Mythology & Modern Minds ｜ Transcendent Naturalism No10 (tdNr3xuNSzs)

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you you you you welcome everyone to the cognitive science show this is episode 10 of transcendent naturalism we’ve been releasing some of these episodes both on Greg’s channel and my channel and we’re getting a lot of very positive response and thank you for many of you who have been sending us words of encouragement and gratitude that helps a lot and of course I’m here again with my ongoing partner in all of these cognitive science show projects Greg Enriquez I’m here again with somebody many of you already know Brett Anderson Brett and I and Mark Miller have published a paper together Brett is doing some just astonishing work incorporating some of my work the work of Jordan Peterson and people and I mean this as a compliment there’s no condescension implied I’m very proud of the kind of work that Brett is doing with my work I think it’s it’s always good when a teacher sees their students exceeding them in fruitful and insightful ways so I want to just thank Brett for that work so I’m going to turn things over to Greg and then he will turn things over to Brett Brett think we’ll set things up for us a bit he’ll start us off and then as usual we’ll get into a flowing discussion conversation about it so take it away Greg excellent thank you John yeah I’m super excited to continue the conversation so just to summarize kind of where we are here we are in transcendent naturalism really looking for the kind of worldview that can bridge science and spirituality and I’m really excited about this episode and excited about the bridging what we saw last time is Brett bringing a self-organizing criticality as a fundamental process where we can see both it in sort of the ontological layering of complexification and in terms of the way we make sense out of the world which of course is very consistent with the with the way we have structured the basic metaphysics of our argument and I thought the self organizing criticality brought a really powerful dimension to kind of thinking about the ontology and epistemology of what we’re doing now we’re sort of getting into the metaphor into the worldview and what I would sort of the collective art potential where we start to think about what does this mean in terms of archetypes what does this mean in terms of really embodying a worldview about what does it mean to be a hero what does it mean to be alive and engaged in the process and I know you have really powerful things to say about that and I think we ended last time with a Trinity of sorts and maybe we can start there and just see where this exploration takes us Brett take it away yeah it works for me thank you for that very generous introduction so I’m going to share my screen again like we did last time so we bring up the PowerPoint here can you guys see that okay yes okay so last time we talked about self-organized criticality as this process by which complex systems in nature self-organized to that narrow window between order and chaos from the bottom up so at that narrow window they become more complex and last time we discussed self-organized criticality as this concept that connects ontology it’s it’s an account of how reality emerges in some sense to phenomenology our experience epistemology and cosmology I also think that self-organized criticality is a concept that can help us to build a real bridge between scientific and mythological conceptions of the world that’s in large part what Jordan Peterson was doing in his first book Maps of Meaning he was trying to build a bridge between scientific and mythological conceptions of the world but he didn’t have this concept available to him he didn’t know about it but I think it does it does help to bridge between these two these two ways of conceptualizing the world and so the characters that make up mythological narratives the characters that were identified by Carl Jung and and Joseph Campbell Jordan Peterson these characters are precisely the same as the basic categories that are associated with criticality so we have order and chaos and then the process that mediates between order and chaos and this trinity of characters I believe can help us to reconcile scientific and mythological conceptions of the world and again you know I’ve probably got more slides then so feel free to interrupt me anytime if we want to go on tangents or anything that’s totally that’s totally cool so in in Maps of Meaning in the beginning of Maps of Meaning Jordan Peterson lays out the problem that he’s gonna attempt to solve in that book and he lays out these two ways of conceptualizing the world that have been set at odds with each other within Western culture the older way of conceptualizing the world the more fundamental way of conceptualizing the world he argues is the world as a form for action the world is fundamentally not a place to you know what we’re doing as scientists fundamentally is trying to understand what the world is like in some sense but wisdom is in is more about how to act in the world right what should I be doing in the world and when you’re conceptualizing the world as a form for action what you need to know about an object or an event is not necessarily what it’s made of or how it works in mechanistic terms what you need to know is its implications for action its implication for how you should act in the world its motivational significance or relevance and so the primary question that we’re asking when conceptualizing the world that way is just how should I act in the world and we communicate that through ritual and narrative and art and philosophy and then the more recent way of conceptualizing the world the scientific way of conceptualizing the world or the objective way is the world is a place of objects where we are asking what are things made of in terms of their constituent parts and how do things or processes work in mechanistic terms in terms of efficient causation and the primary modes of communication here are science and philosophy so Brett can I ask a quick clarification sure so philosophy showing up on both sides I imagine there’s an implicit distinction there maybe you could explicate it how what’s the difference between how it’s showing up in the world as a forum and the world as a place of objects yeah so it’s I mean it’s interesting of course it depends on what kind of so philosophy is a broad category and to some extent it depends on what kind of philosophy you’re doing right so I would put analytic philosophy mostly in the world as a place of objects category right but somebody like Nietzsche really straddled this border right because Nietzsche was really a poetic and artistic thinker and of course he was a so he was sort of he was sort of straddling the the border between different ways of conceptualizing the world and philosophy often does that I see Plato as doing the same thing because he was also a mythological thinker in some sense and so philosophy really does in some sense straddle both of these worlds it connects them in some sense does that kind of get it get at what you’re asking yeah I was wondering if there was if that was mapping on to distinction that myself and other people Pierre Ado and other people have drawn between sort of current modern and postmodern academic philosophy and ancient philosophy as the love of wisdom which would be I think a nice clean mapping of that and I find both of them valuable but I find that they have different goals and different standards by which they’re evaluated etc etc yeah is that does that land okay with you that lands perfectly yeah so like analytic philosophy totally that’s within the world as a place of objects right it’s not really about wisdom at least very very it’s not very often about wisdom whereas yes I think you’re totally right that somebody like Plato or Socrates was much more about much more about wisdom although they were they were you know they were leading us into the world as a place of objects in some sense you know Plato and Socrates and Aristotle they were both they were all sort of leading us into that way of conceptualizing the world so they were kind of straddling it to some degree yes so okay so these are the eternal categories of experience Jordan makes the case in map so meaning that the world as a form for action the mythological world is composed of these three constituent elements right the first is unexplored territory which is chaos which is novelty which is represented mythologically as the great mother it’s got a feminine representation the second is order culture explored territory the known that’s the great father the great represented mythologically as the great father and then the third category is the individual the archetypal individual the the process of creative exploration in some sense is what that represents and Jordan makes the case that we are biologically adapted to this world we are biologically adapted to this this metaphorical world of order and chaos and then the question that we might want to ask about that is is that really true are we really adapted to this world of order and chaos and I think that we absolutely are I think that we are biologically adapted to the world as a form for action we see this in the structure of the cerebral hemispheres so we talked about this a little bit last time the the leading theory is comes from both the animal research and the human research the leading adaptationist explanation of hemispheric differences is that the left hemisphere is basically for order the right hemisphere is basically for chaos or novelty the diametric model of autism and psychosis which is my area of scientific research so I think that we’re adapted to this world of order and chaos not only within ourselves as individuals but also between individuals so individual differences along this autism schizotyping continuum I have argued are basically specializations for order and chaos so people high and autistic like traits on one end they’re really specialized for order and on the other end positive schizotyping is a specialization for chaos and then relevance realization I’ve argued relevance realization as the process by which consciousness develops over time is this process that we’re talking about here so this is you know in the fourth the fourth part of my my YouTube series I sort of make this case that this process of complexification which I won’t go into detail about the sort of scientific understanding of it here but relevance realization precisely recapitulates this process which is basically you have competing interactions leading to self-organized criticality which is this descent into chaos leading into a higher level of integration and we see that process play out at many different levels of analysis and so and so this is a figure that Jordan has in Maps of Meaning which is kind of like you know conceptualizing the world this way this is how our experiential world manifests to us so we are playing the role of the of the creative process let’s say like that’s our role in the world relevance