Four Kinds of Knowing and Personality, Formal Cause, and Purpose with Sam Tideman (TrW3DOIkP78)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TrW3DOIkP78

Welcome everyone. This video was originally presented on Sam Tiderman’s channel, but we thought it was valuable to write it again on my channel because it’s an excellent discussion of the four kinds of knowing and for those of you who are interested in a core piece of my work, which is this theory of the four kinds of knowing, this is an excellent single standalone video for getting into the depths of this in a way that’s accessible. Sam was excellent at making me get clearer about it and develop my thinking in relationship to it. So thank you Sam and I hope you all enjoy this upcoming video. Hello everybody. I am back again today with Dr. John Vervecky. John has been on my channel once before. We had a really good conversation about I think eight or nine months ago. John is a professor at the University of Toronto. You’re a professor in, is it cognitive science or psychology? I always forget. Both. Cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Cognitive psychology. I’ve never, cognitive psychology. I think that’s a relatively new phrase or title. No, I use that quite frequently about myself. Okay. In fact, the University of Toronto psychology department is what I consider it was, I think rightfully so, considered a forerunner in one of the centers of cognitive psychology in North America. That’s really cool. I’m not sure if I’d ever heard that phrase before. So John and I will be sort of picking up on a lot of conversations that have already happened, both continuing the one we’ve already had before, kind of building off of conversations that John has had with Paul VanderKlay and JP Marceau and Paul Anleitner and other people like that. So I’ll do my best to make this conversation that if you’re just coming in for the first time out there listening, that will be somewhat followable, enjoyable. But just a fair warning that there’s a fair amount of context, I guess, that will be perhaps helpful if not necessary for understanding everything that we’re talking about. But John has a wonderful YouTube channel. John Vervecky, I’ll link them in the description. And I would especially recommend his 50 video series called Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. John, you consider yourself something of sort of like a living day Neoplatonist, or at least are strongly influenced by Neoplatonism, as well as integrating it with newer sort of scientific and other philosophical trends since then too. But to get started, one of the things that I wanted to kind of throw by you is that on Paul VanderKlay’s Discord, because there’s a lot of Christians of a lot of different varieties and backgrounds and denominations, it’s quite natural that we get into disputing either each other’s doctrines or the correctness of their interpretation of Christian history and all those sorts of things. And as I’ve noticed a bunch of these sort of discussions, I noticed that there was kind of a handful of categories of how Christians would sort of justify either to themselves or to Christians of a different sort, why they are sort of legitimate, and that sometimes these different categories work so differently that people would be talking past each other. And I felt like they sort of lined up with your four Ps a little bit, although I kind of had to add a fifth one to kind of get everybody to work. And I’m curious, I’m not sure if it’s just a sub-variety of one of them or not, but one of John’s contributions that I’ve really enjoyed and learned from is what you call the four Ps of knowing. And that we have procedural knowing, which is sort of like knowing how to do something, sort of like the recipe of how to bake a cake or something like that. There’s propositional knowing, which is sort of making propositions, being able to articulate them, that’s a little bit abstract. There’s participatory, which I always sort of associate with like doing something, especially together as a group. Sometimes I wonder if I get that definition correct. And then the fourth one is perspectival knowing, right, the knowing of what it’s like to be in the perspective of doing something, like the difference between a sports announcer describing a baseball game and you being one of the baseball players in the game, having the perspective of being a baseball player. So when Christians argue with each other sometimes about why their version of Christianity is more right than the other ones, I’ve noticed that a common one, especially for Protestants, is to assert propositional correctness, right? I have the right doctrines. And that’s sort of a very natural one, especially sort of in the modern age to be like, well, I’m the right kind of Christianity because I believe the right stuff, or basically, I believe the teachings that Jesus gave us in a propositional sort of way. And then we could dispute about who is the right set of propositions. That’s a relatively common and easy one to understand. But there’s also sort of like, especially I’ve noticed this from Eastern Orthodox folks, a procedural correctness. Like we have the right liturgy. We worship God correctly. We don’t know what you Protestants are doing over there in your church services. We do this thing. We’ve been doing it since John Christophsis. We worship God correctly. And we pass this on and we’re the stewards of the proper liturgy. And that’s what makes us correct. And that’s like a very different like a Protestant almost doesn’t even know what to do with that sort of argument. It doesn’t even like register. And I view that as like sort of emphasizing the procedural way of knowing and connecting with God and legitimizing yourself. And then there’s sort of like a participatory definition. And I take this as like, we are the group that has inherited the whatever and are passing it on. Like, you know, Catholics will do this a lot, right? You know, God or Jesus gave Peter the authority, right? And we’re the group that is the participating in that sort of group as defined how Jesus started it, right? You know, we that that sort of participatory connection. And then there’s for perspectival, there’s the sort of the way Charismatics will emphasize an experience with God, right? You come to our group, you come to our church, and you have an experience of God. Maybe there’s even like speaking in tongues and miracles and that sort of thing. Or you experience a very strong sense of personal transformation, right? That experience that happened in your head, that shows that we’re on the right path, right? We’re giving the people this sort of direct internal sense of connection with God, that that is that’s how we legitimize ourselves. What more proof do you need that we’re right with God? You feel it in between your ears, right? And that those are very different ways of arguing. But then there was one group that I couldn’t quite fit. And it was like, Anabaptists, like Amish, or Hutterites, or stuff like that. And they will often make a moral argument that we behave as a community the way that Jesus commanded us to behave, right? We are nonviolent, we practice sharing our goods in common. And you know, that sort of thing of emphasizing the moral correctness and the adherence to Jesus’s own moral teaching. And I was like, well, that is that just like sort of a different flavor of procedural? It’s like kind of procedural, but it’s as opposed to emphasizing liturgical procedure, it’s like communal moral behavior, or was that a different sort of P altogether? So I was wondering, I just wanted to lay that out there and see what you thought of that. And then if that could even apply to things sort of bigger than just internecing Christian disputing. Well, there’s two things I want to do in response to that. I want to do sort of maybe a quick review of the four Ps, because that might not that you’re wrong or anything, but getting maybe richer definitions might help with the taxonomy. The second thing I want to do is reply to this, I think brilliant idea that there, I don’t know, this is quite the right term, especially given the work that I’ve done with with Greg and with Christopher. Greg Enriquez, Christopher Mastepietro, but this idea that there might be something like personality types that are differentiated in terms of which of the four kinds of knowing they identify with. I think that’s fair to your what you’re saying. Okay, good. I like that. That’s a kind of a gives me sort of a psychological handle. And that also brings with it the potential of broadening it beyond just inter-Christian relations, perhaps to more general relations. So those are the two things, the two ways I want to respond first. Yeah, the propositional is, it is dominant in our culture. And many people equate knowledge with propositional through, I think, ultimately, these within philosophy and epistemology within a misreading of Plato. The third wave scholarship has made it very clear that the non-propositional is actually central to Plato. I won’t get into that right now, but basically, this is when you believe that something is the case, and you believe it with good argument and good evidence. So I believe that cats are mammals. Right. And so, yeah, that would map on to doctrinal totally. The fact that we have reduced religio, religion, faith to belief, especially the assertion of propositions, is, I think, one of the problematic aspects. Agreed. The procedural, as you said, it doesn’t result in beliefs. As you said, it results in skills. It’s knowing how to catch a ball. It’s knowing how to kiss someone. It’s knowing how to make a sandwich. Right. And one of the first and important, I don’t know if it’s the discoveries, but at least making prominent of 4E cognitive science was to realize how much of our knowledge is procedural, how much of our cognitive agency is dependent on our skills rather than our beliefs, even our true knowledge. And this is obvious when you start to think about it. You can have all the kind. You can have all the true beliefs you want about swimming. Playing the piano. Playing the piano. And if you’ve never done it, if you’ve never picked up the skills, you can’t play the piano. So that’s really apparent. And what’s important is that each one of these kinds of knowing, and this is important to when you try to add to the taxonomy. That’s why I want to do this in a little detail. Each one of these has a medium in which it works, proposition, or perhaps