https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZPmwS7IqzXM
Okay, fab. So, yeah, so I mean, yeah, we’ll keep it super sort of informal and chatty. And then like I say, if we if it’s going somewhere really interesting, we can do like a more formal and I can do an introduction separately or blah, blah, blah. Sure, sure. But yeah, so I came across your ideas midway through making my series. And I was so it was so certainly the way you are articulating the meaning crisis and the way you’re integrating science and spirituality was so similar to what I was doing. I was almost I was almost got freaked out and basically just said, no, no, I can’t watch this. I need to finish this series first before I absorb all of this stuff, because I knew in the you know, it was just going to have so much to say and be so related. Since I finished the series, I’ve gone back and I’ve looked at lots of the lectures and I’ve realised that actually that you know, the depth and breadth of what you’re doing is so much more. Well, there’s just a lot more there. And then at the same time, you know, I think what I was saying was also something kind of slightly different and a bit more maybe a little bit less constrained by sort of academic rigor in the sense that like I could be way more speculative. I’m not a professor. And then and then also and perhaps bold and ambitious and in a similar sense, foolish and perhaps wrong. So I thought I just like I thought I just yeah, so I’ll give you the thesis. Basically, I I was for about three years working in education and I was working with kids trying to inspire them to make the world a better place. So I go into schools and I do workshops and try and find out what they found most meaningful. And then also what are the biggest issues that they see in the world that maybe relate to them in their lives, whether it’s racism, discrimination? How old are they? How old are the students? Primary ages. Wow. Yeah. And so anyway, so I started to really recognise the power of that, that these kids were just they’re just eyes were lighting up and it’d be the kids at the back of the class who the teachers like, oh, sorry about him, he’s really badly behaved. And they’d suddenly switch, you know, and they were so engaged in a way that they hadn’t been ever before in school. And particularly for kids struggling with mental health problems. And so I got really interested in this. And I started to think about a bit more deeply in what people find meaningful. And I got familiar with Roy Baumeister’s research and Emily Espejani Smith and I hit upon three pillars of a meaningful life by no means exhaustive, obviously. But they were cooperation, creativity and transcendence, which can be a religious spiritual thing or the way I was defining it. It could also be just like self improvement or self development of one kind or another. And so then I started to ask why those three things. And I basically realised that they were excellent descriptors of the trajectory of evolution. That as we’ve gone from a cloud of hydrogen gas through rose bushes, giraffes and human civilisation, that actually there’s a kind of direction to the evolutionary process that can be characterised as increasing complexity. But that didn’t really resonate with people when I was describing it, you know, in pubs, you know, age 21. So I started to think more about, okay, so actually, the evolutionary process has undergone this process of larger and larger scales of cooperation, of cooperative organisation, that the evolutionary process gets more creative, it gets better at evolving, in fact, it gathers pace. And that there’s this kind of is constantly transcending its limitations, you know, that the physical world is very limited and very deterministic by determined by the laws of physics, and that, you know, biology breaks out of those deterministic conditions, and then human culture, even more so. And so the thesis is basically that the things that we find most meaningful are essentially that that’s our way of participating in the evolutionary process, and the best of our purposes are really the best of the universe’s purposes. And that in some sense, when we do what we find most meaningful, we’re kind of, or we get in flow state, we’re basically the engine of evolution as it propels itself to higher levels of complexity. Okay. So there’s a lot I want to say in response to that. It’s a very complex thesis. So I don’t want to give a simplistic answer. So the work, I mean, there’s work coming out right now. I think it’s Owen Guilford, is that his name? There’s a bunch of people that are now talking, he’s talking about natural reward. And people are not talking about the evolution of of evolvability. So that the idea that it’s not just that the morphology is evolving, what happens, so natural selection selects from morphology, and natural reward is a naturalistic process, a deterministic process that rewards organisms that are more innovative. Because the idea is if an organism can open up a niche, it gets what’s called the incumbent advantage. So if you’re the incumbent species, even if you’re not the most fitted, you’ll go in and then you’ll speciate, and you’ll fill that niche, and it’s hard for other species. So this is what he calls a natural reward process. So what’s happening is it’s not that only the morphology is evolving, but the capacity to evolve in an innovative fashion is also evolving. So that’s what I call the increasing tendency towards evolvability, right? An increasing tendency towards evolvability, is that what you said? Yeah, basically, survival of the most adaptable is far truer to the whole of evolution of data than survival of the fittest. Yeah, I mean, and it moves around as the environments move around, right? Yeah, but it is. It’s often talked about now, this is all cutting-edge stuff, it’s talked about sort of the evolving of how innovative your species capacity is for evolution. But yeah, people say the evolution of evolvability, that phrase is also being used. So I think on that, I don’t want to use a verb that sounds dismissive, but like you’ve intuited something, I think that’s bang on. So next part of your thesis is that our meaning-making machinery is somehow keyed into that because of the very plausible additional thesis that cultural processes accelerate for innovation. And he makes that explicit argument that we set up cultural situations to reward innovation, not just adaptivity, etc. And that we find creativity very personally meaningful. Well, we do. But the thing is, I think, I don’t want to overburden you with too much of my own. No, that’s fine. That’s fine. You can go