https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Cfbqaj5Gxyo
Welcome everyone to another voice with Verveki. So I’m here with Rich from Blundell, and he reached out to me, not that long ago, with, you know, a very interesting email. And he said, hey, John, your work and my work are convergent in a lot of ways. And then we met and we talked and I was really impressed that Rich isn’t just bringing in a very powerful theoretical framework, which he does have. And I’m sure he’ll talk about this. But there’s two other things that I want Rich to talk about and I think are valuable for everybody. One, Rich has an ongoing actual project, working at the level of distributed cognition as well as individual cognition to try and bring about transformation. And he’s very much, and this is only half of the joke, he’s very much like me trying to save the world. And so that is something we share, and as grandiose and perhaps as hubristic as that might be, it does not seem that there’s any other morally responsible alternative right now. And then the other dimension, which will be a little bit more nuanced and you know, Rich and I will have to help each other biologically. But when I was talking to Rich, he came, there was the, there’s a spiritual dimension to this. Rich has a participatory connection to what he’s talking about. This is something that, and again I don’t use these terms, I try to use these terms very carefully, but there’s a properly, I would describe it almost as mystical, properly understood aspect to what he’s doing and it’s, and there’s connections between how it reaches the, between, from the depths of him to the depths of the world. And that is, you know, empowers and motivates him to engage in the project in a way that just theoretical belief wouldn’t. And I think that’s very, very important. And I think that’s a very, very important dimension that I think is very, very important for well meaning, the meaning crisis and the meta crisis. So, I’m very very pleased to have you here Rich, why don’t you say a bit about yourself, a little bit about your background, and why you And then, you know, about maybe those two dimensions, the project, the projects you’re interested, you’re engaged in, and again, the way in which you decided not to pursue this just academically, but in a more participatory transformative fashion. Thanks, John. But so let me just address that first thing was just why I reached out to you in the first place. It’s because I deeply respect you and your work. And I mean, as a scholar, you know, and I’ve had the privilege and the opportunity to really listen to you. And, you know, at every turn, you are just, you know, you are a true scholar, and I admire and I respect your rigor that and that you bring to this in that sense. But then there’s there’s also this other side of you that’s really willing to engage, you know, with, with ideas that are outside of your discipline and people that are, you know, that may be sort of outliers and things like that. And I think those two things actually go together. You know, it’s your scholarship actually enables your deep and rigorous scholarship enables you gives you that sort of permission to to look wider. I think. Yeah, no, I mean that though, but but the, you know, the former really enables the latter in that sense. So, thank you. And for all that you’re doing and I also see you being very much, you know, a participant observer in a lot of this stuff I see you trying things out experimenting and putting yourself in front of these things. I don’t know, it’s just, I deeply respect that. So thank you. This other thing about when you when you were sort of introducing me you’re talking about the spiritual dimensions of this. I find that deeply paradoxical because I have absolutely no experience, no training no. I haven’t done any sort of research in any of the spiritual traditions, my only source really of, you know, propositional knowledge is science. And, and so I find it deeply paradoxical that you’re, I can’t, it’s an inescapable sometimes to speak in spiritual terms, and I find it uncomfortable but unavoidable and so I struggle with that. Right. As do I. So I thank you for being honest about that. Well, okay. And so the other reason that I, you know, the main reason that I reached out to you is because I thought you would be a good person to. There is this, there is this practice that I call OIKA, which is actually, it’s much more than a practice. I mean we can talk about it as a practice but it really is a life world. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the, it’s a, it’s a way of being in the world. I was hoping to sort of present it to you as a proposal. Yes, and then see if you thought it, it, you know, suffice as a candidate for a psycho technology I get that it might. Yeah. And so I thought you’d be a good person to sort of it was so that was so that if I could get you to understand what it is the sort of the contours of it. And then we could, you know, really sort of deconstruct it and interrogate it in some sense, to see if to see if it how it works. Yeah, and that might, that might help shed light on that paradox you just put your finger on a few minutes ago. Yeah, why we are called to talk about it in a certain way called from within scientific language nevertheless to speak of speak of a way that’s not traditionally thought of as scientific. So, let. So first of all, why the term OIKA, you know, the entry freak term for the household it’s at the base of the word economics, right. Were you picking up on those associations. I am, I mean the term, the Greek term Oikos is where it sort of is grounded I kind of invented the word based on that idea of home, you know, but in the in the ancient Greek conception, Oikos, it was more about, you know, home was this sort of this synthesis of the person and the person being the man and the house. Right. So the man, the man of the house, and then all of the sort of material things that are in the house, which is what Oikos sort of refers to it as this collective sense of home. And I kind of wanted to expand that out, maybe make it more inclusive and less patriarchal in a sense. Of course. And that’s where the term OIKA comes from. And you’re right, it’s, yeah, so it’s more sort of a feminine feminized, you know, version of OIKO. Right, right. And, and the other thing is that it. I forgot what I was going to say, but that it. Oh, it’s not only the root of the term ECO as in economics, it’s also the root of the term ECO as in ecology, which I think is really profound actually right right right right. Yeah. Oh, so you’re putting like a common connection or a common source of both of those common Yeah, in a way of sort of reintegrating and recoupling those two ideas, which is, you know, we could maybe get to that later, but there is a part of what I do that is that is directly trying to recouple economic and ecological concerns using like crypto blockchain philosophy, that kind of thing. We can talk about that later. But the reason, you know, the reason I even know about what OIKO says is because I’ve trained as an ecologist. That’s my fundamental background is as an ecologist. I started in geology and ecology did a lot of marine sciences that kind of thing, evolutionary dynamics. Then I got into the history and philosophy of science, so I ended up doing it, you know, master’s degree, which is, which was kind of a deep dive into the philosophy of science, which was, which would, I think the most valuable thing I got from that was not to see how powerful science is, but how limited it is, how really it to claim something being scientific, you know, it creates this real constraint on what it is that it can be. If you’re going to call it scientific, at least in my perspective, you know, kind of old school that science has a methodology. And if it’s falsifiable and it’s reproducible and it’s, you know, it