fundamentally and we are surrounded in some sense by a protective bubble of order which is our culture right we’re born into our culture our culture develops us it protects us at the same time as it tyrannizes us it forces us to conform and all of this but it you know it has this dual aspect and then outside of our culture is everything that is not understood right everything that is outside of the grip of our of what is known of our culture and ourselves and that’s novelty or chaos unexplored territory of the great mother and so the question here is whether or not this world as it as it manifests phenomenologically as it’s as it manifests mythologically can be fully can be fully reconciled with the world as a place of objects right with the scientific world and I think that criticality helps us to do this so this is just another way of looking at this so on the one side I saw on on the one side we have the great father who is order who is the known who is culture and I’ll get into why these are represented this way here in just a second on the right side of the screen is the great mother nature the unknown chaos what’s important to understand about all of these care all of these categories is that they all have a positive and a negative aspect so order or culture is security it’s protection it’s the known it’s it’s it’s it’s safety in some sense but it also tyrannizes you it also forces you to conform novelty the unexpected is both promising and threatening right chaos is the birthplace of everything new it’s the birthplace of all new forms but it’s also destructive and you know it’s terrible aspects of nature as well and then the individual right the process the process of complexification as it manifests in us individuals can be can take on you know what what Jordan calls the heroic path of the hero or the adversary right so individuals have the positive and negative aspect as well I’m going to point this out now and then I might you know if we get to it we’ll come back to it later but what I want to point out here is that the Matrix trilogy which I really think that the Matrix movies are like a modern mythology right they they really take on the character of a modern mythology we use these metaphors all the time of taking the red pill and so on the Matrix trilogy really precisely is almost a precise manifestation of these categories and the Wachowskis who made the Matrix are really geniuses in my opinion because they did something really interesting which allowed them to it allowed them to display all of the categories in both their positive and negative aspects because the Matrix trilogy occurs in both it occurs on two planes of reality right so in the real world and in the Matrix and in both of those worlds you see in the Matrix you know the the tyrant as as the representative of order and then in the real world you see that the wise old man is the representative order so it allows you to represent both of these all of these categories in both their positive and negative aspects if that makes sense Jordan also makes the case that these categories line up with Taoism I’m no expert on Taoism so I’ll have to defer to people who know more than me I know I know John you have a lot of expertise in that but he makes the case that Yang is essentially order and is associated with these these attributes in is essentially chaos and then the the Tao is the line that divides them right and that’s the process the free flow again I make no claims to be to have any expertise on Taoism the only book I’ve read about it is Alan Watts book on the Tao but what I read with in Alan Watts book I think very much lines up with what Jordan Peterson argued in Maps of Meaning Watts Watts suggests that the yang is associated with firmness with light with rising all of those I would suggest are associated with order to be firm is to maintain your structure the light is the known rising is what you do in a state of order you rise when you’re in when you know what you’re doing you rise and then you fall into chaos the darkness is the unknown the yielding is allowing the structure to dissolve and so we see that I think it’s a very reasonable to say that these the yang and the yang at least if Alan Watts is correct that it’s reasonable to associate those with order and chaos and then John you’ve made the case that Taoism is the philosophy of learning how to flow and in your paper on flow you made the case that flow occurs at the border between boredom and anxiety which is which is yeah yeah so nice mapping thanks so I’m getting into these categories and why they’re associated with the masculine and the feminine right because I think there’s a lot of reasons for why this is the case but I also think we can understand this scientifically in some sense and so there’s multiple reasons for why the order for white order is associated with with masculinity and chaos with femininity femininity we’re only going to talk about a couple of those here but yeah I guess before we get into that so order is associated with culture and nature with chaos in this scheme and I don’t think that there’s any reason to posit like a metaphysical split between culture and nature but I think it is useful at least to differentiate between those aspects of our world of our experiential world that have been rendered relatively safe and predictable by our culture because of the actions of our ancestors and then everything that exists outside of that relative bubble of safety and and and protection is is nature essentially and so it’s for that reason that order is associated with culture and nature with chaos so why is order masculine and why is chaos feminine we’ll get to that here in a minute one of the reasons why order is represented as masculine I think there’s multiple reasons but one of the reasons is because it’s it’s the reason why culture has always been associated with masculinity so I’m an evolutionary psychologist and given that I’m an evolutionary psychologist you know we don’t have any hang-ups about positing differences between men and women and in terms of the way that men and women develop over over the course of development and of course men and women are the same in many ways but there are some ways in which we there are some differences and one of those differences tends to be the way that men women relate to each other and so Roy Bomeister the psychologist Roy Bomeister he argued in his 2010 book is there anything good about men that the way that men relate to each other is associated with culture just almost by an accident of evolution in some sense culture grew out of the way that men related to each other rather than the way that women relate to each other and Joyce Benenson and her she’s another evolutionary psychologist in her book warriors and warriors she reviews evidence that boys and men typically spontaneously organized themselves into hierarchies essentially the into flexible hierarchies of competence and the service of their shared goals while girls tend to maintain more egalitarian relationships amongst each other and the fact is that you know cultural large-scale cultural systems are hierarchical in nature that’s that’s what I would suggest and because of that they’ve always been associated with men and masculinity to some degree and when we’re you know we’re talking about large-scale cultural systems so why then is chaos represented as the great mother again I think there’s multiple reasons for this and I’m not going to cover all of them here I think that one of the most important reasons is that chaos is always the birthplace of everything new Nietzsche dramatically said that one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star and there’s good reasons I think for why chaos is necessary to give birth to new forms I think we can understand this scientifically so I think we talked about this a little bit on the last in the last one but this is the basic pattern that characterizes the structure of all far from equilibrium phase changes which are the phase changes that characterize complex systems and in order for complex systems to radically transform they must have this kind of little descent into chaos right a temporary increase in the entropy of the system and the uncertainty of the system that’s that necessarily precedes the emergence of novel aspects of the system and so we may ask you know why is it the case why is it the case that entropy or chaos is necessary for a phase change to occur in a complex system and I think one of the easiest ways to visualize this comes from dynamical systems theory so dynamical systems theory construes the state of a system as movement through phase space and I think that we can you know by visualizing this we can see why it’s necessary for chaos to proceed a phase change and so in this in this figure on the screen here we have an attractor so a dynamical system a phase space and the system is currently stuck in a tractor a but attractor B is a more functional and more stable state and so the system moving from attractor a to attractor B would be a phase change and so we have we have that we have the problem of figuring out how to get the system from attractor a to attractor B given that system given that the the system isn’t just going to go uphill on its own right it has to has to overcome overcome I guess the inertia of the system in some sense Alicia Urrero in her 2002 book dynamics in action has a nice discussion of this sort of stuff as she says complex systems don’t wander out of a deep basin of attraction they don’t fall off the fall off the ridges around the edge for bifurcations and phase changes to occur the system must show signs of flattening out it must first become unstable and so if we want to visualize how we can get this this red ball from attractor a to attractor B we can visualize the landscape temporarily flattening out and that will allow at least potentially it will allow the ball to to move from a to B and so that that flattening out is equivalent to an increase in the entry of the system it’s an increase in the uncertainty of the future state of the system and so that’s that’s one way to visualize why there must be a period of chaos or entropy preceding a phase change another way to think about it is if you have a hierarchy of let’s say a hierarchy of assumptions or a hierarchy of beliefs everything is nested inside the top and when you disrupt the assumptions at the top that means that you’re going to have to reorganize all of the assumptions that were nested inside those assumptions at the top and so that’s a kind of descent into chaos that’s necessary for replacing the fundamental assumptions of the system so bringing this back to the metamethology and the image to the right the Great Mother is represented as the anomalous information which precedes the descent into chaos right she’s novelty she represents novelty or instability and that’s both promising and threatening because in the context of dynamical systems theory it really is the case that entropy or instability is both promising because it can allow you to escape a non-optimal attractor but you