and pass that phase now. So hit me. So I basically argue that the core of cognition, I mean, you’ve seen the series, the core of cognition is this relevance realization process, which basically, and this is Evan Thompson’s deep continuity hypothesis, it instantiates the same principles as biological evolution, it just speeds them up. Your brain is constantly introducing variations on how it sizes up situations, then it puts selective pressure on it, and that’s how you get intelligence. But then you can evolve your intelligence through rationality. That’s the evolution of the evolvability. And that’s why rationality is now really important. And that’s why there’s a continuity relationship between them, but not an identity relationship. Intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient for rationality. And you know, because you watched the series, by rationality, I don’t mean logicality. I mean, your capacity for, as you put it, for self-correction, for self-transcendence, and for not only creating new things, but for in a very real sense, creating a new you, and a new way of life, and a new way of being, etc. And so all of that, yeah, yeah, all of that, I think is right. And so now, where I want to discuss it with you is, I’m not quite sure why that allows me to make any grand conclusions about the universe per se. So for example, here’s somebody who, like, because, you know, I’m trying to bridge between the scientific world and the world of spirituality. So like 99.999% of the universe is hostile to life, and life can’t live in it, right? The universe isn’t set up for life. It’s set up so that life can evolve in it, but it’s not set up for life. Those aren’t the same thing. Well, can I just jump in there? Because of course, you know, there’s an inherent sort of, I say, you know, hostility in the law of entropy, right? So that I’m with you there, that there’s this kind of life, or the increasing complexity of the evolutionary process on planet Earth is in some sense improbable. And yet, there is clearly this other thrust, right? So it’s like, the idea that, you know, like, entropy is not all there is. There is in the life on Earth. Yeah, and I’d want to say, and I mean, so I mean, I don’t think about just bottom up emergence of energy, of entropy dissipation. I mean, there are principles that lead to self-organization and dynamic systems. Like the sun is a self-organizing system, for example. And the solar system is this nobody made the solar system, it’s self-organized in it, right? And so self-organizing systems are very prevalent, right? But again, 99.9% of the self-organizing systems are not living things. So it’s like, it’s almost like, you know, the Aristotelian thing, you know, most of, right, you have all of the non-self-organizing, and then the self-organizing, and then there’s the living ones, and have the living ones, there’s the mental ones, because there’s all the plants and bacteria, and then of the mental ones, there are the ones that rise to the level of morality. Now, I think that is, like, like Aristotle, I think that is a hierarchy of value. But I, like, I, I’m hesitant to draw any conclusions about the universe. Because, like I said, it seems to me, like, what would you say to somebody who said, well, we’re lucky. We’re in the, we’re in the, like, we’re in the little place where all of these things just happen, because we have overwhelming evidence that they, most of the world, most of the universe, they don’t happen to work. But there’s a little chance, a very little chance, that there’ll be a small place, right, where they all happen to coordinate and produce, you know, reflective being. Right, if there was no asteroid that hit the earth 65 million years ago, we wouldn’t be here, etc, etc. Well, I was, I was gonna, I was gonna put a similar question to you, to be honest. But I suppose what I would say to that is that, yes, absolutely, obviously, it is tiny, tiny island of complexity in a sea of, you know, of the universe, right. But that nonetheless, you know, where we are, there does appear to be this, yeah, this force of evolution that is not, at least in my account, purely a mechanistic push process, although I believe that that is, obviously, it gets us to a certain point, that at my thesis, at least in, through humans, we are beginning to feel the pull of something rather than just being pushed by bottom-up forces of natural selection. And I wonder what you think of the idea that meaning, for example, isn’t really that well accounted for by evolutionary psychology. So we have all these, you know, we have all these drives and instincts, like drives to seek, you know, hit for dopamine hits, etc. And that motivates a lot of our behaviour. But evolutionary psychologists and the evolutionary psychologists I spoke to in the first series didn’t do a very good job of accounting for that through the bottom-up forces of natural selection. And it seems to me that meaningfulness is like evidence of some kind of teleological pull force, which is creating, you know, moving humanity beyond certain evolutionary thresholds, like the kind of game theoretical trap we have between nation states, because, you know, there’s no out group at the global level, right? So there’s nothing that’s going to push the emergence of a global cooperative. And yes, we have, you know, people increasingly emerging with global mindsets trying to work for organisations like the UN. So that can’t be explained adequately with bottom-up forces of natural selection, as far as I can see. Neither can this pull to transcendence, this pull to transcend our limitations and, you know, evolve spiritually. That sort of, it seems to me that we could get along quite well surviving in a world without the need for meaning and purpose, you know? So what is this evolutionary function in your view? Okay, well, maybe that’s where I would disagree with you, because I think, first of all, I would suggest that maybe the evolutionary psychologist needed to take a look a little bit more at what’s going on in sort of in Fourier cognitive science before. So let’s go back to something. I mean, assist, like we’ve already said, a system that’s evolving its evolvability is a system that is going to be investing more and more in its capacity for self-correction, right, and self-creation, and that is going to be definitely advantageous. And the whole idea about people like Gilbert is, yeah, we have to add to natural selection, natural reward, but he’s at great pains to argue. So if your evolutionary psychologists are only using old natural selection evolutionary theory, they’re fighting a battle with one only one