has all these sort of, you know, controls and it’s stated in terms of probabilities, you know, all these things that make science science. And so we, we tend to like, but that was the, that was the real highlight there was that I realized, boy, science is really limited in what we can say actually. And there’s so much more to the complexity and the nuance of the world that is in some sense out of the reach of science, maybe not in principle, but at least in practice, it’s currently, you know, unavailable to us. So, and then I ended my sort of academic training in a new and emerging field called big history, which is also sometimes called deep history, which is essentially the story of the universe, the whole cosmos, you know, presented and studied in a way that actually includes the human history. So it’s, it’s cosmic history, it’s natural history, it’s human history, it’s history, but it’s all history as a kind of integrated narrative. So it’s like, it is, it’s sort of based on deep time, but, but, you know, it, and there’s a lot of challenges and there’s a lot of, it’s having the field is still having a lot of growing pains, you know, it’s really trying to sort of figure out what it is. But it was the only discipline, if you can call it that, that could really contain my curiosity about the world, you know, I was sort of on a mission back then to, to understand what this is, you know, like it was one of the, you know, this, this fundamental question of what is, what is this, like this thing that we all are living and sharing in what is this. And Big History’s was the only, you know, scholarly way to really even think about approaching, you know, understanding that question, what is this, what is the reality, you know. So who are some names in this field is, I don’t know, is Sean Carroll an example of this with the big picture book or like who, who are you reading it? Well, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a hodgepodge, frankly, it’s, it’s, it’s made, you know, it was, it was the coin, the term was coined by David Christian, an Australian scholar who was actually my PhD supervisor. But there are others in the field. Craig Benjamin is a big name. Eric Shison, who was the director of Center for Astrophysics at Harvard. He’s the one that sort of has been, you know, very prolific in publishing about these things. So there’s, frankly, you know, it’s been a few years now since I was sort of in the in scholar in the scholarly sort of field. So I haven’t really kept up with how it’s how it’s there was a moment where Bill Gates got involved and started, you know, funding big scale, big history projects. But by that time, I had really sort of fallen out of favor with it. Another not fallen out of favor, but I just not as interested in it as a scholarly discipline as that wasn’t why I was studying it. I was studying it more because I simply wanted to understand, you know, my own experience of the world. But it was an amazing way to do it was really an amazing way to do that. But as far as, you know, active research, I’m not really up on who’s publishing at the moment, if anybody, frankly. Okay, well, why did you come to find that that that academic pursuit was inadequate? If you said you sort of lost the taste for it or something. I’m trying to get a sense. I got the sense that there was a lot of confusion over, you know, what, what science was and where science ended in terms of like historical scholarship, there were a lot of historians that were getting involved. And as someone who had just come through the whole, the the middle of the philosophy of science, I just, it was it was like, it was like working with a bunch of kids in a candy store, suddenly, there was this sort of whole population of historians that could use scientific language, but weren’t doing science, but they were using, they were using in their, you know, in their investigations of history, which that’s, that’s a noble and that is a just cause, but it’s not. It just didn’t have the enough history in itself as, you know, as a cohesive discipline to really hold my attention, other than, you know, other than as a offering this amazing narrative, which is this infinite narrative of complexity. You know, well, it and what the really cool thing is that it ties everything together, you know, at the beginning, you’re talking about the Big Bang, and you’re talking about the cosmic microwave background radiation and you’re talking about the formation of stars and nucleus synthesis and you’re talking about supernovas and how supernovas, you know, lead to the formation of planets and how stars and planets orbit each other and how life can emerge and how when life emerges and complexifies, you know, specialized organisms can multi, you know, multi cellular or organisms can arise and then, you know, mammals primates consciousness art. Yeah, yeah, economic politics suddenly, you know, and you’re that that’s what’s the most fascinating thing about it. You know, it’s is that it provides this cohesive narrative in which to, to sort of contextualize everything that we know. Yeah, that’s what really is so fascinating about it, which is one of the, you know, this is we’re getting, you know, starting to get into why I’m reaching out to you. It’s because I want to take what you talk about and take what the communities of practice that you, you know, mingle with and and see if we can’t map those things and map the meaning crisis onto this cosmic narrative. Can we somehow draw new insight, new wisdom toward everything that you’re talking about from this from this big, big natural history and I everything that I know everything that I have ever learned about the cosmic story. It is profoundly consistent with the things that I hear you talking about and I want I want I want to want to interrogate that I want to understand. Yeah, yeah. So that’s the that’s the that’s the proposal is to and now I don’t think we’ll like be able to in this call, you know, really walk step by step through that narrative because it’s a 13.8 billion year story. Granted, a lot of that story is is, you know, there’s a whole period called the boring billions when nothing happened, but nothing, you know, nothing in terms of like no thresholds and complexity were crossed. But but there are things that I have studied in the story of the universe that I think directly link directly, not directly, not always directly and not always like, you know, quickly, but show up and what you’re talking about with some of the other stuff, you know, like with Greg and I, you know, like with Greg, Greg Enriquez and Scott Jordan, these things that you’re talking about have precursors, even even when you when you’re talking about, you know, the great philosophers, I can there’s something that you’re saying that I can hear the cosmic story unfolding. That’s powerful. That’s very powerful. Well, well, and I’d like to, I’d like to, I’d like to take that seriously, you know, I’d like to see how seriously. Yeah, very much. Well, okay, so in order to do that, I think the first sort of concept that we might sort of look at is this idea of ontological continuity. Yes. So, maybe, could you tell me what that means to you, like that, that time. So the version I get comes from 40 cognitive science, especially from Evan Thompson, who was probably the premier student maybe even protege is the best word of umbrella. And, and so the idea there is that there’s a deep continuity between the principles of cognition, perhaps consciousness, but let’s just say cognition for now. Principles of cognition that you know what makes us intelligent learners and problem solvers, and the principles of biology, both auto genetically and phylogenetically. So to give one example, I would argue, and there’s a lot of argument behind this one just gesturing at this argument that, you know, a core feature of relevant of intelligence is this capacity for relevance