need that entropy it’s what we do I think we talked about this before John it’s it’s what psychedelics do essentially and they increase the amount of entropy in the brain they allow you to escape these non-optimal attractors but of course they’re not you know purely benevolent right there is a real risk that can come along with that it’s not just that you’re always going to have this phase change there’s a real risk that the system can just fall apart and and so entropy really does have this dual of this dual nature within this this metamethology right our job as as representatives of the of the mythological hero is to have the right relationship with chaos or novelty to to be comfortable in some sense with chaos and novelty so the third the third category of experience. Can we just pause there for just a second I’d like to get your thoughts about sort of the sort of the implications of maybe positive and negative of thinking about order as masculine and chaos as feminine just in terms of a sort of a cultural mythology I can see both positives and negatives associated with making that kind of linkage and I just wondered if you have some thoughts to share about what you see sort of the advantages of bringing the gendered flavor to it in a particular way or what would be some also maybe some concerns about doing that? Yeah yeah I mean I think it’s an important concern I mean in some sense you know I totally get your your question here in some sense it’s almost it’s not something that I concern myself with too much because my my job here is to try to describe these ancient patterns as accurately as possible regardless of our own particular the particularities of our culture right in our hangouts because I realize you know we have we’re going through a period where we’re very confused in some sense culturally right we’re confused about gender we’re confused about sex all of this stuff and to you know in my I guess I guess my sense is that I I’m just trying to convey what I believe to be true about these these historical patterns as accurately as possible regardless of cultural implications but yeah I mean it’s an important question in terms of how our culture will react to this kind of stuff and all that and you know the answer is I don’t I don’t really know but yeah and I I think it’s you know I guess I would just say we’re trying to describe it as accurately as possible and let the chips fall where they may. Sure so yeah absolutely so you’re you’re giving us a discord of a descriptive historical narrative of thematic analysis right so you’re basically saying okay when we look these are the patterns as they’re described. Yes and we’ll talk about a couple of examples here in just a second but yes go ahead I want to yeah yeah there’s a couple things one is I just want to emphasize this because at times I one of my criticisms of Jordan is he sometimes slips from description to prescription without an intervening argument and I think you’re being very careful here to say I’m trying to give a description and what’s very important is you know this has some universal aspect that’s part of your argument this is this isn’t just western mythology you invoke yin and yang you’re the Chinese right Daoist so you this is a universal there and that means there’s something important universals disclose fundamental you know aspects of the grammar of cognition and how it fits to the grammar of reality and I think that’s what you’re trying that’s different from saying and you know what this then means you know that men should dominate over women because you know culture has to dominate nature and those are prescriptive moves. Jordan I’m not saying that Jordan does this regularly but he has done it and I find and other people have criticized him for that so this is not unique to me so I just want to make very clear that you know there’s two different things one is do our minds work this way and that’s the question you’re trying to answer then the second is well what do we do with that knowledge and that’s a question we could answer separately so first of all I want to make sure that that’s landing with you that that distinction is that okay absolutely yeah yeah 100% now the other one yeah go ahead well I do have another point you do you finish your point because I’m going to move to a more epistemic point well I just want to I just want to say I do make the leap between is and ought here I have no problem doing that but I get what I get your point right so you know we want to make sure I mean in terms of talking about this as I’m talking about it now yes this is purely descriptive now it allows us to make the leap between is and ought because that process that occurs at the border between order and chaos I would make the case it really is optimal that it really is good in some sense now how that manifests culturally in terms of politics and things like that I mean that’s a totally different question and way more complicated right you know going from the abstract to the particular is complicated but in the abstract at least and this is something that you know it has to be made concrete by acting it out but in the abstract at least that that process of criticality just is good yeah well I think there’s a larger argument that’s needed I agree that the is ought distinction has broken down case bears natural ethical facts makes that argument very powerful the fact value distinction has broken down that’s the work of putnam the theory data distinction has broken down that’s quine right you know Catherine Pickstock goes for all of that and I agree and I think there’s something there’s a deep relationship between criticality relevance realization and intelligibility and I think intelligibility is a meta norm if it’s not there all your other norms are meaningless and then I think in that sense it’s a it’s a meta normative good and that’s what Plato is talking about about the good and so I think you could make that argument just to give you how I would supplement what you’re saying now I do want to move to I guess a more I think in the proper sense a scientific question and I’ve raised this question with Jordan as well and this this goes back to a platonic thing so there’s another dichotomy that Plato puts a lot of emphasis on and Drew Highland wrote an excellent book on this finitude and transcendence and his point is we’re always trying to balance between finitude and transcendence if we’re just finite we just identify with that then we’re we are just subject to fate and we’re despair if we just do transcendence then we get into inflation and hubris and right and we were constantly toggling its opponent processing between them and Plato’s philosophy is about trying to be like Socrates who was always Metaxa between them and and this shows up mythologically I’ve suggested to Jordan in that the hero myths that fit in here are often counterbalanced by hubris myths that try to say okay you can be heroic but you’ll never escape your mortality or as we would perhaps more accurately say today your finitude and it seems to me that that dimension doesn’t map cleanly on to these because of course finitude and transcendence are found both within order and chaos and within sort of both within order and both within chaos and there’s and of course a lot of philosophy is also about managing the relationship between finitude and transcendence you have it in stoicism for example buddhism and so this seems to be and of course as I just said it’s caught up in mythology and of course you understand what I’m trying to do here this is not any attempt to refute what I agree with everything that’s happening here that’s why I said earlier this is a beautiful mapping but I’m wondering about that dimension is it orthogonal is it independent do you think it can there’s something higher value or variable or that would allow us to integrate it with the order chaos what do you think about that and you know I might be catching you on a whereas and I don’t want to play unfair I respect you and you know you might have to do this off the top of your head I just I’m just it’s a genuinely open question what do you think yeah two things I think I want to say about that so in the in the first case about the finitude versus transcendence or eternalism I think there’s some sense in which the proper the proper attitude is to kind of straddle the border between these and when you are identifying with this process right so that you know Jordan makes the case in maps of meaning that the meta goal of existence is identification with the process of creative exploration which is this process of complexification now that does something you know I I’m going to get a little bit metaphorical and poetic here so you’ll have to excuse me so you know I you know I as a as Brett Anderson I as this particular person am clearly finite I’m going to die and all this but what I really am at bottom right in some in some important sense what I really am is this process of complexity like that’s what I am most fundamentally this is a but this is a participation metaphysics you’re offering which is very platonic through and through right you you have an identity as an individual but it participates in a more encompassing and deeper reality it’s that’s fair to say right yes I mean it’s a you know in some sense I identify with myself as Brett Anderson but in some sense I identify with myself as this process of complexification right I understand that I have you know you know Jordan said and of course this sounds hubristic it sounds extremely hubristic to say something like this but Jordan said in maps of meaning that you know the if you if you follow the path of meaning and you do it forthrightly you discover your identity with God right and that’s not it’s not meant to be narcissistic you know it’s not meant to be like oh I’m all-powerful right it’s it’s meant to be you discover your identification with this this process of creative exploration which is represented as the mythological hero um and so you you discover that you have this dual identity in some sense I mean that’s that’s how I would uh I would suggest that yeah so I’m kind of getting this then uh if you’ll allow me just to use a metaphor under the metaphors you’ve you and you’ve represented it this way which I think is fair you’ve got like a horizontal relationship between order and chaos and then you have a vertical relationship of identification which is from the finitude and the temporal up to the eternal um and encompassing and that’s the level at which the hero that that axis is the the axis inhabited by the hero is that fair what I just did 100 yes and this is even you know Jordan talks about this in maps of meaning in terms of the shaman the shaman travels up and down the axis moon dot yeah the axis that’s what it is right that’s the that’s the world tree in some sense yeah um what’s been really interesting is I’ve been you know I’m teaching a course for Halkian on nihilism and uh there’s an argument in Tillich and then Rosen picks it up in his essay on nihilism uh which is very powerfully made I recommend that book uh in