a vehicle, if you want to call it that way. It has its own standards of evaluation. Like we are convinced in the truth of our beliefs. We’re impressed by the power of our skills. And each one has its own kind of memory. There’s procedural memory for procedural knowledge. There’s semantic memory. You know that two plus two equals four. That’s just the knowledge of a proposition. You don’t know where you got it. There’s no episodes associated with it. A perspectival, you’re right. The way to think about that is you’re not knowing this with belief or with skills. You’re knowing this with your states of consciousness. States of consciousness. And states of consciousness always have co-defining situational awareness. So if I’m drunk, I’m aware of my situation in a particular way. Or if I’m aware of my situation, like that it’s very dangerous, I have a particular state of consciousness that corresponds. And putting those two together is what gives you a perspective. Now we judge perspective not by truth or power. We judge it by how present we are in a situation. We use the metaphor of presence. That sense of how much situational awareness the person has and how well their state of mind corresponds to the situation that they’re actually in. And then for that we have episodic memory. This is your ability to remember scenes that you participated in. The participatory is most difficult because it’s the one that you do not directly participate with in a sense of awareness. You can be aware of it, but it’s generated at a much lower level. So the way to think about this is to think of the old, and I think it’s being revised, but the theory of knowledge from the ancient Greeks, the conformity theory, that to know something is to have the same Eidos, the same structural functional organization, the same form in your mind as the thing in the world. Now for a lot of stuff, as soon as you think about it you realize this way. I don’t know time as something over there, even that I have a perspective on. No, no. I don’t just represent time. I instantiate time. It’s in the very fiber of everything I do. Same thing with space. I’m an inherently spatial being, and that’s how I know. I don’t just think about time when I’m thinking. I’m thinking in time. In fact, Augustine very famously said, I know what time is until you ask me. Right, right. Yes. And so what this is, is this is the way in which you conform to the world at various levels. And so you don’t know. So could it be conforming to an institution and… Oh, totally. Yes. So you’re not wrong. I’m not saying you’re wrong. Conforming to a social arena is a profound kind of participatory knowing. I just want to make it clear that it extends much beyond this because I want to be able to say that animals have participatory knowing because they do niche construction. They’re shaped by their environment and they shape their environment and you get an agent arena relationship. So when there are, when there’s a network of given affordances between an organism and its environment, that’s the participatory knowing. And then the perspectival knowing selects which affordances are brought into a situational awareness, brought into awareness. So you don’t, the particular kind of knowing, the particular kind of memory you have is not semantic or procedural or episodic. It’s that weird kind of memory we call ourself, which is a very… And remember, yourself isn’t just in here. Yourself is out there. That agent arena co-identification, that’s participatory knowing. So the way your agency and your character are shaped and your biology is shaped to fit the environment and then how the environment is called out by that and how they mutually shape each other, that’s participatory knowing. Does that help? Yes. That helps. So when an Amish community is saying, hey, we know that we are the true Christian faith because we are behaving as a community the way Jesus instructed, we share our goods and common, we’re nonviolent, et cetera, et cetera. Which P do you think that is that it’s sort of tugging on the most? It sounds to me like participatory knowing because what, when you’re making a moral identification, which is what they’re doing, they’re identifying both the world they’re in, the community and the kind of agency they have. They’re largely talking about, they know God via their character. And that’s the primary way of thinking of participatory knowing. And you know that there’s a way in which your character is mostly unconscious to you, although you can consciously become aware of it, you can constantly shape it, but your character is mostly unconscious to you and your character calls out from the environment in a certain way and certain things from the environment call to you. Their affordances are possible. And also certain affordances are not available to you when you have a certain kind of care. Like for example, an honest person just will not see opportunities to steal. It just doesn’t come up for them, which is very different from somebody who’s got a character who isn’t so honest. They might not. Or someone who’s practiced being a pickpocket for years or something like that, that pops to their mind. Yes. And I mean, this overlaps, and I wouldn’t call it identical, but this overlaps with, I think, the way the biblical notion of sin is at the level of your character and the heart of you, rather than just what’s in your mind. It has to do with this more fundamental level at which you are shaping your agency and you’re shaping the environment, and the environment is shaping you in that sort of loop. And so one thing I notice about so these Christian disputes is that if they’re arguing about the same P, then they can often have a more, there’s a possibility at least that they can have a more productive discussion. Yes. Because they are playing the rules of the same game, right? If you’re trying to figure out who is the right doctrines or something like that, well, then you at least know a game you’re playing. But if one person is being like, we have the right procedure for worshiping God, and the other person is like, yeah, but we have the experience that makes you feel it’s like it’s at such cross purposes that it’s almost like not, it’s hard that they’re not playing the same game. And so it’s hard to have that discussion. I think this is excellent. And like I said, I really like the proposal of something like personality differences in terms of which kind of knowing people emphasize, because each one, right, each one carries a sense of realness. You like propositional is that sense of conviction, procedural is that sense of empowerment, prospectable is that sense of presence. So people who are very prospectable will talk a lot about the presence of God, right? You can see that happening. And then the participatory is that sense of like that belonging, fittedness. And it seems to me that people’s, I hadn’t thought about this. And I wonder how it relates to things like the big five and other things like that. But people do or I think this is an excellent observation, Sam, I gotta give you credit for the possibility of personality variation around this. One other thing that’s implicit in what you’re saying, I just want to explicate it. And then we can bring it into the discussion, the possibility of something analogous to modal confusion, where people the issue might be like cross purposes, or even people could be arguing at the propositional level. But one of them is actually talking about the procedural without realizing it or trying to get it. Like there’s possibilities of deep confusion and miscommunication. I think that’s those are both excellent proposals. Right. Like an example of this, so the Catholic Church has been trying to either downplay or outright end the old form of the Latin mass. The Pope Francis has been pushing for that. And this is causing a dispute, I think, between people who are like, wait a minute, the Latin mass, we’ve been doing that for eons past, et cetera, et cetera. It was good for my forefathers, why isn’t it good for me? The people who identify with the procedural. And then the people are like, well, the Pope’s in charge. The mass is correct because he says it is. So they’re arguing about which of these to rank order in terms of importance. And there might be a personality difference between what sort of intuitively feels correct to emphasize. And it could be appealing, again, to different people’s sense of realness. You know, people who generally want to replace the Latin mass emphasize, but I need to understand what everybody’s saying. There has to be that semantic grasp. Whereas when I’ve talked to people who prefer the Latin, they like much more the transformative impact it has on their state of awareness. Like it takes them into a different state. Very much like the way ritual often involves arcane or archaic language or even foreign language in order to try and, you know, shut off the propositional to give more access to other things. But I see some dangers, especially as churches fragment and as there are many, many different choices on sort of the religious menu, is that people will start self-selecting. Well, denominations will start specializing, right? Because I think ideally, a good church or a good religion of any sort would be able to fire on all cylinders such that people of every sort of possible, I don’t know, personality type of feeling connected via the different P’s could get a little bit of what they want and feel connected through it and that there are sort of all of them are on offer on the menu. But as churches begin to fragment, they might specialize in a couple of them. And then people self-sort. And then if you grow up in one that like doesn’t feel like a good match for you, you know, then you feel either kind of like, this faith thing isn’t for me, or then you, you know, de-convert and change and, you know, and it’s sort of like the hyper-personalization that’s happening in so many other aspects of our lives at the moment seems to be happening in that and that’s sort of a danger. I think that’s also a great point. I think any religion, or perhaps even the religion that’s not a religion, because we’re talking about the scaling problem right now with Lehman and Brendan. And I think, yeah, it has to do, it has to have an ecology of practices that develops both individually and especially in a coordinated fashion, all of the kinds of knowing. I think that, I mean, there’s been a long-standing understanding of a deep connection by what used