realization, and that relevance realization is basically using principles very similar to how biological evolution works. It’s introducing variation and putting selective pressure on it. It’s just doing that you know in a sort of a much more local and rapid time scale. But you can see that, right, the principles of evolution, that by which we can explain the emergence of new species can also be used to explain the emergence of new solutions to problems, for example. And so you can get, there’s a continuity between the principles you invoke to explain how cognition is working and the principles you invoke to explain how evolution is working. That’s just one example. But the idea is there’s a continuity. And the reason why continuity is used rather than identity is because identity is, I think this is right, identity is usually denotes a reductive explanatory strategy, whereby you say the upper level is completely explainable in terms of the lower level and people, people have a sense of this when you know when individuals say, love is nothing but chemistry in the brain, that’s a reductive explanation. The point about invoking continuity is to not is to say there is important identity of principle, but there are also important differences that point to emergence. And so that the upper level cognition really exists. It’s not just chemical reactions. So what they’re trying to do with deep continuity is get the idea of an identity of principles, but also a difference that is responsible to real emergence within the ontology. So that’s what how I understand ontological and then the idea of course is that living things are auto poetic things. They have deep continuity with self organizing systems that are not biological things. Again, that’s not to say that biology can be reduced just to the chemistry, but right there’s important continuity so that you know learning about how systems self organize or auto catalytic right can help us understand the emergence of life. There’s a continuity. There’s similar principles, but it will also help highlight yeah but what’s new. Like as you said when we cross that threshold what’s the novelty that’s now introduced in our ontology. So continuity is an attempt to say there’s important identity between levels, but there’s important emergence and novelty there are thresholds that are also crossed. That’s how I understand the proposal of deep continuity. Okay, that, that, that, I think that jives with what you know what I was thinking but the, the, the, you know, the version that really struck me when I was starting you know when I was trying to come up with a research question and doing all my research was came from Eric Shison actually. He’s the guy at the Smithsonian astrophysics center at Harvard. And this is the, this is the, this is the actual sort of paragraph that I took took to, I’m taking it seriously so let me just see if I can say it here so it’s um, he says, if we are to articulate a unified worldview for all complex systems observed throughout nature, then we must objectively and consistently model, each of them, identically to restate once more for clarifying clarifying emphasis which is not something that astronomers tend to do. Unless they, unless they mean it to restate once more for clarifying emphasis complex systems likely differ fundamentally not in kind but only in degree, that is degree of complexity manifesting ontological continuity. And I read that the way I sort of interpret that is that, you know, if you really want to have a deep and accurate, you know, to the degree that you can, you know description of reality, then you must sort of model it as as as ontologically continuous in other words that reality is a continuum so what he what he was doing was he was measuring energy, energy density so energy as a function of complexity, and he looked at all these different phenomena in nature, and basically graphed them out. And when you put this these graphs together with the actual narrative the the ontogenetic narrative of the universe. Right, then what you see is that there really, there is no. He was saying to distinguish entities categorically, but only by degree of basically energy density was what he was saying so. So what he’s saying is that that everything that is, is on a continuum. That everything that we can observe in nature. And if you’re going to say everything, what do you mean by nature, because to me nature means everything. What isn’t nature, you know I haven’t been able to discern that there’s anything outside of nature, which I think you know you hold the naturalistic, you know, stance. Right, so, and if we really take that seriously then what what it seems to me that he is saying is that, that, that everything is on a continuum that goes for the fundamental forces at the beginning of the universe, it goes for the, you know, the earliest atoms the primordial sort of atoms that made the earliest molecules that converged into this first stars and so the stars, and the atoms, and the fundamental forces are all on a continuum. And if those are on a continuum, then so are the planets. And if those are on a continuum then so is the life that emerges on a planet. And if that’s on a continuum then so you know so are we, we are on this continuum. And if we are on this continuum, and we dream, or we have ideas, or we imagine futures or we do politics or whatever it is we do all of these things are still on that continuum. And so that that’s what I took him to mean is that if we are to really take it seriously. And if all the evidence suggests that this is the case, then, then, then really, you know, and this, and this sort of is consistent with many of the kind of philosophical insights that I hear you talk about, you know, that there are people like Whitehead who I can’t tell you know I’ve I’ve forgotten all the philosophy that I’ve learned. But there are certain philosophical traditions that I think we’re sort of on to this, that we’re on to this idea of continuity and and process being this thing that you know that sort of connects everything and, but, and this is, this is the thing too. It’s like when I hear you speak with other, you know, scholars like Scott Jordan and, and, and I hear so much convergence, I hear, I hear. Yeah, I mean, I mean, just on on inescapable amounts of convergence and so you know in, you know, I would call that also conciliance that there are, you know, that all these traditions are arriving at this at these insights that we barely have the language barely have the concepts to, you know, to describe. And to put to language. But we’re, and we’ve come from these disparate lines of inquiry, you know, whether it’s theology or philosophy or, you know, now we see indigenous traditions and psychedelic stuff and we see, you know, just wellness and mindfulness traditions and, you know, you know, Buddhist sort of things that are going on. They’re all sort of pointing at this, at this idea which sounds a lot to me like ontological continuity. So something that’s completely consistent with this, you know, the purely scientific, not necessarily reductionist but a purely rational scientific worldview is showing up in all these other fields as well. And I think this is how one who just is committed to science can end up speaking in spiritual terms. Because, because ontological continuity. That’s why, because eventually, given enough investigation, we’re going to discover that there are deep, deep universal continuities that keep cropping up in the fossil record, but also in in in in philosophy. In now in the blockchain and you know everything else these things are showing up so. So, you know, I’m not sure if this is, you know, if we can track this conversation or not but. So, so this is what I want to talk about. I want to talk about this as a practice, I’m going to talk about this as like. So let me make sure I’m understanding. You’re saying that there’s