lopsided battle there, right? Right. Natural reward is, I think, important, and the evolution of the volvability is important. And that means systems are going to be pushing towards a capacity for self-correction. And Gilbert takes great pains to because what it does is it gives you a very powerful account as to why systems are evolving for volvability, and then I’m saying that what that means is they’re going to get inherently better at being self-corrective in their relevance realization. And relevance realization is you’re actually writing a paper, a review paper on meaning in life, on reviewing all the psychological literature on meaning in life. And the three pillars that people come down to, and I want to see how these match up with yours, is so people want mattering, they want to be connected to something that’s, that they think is bigger than themselves, that’s a metaphor. They want significance, they want their experiences to be deep, to be real, and purpose. Narrative. Okay. Purpose. Sometimes narrative is a way of realizing purpose, but not always. So I’ve definitely read that research as well. And yeah, absolutely. I mean, the mattering part comes in from, well, in conscious evolution, the way I’d frame it, it comes in from the fact that I articulate in terms that are totally amenable to sort of rational inquiry, the idea that, yeah, we each have an individual role to play in the unfolding of the evolutionary process on earth. So our individual choices absolutely matter because we’re part of the evolutionary process. And that- But what do you say to people then who, I mean, so there’s one other thing, by the way, in addition to the mattering, there is coherence. People need to have intelligibility. And all of those, I think, make good evolutionary sense, again, when you start to take this more dynamic view of it. So what would you say to people who reconstruct their mattering differently than the way you’ve described it then? Are they mistaken? So what about the person who, they’re mattering because they want to be connected to social justice, right? And they don’t, because they think the universe is a bleak, harsh place, right? Opposite of your metaphysical view. Right? See, the problem I have is that I’m trying to find an account that would be as pluralistic as possible for all the self-descriptions people give of the way in which they matter. For some people, it’s a very religious thing. For some people, it’s a very non-religious thing. For some people, it’s an anti-religious thing. Their great cause is, right, they want to eradicate religion from the world. And I’m not saying that’s a good thing. There’s a difference between meaning and moral goodness. But that certainly makes their lives meaningful, right? Well, so I would, first of all, I would say that, you know, my podcast appeals to people who are very religious and very scientific, that the thesis is totally amenable to interpretation either way, for the exact reason that it describes the evolutionary process using the language of science. And then it says how we can play an active role in that. And that actually begins to sound quite religious. In terms of people construing their mattering in different terms and the examples that you gave, well, somebody who finds a lot of mattering in social justice is really a perfect example of the theory, because they’re expanding the circles of cooperation in the world. And somebody who finds their meaning in destroying religion, well, they’re coming at it from a certain developmental perspective, right? So they’re coming at it from, you know, what spiral dynamics would call the orange meme. And at that particular developmental level, they’re actually transcending the constraints that, you know, the primitive mythic religions placed on their behavior, you know, that their rational inquiry is actually, in many ways, they’re, you know, they’re finding better ways of discovering the universe and participating in the evolutionary process by the spreading of knowledge, by the spreading of useful means. So, and so, but to, you know, to put my hands up, one of the biggest doubts I had about my thesis was the cooperation element. And I think this is because of the way that I framed it. I mean, really, like to go to sort of Ken Wilbur, or, you know, I start to be familiar with this, the attractors of goodness, truth and beauty, right? And that cooperation, creativity and transcendence just describe the trajectories as we’re attracted to those points. I think that’d be another way of thinking about it. And so my doubt, however, was what about people that find great meaning in, you know, tribalism and excluding an out group? Sure. But and again, I gave a similar answer to what I gave to those two counter arguments that you gave that, you know, could it be that maybe from their developmental level, the unit that they’re cooperating within is really a step forward? You know, nation states, when they evolved, were an evolutionary step forward in the sense that they were a larger cooperative group. But of course, now, jingoistic nationalists are not what we need on this planet, evolutionarily speaking. So it’s like, once you understand where people act developmentally, then you can see that, yes, everything that they’re drawn to, everything that they find meaningful is at least a rung in the ladder of this evolutionary trajectory from a cloud of hydrogen gas to Rose Bush’s Giraffes and Humans. Well, well, it sounds to me like what you’re saying, though, is what you’re actually using to evaluate this, because you’re making now the normative judgments, are standards of virtue, right? Those things that bring us closer to what’s true, good and beautiful. And then what about the ancient and perennial claim that virtue is its own reward? It’s not part, it’s not in service of anything else, that you are just virtuous for the sake of being virtuous. I mean, and that’s again, how many people would see this, they don’t see this as I mean, that’s, that’s definitely that is almost by the by the me if I can prove that what we all agree on is virtuous, absolutely does contribute to the ongoing evolution of complexity on our planet, then what if it didn’t? But none of my point is what if it didn’t? My argument says I would still do it, because it’s virtuous, your argument would say I’d stop doing it, because it’s not contributing to the overall evolution. Well, but but find find me something that we consider to be virtuous, that doesn’t contribute to the ongoing complexification of evolution on this planet, and then I’m all ears. The discovery of the theory of relativity, intellectual inquiry. I mean, and