to be meant by faith and understanding. You can see this a lot in the ancient writers and they talk much less about knowledge. They talk much more about, you know, about faith and understanding or belief in Augustine sense. And wisdom too. Yeah, because there’s deep connections between understanding and wisdom. And I won’t get into the long argument here, but part of what I do argue elsewhere, and something I’m still developing, is, you know, understanding is different from knowledge. Understanding differs in that it’s basically grasping the significance of what you know in an important way. And for example, in propositions, you grasp the significance by grasping some of the relevant implications of your proposition. You grasp the significance of a procedure when you realize to which domains it can be transferred and applied. Hey, I can use this skill here kind of thing. And I won’t go on, but you can see how that’s part of what it’s understanding. But the deepest, I would argue, the deepest significance of any of the kinds of knowledge is the relationship to the proper alignment of them. And that’s the deepest kind of understanding. So when all of the kinds are mutually affording each other and they’re in sort of right relationship, proper alignment with each other, I think that’s the kind of profound understanding you get. So when you, this is the deep understanding that you get with a person that you have a long-standing love relationship with, your identity gets bound to them, you get shared and you inherit and transmit to each other states of mind, states of consciousness that you wouldn’t otherwise do. You pick up all kinds of skills, and of course you develop beliefs about the person. But it’s also that they form this dynamic hole in which all of those reinforce each other. And this is part of, again, this is where I think understanding and trust, right? I think part of what people, I’m cautious about this, but part of what people mean by trust as distinct from knowing is you’ve got all the knowings, but right, there’s something beyond it because of the way they fit together, you’ve got a tremendous sense of the significance of how they all fit together. There’s this sense of understanding, and that is drawing you into a kind of relationship with this person that goes beyond having sort of justified belief about them and things like that. And so I think that churches or any religious institution that is not cultivating each one of the kinds of knowing in a developmental manner and especially cultivating the coordination of them, I mean, I think you could make the claim, I don’t want this to sound too harsh, but I do want to make a criticism. I think they’re doing a disservice because I think to the degree to which you leave the other P’s unattended, you reduce the capacities for deep trust and understanding. And now my final point on this, and I’ll let you speak, you also leave those other P’s basically in ignorance and they therefore become venues through which self-deception can operate in a very powerful fashion. So one of the things I’ve noted is that people, I grew up in a fundamentalist community and although they talked about being born again, it just meant radically asserting these propositions. And then I realized, I mean, I couldn’t articulate it then and this has got some retrospective bias, but these people, and I loved many of them, they suffered from anxiety in that these other P’s were largely operating, as I said, autonomously and they were ignorant of them in ways in which we’re wrecking their lives. I mean, there’s no softer way of saying it. It was just wrecking their lives. And it was like, so that’s a lesson I’ve sort of carried with me about a lack of comprehensiveness of addressing the person, I think is, that’s worthy of moral critique is what I’m saying here. I think it is. And so we mentioned Paul Anleitner and there’s another guy named John in the sort of Discord community and another guy named Nick. A lot of us who grew up in a charismatic background, that really is perspectival, right? Like experience, experience, experience, you know, like, and coming back in again and again and again for the experience, sometimes the neglect of some of the other P’s, it sounds like your religious background was more proposition, proposition, proposition, and there’s a lot of Protestant churches that are like that, sort of at the expense of the other P’s. But when people, especially intellectually curious people, grow up in a church that is very perspectival without a lot of given to the propositional thing, then it causes this sort of weird, I don’t know, disconnect or this lack of satisfyingness. And the danger of overemphasizing perspectival at the expense of or the neglect of propositional is that it can be very chaotic. It can be very unstable. Yeah. And there’s also often neglect of the participatory level. You see this, I see this outside of Christian churches. In fact, Arthur Dyckman talked about, he was sort of addressing people from a Buddhist orientation. He said, ultimately, it’s not altered states of consciousness. It’s altered traits of character. If your altered states of consciousness are not translated into traits of character, then you’re not cultivating wisdom and transformation. And so this is actually a phenomena, well, at least it can become a phenomenon that’s now being investigated by psychology, the phenomena of spiritual bypassing in which people seek these wonderful experiences, right? In order to avoid cultivating the skills and the virtues, the procedural and the participatory that are needed to take a responsible relationship to the world. Yes. Yeah. Feeling close to God is not the same thing as growing more God-like. And yeah, and we know this even in our relationships. Infatuation junkies are people who are locked at the perspectival level. They want to be constantly falling in, and they confuse that falling in love with actually being in love. And our love is an existential mode. It’s not just a state of mind, right? Yeah. Just in the same way that feeling really romantically head over heels for someone is not the same as learning to be a good spouse and life partner for them and all of the discipline and self-sacrifice and patience that that takes. Yeah. Those are not the same thing. I would not want to ground my responsibilities. And that word should not just be heard in a Protestant way. I mean, it’s also responsiveness, both virtue and virtuosity, right? But I would not want to ground my responsibilities and my responsiveness just in my passions. I mean, just thinking about how wanton they are, how much they are prone to bullshit. They make whatever they make super salient in a way that’s really disconnected from profound understanding. They are at odds with each other. They come and go without proper regard to truth or goodness or beauty. Yeah. I would not want to ground my responsibilities and my passions. That seems to be a very problematic thing to do. Yeah. Although what’s funny in Charismatic churches, a lot of the older people will maybe not have grown up in them. They have come from some sort of more of a stale, you could say stale kind of Christian background that just had no perspectival emphasis. Oh, yeah, that’s right. Where you just show up to mass and you go through the motions and okay, you say your Hail Marys, etc. And then there’s just no, it just never connects with them at that level. And then they go to one church service where it’s like, oh my goodness, I’ve never felt like this before. This is part of what I’m trying to criticize in that we’ve got Charismatics that are really good at the participatory thing over here, but lacking some of the propositional rigor that you can find a certain kind of proselytism, but lacking the procedural. It’s like all these ingredients seem scattered. And I hope that there’s a way that we can learn from each other and have churches that can fire on all four cylinders. So two things to say to that, one about consciousness and one about the meeting crisis. The first is, perspectival is grounded in, it’s knowing via consciousness. And I think the best arguments right now point to the fact that the job of consciousness is to deal with novel ill-defined complex situations. And therefore, if you want to get people growing, consciousness needs to typically be involved. And so I think that’s the great strength of those who are perspectively oriented. I think the other point I wanted to make is you’ve made another argument, but I don’t know if you want to be settled with this argument. But the way the Protestant churches led to the fragmentation and how that’s continued has contributed to the meeting crisis in this more specific way by fragmenting the relationship between the four kinds of P’s. And I would put it to you that that is also a driving factor of the meeting crisis. So you now have two, I think, really insightful theses. One is there might be personality orientations attached to the four kinds of knowing. And then the fragmentation of the Protestant churches has contributed to the uncoupling of the four kinds of knowing. And self-segregation. Yeah, that whole thing. Yeah. Well, thank you for listening to that and interacting with that, but also for giving me sort of the language and the tools to think about that and notice these sorts of things that I’ve been able to articulate before. So now that was, I felt like, I was like, that’ll be a good warm up to help get us talking and get us comfortable. But one of the topics that I really sort of wanted to go back to, and this relates to our last conversation about sort of purpose and evolution and that sort of thing, is one of the big topics that you and Paul VanderKlay and JP Marceau were sort of wrestling with is what is purpose and how high up, I guess, does it go? And there was sort of, I guess, maybe one of the tensions between you guys is that you were sort of kind of resisting or pushing back against the idea of there being too much, I don’t know, maybe meta-purpose or purpose to the whole show, as opposed to there being purpose being sort of a more, I don’t know, localized or, I don’t know, fleeting or something like that sort of experience. And that was something that I wanted to dig into a little bit more with you, if you don’t mind. Sure. So part of it was about, I enjoyed that. I thought it was valuable because we were basically touching on an old topic, you know, the problem of evil, as it’s been called, but in a very different way because