that nihilism occurs when we lose when we lose the intersection and the interdependence of the vertical and the horizontal we have just a horizontal we get sort of you know the the endless historicism right and we have just a vertical we can get sort of stuck in eternalism but when we have the two together then we we are properly participating in being and we don’t fall into nihilism and so I think introducing these two um dimensions and their interdependence and intersection gives a way of taking this argument and making it philosophically responsive to well nihilism as a philosophical position so I just want to advocate for that as a possibility and then oh go ahead go ahead Gordon no I just um I’m actually then mapping that a little bit under the tree of knowledge uh representation uh around the vertical and horizontal uh so I’m just I’m seeing the intersection of those axes in a in a fascinating way so I’m just playing along yeah so and one more thing I wanted to say about the uh the hero myth and then the myth of hubris and this is something I’m kind of playing with I don’t really have any certainty about this but you know one of the things I would say one of the differences between these these mythological narratives so the the hubris myth uh to the best of my knowledge was the most well developed by the greeks right that was greek tragedy uh edipis and all this uh generally it’s in hebrews too the hebrew tradition has it tremendously those that try to be like god gets gets smacked down pretty badly so it’s also there as well um what I would suggest and again this is something I’m playing with I mean that myth doesn’t tend to underpin large-scale civilizations and I think there’s a reason for that right so like the the large-scale civilizations tend to be underpinned by a kind of hero myth so that would be christ in our own culture uh the buddha zoroastrianism which I don’t know too much about but I you know it’s a hero myth to some degree and um and then the Babylonian myth of marduk uh the Egyptian myth of horus so those are I would say relatively pure hero myths um and of course there are many other kinds of narratives right so there’s all sorts of narratives that don’t follow that structure but those kinds of narratives for whatever reason they don’t tend to be the ones that underpin these large-scale civilizations and so there’s some reason why civilizations tend to tend to um to tend to develop around these these hero narratives I think um not to say that the that the hubris myth isn’t important I think it’s incredibly important and I’m not sure you know exactly what the role that it plays in all this is I’m still trying to work that out um yeah I mean you see instances where they’re clearly both co-presents so Islam and Muhammad submission he’s heroic but there’s this definite uh you know fear anxiety of hubris right and and so there’s there’s that big so he uh as a hero is he’s both I see his myth and I mean myth of course and if you’re Muslim I’m not insulting the Islam by using that word I’m using it the way we’re talking about here uh you know universal deep structures of how we make sense of important patterns in reality um and I see his mythos as simultaneously heroic and hubristic at the same time that makes sense to me yeah I mean I I think yeah so this is something maybe we can move on but I sure yeah but I the main point the main point what I like and what I got out of this was the vertical and the horizontal because I think that’s I think that’s really elegant so thank you for that thank you okay so the third uh the third eternal category of of experience is the process that mediates between order and chaos and that’s consciousness it’s you I’ve argued that it’s it’s relevance realization given that relevance realization is the process by which consciousness develops over time this is the individual it’s represented mythologically as both the hero and the adversary the hero is narrative representation of the process of creative exploration which occurs at the border between order and chaos and the adversary is mythological representation of the denial of that process um I’m just going to read what Jordan said this is from the abstract of maps of meaning uh Jordan said that the capacity for creative exploration embodied embodied in mythology in the form of the ever resurrecting hero serves as the eternal mediator between the fundamental constituent elements of experience voluntary failure to engage in such an exploration that is forfeit of identification with the world redeeming savior produces a chain of causally interrelated events whose inevitable endpoint is the adoption of a rigid ideological ideology predicated totalitarian identity and violent suppression of the eternally threatening other um so what what happens here essentially is that um and and Jordan has a really nice he’s got some really nice papers about this but you know anomalies confront us all the time and we’re tempted when we’re confronted with an anomaly we are tempted to ignore it or we’re tempted to deny it or suppress it or whatever um you know people and people do this all the time especially you know we I think we can think about this in terms of personal relationships in some sense like maybe you get a little bit of evidence that your partner isn’t quite as trustworthy as you thought they were or something like that you know and uh people will ignore that all the time and then you know and then it it bites them later on or maybe you get um word that your boss is you know your your boss at your work is doing something that he shouldn’t be doing you know people ignore things all in it you know when you ignore a problem of course it doesn’t go away it just gets worse but also it makes you weaker as an individual and if you ignore your anomalies long enough you end up becoming a kind of you know so fearful of the unknown that you suppress it rather than exploring it right you become purely uh purely adapted to suppressing anomalies rather than exploring them and that’s essentially the adversarial stance um Jordan makes the case uh that the adversarial process let’s say uh takes one of two forms which represent either an excess of order so you can kind of fall off into too much order or you can fall off into too much chaos uh he says that the excess of order he calls this the fascist this is somebody who clings desperately to their tradition uh and to the the security of the group and the decadent is is kind of the opposite in some sense the decadent is subversive they reject culture they reject tradition they they do this largely because they’re too undisciplined to adhere to the strictures or because they couldn’t compete in the hierarchy of culture anyways and although these may seem very different from each other uh Jordan makes the case and I would as well uh that these are equally arrogant equally rigid and equally dangerous in some sense could I open that up a little bit because I think there’s something really important going on here uh and this of course harkens back to you know ideas around relevance realization predictive processing etc I mean most of the anomalies should be ignored um I see that wall over there as as completely white and it’s not right there’s all kinds of anomalous stuff coming up and this is the precision waiting and so um it seems like there’s an implicit distinction here between the anomalies that we should ignore and the anomalies we shouldn’t and that goes towards some of this deeper meta normativity we’ve been talking about could you could could you could you unpack that a little bit given the like uh is like uh I take it that both the fascist and the decadent are making mistakes about this but maybe they’re making opposite mistakes right the the the fascist is ignoring too many anomalies and perhaps the decadent is identifying with the wrong ones or something like I’m trying to map this in uh could yeah could you open that up a little bit yes so it would be easier if I could visualize it but we’ll we’ll work with what we have here so you can imagine and this is how predictive processing uh construes the mind the mind as a hierarchy of predictions or a hierarchy of priors right and you have more abstract or more fundamental uh priors at the top right and everything else is nested inside of those so prediction errors right travel up this hierarchy and we try to we try to uh resolve the prediction error at the lowest level that we possibly can right so you know if if we can resolve the prediction error by not changing much about our beliefs then we do that right we we resolve it at the bottom of the hierarchy and that’s all well and good um so what I would suggest is that one way to visualize uh the fascist let’s say so when you’re identifying with the with the hero let’s say when you’re identifying with that process of creative exploration that process is what goes at the top of the hierarchy that’s the highest value in the hierarchy the highest value in the hierarchy becomes the process by which the hierarchy is updated and it’s not static right it’s ever-changing right it’s it is fluid you know it is that process of flow in some sense the fascist in some sense what the fascist does is takes a product of that process right so we have world views right we have beliefs these are the products of the process of creative exploration but they’re not what’s of most value what’s of most value is the process and not the products the fascist takes the products right takes this this worldview that he has and he makes that the highest value protecting that becomes the highest value at all costs and so prediction errors even though they’re going to try to to go up the hierarchy right they’re going to run into a wall essentially at some point where nothing gets past that right you’ve you’ve said this is what I’m clinging to I’m clinging to this belief system this tradition that I have uh and there is nothing you know there’s nothing getting getting in there um and so in some sense they they the fascist closes off the top of their hierarchy from being updated right it always has to remain the same the decadent in some sense does something I think quite different uh they have nothing at the top right so the decadent’s hierarchy is essentially flat right it’s it’s a pathologically flattened out um to where they don’t have a highest value at all right there is no they you know um all you know this is nihilism it’s all is false everything you know nothing is of value nothing is true um and therefore nothing means anything at all right both of these are rejections of meaning right because meaning is found in the process right meaning is always and so both the fascist and the decadent are rejecting meaning but they’re doing it in a different way um does that does that make sense john yeah I mean I and I think there’s a profound connection to uh a deeper and perhaps renovated notion of rationality here uh where we’ve we tended to equate rationality with logicality but stanowicz uh who does overemphasize the propositional nevertheless made the and he’s done this in a couple of places