you can’t, you’re not allowed to do a Jeff Stowe story, right? Because you can always find how this is advantageous to people, right? That’s not playing fair, right? It’s got to be, you got to show me a very clear way. And in which, like, like, you could like, do you understand what I’m what I’m saying here? Like, I can’t be that well, look, it survived, which means it’s complex, which means it survived because it’s complex that that’s, that’s not a fair argument, right? No, no, I see that. I mean, accurate knowledge about the world allows us to, yeah, is highly evolutionary allows us to to form coherent societies, it makes it allows us to know who to trust, how not to trust back and forth, build, try to build more technology, how to evolve our societies, does it not play? You know, but see, adaptivity is actually plays off against, you know, accuracy, signal detection, right? So that’s why you have so many cognitive biases, right? So it’s why you look why people tend to confirmation rather than looking for disconfirmation, things like that, because accuracy is not always advantageous, it doesn’t always survive, right? You know, how about how about how about the transcendence part of it then that, you know, that by increasing our knowledge of the world as it is that we’re basically transcending our limitations, we’re giving ourselves more and more knowledge with which to, you know, essentially ourselves, right? So the discovery of relativity makes possible the atomic bomb and the nuclear warfare, which could potentially destroy us all. And if that happens, then your thesis would be undermined. Right? I mean, I mean, my thesis doesn’t overlook the fact we’ve had six mass distinctions. So I’m quite I’m quite comfortable with the fact that we’re not comfortable the wrong way. But like, I mean, a monster, don’t worry. I mean, I’m quite I’m quite like, I’ve obviously absorbed the fact that there have been six mass five mass extinctions, you might be in the middle of six. So but nonetheless, like when we have a mass extinction, it doesn’t reset the evolutionary clock, we don’t go back to sort of day one. And the trajectories of evolution is still evident, you know, if you set out the evolutionary timeline, you know, from literally the the dawn of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, roughly, to now, and you see these trajectories, I’ve done this in schools a lot, you know, you can see these mass extinction points, right, but the trajectories, they don’t undermine the trajectories, right. And just because we find, yeah, just just because we might be an evolutionary dead end, you know, humans might not make it through the evolutionary bottleneck that is approaching, right. So we could just be another mass extinction. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re beginning and I would argue if that happens, it’s because we haven’t really followed what we find meaningful, right, we’ve somehow gone astray, because we don’t find the idea of blowing each other up meaningful, we find the exact opposite of that, you know, we are repulsed by that. And so, so to come back to your thing about relativity, and why we might find that meaningful is that, well, no, I see what you mean, because then I could just do this trick that you say, where I’m just like, sort of reverse engineering, why everything that we you know, is here is meaningful. I mean, it seems, I mean, it’s, I don’t know, scientific inquiry, and the pursuit of pursuit of truth seems to me to be conducive to the ongoing evolution of our of our culture and consciousness, I can’t see how those two are at odds, you know, and just because it could be used to blow ourselves up, it doesn’t mean that it’s it’s, you know, the knowledge in and of itself, and the pursuit of it is not in any way contradictory to the ongoing evolution of our culture, right? Well, well, what I was, I was arguing that it that the conclusion to come out, which would be on balance, would be that it’s teleologically neutral, we’re both agreeing, we’re not disagreeing that it’s good, right? Or there’s the so and that because that was my point, it’s a virtue, it’s an intellectual virtue, it is a good thing, truth is good. I was acknowledging what we’re arguing about, and I think we’re doing it very friendly, which I thank you for, right? That that’s very important. Likewise, thank you for entertaining me. Well, I mean, I think it’s I think it’s symmetrical. So that’s good. What I’m saying is, I was proposing to you that it’s teleologically neutral, even though it’s virtuous, so that I can say, well, it’s a good thing to do, because you know, knowledge is a good thing in and of itself. And it may not have any tele, it may be teleologically neutral. And I was saying, doesn’t it look like the fact that it can go really good or really bad? Isn’t that evidence that it’s teleologically neutral? Yeah, I would. Yeah. So I would say it’s, it’s not evidence that it’s teleologically. What would count as evidence for things being teleologically neutral, because then that’s what I need to understand, perhaps. No, that’s a really good question. Because I’ll just put my cards on the table. I just want to say that for me, the fact that things can plausibly go one of either towards the good or the bad indicates that there’s no teleology at work in them. Right. Or if it is, it’s extremely weak. Unless I mean, unless they make us unless it makes us more adaptable. Right. In which case, it’s clearly part of the teleology of life towards more and more adaptable forms. Right. And if we’re drawn to it, then it’s, it’s a good evidence of that argument, right, that what we find meaningful is contributing to our ongoing evolvability. The question is a real cracker and something I haven’t thought about. And, you know, that like, so so so so your question is, what would count as something that we could say that’s teleologically neutral, right? Because then we can start to. Because we clearly have evidence of organisms becoming less complex across time. Right. Think organisms also find ways of simplifying themselves, like to live inside your intestinal tract and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is the Stephen Jay Gould line of thinking, right? Yeah. And the pandas thumb and that we have lots of evidence of very poor design and simplification. And so, but so I just want to like, there’s there’s variety in how things evolve. Right. I don’t want to take away from the thesis, which I’ve granted you, because I think it’s an important thesis that there is. I kind of want you to though. I’m really like, this is really good fodder for me. Like, no, no, no, no, I’m