this deep convergence, which I agree with, which lands plot tremendous plausibility around ontological continuity. You know, and, and, you know, and you can see this from, you know, people, the Neoplatonic tradition and Spinoza Whitehead you can see it in Greg Enriquez’s work you can write the Evans work, like, like, totally. And then what I hear you say is, right, what I what I think is you want to, you want to turn it into a practice meaning you want to. Well, I’m asking a question, does this mean you want to enter into what is it to be in right relationship to this reality, because there’s one thing to have a theoretical statement about it. And then there is that there’s another, another thing to realize a correct or appropriate a right relationship to it. Am I understanding you well. Yes, and the reason that we’re in that meaning crisis is that heretofore we have not really been in right relationship with it. There was a time when when we were when we were still young and you don’t, and we were still living very close to nature, when we all could experience nature every day that that we that we held this, but then over time by pure accidents of history, we have drifted away from it, and we’ve been struggling to sort of recreate it one way or another ever since. And the, and this is sort of part and parcel of the meaning crisis that you described. And so I think that if we can come back into right relationship in some way that is scientifically consistent, that is not derogatory of all these other traditions that can sort of include them as valid and noble sort of attempts that we can, in some sense, start to ameliorate the meaning crisis, like there are. And, and, you know, what you call the meaning crisis, you know, there are a million words for it you could call it and social enemy, I think was Durkheim’s enemy. The Anthropocene was the you know was kind of the word that I used because it came out of the environmental sciences. You know, whatever you want to call it that it’s all sort of the same crisis. And it’s a crisis. It’s a crisis of identity. It’s a, it’s a, and this is what puts it square in the lap of cognitive scientists is that this is fundamental all of our problems essentially, I think, not all. I want to make this clear. I’m not a utopianist. And I’m, and I’m, I am not naive, I am idealistic, but I’m not naive about this stuff. But what I’m saying is that, that at the root, if you if you dig deep enough to the to the facets of the meaning crisis or the Anthropocene or whatever you want to call it, you will get to these psychic accidents, you will get to these, these fictions, these cognitive fictions that we hold and and shape our identity. And deep down in there is a profound ameliorative revelation to be had. There’s something here that will that will by default solve many of the perennial problems because it’s because it’s working upstream of all of them. You know, that’s a very exciting proposal. Say more. That’s fantastic. I mean, this is like an inescapable this is just logic to me like that, if you, if you truly think about spend if we really spend our time, you know plumbing, what science has been able to reveal about the way the way the world is at every turn, every chapter in that sort of scientific novel is saying what you’re saying, when you talk about how, how, how consciousness, how cognition is this function of relevance realization, and how an organism is in sort of relationship with its in its environment, and it’s seeking right right relation, it’s seeking what’s relevant, which is really a function of relationship right I mean relevance and relationship are not. That’s not just a coincidence that they are, you know, like I do think that that there is a deep relational intelligence what I call ecological intelligence that is sort of speaking to us through our cognitive capacities through the way that our consciousness and our cognition has evolved purely through biological, you know, well understood dynamics of Darwinian evolution and and molecular biology and blah blah blah blah we can go we can go all the way down. But the point is that that somewhere in there is this message, and I see the message everywhere, you know, and I’m not talking about the gospel you know I’m talking about this message of, of, of ontological continuity of of deep interconnectedness and interdependence of things. Okay, and so, and I just see that we have every, I listen a lot, I listen to podcasts, a lot, I, this is why I’ve devoted my life to this pursuit, and so I listen. And I, at in in every sort of popular podcast that’s out there. I hear this. I hear a great frustration being voiced. I hear a great sort of crying out for something that can that can ameliorate. And the reason it’s frustrating is because I’m like, here it is, you know, it actually it’s right in front of us, it’s all we’re immersed in this stuff, we’ve just created this. We’ve created this, this, this artifice of that obscures it. And so, and we’ve become sort of, you know, obsessed with this other fiction about who we are. And if we could just kind of re discover, remember this deeper sense of continuity that we have that expresses itself and through our consciousness, by the way, you know, like, it’s our consciousness isn’t separate from natural history, like consciousness is, is just a, it’s just another part of, of, it’s a profound part but it’s just another part of, of, of nature seeking to express and know itself, you know, Okay, this is really cool. Sorry for interrupting but I just want to be able to ask some questions. Please, please. You’re eloquent and so I tend to get swept up. And so that’s beautiful. So, so there’s three things I want to ask you about so there’s. You sound like a Neoplatonist by the way, but say remembering, remembering and that consciousness actually participates in that deep structures of reality. But you said you, you want to turn this into a practice and it sounds like it’s a practice of remembering in some profound way. And, and, and that, and this has something to do with what you’re calling ecological intelligence which seems to be some, something we participate in. It’s not, it’s not just subjectively projected from us. Right. Right. But we participate. No, no. It’s in the world. It’s in the world, and because we are the world in the world, we are the world, because we are in the world to. It’s in us. Right. So we, the world and us. Let’s use nature for the most encompassing term like spinosa does. And right and then we will use us and the world, sort of the way we’ve done since the Enlightenment. The idea is that it’s in the world. And in us, but a better way of saying it is the world and us are both in it. Is that a better way of putting it like it’s, it is as long as, but as long as you acknowledge that we are continuous with it. Of course, that’s what I’m trying to get at. Right. So, what, what is this practice of remembering. And what is it to, are we like, what is it to remember this ecological intelligence like what is, what is that you once said you said it’s all around us, but in another sense, right. Well, it seems to me like you’re saying, but we have what you know a cultural cognitive grammar that’s forging us, misdirecting us you use the word fiction multiple times, it creates a fiction that keeps us from remembering. So, like, what, what is it that the practice is doing? How is it challenging the fictions? Is it getting us to sense the ecological intelligence and then how does it do that? That’s, this is very exciting. Well, it does it through narrative. Okay, it’s just the thing that that Okay, so I assume that, you know, we are deeply narrative creatures like that we make meaning and our consciousness is very much linked to our capacity to create these durable structures of experience memory that we call narratives. So there are narratives about the world narratives about pens that make it easy for us to sort of, you know, yes, this is a pen, it’s the thing that writes it has ink at one end and it’s this invention of humans and this is narrative about that we use narrative to make sense of the world to make meaning of the world. And that’s deeply one of our biggest, you know, the greatest endowments that we have as a species, which is what sets us apart in many ways. So if we take that idea that narrative is just so ubiquitous and central to what we do. Take that narrative capacity and look at the history of the universe with it. What is the story here? Well, the story is that there was this from this mystery, a big bang happened. And then we can sort of piece together the story of how things came to be. And somewhere along the way. I forget what it is we were trying to we were trying to what is the practice of ecological intelligence? It’s it’s it starts there that that everything is related everything that nothing happens without relationship. Now, this is where like I’m kind of forced to start talking about the how the universe is built on relationship. Like if you look at the we can’t really do it deeply now, but if you look at the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the earliest light that we see in the universe, we have a picture of it, we’ve taken it, you know, there’s, there’s no, there’s no controversy here, we have this picture of the earliest light of the universe. And if you look at it, it’s not uniform. It has little splotches of blue and green and yellow, it has different temperatures, different energy levels. It’s not uniform, but it’s those differences in temperature. And so it’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform. It’s not uniform those differences in energy density in in the early space time that presents the earliest or some of the earliest opportunities for there to be relationship. Yes, very much that that cosmic microwave background radiation evolved into the first stars the first starry night. The cosmic microwave black background radiation is a blueprint for the first starry night. Those stars formed in places where the energy was less so that hydrogen and helium could come together in such a way as to ignite the nuclear furnace. Stars ignite nuclear nuclear synthestars. But the point is, if you were watching this thing happen, you’d see the first stars appear in the night sky. And suddenly, there’d be the starry night. Well, that starry night evolved into later renditions of starry nights up until the one we have tonight. If you go out and look at it tonight. The starry night we see tonight is actually just a a later version of earlier starry nights. So there’s this. The point is those relationships that were in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Well, they’re still playing out as relationships today in the stars that are in the sky tonight. Well, guess what, though? It’s not just the relationships between stars that that are derivative of that. Our relationships are derivative of that because the earth evolved as part of that system to the relationship between the sun, our star and the earth is actually a relationship that was once has this lineage that goes all the way back to the to the cosmic microwave background. The point here is that all relationships are derivative of those primordial relationships. What I’m saying here is that the universe creates through relational dynamics. If there’s if there’s no relationship, there’s no creativity. If there was no creativity, we wouldn’t be here. But if and if the universe truly is ontologically continuous, then every relationship is is is a part of that evolving system. So the relationship between me and this pen is actually a lineage of the cosmic microwave back the relationships that were originally in the cosmic microwave background radiation. This is how ecological intelligence becomes available accessible when you see and this story is told like with with all of the rigor that we can muster, we can tell the story. We know much of the details. And the whole scientific endeavor is really out to disprove this story, but it can’t because so it’s the best story we have is that everything has evolved through these these relational dynamics and they’re still evolving. Now every ecosystem that you encounter is on a continuum with those early really, this is what ecological intelligence is. It’s saying that that creative capacity of these systems that are evolving is ecological, meaning it’s relational. Now, once you know that, and once you know that you are a inextricable part of that, then you can see how that intelligence becomes available to you as an inextricable part of it. And that’s what we’re talking about. And that you can in some sense participate in that intelligence, participate in that creativity, and suddenly you have a home. This is now this is it’s about being at home in this story in this evolving universe. This is beautiful. So let’s slow down. And I want to expand that that that that last that last move you made because that ties it right back to like you was like home, right? There’s a sense in which we’re getting home. We’re getting a cosmological or cosmic home again. And so yes. So rich, I want to ask you something. And this is this is not a circuitous criticism. I want to I want to ask I want criticism. I want I want. And I promise if I come up with one, I’ll give you one. But right now, this is a clarification question. Right? So I see a difference between you saying like there’s something happening in the way you like, grant me this, I, somebody could write everything you said in a textbook. They’re high school textbooks, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they do all that. Right. And that it’s not transformative of people. Right. Like, it’s just something that right. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And what I hear happening is there’s a moment in the in the homing where it goes from being propositional to something other than propositional and you’re nodding. So I’m on the right track. So can you unpack that a little bit more? Well, it goes directly to participatory. Right. It’s suddenly I am a participant in this thing. It really grounds participatory knowing in a deep, deep way. That’s one of the things I’m hearing. Right. That right. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, no, no, no, please. Well, I mean, you know, participatory knowing is the knowing that results from how, you know, me and the environment are co-shaped together. And that can be culturally co-shaped. It could be evolutionarily co-shaped. But now we’re down to ontologically co-shaped. Right. Right. Right. And this is the deepest grounding of participatory knowing. Right. Yes. The fact that both the planet and I and the planet and I together, I’m not trying to get too restrictive. Right. But, you know, we are all, you know, affected by the sun’s gravity and radiation. And so I’m being co-shaped, the planet, the environment and me are all being co-shaped by these deeper ontological continuities. That’s what I’m hearing you say. They’re really great. There’s a way in which reality and Let me play with words a little bit here. So I’m asking for a bit of generosity. There’s a way in which reality is realizing itself in the sense of, you know, unfolding itself, actualizing itself. And the way I’m capable of realizing that in a cognitive sense, they’re both being shaped at this participatory level to fit each other. Does that make, does that? Well, has it ever been any other way? You know, Yeah. That’s, it’s just that we don’t quite live like that’s true. But news for you. It is true. Like that is you. That’s an inescapable conclusion from everything we know scientifically. Okay. So that, yeah. So I think we’re in agreement. There’s convergence here. There’s a deep grounding of participatory knowing how fundamental it is, how primordial, the word you used earlier, which is very good because it has good Heideggerian sense to it too. Meaning it goes into sort of the deep ontology that he talks about. So what do you mean that that last thing you said was really crucial to me. We just don’t live as if it’s true. That seems to me to be a crucial thing. Right. That’s the fiction. That’s the inherited fiction. And, you know, and this comes down to us through, you know, the sages before us that And we have all of these sort of diverging traditions that in one way or another sought to heal this, this divorce, you know, this sort of this, the separation of us. Now, by the way, so the way I just sort of pitched that to you was very cosmic in scale, which I know is hard to, hard to realize as a human being living, you know, as an earthling. You can also realize it though simply on the earth. I mean, and I think it’s also probably it’s probably more appropriate and more important to just simply realize that we belong to the earth as opposed to the cosmos. I mean, if you’re ready to really belong to the cosmos, there’s plenty of fodder out there for you to just simply realize that we belong to the earth. You know, it’s probably more appropriate and more important to just simply realize that we belong to the earth as opposed to the cosmos. I mean, if you’re ready to really belong to the cosmos, there’s plenty of fodder out there, you know, to help you. But if you I think in the near term, the crisis that, you know, is faces us right now, which is ecological and planetary in scale, you know, it’s probably more appropriate just to simply understand how Excellent. People really belong to this planet. Yeah, there’s a pedagogical point. I get it. I get it. There’s right. Right. I tend to like, you know, big picture stuff you do too. That’s good. But I get your point. For many people. But there’s but there’s something more intimate about being from the earth and knowing that that this that this logic applies to earth bound identity, you know, it’s there’s a deep intimacy to that that we can experience like we don’t have to go to space. We don’t have to look through a telescope to to to see this in action. Sure. Now, the thing is, human beings are capable of nested homes, right? I have my home in Toronto, which is in Canada, which is on the earth. So you’re not saying that these two senses have to be in opposition to each other. But just one is more intimately available and perhaps should be pursued first. Yeah, because of the urgency of it, you know, we are in a moment where the earth is really needing us to get our act together, you know, and to remember this, you know, and I won’t we don’t need to get into it now. But I also happen to believe that many of the other perennial problems that we face will in some sense be addressed by default. If we get this deeper identity sorted out, that many of the many of the sort of us psycho pathologies that befall us because of our separation from the planet will, you know, they are basically these other things like racism and economic injustice and politics and all these other things. They are really just manifestations of this deeper sense of of of of identity crisis. But interestingly, although we can like the argument we’ve already run sort of like strengthens the claim that this relationship to the earth, getting the right relationship to the earth is is a fundamental relationship, a primordial relationship. Right. So people may not need, you know, that that cosmic stuff, but the argument you’ve made about the big picture from science legitimates the claim. Look, this this relationship, this getting into a right relationship with the earth will is probably going to ameliorate a lot of the other psycho pathologies as you put them. We call it psyche pathology in the new series that Greg and Gary and I noticed that right now that will address those. So I think that’s a very interesting claim. So can you can you can you follow up on those like the claim that this is more intimate for people? I think that’s an important point. And then, like I said, you’re right, we can’t fully do it. But some idea of why you think addressing this will help to ameliorate a lot of the other things that are familiar features of the meta crisis. Because of the sheer beauty and joy that being a part of this brings, it is a kind of and the gratitude, like the sense of gratitude that is like this. Antidote to the to the grievance, this this sense that once you once you hold this, once you hold this as something you fall in love with the world. Yes, yes. Carries a lot of an occurs a lot of inertia into the way you interact with the world. Right. It carries inertia into the way you see yourself, the way you treat others the way it also it’s it’s I think it’s this antidote to hyper consumption. Like, why? Why do we? Why are we constantly consuming, consuming, consuming? Well, it’s to to kind of just because we’re grasping at ways to heal this this hole in us. And so when you when you identify with the living earth and you see its complexity and you see it play out in the way that birds sing or the way that water moves or the way the wind sounds or the way things smell. It just it enriches your life to such a degree that it makes so much of what we do this so much of the mistreatment and the suffering that we create. It makes it these things irrelevant. Like they kind of go away. I’m no longer interested in violence. I’m no longer interested in materiality. So you three things again, you sound so much like platinus, right? It’s really and I was about this compliments, by the way. At least for me, they would be right. So you said you mentioned beauty and joy and gratitude and how it really refrains your salience landscape in it just a profound way. So right. You’re not you’re not sort of struggling to give things up. I remember I often quote St. Paul from the Bible. He’s where he says it’s like I used to be when I was a child. I spoke as a child. I thought as a child. But when I became a man, I put childish things behind me. He doesn’t have to sort of resist eating too much candy or playing with toys or like because he now has a totally different salience landscape. It’s that kind of transformation. And the way you evoked beauty and joy. So how do you like again, how do you go from. I understand. I now see sort of I’m sort of forcing why art plays such a big role in what you’re talking about in the project, at least it did in the link you sent me. Yeah, it is. How do you go about and I get it now. We’re not just we awake. We’re not just getting people convinced of propositions. We’re trying to reawaken a sense of identity. I in fact, you said a sense of identification that awakens in us the capacity to fall in love with the world, beauty, joy, gratitude. How do we do that? How do we do that? Well, knowing the story is like this is what you know, for me, I grew up as this kid, you know, who was always outdoors, always getting scraped up and bruised and just out after dark and just got wild. You know, it ended up causing all kinds of, you know, problems later on. But I was so having that formative time, you know, in nature, I think is a big part of it, which we’ve largely lost. But the other way is through more and more intellectual endeavor, just knowing the story. We don’t and this is the thing where a lot of these other traditions didn’t have the the resolution, the depth of knowledge that we have, the fine grained resolution knowledge of of nature that we have about like the science, what science has revealed. So I guess what I’m to answer your question is, for me, that propositional knowledge about the way the world is built, you know, the way that has come to be the way it is. Has always been, you know, this exponential enhancer. It’s been this amplifier of the participatory experience. Those two things have always sort of dovetailed and and synergized with each other. I think that’s how that’s just one way that I’ve done it. But it’s it requires a lot of investigation. It requires a lot of study, you know, of learning. It’s it’s it’s think about Humboldt was the last one who was said to be able to have known all everything. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we need, you know, I think we need some version of that. And I think that’s what big history or deep history does is it tells the story in a way that is just infinitely rich and just the way that multicellular organisms came about, the way that life has emerged, you know, a biogenesis, you know, the the the the origination of life. And what was going on just before it. It’s so relevant to an action and activism, this idea, you know, this that that that consciousness is a function of a mind and a world in conspiracy to create consciousness like that was going on prior to life. Like this idea that the world impinges itself onto materials, moving them around, putting them through gradients and creating the conditions of the conditions for life before those those impulse, those sort of processes of the world. They they they bleed right into an action like an activist thinking and which shows how our version of that our version of consciousness in its sort of in its currently evolved state is on this lineage that goes straight back to the prebiotic world like that. That that that there are things going on at atomic and material scales that then show up in consciousness, that show up in people’s dream, you know, imagination, they show up in the art, they show up. I just, you know, it’s just like knowing stuff like that, like knowing the nuts and bolts facts, the scientific facts. You know, did a great deal to like open me to that, that experience of that. That’s and that’s really what I’m concerned with now is what are the experiences? What is the phenomenology of this ontology? Like, if we take this stuff, if we take it seriously, you know, and I do, I take the science seriously. What is the lived experience of these of this like, Yeah, such that you get the beauty and the joy and the gratitude. And the sense of belonging, the sense of belonging. Yeah, yeah, yes. Yeah, and it’s and it’s a bite. It doesn’t go away. You know, John, I’ve been at this for decades, you know, and this and and it’s unique. I wake up every day, you know, and it just doesn’t fade. It only compounds. It only confirms it. And I know there’s confirmation bias. I know all that stuff. But I’m just saying like, no matter how I interrogate this, no matter how I seek to disprove it. Everything I learn confirms it validates it and then and propels it in forward, you know, like, so what do you do with this? You know, like, and especially what do you do with it when you’re in a situation where you’re like, What do you do with this? You know, like, and especially what do you do with it when you watch the world around you suffering, falling apart, crying out for new for new things, you know, crying out for new practices, crying out for new ways of relating to each other so that we don’t self annihilate, you know, what do you how do you this is my big great frustration is how do we I share this in a way that can be in some small way a part of responding to the meeting crisis. Well, I mean, Let me offer a suggestion. Right. I’ve been trying to get, you know, the COGSI picture, a fairly big history picture, not as deep as yours. But No, but I see it. I see it as as 100% consistent, you know, it is. I see what you and Gregor is talking about is it. Yeah, there’s just some there’s some there’s some details, especially pre Pre pre prebiotic details. But yeah, I agree. So what I meant was, let’s take it that we agree on that because I think you do. What I meant was, part of what and why I’m interested in Greg and why I’m talking Greg’s work, and I’m sorry, I’m interested in not in just Greg’s work. I’m interested just also Greg as a person. He’s a friend, right? You can tell. He’s an important person to me. I didn’t want to make it sound like I was, I was just, he’s just a commodity. Because that’s part of the problem. Well, what I meant is, like, I’ve been talking about, you know, the colleges of practices. And then communities of distributed cognition, collective intelligence, but I’ve always said that needs to be home to within a scientific worldview that properly legitimates the communities and the ecologies of practice. And I think What you’re what you’re doing is offering that you’re saying, here’s a way of taking the scientific worldview. And here’s a way of framing it that would properly home the communities and the ecologies of practices. That’s what I hear you say. Yes, yes. It brings content. I see. And I don’t mean this in a sort of, you know, in a disparaging way, but all of the practices that I see out there, very few of them actually appeal directly to nature for guidance, inspiration, energy, wisdom, whatever you want to call it. Some do, and that’s beautiful. But many don’t. Many don’t even really So sort of as an ally, I think that’s the kind of OIKA shaped hole that’s in a lot of these practices. That’s and and But what OIKA could do is contextualize all of them, give them a context to matter more in. Yes, you know, Matter more in. Yes, you know, it does. I mean, so there are people, I mean, you probably heard me talk to Rafe Kelly and he the core of his ecology practice is he takes people out and he does parkour in nature. Because he emphasizes the perspectival procedural participatory knowing within nature as sort of the core place right. I see that. Yeah. The stuff she does where she has people come on basically to a situation and they’re interacting with forces and they’re doing this really kind of primordial kind of union with with non human organisms as a profound. So I, you know, there there is that that growing recognition. And so I think that what you’re doing. First of all, is valuable for like for putting out that there’s a centrality to what they’re saying it. Can you say. There’s a centrality to practices within and with nature that should be given more priority within ecologies of practices. That’s one of the things I think what you’re arguing for would point. Like, like you’re right, many colleges of practices don’t have the involvement with the natural world as an essential feature. And it seems like given your argument, that’s something that should be addressed. And I think some people, Bonita and Rafe come easily to mind, have have at least intuitively seen that and have tried to put that as a priority. But I also think that it would apply to things that we would not normally think of as ready, for example, Catholicism, you know, straight up religion, the religious doctrine. There is a place for those things in this story, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can actually this can validate it can it can validate it can heal the. You know, it’s like science is actually confirming the religious religious insight. So there’s a whole I think there’s an appalled important. But what I want to I agree. And I mean, I’ve made these arguments that I think you can see a lot of the functionality of religion when it’s operating adaptively as trying to get us to fall in love with being again in a profound way. But I do think I’m trying to pick up on this sense of the intimacy with the earth that you talked about and that I think. Well, maybe you’re not saying this, but one of the things I’m taking from this is there needs to be practices in which that’s a little bit more explicit and focal. Like, you know, there’s like the sense sitting that people do, which is a very interesting practice. You go out in nature, you basically instead of meditating inward, you sort of open yourself up receptively to what’s going on around you. Things like that sound like I like I sometimes avoid the idea of meditation. It’s much more about contemplation. But I bring it one step further and say it’s contemplation play. There’s a play. Oh, you really you really do have to like engage in a kind of imagination, imaginal play. Yes, for example, for example, one of the things I use a hammock a lot like just a regular old hammock. And the reason is because I’ll just say this briefly, like this is one of the practices is that, you know, you have this hammock, you’re walking through the woods, you’re looking for a place to hang it up. What you need to find are two trees in the right relationship. So you have to kind of get yourself into a relational state of mind looking for the relationship. Right. And then when you get it and when you find it, you’ve got to put the hammock literally in the relationship between those two trees, those trees in an ongoing. And so you enter into that relational space physically and you get into the hammock. And then there are all these practices that you can do. Like we call it radical affection is one where you sort of conjure up this sense of affection and you project it out into the tree and wait to see what comes back. And what you end up getting back is, well, I won’t spoil the but but so I think that, you know, like there are practices and practices. There’s there’s just so many little things that we can little contemplations that we can do. That’s cool. To, you know, to ritualize and to, you know, to just to embody these things. Oh, I think ritual is fine. I just released my my my the link to the talk I gave at Cambridge about imaginal serious play and ritual. And that’s exactly exactly what you’re talking about. And I could see why these would be so transformative people. And so, like, do you like you basically are offering people a course where they come and they learn to like you said it’s a way of being a way of seeing a way of being. How do you help people get into this way of seeing it? Well, I do have a course I have, you know, I have developed a course. It’s free. You know, my work is I’m lucky enough to have some funding and philanthropic source. But I created this course that tells the story of the universe in two chapters. And it and it does it just tells it in a way that highlights how everything is relational. And it and I’ve adapted that I’ve been working with a lot of artists. It’s strange that I would sort of find this affinity with artists because as you know, coming up through the sort of scientific mill, I was never asked to or encouraged to do anything with art. And so I didn’t. And then just in the last couple of years, I’ve discovered that there is this incredible community, this incredible incredible population of people out there that are deeply sensitive and deeply creative who also don’t really know any of the science because like me, they weren’t asked to really engage with the science because they took an artistic professional route. And so we’ve sort of found each other out there in this this emerging community of practice of artists who are willing to take their sensitivities. Learn the language that I can give them, like learn the story of the universe, see how their their creative practice is actually an extension of nature’s creativity. And once they sort of tap into that alliance, they can bring it to the work, they can bring it to their art, which means that the ecological intelligence ends up getting embedded in the art. If it gets into the artist, it gets into the art, it gets into the art, it gets into the culture. So that’s the sort of that’s the kind of like methodology that that I’ve been playing with a lot lately. But otherwise, you know, for me, you know, it’s I really don’t have anything to sell, you know, like I’m not. Yeah, but but I do. But I am on this sort of ongoing pilgrimage to like and I’m actually starting to work with scientific field stations. Back in the day when I was doing ecological research, there is this whole network of field stations that are just out there. There are the places that scientists go to do field work. And so I’ve been sort of slowly bringing artists into that world and giving access to the. Excellent. Excellent. And then it becomes a collaboration between art and science. You know, the science can sort of inform the art, but the art can then really blow up the experience of of place, of nature. And so we’ve been working. That’s something that’s sort of been been unfolding in the last six or eight months. So I forget why I was telling you that. I think it was because you asked me, how do you how do you bring people? Yeah, how do you help people into this way of being like what practices do you give them? What what kinds of knowledge do you give them? What kind of I mean, a lot of people find that it’s a it’s a long process, John, to like, you know, I could teach a course and I could give a workshop. I can, you know, we can do these practices, but the most fruitful ones, the ones that have the real sort of magic are the ones that become relationships with with, you know, with, you know, friendships. And and co creative projects. Yeah, apprenticeship and fellowship are, you know, really, really, really. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it’s and it’s this and it’s it’s, you know, it’s two way I’ve learned so much from working with these artists. You know, they, you know, I just get to see the world totally differently. And it’s and it brings an energy to the whole thing. And that’s so. Yeah, I don’t have a formal sort of offering other than if anyone wants if this is interesting to anyone, they just got to seek me out. Right. Right. You know, I started doing podcasts, I hope to do more of those. But really, it’s about when people are ready, they’ll find this, you know, it they’ve got to be ready to receive the gift, frankly. And and that’s that’s how it works. That’s the best way, I think. Well, that seems like a good place to close our first session. I foresee that we are going to have others. I hope you’ll come back again on this. Because this has been I hope so. I think it would be great to like, let’s let’s what I kind of, you know, a sort of fantasy of mine would be to go through the different thresholds of cosmic evolution and draw out. All of the wisdoms, all of the insights and talk about the practices. Right. I would like to do that. So let’s let’s set that up to do that. I think that’s an excellent thing to do. So I’ll ask which to give some links. So those of you who want to take up is very generous invitation can reach him, can talk to him. And I’m promising those of you are interested, he’s definitely going to be on if he wishes, he’s definitely going to be on Voices with Viveki again. This which you did a lot to embody the beauty and the joy that that I think will ultimately be the things that most persuasive for people. So it’s been really, really wonderful. I always like to give people or my guests sort of, you know, the last chance, you know, the last word, any any brief sort of final thing you want to say. I guess just know that this is out there, that, you know, when you feel like despair, when you feel that the world is broken. You’re right, it is broken. But like, there is hope. And I know it’s my opinion isn’t worth anything at this moment. But in my opinion, there’s reason for hope. Like, and I can actually see that hope. And if I can see it, maybe you can see it. And that, you know, there is a way that humanity can transition. You know, that is the name of the game. We’ve always done that. And we still can’t do it. And it might seem overwhelming and it might seem intimidating, you know. But actually, when you really allow yourself, you discover that this is a beautiful like, and it’s a beautiful opportunity. It’s not just a crisis. It’s an opportunity. And yeah, that’s that’s that’s it. We can do this. We kind of have to do this. And and there are ways to do it. And so keep looking. Thank you, Rich. Thank you so very much. Thank you, John. Thank you.