and I’ve tried to sort of magnify it that one of the fundamental things that marks somebody off as irrational is a is a hyper fixation on the product of cognition and a neglect and undervaluation of the processes of cognition this is the fundamental stance that takes you into irrationality in a deep way and I think what you just said dovetails nicely with that much broader and I think more existentially important notion of rationality yeah makes sense to me yeah one of the things I’ll just highlight uh which would then uh that goes along with this is some of the stuff that john and you I’m sure you’re probably familiar with the prep but just on trait theory um and the differentiation between uh things like uh extroversion and openness uh emphasizing the press out uh into exploration conscientiousness neuroticism emphasizing that in particular the way you describe the fascists and the decadent uh see I would argue that sort of openness and conscientiousness really are the organization of your system of justification um and they then reside on this kind of like well how rigid and organized are you and so extreme conscientiousness with no openness um is one particular kind of structure extreme openness uh with no conscientiousness is another so that’s another angle in relationship to just seeing this as it would show up on well validated trait dispositional tendencies that we see you know defining character so this is just another angle uh to be brought to bear in terms of how this pattern can show up yeah and yeah and gary hilbenesian and i have integrated tried to integrate that with with relevance realization uh you know the colin de young’s notion about the playoff between instability and plasticity which is also maps right on to uh order and chaos uh very readily but so i think we’ve done enough digressions so let’s get i want to give the baton back to you okay so uh yeah so jordan says and this is kind of self-evident from what we’ve talked about but the pitfalls of fascism and decadence may be avoided through identification with the hero and again i i don’t think this is a narcissistic identification because by identifying with the hero properly understood anyways identifying with the hero means that you are identifying with your own fallibility right your own uh uncertainty about the world right because that uncertainty that chaos right you have to have one foot in chaos all the time so i don’t think it’s it’s narcissistic but um identification with this with the process of exploration rather than with any of its particular outcomes uh and of course sometimes the the process of exploration leads to the degradation of the hierarchy so that’s decadence and that’s an outcome that can happen too but you don’t want to identify with that either um so identifying identifying with the process precludes the the suppression of threatening information which would be the adversarial stance so just some key ideas here from what we’ve talked about the hero stands on the border between order and chaos and what this means in effect is that the hero voluntarily engages in the process by which order is renewed renewed when necessary which means voluntary confrontation with or a voluntary descent into chaos and this process manifests as a particular pattern of behavior which has been represented mythologically and i would make the case and i think jordan would make the case as well that this is the most general pattern of optimal behavior and this is the most uh it has to be made concrete because of course it looks different in every particular circumstance right um but it’s still it’s still the general pattern of optimal behavior but that’s fine because relevance realization predictive processing the two meta problems right they’re universal uh they’re universal processes but that doesn’t mean their products are homogeneous in fact it predicts exactly the opposite you’re going to get a plurality of those because of the of the dependence on environmental differences i want i wanted to so i think that i think part of this and greg and i’ve been talking about this too that this this kind of gives us a proper pluralism in between essentialism and relativism uh because there’s a universal process but there are it doesn’t mean that there is a homogeneity of of of cognitive products etc so i think that’s an advantage of this just epistemologically and ontology ontologically i wanted to ask you another thing since we’re in mythology so again i think this what you’re doing here is amazing and i think the way it also maps up into the relevance realization of collective intelligence we we sort of uh we didn’t argue well we argued in the right sense about that last time but um i wonder so i see this in both the pre-axial and post-axial myths uh but i see the diff i mean in charles taylor and many other people you know have argued and i think the evidence is good and the arguments are good that you know with the axial revolution after the bronze age collapse you get this you get this difference put in and maybe this is harkening back to the vertical dimension again because you get the you get the opening up of a two worlds mythology um and it does something weird i think so this is me thinking off the top of my head but it seems like it does something weird it seems like among the other horrible bifurcations that it saddled us with even though there are very important reasons why the two worlds mythos takes off all across the world it seems like it also you know it seems like it puts order in the upper world and chaos in the lower world and then has them as incommensurable and in discontinuous from each other and therefore radically prevents the heroic response that you’re talking about here is is that a fair argument to make i i can’t believe you just said that so this is that’s exactly the argument that i made in uh part 5.3 of my series i think 5.3 oh okay um so this what you just described that’s what nicia is referring to what he calls the ascetic ideal that’s what the aesthetic ideal is the ascetic ideal was the elevation of order over chaos it’s the elevation of of soul over body it’s the elevation of rationality or reason over instinct it’s the elevation of uh of altruism over egoism which is the group over the individual it’s the elevation and so we have all these dichotomies and i i won’t go through them in detail here but uh but yes i think they’re all associated with order and chaos also um philosophically we elevated nicho would argue and i would argue we elevated being over becoming uh which is another manifestation of order over chaos uh parmenides over hair clitus is the way that alicia urero i would put that um and so yeah i think that’s 100 correct and and you know this was a response the argument that i made is that that ascetic ideal was a response to an ancient meaning crisis um so we had a meaning crisis essentially that occurred whenever we found ourselves enclosed within the walls of civilization um and we’ve responded to this in a variety of ways um for the first few thousand years we had these we had these massively hierarchical societies with god kings and all this and that’s not really where the two worlds mythology came from the two worlds mythology came when we got rid of those hierarchical societies but um the thing is that when we when we found ourselves enclosed in the walls of society we found this this massive internal conflict because the instincts that we have uh the instincts we have were evolved for millions of years in a hunter-gatherer society as you know uh small groups um small groups of relatively differentiated people and when we came together within a society the instincts that we had that we had evolved no longer served us well and so we saw this conflict between what you might say reason and instinct which has been conceptualized as soul versus body or however you want to put it um and and so this ancient meaning crisis was uh i would argue that the ascetic ideal was our response was the response of what you might call the priestly class to this ancient meaning crisis that we found ourselves in when our our instincts were no longer serving us well and we had to be we had to rely on on our reason to some degree which is you know not not not good anyways um and so yeah i think you’re totally right about that uh anything else uh anything else you want to say about that um well i mean there’s a longer thing but i’ve said it elsewhere where i i think dietschi is right about uh the deep profound connection uh between the two worlds also the lower world becomes completely instrumental for the upper world and all the other critiques where i disagree with him is um he seems to think that the only way in which the vertical can be or at least that’s how heidegger interprets him to be fair uh the only way we can relate to the vertical is with the two worlds mythology and of course the very project that greg and i are engaging in here is to say no we can properly talk about the vertical without having to defer to a two worlds mythology so that’s uh i i just want just because it’s relevant to the whole project here that greg and i are right i engage in that’s a nice that’s a very i like that jones that’s a very succinct point uh that is at the core of what this is about so yeah there’s like there’s a there’s an underlying presupposition like i said that uh the two worlds mythology is the only way in which uh and you of course you see this in a lot of the critiques that are made you know that are sort of uh you know adjacent to nihilism you know love is just a chemical and all that sort of stuff uh right all the reductionisms which are just an inverted and decadent form of neoplatonism anyways um so i just wanted to put that out uh just in response yeah i mean i don’t think there’s something we’re going to resolve here and i don’t think we need to but i i disagree with that interpretation of nicha i think that he was working as hard as he could on this problem right i mean this is what he was doing at the end of his life it’s essentially why he went insane uh is because he was trying to understand value without the two worlds mythology right like like real objective value how do we understand that without the two worlds mythology because for thousands of years our values have been tied up with this yeah um his his will-to-power thesis was a response to that but it’s it’s vague you know his will-to-power thesis is vague you know he was he was feeling out he was you know exploring with it in some sense but yeah so so i recommend nishatani’s book the self-overcoming of nihilism where he gives a much more positive reading of nicha’s take on this that in some way which is surprising because nishatani studies under heidegger but which i think is actually alternative to heidegger even though nishatani never directly says that so i would recommend that book the self-overcoming of nihilism um and it’s it’s powerful because because this is chinese from the kona school and he’s coming from the asiatic perspective he’s got a perspective from the outside so he’s not so instinctively bound i mean in the cultural sense of instinct he’s not so automatically bound to the two worlds mythology as a way of trying to articulate things like this so i recommend that i i don’t think we fundamentally disagree um i i i think for me there’s two niches and and the one i’m criticizing is the one that post heidegger was taken up into post modernism etc etc things like that so i’ll just leave it at that if that’s okay with you you find that a fair place to leave it it works for me yep so uh what i’m going to do now so this is just the you know the basic metamethology order pre-existing stable state the anomaly which disrupts it the descent into chaos the re-emergence into a higher form of order that’s the basic pattern it’s relatively simple uh we’re going to look at how these characters play out i’m only going to do one example here um i’ve got more examples i can pull up but i’m just going to use one here to to save time uh so just a narrative example a mythology and see and we’ll see how these characters manifest in this mythology so uh i get my my interpretation of this from marseille illiot and his uh his books on the history series the yeah that’s such a wonderful series i recommend it it’s unfortunate that he’s kind of fading out of the spotlight but i think that three volume set is just amazing he’s brilliant he’s brilliant so uh this is basically the way that the elliot characterizes the story right so this is the story of osiris and isis and horus in egypt uh horus is the is the mythological hero in the story so osiris was a mythical permeable king uh he ruled egypt justly and fairly but he was blind to the forces of tyranny in his midst now there are different versions of the story and this isn’t too important there’s different versions of the story and some versions of the story osiris sleeps with seth’s wife so there might be some a little bit of corruption there as well so maybe he’s blind and a little corrupt or whatever so uh he’s blind to the forces of tyranny in his midst and so his brother seth rises up against him uh the lion king kind of recapitulates this story in some ways scar rises up against mufasa much in the same way that seth rose up against osiris uh so seth kills osiris he betrays osiris kills him he doesn’t really kill him because he’s a god and it’s kind of hard to kill a god i guess so he dismembers him he spreads his body parts across the kingdom and then osiris’s spirit goes down into the underworld um isis who is the nature goddess mother nature she’s the queen she’s osiris’s wife she gathers up osiris’s pieces and she makes herself pregnant with his with his phallus and out of that union she gives birth to horus and horus is the hero horus goes on to challenge seth uh he defeats him but he loses his eye in the process and one of the interesting things about this story is that it could have ended there and it would have made sense so it could have ended there and horus could have become the king and that could have been the end of the story uh what horus does after that after he beats seth as he goes down into the underworld he rescues his father he gives his father his dismembered eye so that his father can see again because he was blind and he brings his father back up and they rule the kingdom together so uh looking at this from the frame from the perspective of the framework we’ve been talking about so osiris is the representative of order and tradition right he’s the representative of past heroic deeds but as with as is always the case with our traditions right is always the case with our culture that it’s blind in some sense it’s necessary we need it but it’s blind to the dangers of the present seth the adversary takes advantage of this of this blindness he disrupts the current order in his in his pursuit of power uh causing this descent into chaos which was the breaking up of osiris right the the current order was broken up spread across the kingdom um out of that chaos out of that broken order um it it intermingles with the positive aspect of nature with the positive aspect of chaos right and then out of that intermingling is is born the hero and jordan maps of meaning says and i quote that this story makes a profound point right the degeneration of the state or the domain of order and its descent into chaos serves merely to fructify that domain and to make it pregnant in chaos lurks great potential and so horace uh confronts seth he’s harmed in the process which is typically the case but he is ultimately victorious and then he goes down into the underworld and he rescues his tradition right we see this you know jordan talks about this all the time this mythological trope of going down and rescuing your father from the underworld you see it in uh panokia as well he goes down and rescues his father from the belly of the whale um really you kind of see it in the lion king too in some sense it’s a different play on the trope when simba looks into the dark pool and he sees his father reflected up at him right it’s like when you look into the abyss when you look into chaos what you find is the great ancestral figure in some sense uh so horace confronts that so he goes down rescues his father gives him his eye and then the tradition and the hero rule the kingdom together in some sense and so um and so yeah this is how these these characters play out at least in this in this particular narrative so as i said earlier i think that the matrix movies really precisely recapitulate this this process we have the great father which is the the positive aspect of the great father in these narratives um typically is like the wise old man it’s like gandalf or dumbledore um who facilitates the initiation of the hero right so they uh facilitate the hero’s descent into chaos or they’re at least controlled descent into chaos in some sense um and then the tyrant is the the negative aspect of the great father and in the in the matrix movies it’s the it’s the architect who was the father they literally call him the father of the matrix uh neo is of course the revolutionary hero he experiences his personal descent into chaos which is followed by a reemergence but then his reemergence proceeds a social descent into chaos as well and that’s a pattern that we see in these stories um the hero acts out of his love for existence in some sense while the adversary is motivated by his disgust and resentment with existence and that’s actually like it lines up really nicely with the psychology i think um anyway so i just want to point this out i think this is a really nice representation of these categories now uh so you brought up you know the last time we talked about uh collective intelligence um and the potential role that consciousness may play there you know we maybe we argued about it but i you know i don’t think it was too too uh crucial of an argument but um i think that uh uh so the revolutionary here i think the revolutionary hero can be thought of as an archetypal representation of of that role that consciousness plays in collective intelligence i’d be really curious to hear what you think about this and whether or not it it um it sort of winds up with how you think about it but um you know so we we sort of had this um discussion about well groups aren’t conscious but individuals are right and so is there some role like some functional role that consciousness plays in the in the uh in the role of the individual within the group and so jordan makes the case um that adaptive behavior is created or transformed by those driven to resolve the tension that inevitably exists between personal experience and society that is driven to resolve the the tension between what they know to be true and what history claims and the revolutionary hero which is uh neo is i think a a narrative representation of that is an embodiment of that of that process which is the action of consciousness itself and so this is the case that i would make about this um all of us are inculturated into the assumptions of our society and we’re not it doesn’t always happen consciously or explicitly right we observe the people around us we observe their assumptions about the world their value their implicit values and their implicit assumptions and we take on those assumptions as our own and when what you know to be true because of your personal experience is contradicted by those assumptions and this can happen at multiple levels of analysis because of course as scientists we are also inculturated into the assumptions of our field and sometimes our experiences contradict those assumptions as well but if you if you have personal experiences that contradict the deep assumptions of your culture there are like a few options that you can that you have in this situation um you can try to reinterpret the experience right and so these these line up basically with assimilation and accommodation and the first two are assimilation and the last is accommodation in the first place you can try to reinterpret the experience you can you can interpret the experience in some way that makes it compatible with your cultural assumptions and that allows you to maintain your basic assumptions about the world and it’s not like that’s never the right way to go right like sometimes that is the right way to to go you know sometimes that is the right option i think and that’s associated with piagetian assimilation i would argue it’s associated with cuny and normal science it’s the mode of adaptation of the left hemisphere the second option that you have is to deny the existence of the experience you can claim that the experience was illusory and that will also allow you to maintain your basic assumptions about the world again that’s another it’s another version of assimilation and then the third option is that you accept the reality of the experience you accept that it exists in contradiction to your deep assumptions about the world which have been instilled in you by your culture you accept the dissolution of yourself in the face of this contradiction and that’s accommodation that’s revolutionary science that’s the the mode of action of the right hemisphere and jordan characterizes it this way he says when faced with a paradox whose solution is impossible in terms of the historical canon in terms of the the axiomatically predicated hierarchy of values and assumptions the revolutionary hero takes inspired action and transcends his culturally determined limitations instead of denying the existence of the problem and tormenting those who cannot help but posit it he accepts the apparently impossible task of solution and of reuniting the warring opposites and so i think this is a way to think about the role of consciousness in collective intelligence that is you know groups don’t have experiences but individuals do in some sense and and when our when our personal experience comes into conflict with the deep assumptions of the group that creates attention because the group in some sense has a an interest and i’m personifying the group here but the group has an interest in maintaining its traditions against deviations from those traditions this is sort of built into the logic of cultural evolution because cultural evolution requires on the one hand and this is an argument that’s been made and you know by michael tomasello uh joseph henrik and some of the cultural evolutionists cultural evolution requires a kind of blind imitation on the one hand we have to in some sense blindly imitate what our ancestors did simply because we don’t have access to enough information to rationally judge our traditions um and and so we imitate so also we won’t have the skills to do so until we’re to some degree inculturated right yeah yeah that makes sense yeah uh we have to master the tradition before we can transcend it um and so but the the group in some sense has an interest in in not allowing people to disrupt that tradition but and so you you can get this tension between you know the the the necessity for the conservatism of the group right which is a real necessity it’s not you know it’s not a pathology like you need that conservative tendency and on the other hand the um the necessity to update that that that tradition in the face of anomalous experiences now nicha made the case and jordan peterson made the case in maps of meaning that in the extreme uh the extreme examples of this are associated with essentially madness right like the person who has the anomalous experience essentially has to go insane uh to to incorporate it um and this is you know jordan makes the case and i think he’s right about this um although the anthropological evidence is is murky in some sense but he makes the case that this is the the shamanic initiatory crisis right so oftentimes before the person goes on to become the shaman within their culture they have this real psychological breakdown they have a you know indistinguishable from psychosis in some cases um we see this in mythological tropes as well i think we see it with the buddha you know the buddha had this this psychological uh crisis before doing what he did but um and in some sense this is you know this is yeah so this is represented in the matrix movies i i would suggest so neo has these experiences that are considered impossible given his deep assumptions about the world uh these coincidences that occur or the the typing on his computer right these things should not be possible he’s given a choice as to whether he will deny or accept the reality of the experiences that’s the red pill blue pill metaphor uh as a result of his voluntary confrontation with that as a result of taking the red pill he he has this personal descent into chaos this psychological crisis where he has to reformulate his fundamental assumptions about the world and he re-emerges from that uh where he becomes the anomaly um and they actually call him this in the movies right so the agents of the matrix call neo the anomaly interestingly enough this is jordan peterson and it’s so it is really interesting to me because these movies came out at the same time they both came out in 1999 um or the matrix came out at the same time as maps of meaning but jordan also calls the revolutionary hero this archetypal figure an anomaly right they’re an anomaly from the perspective of everybody else um and so neo ends the ends the trilogy by reconciling the war and opposites so this is just uh i think that the wachowskis are really geniuses and they intuitively picked up on this on this underlying pattern i think they have i think they had a muse that was a genius in that one movie i’m very questionable about their their movies thereafter can i just ask something here then yeah please do yeah so uh again um i think this uh this uh this exegesis interpretation of the matrix uh like i’ll say i’ll just reserve it to the matrix uh the movie um i think it’s it’s it i think it works very well however uh again maybe this is again me invoking the vertical props it’s also clear that uh the neo the neo-platinism is he’s called neo he’s called the one this is a version of plato’s cave myth and the ascending out of it the returning back down he goes out of it and comes right welcome to the real world all that sort of stuff right and um and of course neo-platinism is based on the idea that uh our anomalous experiences can not only be ones um that are how do i want to put it uh that fall outside of what we consider real uh they can also be what i what i’ve talked about elsewhere as they can be onto a normative uh namely they’re anomalous not because uh we we can’t fit them in to our world that’s anomaly not following the laws but uh the opposite um is we reject all of this world as right less real than those really real experiences the experiences of the one that are of course being invoked um when neil when neil is welcomed to the desert of the real and all that sort of stuff and this of course goes with you know all the metaphors for waking up the buddha is the awakened one enlightenment um and so again i’m wondering uh how that would fit into uh this model because it’s it’s it seems to me that um uh there’s there’s different kinds of anomalous experiences that people have and some of them i think are ones that drive towards breaking things up the way you very i think eloquently describe but there are also ones that are like logos they are anomalous experiences that portend a much greater integration that has been lacking and that people are drawn to precisely because of that how that enhances intelligibility etc so how does that land for you as i mean i i i don’t think it’s unfair for me to say that mythology is also being invoked in the matrix yeah yeah i i don’t know enough about neo-platinism in general to comment on that uh but the um so the anomaly right and so i think there’s a couple things to say about this is that in the first place anomalies occur at different levels of analysis and i see this process is kind of playing out as a kind of fractal in some sense so uh with small anomalies right and with small anomalies we have a small descent into chaos right only it only generates a little bit of psychological uncertainty or whatever kind of uncertainty um and maybe we have to break with the group a little bit but it’s not a big deal and you know whatever uh a new scientific hypothesis generally doesn’t uh you know we wouldn’t call that revolutionary right but it is in some sense it’s still the same process playing out at a at a different level of analysis um when more fundamental assumptions are are disrupted right that’s that’s really when we see this process play out in the sort of archetypal way and um with those kinds of anomalies i would suggest uh that they have this dual aspect of you know what you talked about of of being both integrative but also destructive right and and um uh both promising and threatening right like when you’re really threatening something like a really fundamental assumption uh the anomaly that threatens that is both destructive on the one hand because it it requires destruction to incorporate it but it’s also integrative on the other hand because it it uh it holds the promise of a greater level of integration right but it’s uh that’s why that’s why novelty has this dual aspect of being yeah yeah with promising so it’s very much like the the yin yang right the order and the chaos actually deeply interpenetrate each other i see yes okay that’s i like that’s a good answer i appreciate that answer well and it plays out ontologically that way too because um you know the process by which the universe becomes more ordered is the same as the process by which entropy increases in the universe right so exactly exactly so those are those are the same process right and so order and chaos are two sides of the same coin um and so that’s helpful thank you so here’s the hypothesis that i would i would make about this um the hypothesis about the role of consciousness in collective intelligence and i’d be curious to hear what you think about this so uh so the role of the consciousness in the metamethology is is narratively represented by the mythological hero the role of consciousness is to mediate between order and chaos it’s to mediate between the known and the unknown to update order in the face of anomalies in some sense the role of consciousness and collective intelligence is to do that as it plays out with the the individual in the group it’s it’s to um to mediate between the assumptions of the group right which is order right which is your culture and uh and everything that exists outside of or in contradiction to those assumptions which which is chaos right and so when your personal experience uh is anomalous in some sense when it when it violates the assumptions of your group right the role of consciousness is to uh in some sense dissolve yourself first and then to dissolve the group later and of course that that happens you know as i said i think it’s a fractal um but that’s what um you know given that insight in some sense is an important aspect of the development of consciousness right well that’s kind of what we’re talking about here right we’re talking about the capacity for insight the capacity to reframe uh to reframe the world in some sense whenever faced with something that violates your assumptions about it so the role of the conscious of the conscious individual is to update both themselves and the group in the face of the anomaly even if this even if the group doesn’t like it um typically this process is disrupted by those who have sold their soul to the group that’s how jordan describes it uh nicha nicha calls them the good and the just you know nicha’s always railing against those who he calls the good and the just and he’s saying that sarcastically because that’s how they think of themselves but these are these are people who are so sure of their own moral and empirical assumptions about the world that they are willing to punish and condemn and ostracize anybody who violates those assumptions and so that’s the adversarial that’s the adversarial process and as we as we’ve talked about this process can play out at different levels of analysis with very different consequences depending on how anomalous the experience is or how deep the assumptions violated by the experience are and i think we see this in movies uh so of course the you know the matrix we’ve talked about a lion king is a little different because it’s a children’s movie but it does follow the same pattern money ball is a one of my favorite sports movies where brad pitt who is playing this role of the hero discovers a new way to build teams right he discovers a new way to analyze players and to build and to build a baseball team and this is in total contradiction to the way that everything has been done before and the movie is about his uh his having to deal with the assumptions of everybody who’s you know all the uh all the other people involved with the team even though he’s clearly right right so um so that’s what i that’s my hypothesis i would i would say about the role of consciousness and collective intelligence so i think that’s good uh because um and i think we we sort of got converged towards this last time we’re talking about this um i think the uh when you talk when you talk these two questions are deeply interdependent and see my series with greg on untangling the world not but you know the function question the nature question but i think the function question is you know that you first of all you got a lot of convergence that the function of consciousness is some kind of relevance realization now it can’t be identified with it to core because we have lots of relevance realization that’s going on consciously uh but i think you know the work of or seph and others uh you know is that well now what we’re doing is this is a higher order more recursive form of relevance realization associated with working memory uh which is a which is a relevance filter uh with with fluid intelligence with attention and the proposal is that what consciousness is it’s about dealing with those problems that are high in novelty high in complexity high in ill-definedness and so when we can convert those ill-defined problems into well-defined problems then we can proceduralize them and the need for consciousness drops down significantly and so i think insofar as the system doesn’t have consciousness the the spirit of collective intelligence and i agree with you i think and i think this is actually a way of making this argument very sharp um but if that is true then that means that the collective intelligence is not very good at dealing with problems high in novelty high in complexity and high in ill-definedness and uh now the counterbalance to that is um you pay a price for that heightened relevance realization being individualized which is its cognitive scope its cognitive light cone is significantly diminished so it often can’t and this is the argument about why consciousness is at the level it is so it often can’t grasp patterns that fall outside of our own particular phenomenological field and you need collective intelligence to well track global warming as tim you know as as as merton’s uh example is right uh when he talks about hyper objects uh and we can’t see evolution but science can track it um etc etc so again i i think this is right and i think there’s a trade-off relationship uh between them which i think makes a good case for why we should resist people who want to attribute consciousness to collective intelligence because it misses out on i think this very important trade-off relationship functional opponent processing between individual consciousness and collective intelligence how does that land as a response i mean that lands perfectly um yeah so you know one of the things i’ve thought about is that you know in some sense an infinitely scalable non-zero sum game and if we were trying to discover the infinitely scalable non-zero sum game is to facilitate this process uh in as many individuals as you possibly can right because that’s in some sense what it would mean right so we you know i made the case that you know for an individual what you want to do is put that process by which the hierarchy is updated at the top of your hierarchy of values and i think that if a culture were to do that in some sense like if you were really to uh if a if a culture were really to in some sense worship that process um that that’s how it would manifest it would manifest as a devotion to facilitating that process and as many individuals as you can or or uh or uh i i think that’s i think that’s agape i mean i think that’s what agape is in some sense but um well i think jordan hall and i have also talked about that and picking up on some of the exciting theoretical work coming out of the philosophy of biology you move and this lines up to what we were saying earlier about rationality you move from the evolution of traits to the evolution of evolvability which is a very different higher and that’s not a quantitative change that’s a qualitative change and there’s now a lot of work coming out about how that and what’s called natural reward are as important to evolution as natural selection because of course when a system moves to evolving for evolvability it moves into niches first and then you get you get the benefit of being you don’t have to be the best if you’re first and fast enough at being first and that’s the natural reward that you get for shifting off the evolution now of course there’s a point of processing between them right because the evolution of traits really hones you to specific niches the evolution of evolution makes you makes you uh it gives you access to new niches and there’s trade-off relation explore exploit trade-off relationships there so i think yeah i think that that’s fine now i love that paper the gilbert paper you introduced me to that yeah yeah yeah um one more thing i wanted to say about this in relation to the you know the role of the individual in the group and you know i i would just look at darwin again and of course you know darwin couldn’t have done what he did without all of this work that had preceded him uh but you still needed an individual to see how it all fit together you still needed an individual to have the insight and so even though it requires you know all of this all these other people in this community right the the insight itself still still manifests as uh within an individual i think that’s well said i don’t think you see anything analogous to insight problem solving and collective intelligence so i see i would say let me let me just say that i mean i i think that this might be considered a kind of collective insight right like this process but what has to be understood is that it it it manifests as an individual and something like you know what what jesus christ did in western culture right okay well whatever the case was and whatever the historical reality of that was like it clearly caused this you know you know it it uh at least contributed to the the roman empire doing what it did and yeah on all that right so it was just descend into chaos and i i would maybe you might man maybe you might call that a kind of collective insight we have to be careful about that um yeah but i think i but i think what you just said makes it a more precise claim maybe there’s something analogous to it but it has to be apprehended by consciousness in order for it actually to come into existence yes i think so i think all new ideas in some sense i think they have to be embodied right i mean i think they have to have like a almost a problem i totally agree with that relevance realization has to ground out an embodiment but that’s another argument i think we should move towards wrapping this up because um i’m going to stop talking because i’ve talked a lot i’m going to let greg talk now i first put my last word is thank you so much for this this was brilliant this was eloquent this was insightful i’m now going to turn things over to greg yeah no i mean you know i’ve been uh sitting and absorbing and playing uh with this frame and so one of the things maybe brett that i i would uh you know kind of um invite you then to think about is as we sort of sort of our collective intelligence in your own consciousness begins to explore this territory you’ve laid out a rich case in relationship to the criticality and the meta myth what do you have a sense about the kind of you know transformational processes that consciousness needs to sort of spark to awaken a collective intelligence i mean can we you know obviously we’re trying to get together and do this series and you know john and i are sort of thinking about okay laying the groundwork for this transcendent naturalism uh wakening people up and coordinating that process what is it that moves people in that direction what is it that can orient them to the criticality that enables them to appreciate the meta myth um any any thoughts that you have i was kind of sitting here thinking like what a beautiful narrative what a beautiful kind of story what draws people uh to that what kind of transformation takes place in cultures and collective intelligences how does that sparked uh have you given any thought to that yeah yeah i mean definitely i mean so in some sense it’s related to what we just talked about right and you know in some sense there always has to be a kind of profit right and and and jordan peterson played that role to some degree uh i mean this this corner of the internet wouldn’t be what it what it is if it wasn’t for that whole controversy right now you know jordan i have my criticisms of jordan’s more recent behavior and i think maybe we all do but uh but it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t if it wasn’t for for whatever you know whatever happened in 2016 um you know my answer to your question is i don’t know right i don’t really know but what seems to happen is that there are these like literal you know these cultural inflection points right these uh this tension that is always building and somebody comes along and um just sort of pokes the hornet’s nest in the right way and and then we get whatever you know whatever the jordan peterson phenomenon was but um you know that’s kind of over now but i don’t know it’s something like that right it’s something um you know and of course you know both of you guys are certainly sparked a criticality for sure right i mean you know it was was huge right it was it was huge um so yeah i mean i i don’t really know right i don’t i don’t really know i mean i i think that are you know in some sense that’s almost it’s almost too big picture for me right i my my goal is to just communicate to these things as clearly as i can and and let the you know let the chips fall where they may but uh in terms of you know how this is going to play out in the future man it’s really hard to tell i mean i i really do believe though that this corner of the internet right what’s going on in this corner of the internet is you know despite the fact that we’re not getting two million views of video i don’t care i think there’s something really important going on here uh i really do and so i do think it’s going to come to a head at some point um and and have a profound effect on the culture lovely so i do too i really do yeah so i guess yeah that’s that’s it we can go ahead and wrap it up i’ll stop sharing my screen here and yeah well brett let me i’ll also just acknowledge i listened to quite a bit of your uh intimational worldview um i deeply appreciate your sharing your story uh the journey of your own hero’s journey in relationship to the exploration of criticality the experience of that uh and the reorganization of that and living out the hero’s journey and bringing uh your story and your insights to us is really aligned brilliantly i think with the uh mission vision uh articulation of transcendent naturalism so um both at the personal level and at the insight level i’ve deeply appreciated this journey thank you greg and i appreciate you guys having me i’ve enjoyed both of your work as well so been great so i’m just going to thank all of you for hanging in with us uh this series is not done uh there’s more people to come uh we’re going to be doing quite a few episodes and i’ve just wanted to thank everyone once again for your time and attention and thanks again