not giving up on my point. I want to press you on the question that I asked. But what I’m allowing you to use in your response is I’m acknowledging that there is an adaptive advantage to the evolution of evolvability. And that that implies a system getting increasingly better at self-correction and self-creation. However, I would point out that the person that is arguing for that takes great pains to argue that it’s what he calls a deterministic and non-teleological process. Right. And so he definitely sees what we’re talking about. And, you know, he’s a relevant person. He sees it as a teleologically neutral thing. And so that returns. So what I’m saying is it doesn’t seem to be a necessary consequence of the evolution of evolvability, that things are teleologically driven. And so I come back there. I gave you something and then I took it back. Which is like, what would count as evidence that things are teleologically neutral? Because presumably there are because you acknowledge at the beginning that vast tracts of the universe are just unfolding in what seems to be irrelevant to life. Yeah. Yeah. I’m going to have to, I think I’m going to have to sit on that and come back to you. I mean, I had this exact same conversation with my cousin on the boat because he lives on a boat. We had a long chat about the podcast. And basically he said this, but I find life ultimately, you know, he really loved the podcast. And he was like, yeah, I find all these things meaningful. And I can see the trajectories you’re scoping and that’s informative. But he basically made that point. He’s like, you’re making a bit of a leap to say that that suggests something larger in the universe. I mean, I suppose what I’ve done a little bit of is I’ve taken those three trajectories. I’m not giving my thinking here. And, you know, we can, you can help me pick it apart. Was that, okay, so I can see these trajectories in the evolutionary process that are by no means inevitable. You know, that there can be mass extinctions and that they’re, you know, not all life achieves these breakthroughs, right? So obviously you say, you know, there’s still bacteria, there’s still et cetera. Yeah. In terms of biomass, they’re way more successful than us. Yeah. But that, that, that I think is a mistake between, you know, confusing what they call span and depth, right? You know, that there’s this, there’s this increasing. Yeah. Be with me on that. So, so what I think what I did is I looked at those trajectories. Okay. So we’ve gone from, you know, larger and larger cooperation, more and more creativity and gradually transcending our limitations. And then I said, well, okay, if you extrapolate those and you think of the most cooperative, the most loving, the most creative, the most transcendent entity that you can, it becomes a very, very good definition of God. So I suppose I was going down a kind of, and I’m a spiritual person, you know, I’ve had massive awakenings and experiences that, you know, caused me to question the scientific worldview as it was presented to me, stripped of all meaning. And so I just, I just jumped and went, okay, great. So we’re basically being attracted towards the divine, but being attracted towards God and we are, you know, and that’s what we find. That’s why, you know, people who are religious find their lives meaningful, don’t have mental health crises, right? Because they’re very, they have a clear, coherent story and they’re drawn to the divine and in our secular culture, we’ve had that stripped out, right? So we don’t have a good account of that. Yeah, I think a lack of a worldview that Holmes, I’m trying to pack a lot into one word, Holmes are experience of sacredness. I think that’s one of the great defects of our worldview right now. I agree with that. And I think, so let me, let me see if I can phrase your question in a way that might be more challenging to me, which is, yeah, I get all this John about self-transcendence and all that, but human beings seem to be attracted to things. I’m trying to, I’m trying to be as neutral as possible, Robert. So if I, if I impose on you, you’re allowed to, you’re allowed to interrupt me. Okay. But human beings seem to be attracted to the experience of the sacred that isn’t needed for all the other stuff you’re talking about, John. And yet it seems to be a powerful driver and a powerful predictor of meaning in people’s lives. Kind of a TLRD Chardon kind of argument. Is that a fair representation of what you’re saying? Yes. Okay. So. And that, and just to add onto that, and that, that I don’t think, I mean, I think the sacred, we can just to qualify here, all of these things. I said you’re welcome to, so please. All of these things can be understood, at least in part through bottom-up forces of natural selection. So the example I always use is music, you know, and I know that you’ve written and spoken about this, you know, so there’s the kind of, right, it bonds us together as a tribe. It makes us better to go into war. It gives us more coherence, et cetera, et cetera. And yet I think, you know, when you’re listening to music and you feel that feeling of expansion, we can feel, I think, the evidence of a pull force as well as a push force, that there’s something, that it’s transforming our consciousness in a way that it sort of encapsulates truths about the universe almost, like the harmonies in music are somehow representative of the harmonies of life, and that we somehow imbibe that. And that I would make a same argument with religiosity, that like, yes, of course, there’s bottom-up explanations of why we have this religious impulse to do with cohesion, et cetera. But there’s also a pull force which is acting on our consciousness, that there’s a kind of spiritual impulse there that can’t be added. Okay, but so then we come back to that guy you mentioned where it’s not just about natural selection, but it’s about natural, what was the other one you used? Natural reward, yeah. So I’m unfamiliar with that, and I’ll have to get into that. Hang on one sec. I can get the article, I got it right over here. Yeah, it’s called natural reward drives the advancement of life. Sounds like a lot of your terminology. Owen Gilbert, Gilbert, that was, I think I was saying, was I saying Gilbert? I think it was. Yeah, this is in rethinking ecology, and yeah, and so he, yeah. And so yeah, he thinks it’s teleologically neutral that though. Yeah, he explicitly wants to say the point about it is, and this is his language explicitly, he wants to say that it is deterministic like natural selection, and require, it doesn’t require any foresight processes, isn’t, and is not