we came through, right, JP and Paul proposed, I just want to emphasize, and I think you’ll support me on this, it was just tremendous fellowship throughout all those discussions. Yeah. That was very important. So I had proposed that, you know, Jesus was enlightened, and this could explain a lot of his uniqueness, his specialness, if you want to put it this way, his ability to transform other lives, and he would be, therefore, be in a category with people like the Buddha and like that, and he would be a fount of wisdom, and then the part of the proposal is that that doesn’t require a supernaturalistic metaphysics, ultimately, in order to explain it. And, you know, and JP and Paul were very appreciative of that. They didn’t, it was, I liked their replying that they weren’t denying that Jesus could probably be understood as enlightened, but they said that they thought there was something more, and there’s something more was the redemption of human history and the redemption of the physical cosmos, and that’s what was carried in the incarnation. And then I responded to that by saying, but then what I should be able to see is good evidence for the redemption of history and the redemption of the physical universe. I’m just giving a little bit of context, and then this, and then, and this is good, and this centered down on, you know, well, how would you look, that redemption is definitely a purposeful notion. You should see some sort of developmental line and progression. That would be evidence of this unfolding, and so we, that’s how it got to the discussion of whether or not there is purpose, and then I’ll give me a couple more minutes, Sam. I’ll say what my initial rejection was, or sort of my original proposal, because it was more of a question, I think, in fairness to me, and then something important that I’ve taken up that was said by both Paul and JP in various ways. So the first thing I said was you look out over history, and this is, you can see how both of these touch on the problem of you, that you look over history, and you, like the previous century, the 20th century is just a century of bloodshed and mayhem, and it’s like this, and nothing wonderful seems to have resulted from it. It’s hard to see a redemptive arc in history when you look at Auschwitz, is how I put it. Right, and the 20th century seems uniquely weird in its bloodshed, and that it wasn’t just territorial disputes like humans have been having since eons past, but grander sort of visions of human history at clash with each other and- Genocidal. Genocidal and like clash of completely different world views, like Nazism wasn’t just, you know, another group that wanted more of their neighbor’s land, it was something bigger than that. Communism had a much grander vision for itself, and capitalism and America and how that all fit into it, yeah, it was of a different sort really in many ways than the centuries that had come before. Right, and the fact also that there doesn’t seem to be, at least initially, I’m totally open to discussion, that’s what we’re doing right here, but there doesn’t seem to initially be some sort of redemptive narrative you can tell about it. Yes, but all of this resulted in this wonderful huge, right, you know, improvement or something. Yeah, the American hegemony, well maybe an American can be a little bit more proud of the 20th century, but yeah, no, anyway, I want to let you kind of sort of lay some groundwork before we get into the details of that. So thank you though for that interjection and at least, you know, recognizing the position with respect, I think it has to be taken seriously. And then the other point is, you know, when I look at the physical universe, it seems like 99.9 percent hostile to life, and even if you put all the planets together, they’re a minuscule amount and etc., etc., and then it seems plausible that there’s been billions of years when there’s no life at all, and it doesn’t seem like the universe is here for life. Now, I bought a really good book, I haven’t had a chance to read it, on the fine-tuning argument, and we could possibly talk about that, but it is reasonable to say that argument is very controversial right now. For the record, I don’t even quite like it. Yeah, well, I’ve got what’s been recommended as the most philosophically careful defense of the fine-tuning argument that’s been written, so I want to read that at some point and see it. But okay, great, so for the record, so if we put aside those kinds of, you know, stronger, weaker, and pathropic kind of arguments, it’s like the universe doesn’t seem to be life-orienting in a certain way. Now, one other thing, and for me, that just cancels out the idea of a redemption of his. The universe seems neither fallen to me nor in redemption. It seems outside of that categorization. It doesn’t seem to belong. The Christian mythological arc doesn’t seem well fitted to what we’ve learned as the bigness of the universe have grown and the place of evolution and, you know, the largeness of the universe, the length of time, all of those sorts of things have put extreme stress on sort of the Christian mythological metastory arc or something like that. You said it better than I did, Sam, so thank you. That was well said. And then the two of those, right, they reinforce each other in complex ways. Now, I do want to acknowledge, I’m not that this is the only thing that was said that was good by Paul and JP. I’m not claiming that at all. One of the things that made an impact on me, and it was an argument that I had sort of known but had forgotten, was the qualitative response, which is, look, it’s not the amount of life. It’s the quality of their being life. And the argument goes something like this. Which would you rather have a universe with life in it or a universe without life in it? Well, most people say one with life in it. Well, why? Because life represents the revelation of the deepest possibilities of being in a way that non-life can’t, and then more so for intelligent life and then more so for rational life. So it’s an Aristotelian argument about, like, that although we may not represent a particular large amount of being, we represent a particular quality of being that, if you’ll allow me to use horizontal for quantity and vertical for quality, we represent a height of being that discloses the depths of being in ways that inanimate things can’t do. And in fact, of course, inanimate things can’t know the universe, and there’s all kinds of, and so there’s a qualitative response. Now, I don’t know if that, I’m very cautious about whether or not that gives you any grounds for, you know, the redemptive arguments, but I do think it’s important, it’s an important point, even independent of that debate, because I think one of the things that we need to do, I’ll use some Frami language, is to break out of the having mode of quantity and return to the being mode of quality in order to deal with some common arguments about why we are insignificant. And these arguments are within the having mode, and they’re arguments about our quantitative status within time and space. But if you shift into the being mode, you can appreciate qualitative status arguments and say, we may be insignificant causally, but I could pile sun on top of sun, and it won’t have any of the difference to the universe that a mind has. And that is important, I think is a very important point that I took out of that, as just independently valuable from the debate. So just not the debate, the discussion. So that’s sort of how I saw it. Sure. So yeah, I wanted to sort of, I guess, pardon me, I don’t want to do this too much, it just like feeling like, oh, I’ll give the right answers that Paul and JP missed, because I’ve had two months to digest your discussion and listen to it two or three times. But I do feel like, I mean, part of this is that because I’m not a Trinitarian in the way that they are, and that I have a very different understanding of what incarnation is, like, I actually tend to not use that word, because people would misunderstand me as thinking the mainstream thing. So I generally say I don’t believe in the incarnation, although I would say, I think more properly, I’ve just a radically different understanding of what the incarnation was, because at the end of the day, I also think that Jesus is the word made flesh, I just hashed that out quite differently. And JP and I have kind of hashed some of that out before, but not fully. But I think part of that is what gives me maybe a different approach than either Paul or JP will take. But let’s see here, man, yeah, you laid out a lot of things. So I think one thing that I’m going to do is back up very, very far and talking kind of relating back to what we talked about last time about purpose. And that we talked about sort of there being different kinds of purpose and that minded creatures are well, I should say, I think humans have a unique ability for understanding purpose, talking about purpose, intuiting purpose that is utterly unique. Yeah, they can do it from the context of an awareness of mortality. Yeah. And Heidegger is right about how that, I mean, that puts us into a different relationship to purpose than any other organism that doesn’t have that relationship. And Jonathan Heidegger has said this, I presume he’s getting this from somewhere else. I’m not sure where he’s getting it from, but I’m getting it from Jonathan Heidegger is that one of the unique things about humans and human behavior is that we can see someone else, I can see someone carrying a box to their recycling bin, and that they’re struggling because the box is too big. And I can be like, oh, I see what they are trying to do. Right. They want that box to go in that recycling bin, but they’re struggling. I can go over there, pick up the other end of the box, and we can carry it together. And we can then enter into a joint something that is accomplishing a purpose together. And the person didn’t even have to tell me what their purpose was. I saw it, I intuited it. Right. And decided to participate in that purpose together with that person. Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of respect for Heidegger, but the claim of uniqueness to humans, I would challenge that. I mean, my colleague at U of T Deaf and Bushbaum in the canine lab, we’ve been selectively breeding dogs for a long time. They’re very good at picking up on human intention. Really good at it. Their mind reading abilities are very good. And chimps are really, really expert at picking up other mental states of their conspecifics. They engage in deliberate deception and all kinds of stuff. So when it’s appropriate to say that an organism can lie to another organism, then you also got that kind of, you know, it’s called mind reading or theory of, I like calling it mind sight the way Siegel does. It’s like insight into other people’s mental states. So I would reject the claim of uniqueness, but I do think we are among the few species for which there’s clear evidence for. Sure. Sure. And we’re at least unique in our ability to talk about it. Well, and I think that, and that gives us one of the ways we can share that is we can share our mortality with each other in a way. Again, chimps and elephants mourn their dead and crows do too. So there’s something there, but we, yeah, we do it in a profound way. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I don’t mean to harp too much on human uniqueness. Honestly, I guess I’m more just going for minded, the ability to understand purpose with your mind. Right. Yes. And both understand your own purposes and purposes of others. That’s one level of purpose. And like, I can decide within myself to try and go accomplish something with my purpose. But then there is purpose, like, you know, and I think we talked about polar bears last time, right? Polar bears are white, right? And that has a purpose to it. And their mind doesn’t need to know or understand that purpose for that purpose to still sort of be there. Yeah, we, we moved into the language of function as opposed to awareness. Right. There’s a function that is being served. Right, right. Functional purpose is not dependent on the mind. Right. And we can even talk about like bacteria or stuff, right? They have all sorts of functions and adaptive capabilities that are accomplishing purpose and they don’t have any mind really whatsoever. But that’s not to say that they don’t have a purpose that they’re sort of striving after that allows them to keep surviving and continuing and, you know, reproducing, etc., etc. So there’s, there’s minded purpose and there’s a minded living purpose, unminded living purpose. And, and another category that I kind of want to throw in here is non-living purpose. And, and that this is, I think that, that I’ll relate that this, this is sort of getting at the question of is there a larger purpose to, you know, the whole show in a certain sense? Yeah, take your time. Is that like Mount Everest, right, is a super big mountain. And if you were to think in your mind, okay, man, I want to make a really big mountain. How, how, how am I going to accomplish making a really big mountain? Well, it needs to be built out of really firm stuff, right? So that it doesn’t erode too quickly. And, you know, it should probably be at a fault line between two major continents so that it’s getting pushed up. And also it should be, you know, probably a tetrahedral shape is actually the best shape for being able to be tall, but structurally rigid. And the, the danger of a mountain is that it will erode from water and snow and wind and ice. And, and we don’t, we want it to be very sheer so that glaciers don’t get stuck on it because glaciers will, well, glaciers are the enemy as of mountains. And right, like, you know, we can, we can think about all that and like, lo and behold, Mount Everest is almost perfectly tetrahedrally shaped, almost perfectly sheer, not perfect though, but, but almost. And it’s, you know, at this plate, you know, that the sub, the Indian subcontinent collided into the Asian major continent, etc. And so it’s sort of like Mount Everest by sheer accident is of all of the places on planet Earth most perfectly embodied was if we were to quote unquote design a mountain to be as tall and durable as possible. And it’s made out of really tough granite just because of, you know, geological processes from eons past that I couldn’t explain. But, but it’s all of those things like Mount Everest itself almost seems to be embodying the desires of what a mountain would want to be if it were trying to be as big as possible. But you and I, I think would both agree that there’s no soul or mind or whatever within the mountain, but just by sheer accident, all of the other mountains were less good at embodying the purpose of a mountain than Mount Everest was. So Mount Everest is the current winner of biggest mountain competition. Okay, so first of all, that’s really cool. Secondly, there’s two notions that are in there. One is Spinoza’s notion of Canadas, which I think is relevant here. And I really recommend Carlisle’s book Spinoza’s Religion. It is, it just came out and it’s, I think all religious people should read this book. I there’s a there’s a YouTube series by Wheaton College professor on the history of philosophy, and he spends like four or five lectures on Spinoza. And I’ve been going through that lecture series. So I, I like last month or the month before I listened to a whole bunch of lectures about Spinoza. So I’ve never read any of his works or read about him. But that would be enough then to read Carlisle’s beautiful, beautifully written. She wrote an excellent book on Kierkegaard too. Because it’s it’s there’s been some books on Spinoza’s theology and metaphysics, but this is a book on, you know, this term is overused sort of the spiritual aspects of Spinoza’s, the ethics and all of his writings, participation in God is shown to be the central notion, and very much in the participatory sense we were talking about earlier. And so it’s very profound. But Spinoza had this notion of canadus. And the reason I want to mention it. So what does canadus mean is that that everything, every being is striving to preserve itself in its being. And, and what he and this is a Neil Platonic idea that, you know, at the level of inanimate objects, they’re not like living things and that they’re seeking out the conditions. But they at least have a structure that resists entropy. And so if we to use sort of modern language, they have a structural functional organization that is resisting entropy. And, and the canadus of individual things is a mode of God, it expresses something. And so I think the the the the best way to understand canadus is sort of a dynamic version, a dynamic self-organization of version of, you know, Aristotelian formal causation, that things have a structural functional organization that preserves them at minimum in being long enough that they are entities that are intelligible to us. And so I’m bringing all that up, because it sounds to me, to my ear, that what you’re talking about with Mount Everest is formal causation. And if so, you have a readily available account of what you mean by embodiment, which is formal causes are being instantiated, a la Platonic participation in Mount Everest. And of course, you know, things will vary to the degree to which they implement or participate in or realize however you want to do it, particular formal causal, real possibilities. And I am a strong advocate, as you know, of reintroducing formal causation back into our ontology, because we need it in order to explain, I would argue, you know, life, and many people would agree with me on this life, anything that’s fundamentally self-organizing and self-directing, self-preserving. And so that to me is an instance of formal causation. And, and well, to give you some ammunition, although we’re not really fighting, I think Aristotle did see there was a big connection between formal and final causation. But in fairness to me, there’s a lot of people like Alicia Urrero and others who think we, we, we do not need to bring back final causation when we bring back formal causation. So I could say to you, yeah, you know what you’re recognizing in Mount Everest? You’re, you’re recognizing that above just efficient causation, that there’s another important way in which things are, which is their formal causation. And that deserves important recognition. But to the degree to which that points towards any, anything like final causation, I need, I need an additional argument. All right. Okay. I think I’m, I’m, I’m ready to keep working on that. So I, it’s not that like Mount Everest really in a certain sense, just got lucky, right? It didn’t, Mount Everest didn’t ever do anything to become, you know, it, in a way that a living creature will intentionally take on choices and behaviors and actions to, Mount Everest has no autopoiesis, right? Yes. But, and Mount Everest is still eroding. The wind and ice and snow and rain will win eventually. Yeah. It’s that it’s the wind and the rain and the ice is winning less quickly on Mount Everest than on other mountains elsewhere. And that is importantly analogous or to use Evan’s term, Evan Thompson. It’s deeply continuous with the way living things are also only slowly. Yes. They’re also, we’re all, you and I are losing. But living things have the magic trick of reproduction, right? To, to, whereas Mount Everest can’t have Everest babies and then with flight variations and then slowly the mountains get better and better at being mountains through some form of. But to keep the argument, and that’s right and that’s important and that’s even doing this, but eventually even the species goes extinct without necessarily leading to another species. So even the species aren’t permanent victories against entropy. Right. And sort of where I think kind of the forecast where I’m going is that entropy, even though it seems like it’s the sort of the enemy of existence or the enemy of organization and structure like that, it’s actually the thing that drives it into existence is I think sort of kind of my larger point. Like imagine if I had a styrofoam block, right? And I have a sandblaster, right? And I just, you know, turn on the sandblaster and I start blasting this styrofoam block. Well, it’s going to be starting to get shred into pieces, but what will probably happen is that it’ll turn into a cone shape that’s pointing at the sandblaster because that is the shape that is the most resistant to being sandblasted. And just the sheer entropy on the thing sort of forces it into the thing that is the least exposed to the entropic force or something like that. Here’s how I’d want to nuance this. And I don’t know if I’m disagreeing with you, so that’s why I’m going to preface it. I think the fact that entropy doesn’t just homogeneously wash into chaos is one of the best pieces of evidence we have for real possibility, for there being formal causation and reality, because it