stage capitalism or, you know, fill in the blank of any other kind of ideology that doesn’t have that set of boundary conditions, the likelihood that we will sort of randomly find ourselves in a good place is pretty rough. Right, but there’s the potential of an accelerating rate of paradigmatic change because there’s two, I’ll shift this ontologically, then I got to go soon. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, and I’m thinking about Zach’s thing about how we’re losing the connection between the generations, and one of the things that paradigms gave people, the paradigms were the field of possibility of intelligibility, and they were the primary imaginary for the eternal. People always use their paradigmatic structure to talk about what they conceive to be eternal or timeless. So now we have relativity and we have time space and we have the continuum, and that’s our big, that’s our, I don’t want to say our god, but it’s our sort of stable ultimates, if you’ll use that term. But the problem is, right, before it was absolute space, that was the stable ultimate, that’s gone. Right. And there’s a possibility that, you know, two things could happen. We could have this rapid change and then people just lose touch, if you’ll allow me to expand this word, they lose touch with the eternal. And I think that’s a devastating condition for human beings to be in because that to me means they lose the fundamental space in which self-transcendence occurs. Or or structural realism is right, and I don’t know if they are, but let’s say they are. And what happens is as we do this outbreaks, we actually are getting better and better at knowing the way to discover the real invariance of reality, and then we thereby get a deepening access to the eternal. Though it could be either one of those. I don’t know which one. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, oddly enough, my current position is that both are true. The latter is more true. Right. But we’re currently we are going to experience a superposition of both. I think both are happening simultaneously. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s going to be difficult to partition them. It’s going to be difficult to tell the difference. But in some sense, they actually mutually support each other. Yeah, I see that. Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. That sounds plausible to me. Yes. It’s very interesting what the kind of cognition with individual distributed needs to be so that it can properly cultivate that weight when you need to wait and then intervene when you need to intervene. Making sort of like a Heideggerian argument. Yeah. That to me becomes the central question. That would be a new configuration, a new dimension, almost like what the axial revolution did to dimensionality of what we mean by wisdom. There’d be this new thing, this kind of disturbance. Right. This kind of discernment is like the wise group or the wise person, more probably the wise group, can discern in that superpositioning when to wait and when to intervene. Yeah. Because they’re not going to be able to do that in a strictly planned inferential way because the way the system has a life of its own. Exactly. Yeah. The distinction actually almost becomes very clean. Mode one is a little bit like if you talk about in terms of distributed intelligence. Yeah. Two is when you talk about in terms of distributed wisdom. Yeah, very much. I agree with that distinction wholeheartedly. Yeah. So I mean, part of the task, I feel that we both belong to a bunch of other people, is trying to get at least some facilitating conceptual vocabulary and theoretical grammar about that distinction that would afford people to start pursuing it in a way that is self-evolving, self-exempting. That’s what I think we’re in some sense, I feel I’m trying to do. Yeah, very much. I’m trying to just sort of clear the space, smooth the landscape, provide some micro maps that allow certain hard mountain passes to be traversed so that more and more people can engage more and more from where they are in the exploration. I agree. I agree. Bye, man. Okay. It’s good talking to you. Yeah, I’m glad we were able to reconnect. Yeah, take good care. Bye.