teleological in nature, and he actually says that, but he says, I think this is fair to you, he says like if people are only doing the natural selection side of the argument, they can’t actually capture a lot of the phenomena of living systems, the way in fact, right, the, you know, we evolve for evolvability, we’re genuinely advancing in our capacity to be innovative as biological organisms. He talks about genuine advance, but he thinks it’s non-teleological. The same way, the same, well, just if I can finish the analogy, the same way we now think, and I think you’re acknowledging this, that intelligence can be designed by non-intelligent processes, intelligence doesn’t require an intelligent designer, in the same way advancement doesn’t require a teleological designer, that’s the basic argument. Okay, so I’m going to imbibe that and have a bit, do a bit more thinking. Before I run out of time, there’s a couple of other things I wanted to run past you. Sure. I was really enjoying this, but no, go ahead, you’ll come up with something good too. I’m really enjoying this is what I’m saying. Good, good, great, great, and I need, certainly need to do a lot more thinking, and this is part of the reason for having this chat. Okay, so another thing that I want to run by you, and it’s basically, this is basically someone else saying what I’m saying, but he has a different way of phrasing it that I think you might get your teeth into, and that is, and I’m totally going to get his name wrong, but I actually wrote it down here so I can, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, do you know this guy? Oh yes, yes, yes, Csikszentmihalyi, yeah, you did pronounce it right. I know, it’s because I googled it before the chat. Yeah, I published on his work, I published on Flow. Okay, yeah, so he’s saying a lot of what I’m saying, it’s just he substituted, or rather I’ve substituted, meaningfulness for flow, you know, that he says when we are in flow state, and we are, what does he say, flow seems to be the engine of evolution propelling us to higher levels of complexity, or, and he says, and this is the other part that I wanted to introduce, or just do it the same, is that becoming an active part of the consciously, of the evolutionary process is the best way to give meaning to our lives, so that’s my thesis, essentially, is that, you know, yeah, that not only, like the evolution up to this point can maybe be explained quite adequately with bottom-up push forces of natural selection, but that we’re not going to make the next shift, right, because of that thing I told you about, there’s no out group, right, so there’s no out group to push the emergence of a global cooperative, and so we’re going to need to make it part of our conscious intention, that it’s going to have to come from, aha, we’re being drawn somewhere, we want to get there, and we’re going to deliberately and consciously almost override our biological programming for tribalism, for hits of dopamine, in order to make that next evolutionary shift, and that’s where the conscious part comes in. Sure, and I agree with that, I think we, I mean, I think unlike a lot of the other things we’ve been talking about, we are capable of conscious foresight, and I think that, I think, I don’t think you disagree with me, that, you know, our ability to foresee the future was tremendously adaptive, and then, but we have the capacity for exaptation, right, we have the capacity to take things that evolve for one purpose, and then co-opt them for a new purpose, I’m using my tongue to speak, many organisms have tongues, they don’t speak, but, right, having an organism, sorry, having an organ, the tongue, that’s good for poison detection and moving food around, is actually also already pre-designed in a lot of ways, but not foresightfully designed, but pre-designed for speech, it makes speech easier for it to appear, and so that’s sort of the difficulty I have, because, like, everything, there’s a sense in which everything we do is going to, like, if, let’s say evolutionary theory is right in some fashion, then everything we do is going to be adaptive, but does that mean, and it might even be that we evolved, because I was arguing that, we’ve evolved an ability to, right, to adapt ourselves, not just to adapt, and that’s what I think relevance realization is, so why do I need anything more than that, so I just, I’m becoming a more adaptive, you know, I’m getting better, so I wrote a paper on flow, to accept my husband’s flow, with Leo Ferraro and Ariane Arabenet, and we basically argued, I think you’ve seen some of this in the series, that in flow, what we’re getting is an insight cascade, and we’re improving the conditions under which we’re doing implicit learning, and this is going to be massively, like, if we evolve to pick that up, we’re going to out-compete all kinds of other organisms, because we’re going to get, we’re going to be much more cognitively flexible, we’re going to be able to do much more complex intuition, that’s going to be really powerful, especially if it’s helping us to pick up on, you know, the real causal patterns. That seems to me, like, why isn’t that a sufficient explanation, why do I need something extra behind that, why, like, why isn’t that just like, well, that’s why, that’s why I like it, that’s why, and not in some hedonistic sense, I like it, because it’s good for me, it’s good for my cognitive agency, it’s good for growing my cognitive flexibility, for improving my cognition, to be a, you know, a good self-correcting problem solver, which is, that’s just, you know, a good solver, which is, that’s just categorically good for everything, because everything else I try to do requires me solving problems, so of course this is going to get a meta-value attached to it, like, that seems to me to be sufficient, I don’t, I don’t seem to need more. It’s a sufficient, yeah, it’s a sufficient explanation of why we have flow states, I guess, right? Yes, yes, yeah. Yeah, and that’s, and now we’re back to the teleology thing, which is like, yeah, so it may, it may be that I’m, yeah, I’m putting in a teleology piece that isn’t totally necessary, but nonetheless, he does describe flow states as, you know, as, like I said, as the engine of evolution, so it’s like… I do, I think they are, and I think that’s great. I think he also has, I mean, if you’ll allow me, he has a fairly mechanistic explanation of how to create the flow state, right? That’s where he loses everyone, that’s why his book hasn’t set anyone on fire apart from geeks, like me and you. Yeah, well, okay, so, yeah, I mean, and so this, I suppose, is really my skill, is taking all this stuff and breaking it down into language that’s very, very accessible and also, well, inspiring, at least as the feedback from season one has gone. And, you know, I think those, certainly, like, we do need an overarching narrative of what is meaningful, that it’s not enough for us individually to find, I mean, this is just from a kind of, like, evolutionary strategizing here, right? Like, how are we going to get through this moment? Like, I think that leaving aside whether it’s true or not what I’m saying, which, you know, maybe the teleology bit is an unnecessary piece. I think it’s not enough for us to just say, oh, you find this meaningful, you find this meaningful, and off we go. That actually, we do need some larger story, which is A, you know, can resist rational inquiry that actually stands up in the face of rational intellectual inquiry. And then at the same time speaks to this deep need that we all have a meaning and purpose that articulates a general meaning to life, and not just a specific you find this meaningful, you find this meaningful. And so I think, like, my podcast does a good job of that. Maybe the teleology piece, if we’re being strictly rational, isn’t a necessary component, but it’s also not, it’s also doesn’t contradict anything factually scientific, you know, and there’s plenty of evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson, for example, that are or who’s that guy, Robert Wright, who are really kind of amenable to ideas that, you know, the evolutionary process has a direction that we need to become consciously evolutionaries, etc, etc. I hope you never felt I was insulting you at any point. Oh, my god, no, no, no, not at all. I do. I literally love this shit. So I’m having a great time. Don’t worry. No, no, no, I treated you with the intellectual respect that I thought your your statements deserve. Yeah, yeah. I guess for me, the issue is, well, let’s let’s shift to the practical arena, because I think that’s where you’ve shifted. And I don’t like that word, because it always sounds dismissive. I sometimes replace it with a horrible sounding word practicable, which but see, so if we take a look, again, this is something I do a lot of work on, on on the meaning in life stuff. Purpose isn’t as important as coherence and mattering and depth. And I, you know, and I was going to bring up, you know, that that return to the divine to the sacred, you had, like cultures that didn’t see it. They didn’t see it in terms of like a historical teleology. They you know, the Neoplatonist, you’re actually going, it was a vertical transcendence, not a progressive progression. Yeah, I get that. I get things I want to say. So I worry about putting too much emphasis on purpose, actually, because it does keep biting up. See, the other ones, the other ones don’t butt up against science as sort of dramatically to my mind. Like I said, because like we think we can talk about them, I think at length. And like I say, we have cultural evidence, historical evidence, and now we have psychological evidence that purpose isn’t that as contributive to meaning our culture thinks it is that’s overwhelmingly clear. But cross cultural evidence and psychological experimental evidence seems to say no, no, intelligibility and, you know, a procedural and perspectival and participatory connectedness to things and a sense, right, of, you know, being in touch with what’s real, that seems to really, really matter to people more than having a purpose. So all those bits of the, I mean, I wouldn’t say that having a purpose is more important than any of the other those bits. I would say that when I was reading that literature, I was thinking, aha, so I’m sort of neatly taking care of those without it being explicit upfront, you know? Do you know what I mean? Basically, if you buy, you know, my particular horse I’m flogging or whatever, then you’re going to feel that what you do matters and you’re also going to have a coherent worldview, you know? Sorry, I paused it, but I was only sort of halfway through the argument. So take what you said. I heard what you said. I’m not ignoring it, right? But then I say, so I see that trajectory. And then, I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time both in practice and in study, you know, on many of the mystical traditions. And, you know, you read the Heart of Eckhart or others, and you’re supposed to get to the place where you live without a why. And that you’re supposed to see that things have no purpose, that the rose has no purpose, it just is. And so the mystical, like the mystical visions also seem to converge on that place where- Well, that depends what mystical tradition you go to. I mean, funnily enough, I’m actually, my best friend, Tom Kenning, who is responsible for this Chinese tea that I’m drinking, he’s a Zen Buddhist, and he says that, he says that, I think, conscious evolution is a useful story, but ultimately, there’s no why. He says exactly that. But I’m a practicing Sufi. And Sufi, Sufism is very, at least the lineage that I’m part of, is very evolutionary in its thinking, and quite directional, even. It says that, yeah, that, you know, that human consciousness is evolving towards the, well, what they call the Jin plane, the plane of genius, which should explain the kind of, you know, interest in rationality and technology and stuff, but that we’re kind of evolving towards our angelic nature, I suppose. And, you know, again, you can think of that in very mystical terms, but I can also break that down and think about that in terms of like, aha, this is just where the evolution of our culture is going. If you look at how our values have progressed, and you extrapolate that a bit. So I don’t think they’re all necessarily sold on this, there is no why. Well, enough of them are, and I think I could find enough passages in Rumi that seem to indicate you should give up the why. I mean, he seems to say that, and I, because I’ve studied him pretty thoroughly. Now, I’m not saying that he’s a representative of all of Sufism or anything as ethnocentric like that. But what I’m saying is, well, there’s enough of these traditions, and there’s even threads within Sufism that it deserves to be. It undermines the claim that you can’t get that mystical richness without teleology, because you clearly can. No, you can definitely get the mystical richness without the teleology, that’s for sure. Yeah. Yeah, okay. So maybe the teleology is the bit of the puzzle that I cast out. I mean, maybe I don’t need it. Maybe it doesn’t, well, I say I, maybe the theory doesn’t need it. Maybe it all hangs together very neatly without saying that we’re evolving towards anything in particular. Might it just be enough to say, look, there are these trajectories in evolution, playing a part in them gives you a life meaning, but who knows where it’s going? For me, that sounds fine. I don’t see myself arguing with that. I mean, because I’ve acknowledged from the beginning, I do think natural reward, I mean, I think that’s going to pan out. I think it’s a very powerful idea. Not all of us agree with it, because that’s a controversial idea right now, which is where I tend to like to look. Well, I like to look within what I call, legitimate science, but at the cutting edge, because that’s where, what we need right now. I’m trying to look for the Kuhnian edge where the paradigm is about to shift, is what I’m saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, me too. So I think, and I think there’s enough people, people that I respect in biology, talking about the evolution of evolvability. Then I see that as plugging into this work I do on relevance realization and altered states of consciousness and flow and mystical experience very coherently. Like I say, and even plugging into some mystical traditions that don’t need, I know what you’re saying, Robert, I hope you feel that I’ve been fair to you, because I do get into these good faith discussions with people who are Christian, like Jonathan Pageau and Paul Van der Kley, and they definitely have a teleological orientation. And so I understand and I want to treat it with respect, and I hope you felt that. Totally. Yeah, no, I mean, like I know that you’ve got to be elsewhere in seven minutes. So I want to say, first of all, yes, you’ve treated me with huge amounts of respect and probably more than I deserve. And I really, I mean, it’s very nice of you to give me your time and to bounce these ideas around and, you know, you’ve informed my thinking and I want to get my teeth into a few of the things you’ve mentioned. Would you be able to hit me with some links at the end of the list? Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then great. And then the next thing I wanted to ask is, so essentially, that’s my thesis. And the next series was going to be how can we put this into practice as an individual? And then the third one’s going to be how can we put into practice as a collective? So it’d be more civilisation design stuff and that kind of thing. Yeah, your work is converging with mine. I’m tackling those two questions right now too, very much. Okay, brilliant. Well then, if you’re amenable to it, and if that’s okay with you, I’d love to, yeah, basically do a proper interview, which will be me not talking. And just ask you exactly those questions, get into all this stuff about flow and spirituality. And I particularly want to know how spiritual practices can make us more cooperative, more creative, and all of that kind of stuff. And also, yeah, so all that kind of stuff. And then basically what I’ll do is I’ll lift sections out of that and use them over the course of the next two series. That’d be fantastic. Count me in. Yeah, I mean, you’ve impressed me, Robert. I’d love to be a part of this. Brilliant. Okay, well, that’s great news, John. And yeah, thank you so much for your time. And yeah, and I understand you’re super busy and you probably have a thousand people like me badgering you, but if you listen to one of them, listen to the last episode, because I think you’ll see it’s not like your average podcast. It’s got a rich soundtrack. It’s got lots of different voices. It’s very well produced and put together. And I think you’ll see the, yeah, I don’t know, it’ll trigger some stuff. You’ll see where I’m going with it all. Well, I will. I will. I mean, what do you intend to do with this? Because I’d like to put this out on my channel. I think this was a real, this is an example of genuine good faith theologos. I’d like to put it on my voices with Verveki. If you’re open to that, then I’m happy to put in links to your podcast and whatever promotion you’d like to do. But I just thought this was excellent. And I thought it was really good faith and it was fun and friendly. And yet it was also incisive and we were really wrestling. I really think it’s an exemplary conversation. And so if you’re open to that, I would love it if you send me the files and I’d like to put it out on my channel. I don’t know. I mean, you can do whatever you want with it on yours, if you have my permission. But I’d like to put it on mine. I really liked how this unfolded. Okay, fab. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I’ll send you over the link. That’d be great. I personally, I don’t know. Yeah, I know I might use chunks of it and whack it in the podcast. It all comes down to the editing process. You know, like when I finally have got, because I’ve got so many of these transcripts and then I have to go through them all and be like, oh, that was a useful paragraph. That was a useful paragraph. But I’m sure I’ll use chunks of it, but I probably won’t put it out as a live chat. So please do that. Yeah, that’d be great. Yeah, that’d be great. So thank you very much. I think that’s excellent. And yet count me in on the future. I think this was really good. And yeah, if you take a look at some of this other stuff I’m doing, the whole dialectic of the logos and all the ecology of I mean, all that stuff outside the series has been after the series, I then went into the two next questions you’re pursuing. Okay. What’s the practice look like? I put out a whole, you know, cultivating meditation and contemplation and then going through the Western, Western traditions of Epicureanism, Stoicism and Neoplatonism. I put that all out. I put together an anthology on how to do dialectic into the logos and then which is the way to bridge from the individual to the collective. So those two questions you asked, those are the two questions that are uppermost in my mind right now. Great. Yeah, I did check out a couple of those DIA logos. Some of it went over my head, I have to be honest. But it’s cool because they’re really, I would say, you know, they’re different answers than what I came up with, you know? Yeah. But I can see, you know, I mean, I tap into the game piece space. So I know they love their process and the dialogue and that’s all I get. That’s all super valuable and interesting stuff. Yeah, cool. Well, thanks, John. And that’s very exciting news and I’m very glad that you’ve agreed to another chat and yeah, for sure. Yeah, so like I said, please send me the files and I look forward to talking with you again. So keep up the good work. Take good care. Thanks, John. You too. Bye bye. Bye.