means things don’t just progress chaotically. They seem to even progress in terms of order and structure, right? Again, we don’t, we’re not claiming, I’m not claiming we violate the second law or anything like that, but I’m giving to you what you’re saying and I’m acknowledging the phenomena and Whitehead, of course, made a big deal, as did Spinoza and the connection between them is quite deep, right? And for me, for me, that’s a basic sort of fact that I think constitutes powerful argument for why we have to talk about real patterns and real form and real formal principles. So very neoplatonic, this is the evidence for it. Because it is logically possible that entropy would just unfold in rapidly accelerating chaos. That there was no possibility within materiality to resist it, right? Whereas what seems to be the case is there are various ways of resisting entropy, right? Like you live in Toronto, I live in Chicago, we’re both on the Great Lakes, like the Great Lakes are so heavy, right? They’re melted glaciers from the last ice age, and they’re so heavy that they push the crust of the earth down. And then that sort of pushes the edge up a little bit, so they make a bowl for themselves. Like Lake Michigan is in its own bowl. I’m not an expert on Lake Ontario, you guys have the St. Lawrence Seaway, so you guys are more exposed to the entropy of washing out to sea. Although I don’t know why you don’t. So there must be, you must be getting enough water through Niagara Falls to meet the outflow into the St. Lawrence Seaway. But even the Great Lakes have a weird sort of accidental autopoiesis in that they make their own bowl that protects them from just like pouring a glass of water onto a table and it just disappearing to the edges. Yeah, and exactly right. And you know, so at fundamental levels we have, we keep having quantum collapse, and it’s due to factors, purely formal factors like coherence. You know, even especially if you think of something like, you know, what is it, Penrose objective or orchestrated objective reduction or something, I can’t remember his name for it. But you know, even the inertial properties of matter, I mean that we forget that, you know, one of the great discoveries of the Scientific Revolution is the understanding of matter as resisting, as resistant, just in its nature. The inertial patterns we have, you know, and we have all kinds of things like that. And I think that is testament to how profound and how at multi scales, the emanation, if you’ll allow me this spatial language, the emanation, it descends all the way to the bottom. And it’s calling from the closest thing we have to Aristotelian matter is sort of the quantum flux at the bottom. And something is calling that into, right, into order, into order. And that’s just one of my many examples. So for me, this is talking very much about the vertical dimension, the complete interpenetration, the complete coordination of emergence and emanation. And again, this is, as you mentioned, I would say that I describe myself as a post nominalist, neo-Platonist. We can’t go back simply to the neo-Platonism before the Scientific Revolution and normalism and all that. But yeah, but given that, that’s how I would understand that. And then for me, and this came up in the discussion, when we start talking about, like, the fundamental grammar of reality, I think of these things as precisely not being on purpose. And here’s the, and this is a platonic argument about goodness and realness. Things have, the things that, you know, I value truth for its own sake, not just for its instrumental uses. I value beauty for its own sake. I value goodness for its own sake, precisely because these things are not for something else. They are for themselves. And I’m just making a gestural argument here. I can make it more complex, but all of those are together in the for-itselfness of reality. And so I think of realness, especially when we get to these fundamental levels, as something that, because it’s real, precisely because it’s real, it ultimately is not instrumental in any way. Its existence is not instrumental. Its existence is inherent. And that means it has no purpose, especially if you acknowledge that it’s not autoproetic at that fundamental level. So if it’s neither autoproetic and it’s non-instrumental, I don’t see how we could talk about it having a purpose. That’s the core argument. And I think that I would sort of push back on that by saying, not everything will be well conformed to a purpose that is conducive with longevity. But then they’re not long for this world. If I take an ice cube out of my freezer and put it on my counter, it has a form, but it is not very well conformed to its environment any longer, and that ice cube is not long for this world. And so that the- But wait, I just want to say something here. I want to be clear, and this again is very neoplatonic. Talk about formal causation isn’t to talk about something just specific to a thing. The forms are like Indra’s net. It’s like the theorems of a system, of a science. They’re interpenetrating, interdefining. Yes. Right. So- Like even the polar bear. So imagine that the polar bear was such a good polar bear that he ate all the seals. Well, he would be very fat and happy for a little while, and then he would get hungry, and there would be no more seals. Right? So even the purpose of the polar bear depends on the purpose of the seals. And really, you could sort of think that at one scale, the purpose of a polar bear is to hunt seals. Okay, but that’s actually a self-extinguishing purpose if it was too good at it. But really, maybe the purpose of the polar bear, of polar bear kind, is to provide a check on the population of seals. Right? And that you need to have some sort of predator-prey balance, really, at the level of an ecosystem for polar bears to continue to perpetuate themselves instead of just eat their seals out from underneath themselves. And then where are the seals? The seals are eating the fish and the crustaceans and the stuff in the sea. And so you don’t want there to be too many crustaceans because the crustaceans will overpopulate, and then they will eat their food supply, and they’ll collapse, so the seals keep that from happening. The polar bears keep that from happening to the seals. Right? So it stacks up on itself, and I completely agree that you can’t, in some sense, you can isolate and say, the polar bear is white so that it can sneak up on seals. But it also, you have to zoom back out to really fully understand these things better. And sort of part of my point is that it seems like purpose can keep doing this stepping back and stepping back, big opening up the frame, opening up the frame, such that it would seem to be, you know, that you could then project it all the way up. If there’s purpose down, and you can kind of keep, you know, broadening the perspective on how you understand the purpose, then purpose is then scaling up and that it must keep going, I guess, is something sort of like my argument. Okay, so I guess, let’s talk about that. I think we’ve moved back into things that are self-organizing because that’s what ecologies are. I’ve transferred from, so basically, my point is that everything that exists, if it’s going to exist for very long, will need to embody some form of, some formal cause that is conducive to a purpose that is resistant to the forces of the sand blaster of entropy of time. And that over time, things will be more and more conformed to some sort of purpose. Like, you know, the earth is round because like any molecules that are too far away from the proper circumference have a really difficult time not being pushed down to the middle. And when they get pushed down to the middle, then it makes the earth round again. Like, you know, so even at the scale of a planet, right, it makes sense for it to be spherical. Okay, and planets can’t spin too fast because if they spin too fast, the centrifugal force scatters their own matter out into the abyss of space and then that planet ceases to exist. So lo and behold, almost all the planets have a rate of spin that is not too centrifugally disruptive. I don’t know if I’m saying those words correctly, but like even at the scale of like astronomy, not, you know, Mount Everest is really good at resisting erosion. The planet is really good at, you know, being in the right place. And like even like our solar system, Jupiter does an excellent job of absorbing all of the meteorites such that the other planets don’t just get blasted to death by meteorites. And so solar systems that have lots of planets that haven’t been pulverized by meteorites often have something like Jupiter in them, right? You know, like, so like, you know, the scale seems to keep going bigger and bigger from a polar bear to Mount Everest to a planet to a solar system. And if I knew more about astronomy, I presume that I could keep going, but I’m not actually an expert on astronomy. So again, I think I’m not trying to convey that you’re just repeating yourself. I see the point. But what I would say is to me, that seems properly described by your disc, right? That when you discover the patterns that self-organize over more extended or greater extensions in time and space, we think we’re getting at deeper formal causes. Yeah, right. It’s easy to make a neoplatonic way of articulating that. The things that are the most eternal are the most true. Yes, exactly. And that when we’re moving to real possibility, just like when we’re moving to real actual, to the ultimate sort of actuality, actualization of reality, we start to get into eternal things because they have to be a property of being, not a property of any being, right? Being big versus any particular thing. And that’s where we start, I think, very properly getting into the language of eternity. And so for me, again, I am very happy. And I think science relies. I keep saying this. And I keep saying our ontology is not just what is derivable from science, but what is presupposed by science, right? So science presupposes things like E equals MC squared and pi, right? For the Earth, right? And it also presupposes that there is an ultimate, you know, interpenetrative, intelligible relationship between all of these. They’re not just randomly isolated from each other. And in science, so science presupposes formal causation and the intelligible network of those formal causes. And I think we should more properly be bringing that into our ontology. But if you were to ask me what’s E equals MC squared is for, for me, that’s like saying what’s north of the North Pole. Being isn’t for anything. Being is being. It primarily just, I don’t mean is in the sense of actual existence. It has is-ness. It’s, you know, Thomas Aquinas, I want to use his notion of, you know, of essay, the act of existing, right? The ocean of being. And to me, that has no why. That has no purpose. And so here’s where I might interact with the fine-tuning thing a little bit, because I would want to fine-tune the fine-tuning argument. I think that it’s not quite right, because it’s sort of like God has inherited these laws of physics. And so he’s sitting there at the dials of these constants, you know, trying to solve some puzzle that came to him from who knows where. And yeah, it’s like, that’s a bad version of the argument. It’s too agentic. It’s making God too agentic and that he’s the inheritor of the arena, right? Or that he can play with the arena, but he can only play with certain parameters of the arena, or something like that. And it’s like, that’s not quite right. But that’s the neoplatonic argument. The neoplatonic argument is ultimately that the highest level can’t in any way be agentic, because you get a fundamental dichotomy, and you get reality fundamentally bifurcated, and you’re losing the properties of ultimacy that you want to attribute to what is really real, and I’m happy to use your language here, to God or the One. And that’s why it’s, the Oneness is even beyond the network. But again, there’s no, again, there’s nothing agentic at that level. And for me, and this, you know, and to be fair, also, the mystics talk about this, they talk about, you get to a state where, you know, there’s no why for the Rose, when you really understand it, it just is, right? And this is Spinoza, right? When I can really see things participating in God, I see them just having that, I don’t know what to call it, the sheer effluence of being, or something like that. And that there’s, and that, and I think this is right, too, this is a platonic idea, that beyond sort of, beyond, and beyond in the sense of being convergent, beyond how I find truth, goodness, and beauty inherently valuable, I find being just inherently valuable. And maybe that’s just a property of any, and for me, that’s a profound kind of participatory knowing, right? And so, like, I think, and again, I’m not, I’m not, I hope you don’t feel I’m trying to be dismissive. No, no, I don’t feel dismissal, and I appreciate, I appreciate the pushback and stuff like that. But I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think that everything that’s able to persevere needs to be, to some degree, to the fullest extent that it can, to be conformed to some formal purpose, formal shape, or form, I should just say, be conformed to a form, and that form needs to have a autopoetic purpose that can persevere through time. And that, to the extent that you don’t do that is the extent that you’re not likely to belong for this world. And to the extent that you do do that is the extent that you are likely to persevere and to persist, and that it’s actually entropy that causes this to happen. Like, imagine if there was no entropy and something that had a good form for some purpose existed and something that didn’t have a bad form existed, then there would be no advantage to either one if there was no entropy. But suddenly it’s the entropy that starts to dissipate the malformed thing and to cause the conformed thing to persist longer. Let’s see here. All right, yeah, sorry, we’re back. Okay. Yeah, we’re touching on something really deep here. I mean, and we’re touching on the relationship between time and eternity and becoming and being. And the idea that, you know, in order for being to be fully, in order to fully be, it also has to, you know, it has to penetrate to the very possible bottom depths of becoming where it bumps up against non-being. And I’m using really spatial language because language other than that, or the relationship between time and eternity, and time is the moving image of eternity. And I guess, and maybe this is fundamentally, you know, an aesthetic difference, and that doesn’t mean it’s that important, by the way. I tend to see eternity as being the explanation for why anything has being and therefore has any kind of persistence. Yes, well, that’s very much, yeah, that’s what I’m trying to agree with very strongly, is it’s almost as if there is this sort of perfect, I don’t know, kingdom of heaven that is the thing that would be the perfectly eternal, you know, unassailable form. And that we are being pulled to that, not in the sense that Airsoil would often talk about, well, the rock wants to be at the bottom of the ocean, and the air wants to be in the sky, or something like that. Like, not that sort of way, but in this kind of weird, backwards sort of way, where if you aren’t sort of on the wagon that’s moving in that direction, you’re likely to fall off and be left by the wayside sort of thing, you know? Yeah, yeah. And it’s that sort of sandblaster effect of time that is purifying, I guess, or refining everything towards that becoming. At times, I mean, let’s remember that ecosystems also push themselves into extinction, right? So you get an evolutionary blurb, you get, you know, photosynthesis evolves, and the oxygen almost kills all the life on earth kind of thing, right? So again, I don’t see sort of a steady progression, I see, you know, an airing in Heidegger’s sense, there’s a constant wandering. Yeah, and so that’s on one point. So I don’t see good evidence for any sort of line there. I do see evidence for complexification, if that’s what we’re talking about. And I do, so let’s put that, maybe that historical dimension, because, but then you’re talking about everything seems to be participating or conforming to eternity in some way. Eternity is backing it towards itself. Yeah, and Plato would love that. At the risk of extinction, or something like that. It’s sort of, and I feel like this sort of balances like, you know, the Gospels are sort of weird in this way of really warning you very strongly about how bad the consequences for bad moral behavior or deviation from the way is, or narrow is the way that leads to life, and broad is the way that leads to destruction. There’s this very strong judgmental thing, right, balanced with this love and this, you know, eternity, and this promise of eternal life and stuff like that. And there’s a weird sort of way, I guess, and what I’m saying is that I like, kind of see that as conforming to what I’m trying to describe as like the sort of brutal judgment of nature demanding that you be conformed to something that can cause you to exist or at the risk of extinction and dissolvement and lack of being. And I think the, you know, whatever is powering the emergence emanation, the dialectic of conformity. I think you’re in very good company with making that a way of reinterpreting I don’t recall it, redemption purpose. I mean, this is a long-standing, and it’s appropriate to our discussion, a long-standing, and therefore we should pay attention to an argument within Christian Platonism, that there is a sense in which that conformity relation, and this is something I’ve been arguing, and so, and maybe we’re getting closer, I think it points to, there’s, like I’ve been trying to argue, a trans-epistemic, trans-aesthetic, trans-ethical goodness to being, right, that is disclosed by that, and therefore there is something that ultimately grounds our ability to fall in love with reality, to fall in love with being. And part of me almost wonders if falling in love with being is itself part of the pattern of being able to persevere. I think so, I think there’s something analogous with our conscious experience of the love of the goodness of being, and something about reality persevering. Right, well, because if you don’t love being, and you aren’t trying to conform yourself to what you imagine is the sort of the purpose for your life or something like that, it might not go very well for you, whereas if you’re someone who’s deeply trying to sort of submit, I guess, yourself to what it seems like is the higher beckoning in your life, right, like, you know, the scale of purposes, like, you know, on a daily basis you need to make all sorts of decisions for your own perseverance, you need to eat, you know, you need to sleep, you need to go to the bathroom, all these sorts of things are important for your autopoiesis and at the level of days or minutes and stuff like that, and then there’s bigger things like having a job and, you know, getting married and having a family and being involved in community, right, you know, there’s scales of purposes from, you know, things that take minutes to things that take years and decades, but, you know, it’s sort of like you’re needing to conform yourself to the purpose as you find yourself in the context, and that’s sort of the affirmation of the goodness of being is saying that, yes, I submit, I take up the challenge and I’m going to do it, as opposed to saying, I don’t like this game, I don’t like this, I didn’t write these rules, I didn’t choose to be here, I reject this, and which case, well, you know, maybe, you know, being itself won’t like that choice nearly as well as it will like the choice of voluntary trying to submit to the circumstance that you find yourself in. So that’s, I mean, there’s two things I’d want to say, I think definitely when we are responsive and then responsible to the emergence into our life and consciousness of this aspect of reality, it will definitely make us more purposeful and purpose. I think that’s right, I’m not challenging that. I guess for me, I would say, I don’t see there being any purpose to emergence in emanation, and I ultimately don’t see there being any, it’s the complete, you know, Platonus talks about it, just the self-overflowing of the one, it’s just the plenitude of being, I don’t know how else to, and for me, eternity is exactly the domain in which purpose makes no sense, because purpose is a temporal notion in some fundamental sense, and so I don’t see, and again, and again, I’m saying something very orthodox, God has no purpose, God can’t possibly have a purpose, so, you know, and Spinoza makes that clear, is like, what would God be intending, right, what does that mean, that doesn’t make any sense. But God can be a source of purpose without being… Yeah, but I acknowledge that, yeah, exactly, and I wanted to acknowledge that, and that’s exactly right. That’s sort of kind of my point, that it would seem to be that then purpose would go all the way up and all the way down. Well, then you’re getting close to Aristotle’s, you know, position of God’s the unmoved mover, and that means God has no purpose, but nevertheless, God draws everything towards him, and that makes everything purposeful. Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly what you’re trying to say. And that’s interesting, because the… Sorry, I’m hesitating because I’m trying to give due justice to what you just said. So, a difficulty facing that, of course, is Aristotle locates that in the horizontal dimension of the way things are changing through time, right? Yeah. Like, you get the stone wanting to be at the center of the earth, and all kinds of problems with final causation, and it’s because of that, it’s that aspect of the Aristotelian model that I reject, and that’s why I see all of that when you’re talking about, ultimately, in terms of formal causation. But I appreciate what you’re saying is that everything is being drawn towards the one, and that… And there’s a scale of eternity to purposes, and so therefore, that must go all the way up to that thing which is the eternal that’s calling it, kind of, in the grandest possible way, both at the scale of individuals and at the scale of communities and nations and planets and solar systems and stars and everything. Sure, and I think, I mean, when we get to this point, if you’ll allow me to call it vertical purpose rather than horizontal purpose. And I think they’re both. I think they’re very related, right? It’s the vertical purpose that works through the horizontal, that causes there to be horizontal purpose. Yes, but whereas I think it would be possible to to find vertical purpose completely distributed vertically, if you know what I mean. So it’s a property of all things to be caught within emergence and emanation. I do not know, in fact, I’m still unconvinced that it’s a property of everything other than autopoetic things at the horizontal level to be expressing purpose. So when we move, here’s what I, here’s what I, the position I’ve come to, that when we move outside of autopoetic things, the only way we can give them a purpose is by looking at the vertical dimension. And here’s what, here’s where I would push back on that. Yeah. Is that, like, we creatures don’t exist in complete separation from our environment, right? No, that’s right. Beavers build dams, we build cities, right? You know, and train tracks and airplanes and stuff. And like, you know, Chicago looks completely different than 200 years ago, there was a fort, right in Chicago. And now there’s 10 million people in skyscrapers and trains and highways and electrical lines and power plants, etc. And that I think that part of us as gardeners, right, in a certain sense, is that we can, through our agency, interact with non-autopoetic matter to be part of our extended sort of, I don’t know, phenotype, I think that’s the thing that Richard Dawkins will say, such that we can give autopoiesis to extended mind, yeah. Through our own powers, and that’s sort of like the ultimate role of a gardener, or something like that. I agree that it’s possible and plausible to attribute agency to extended cognition, which is what I think you’re talking about, and therefore to see extended cognition acting in there. And when, as soon as I say acting an agency, I’m committed to purpose. I agree with all of that. But then again, that’s to shift back, ultimately, I would argue to, yes, but does the history of extended cognition indicate any kind of overarching narrative? And that’s the original problem I have, because we also purpose matter for genocide, we also purpose matter into nuclear weapons, and so. And we haven’t talked about evil, so that might have to be the subject of our next conversation. Sure, sure. But I want to go ahead, I just wanted to say I really like, I mean, for me, and I don’t mean this as an insult, Sam, we got to a point where we are sort of blurring the line between formal causation and a different kind of purpose. It’s definitely not anything like the traditional final causation model. And I find that an attractive proposal that I want to think more about. So I wanted to thank you for that. I thought that was very good. Yeah, and I want to thank you too. I’ve been sort of, I guess, mainly pushing you on my thoughts this time. But I think that I’m still not sure if I agree with my proposal either. I think part of me feels like this will go in some weird places, I guess, if I put basically everything into this sort of kind of pragmatic, it kind of collapses into a weird sort of pragmatism, where Christianity, spirituality, everything will be serving some sort of pragmatic, theologic purpose. And then I’m not sure if I like everywhere that goes, but I also struggle to feel like I don’t know how that could not be true in a weird way. That allows me to circle back to a point that I did want to make. And the way you articulated that really brings it out. Because I was trying to talk about things beyond purpose that have to have an intrinsic being that’s good for precisely their independence from our purpose. Yes. And one of the deep criticisms, it’s not my criticism, it’s a long-standing criticism of pragmatism, is pragmatism ultimately needs a non-pragmatic account of truth. Because you need to be able to determine, independent of your pragmatism, if you’re succeeding. Or else you just get an infinite aggress. And it also needs a purpose. You’re doing things for a reason. Well, what’s that reason? Our cognition is such that we have really good resolution in the middle of our pupils, but not good in the periphery. And there’s this trade-off between brain capacity and being able to see in high resolution. But what’s the purpose of that? And the purpose then is autopoiesis. Well, what’s the purpose of that? And then you’re back to the discussion that we’ve been trying to take. Exactly. And I find pragmatism important, like sort of locally, at sort of the mesoontology, the middle ontology. But it depends on non-pragmatic aspects to reality in order for pragmatism itself to exist. And for me, that’s again why I’m very hesitant to attribute that there’s an ultimate sort of purpose to everything. That there’s a utility or instrumentality to everything. And again, one of my worries there is, and I’m not saying you said this by any means, but when you get into this, everything’s for a purpose that’s this close to what Heidegger was criticizing, where we think of everything as a standing reserve that’s there for our technology and there to be used. And it’s rather than things just having an intrinsic existence, completely independent from our purpose. Yeah. And the hyper instrumentalization and stuff like that. And it will seem weird. What will get complicated is when you actually get to the particulars of Christianity, is Christianity really just the thing that works the best? Is it really just the religion that creates the most fit super organism that trumps all of the other super organisms? And is that the implication that I want? Is it just like, yeah, does it just not the way you’d expect? You wouldn’t expect a religion that’s centered on a voluntary crucifixion to be the thing that meets all of the other principalities? Maybe it is. Or is maybe that not where I want to go? But I almost feel like it’s unavoidable, I guess, that something like that would need to be true. Or else why is Christianity the biggest religion in the world? Why did it have the effect that it did? And that sort of thing. It has impressed me that two Christians that I respect, you and Paul, because I brought this up in discussion with Paul, this is one of my responses to the Tom Holland argument. The Tom Holland argument can be totally addressed by what you just said, to my mind. Totally addressed by what you just said. And therefore, it does not serve as any launching pad into, and therefore God, right? It doesn’t work that way. Because it’s an argument about the fittedness of Christianity. And therefore, it can be addressed completely by that argument. And so that’s- Then I do the thing, well, where does the purpose that it’s fulfilling come from? Why do we live in such a universe that Christianity is the one that wins? And does that point to some sort of truth of its own self-understanding of what it’s trying to describe? Right. And then we get back to either a very difficult fine-tuning argument, or again, I think we’re going to get into what ultimately there’s a structure to- We’ll get something like- I think we’ll circle back into Christian Platonism in some fashion. I should get going now. And it seems like we came to a- I really enjoyed this discussion. I felt very adduced, drawn out beyond where I’m normally thinking. And so I really appreciate that a lot. Thank you. Well, and thank you. I felt like I was pushing my thoughts a little bit more this time than previously. But I appreciate the pushback. And I think we have plenty of things that we still need to address, such as how would evil fit into any of that sort of thing. And I know that you gave some arguments against the idea of sort of causation and purpose at the highest levels in your discussion with Paul and JP that I didn’t quite address. So I think there’s still plenty left on the table, but I appreciate the time that we had today. Well, and I appreciate it too. And I’m glad that we’re- I mean, for me, I have motives other than- sorry, Sam, this is too weak. I understand you’re not just doing apologetics. So I want to state that now. But I have motives outside of that, because I think wherever we may land on this religiously, there’s more culturally shared problems of getting our ontology back in shape so that nihilism is not the default attractor state for people individually and collectively. And so I think this whole project is helping towards that in a profound way. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that too. I hope that I wasn’t just doing apologetics. No, I really- I meant the qualification. I didn’t see you doing that. But I wanted some- I guess I’m saying somebody who’s reading this and looking for its value only in apologetic terms, I think there’s value to it beyond that is what I’m saying. Okay. All right. Well, very good. Thank you very much for talking with me today. Thank you. Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Verveki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes.