https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=EKnqvVCH2vM
John Ravecki and Sean Coyne have together authored a new book, Mentoring the Machines. It’s a book about artificial intelligence and the path forward that further develops the arguments of how to align artificial intelligence to human flourishing, and it sets those arguments into beautiful and accessible writing. Welcome everyone to In Other Voices with Ravecki. I’m here again with Ben Holden. This is our third conversation, one on his channel, and this is the second one on my channel. And I’m really looking forward to our conversation. Our last one was really interesting and thought provoking and I really enjoy learning about Ben’s work and what he’s doing and he is going to share with us something that he’s working on right now. So welcome Ben, it’s good to have you here again. Thank you, John. Good to see you again. Yeah, people seem to really appreciate the last conversation. I don’t have much time to read the comments or actually it’s an intentional thing to avoid getting too into the comments you know because you can get addicted to that stuff really easily. Yes. And it’s right off the bat it feels like just a big interesting question of, you know, how do you engage with that because there are some really interesting people commenting, and at the same time not get addicted to those little dopamine hits so I don’t know I’m still figuring out if you got any ideas. Yeah, I wanted to say like the caliber of people that seem to consulate around the communities that you’re helping to curate. It’s pretty, pretty high. And it’s just great to be a part of that, that community of people and, you know, contribute something creative. That’s what I’m working on at the moment. I just released a short story called Tokyo Yokei. This is an urban fantasy set in Japan which I actually had voice acted by a Japanese actor called Noriko Sakura, and we had a really good conversation last night actually and you can, you can see that it’s out now. And she’s a really interesting character. You know, in our last conversation, you mentioned the Kyoto school. Yes. Of philosophers, and how neo Platonism has an influence on these guys. I was speaking to a Japanese person about animism and about her experiences and, you know, she’s an actor right and actors, the good ones are quite porous people that open to the more porous and ordinary individual maybe. And because she’s Japanese she has the Japanese perspective she has the, you know, just kind of background animism. So, so to work with her. And that was really cool. You know she’s, she’s like crouched down in a little home recording studio and a wardrobe, reading these very strange lines that I read, and it was just odd and a brilliant thing to do. And so yeah, that’s just a small contribution it’s like a 40 minute short story something like that little thing but feels good to share something. That’s great. I’m glad that there’s, there’s been some uptake of your work, which is really good, too. Maybe send me the link for that and I can put it in the notes for this video. Yeah, thank you. And but, you know, you asked me just before we started recording what do you want to talk about. And I wasn’t really sure. And I like this not knowing, and I like your style of surrender to what comes up. I don’t really get the deal logo so I’m totally behind that wherever it wants to go. But one idea right was to do something that feels a little bit of a high wire act. And that would be for me to describe some of the ideas that I’m working with on a present longer work, and see if they to critical inquiry from someone like yourself. Not only, not only critical inquiry but you know just that that dialogue. Yeah, that might, well I’m sure it will deepen it I don’t know what will happen, but we could try. Yeah, let’s try. Okay, so this is epic fantasy secondary world fantasy. So, it’s steeped in what Tolkien started, and we spoke about his essay on fairy stories. Yeah, but I want to do something that speaks to where we are today. It’s set in a city, and one of the the tropes that I’m working with is this trope of naming magic. Are you familiar with this. Just the idea of in ancient Egypt like to that names carried with them sort of a magical power power to invoke an entity or give you control over it, but I don’t know very much about that idea. Exactly yeah well that’s where it comes from. Myth and folklore, the, the deep tap roots of of fantasy literature and fantasy sense, it’s outset was working with this idea of naming magic, which it borrows from ancient method different cultures and people seem to have different takes on it. But one idea is that if you can name something, then you can have power over it. Sometimes that’s sort of as far as it goes like you know, the seminal work by Urshula Le Guin, the, the tales of Earthsea. She’s working with naming magic and many others have done it as well. But I want to inflect it and maybe draw on some of the stuff that I’ve learned from, from you actually and other people. And this idea of okay so let’s take, let’s imagine like a mountain or a river or piece of metal or even a person an animal. If you could know its name, what would know in its true name, its true name. So something to do with this essence right and maybe that links to its platonic form, maybe. But what seems odd to me is that whatever it is. Like if it’s a mountain or a river or an animal or some metal. Its name would be inflected by its specificity of its, of its local character. Right. So in this story that I’m working on, you have cotteries of name seekers who intensely study a specific terrain or a specific phenomenon or animal or, or vein of metal. And you’ll have them living under the ground for several years, coming to know it in like deep intensity and familiarity. They have to know it, not just intellectually, but they really have to know it as a presence. And it’s that specific vein of star iron, or it’s that specific river, that specific part of that specific river that has its unique character that’s different to a river, you know, on the other side of the country, which may have a different name. So, just that to begin with. I’m sure that brings up some some thoughts and ideas for you and I’m wondering what those are. Well, I mean, you’re bumping into a classic philosophical ontological problem, which was the relationship between the form and the specific identity. This came to a particular head in the Middle Ages. And the problem you get is you get a kind of nonconceptuality at both ends. So when you try and get the form of something, like if I asked you what the form of a bird is, it’s the complete through line that gives a structural functional organization of all the ways a bird can be. And that borders on, you know, something that you can’t put into words that’s ineffable. And then when I move out of that, and I try and pick up on, yeah, but what makes this this bird. This is the Buddhist notion of suchness. It’s also something that of course by its very definition or non definition can’t fit into a category, because it’s what makes it not a member of a category but uniquely itself. And then you get in, you get the also something you get this tension between these two. I often talk about the moreness and the suchness of a thing. And what’s really interesting also is you have things like current objective oriented ontology, and they resist what they call undermining and overmining, trying to reduce something to all of its connections or trying to reduce the something just to all of its parts. And so you get this, you get this not weird, you get this wonderful idea of a thing as this nexus of this convergence down all the form. And yet this expression, this pure emergence of its unique suchness, and it causes you to see even ordinary mundane objects as quite wonderful provoking of wonder and reflection and awe, and we realize how far we are away from truly knowing them, or in your case, truly naming them. And the interesting thing about names is they hover between those two common names push us towards the category and proper names push us towards the unique individual. And so, could you give an example of that? Yeah, so a common name, right is dog. Dog tells you that it’s part of this particular being belongs to the category dog. But the, this, the, like, John refers to this specific individual, and John does, and this was important work done by Kripke. Proper names have no description attached to them. They’re pure pointers. They’re trying to just point out that, that, that there, right? Pure demonstrative reference, John, right? Because that same name can apply to somebody else as a very different description. And yet, and all it does is point to that individual uniquely. So proper names really put you down to, right, the here now suchness, uniqueness of the thing, and the common names. So John is a man, right? So somehow there’s this, right? There’s this categorical membership that puts me into this whole network of things and possibilities. And then there is the proper name that picks up my unique. Naming is really, really interesting that way because the two kinds of names push us in the different directions. Those are the things that come immediately to mind. And to add to that, you could think of naming as something that’s, as William Blake might call, Eurozenic. It’s cutting away this from the mystery of pure experience into a category, or you could take the poetic view, and poets name things. Yes. But they name them beautifully and precisely, and sometimes unusually. To break that we were talking about last time, things become familiar quickly for some reason, for many reasons. And so the the numerosity of a particular thing, it can presence itself to you if it’s named in a certain way differently, and poets are very good at this. Well, but this also brings up something else. I mean, this brings up the difference between what’s being said and what’s being conveyed. So I’m using words like more and moreness and suchness, but they’re actually conveying something that can’t actually be said. And so now we get words that don’t represent, they gesture towards something that can’t be brought into full speech or full conception. And so I take it that there’s also that aspect that goes into naming, and we forget this. Just think about what it what it means to say that something is a dog. You’re saying that somehow that being there shares an identity with beings in other places, and that relationship is not a causal relationship and it’s somehow outside of specific time and space because it binds entities in different times and places together. And when tempted, oh well it’s just abstract, but that doesn’t solve the problem of, you can be anomalous and say it’s just in the mind, but then the problem is, but yet I can make inferences from one dog to another dog, which is a fact. It’s not just a way of talking or speaking, and science presupposes that. And science presupposes these, like when it’s force equals mass times acceleration, it’s saying that all of these different things can be categorized in this sort of non-temporal spatial way, because where is force equals mass times acceleration? It’s everywhere and nowhere, right? And so you’re caught into these really interesting things if you just stop. But this is what good philosophy does. Good philosophy makes the familiar unfamiliar again in a way so that you are generally genuinely open to the possibility of really relearning it, not just learning more facts about it, but really relearning it in a profound way. Great, so let’s take it a bit further then. The reason why in the story that these name seekers are trying to find the hidden names of particular veins of iron or rivers is because with it, they’re able to force out the spirit that’s hiding within that piece of matter into a form, into an animal form. And once they’ve done that, they can then kill it, take its organs out, and then use it in some kind of dark alchemy for the good of the country’s economy and the people. So, for example, there’s a particular mountain near the city of Osterfold where the story is set, and there’s a coterie of magicians that have been down there for years, intensely studying a vein of iron that they believe has its origins in a particular comet, a meteor. So, it’s linked to the stars, and they found that once they gleaned what they believe is its true name, they can create like a word that speaks that. And I feel like this is more, it’s like a symbol, an emblem, not because alphabetic language in the West is more abstracted than say kanji in Japan is. So whatever that emblem is, it needs to be something like you can feel it’s like glowing with power, not just a word, it’s like a heightened word. In an image. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the first step. There’s more, but do you want to comment on that bit first? Well, no, that just reminds me of how in science, we’ve done a similar kind of translation. The platonic notion of the form has often been translated into formulas, where formulas are names that try to disclose the structure of the thing, and thereby explain how you can predict its functionality. So, water’s formula is H2O, which tells you it’s made up of, you know, two hydrogen and an oxygen, which means it has this particular shape, which means you can make all kinds of predictions about how it’s going to perform, what you can find inside of it, what it can and cannot do. So, it seems like you’re just doing something analogous in the fictional magic that’s being done in science, where we try, we try to create formulas, which are names, right? H2O is a name for water, but it’s a different kind of name. It’s a name that tries to disclose the structural functional organization of the thing and thereby explain why it behaves the way it behaves. Great, yeah, this is where the nuance comes in, because if you get a particular group of magicians that are taking that approach, which is a more abstracted approach, then the creature that they force, the spirit hiding within that matter, the creature that they force it to become, will be sort of distorted. You know, they might think it’s the true form of that hidden spirit within the matter, but it may not be at all. So, perhaps it depends on your depth and quality of relationship. And I think of Emma Gilchrist’s, like, four ways to know something deeply, to come to truth of science is one, intuition, imagination, and reason. And so, I can imagine within this world you would have different conflicting ideologies and schools of magic that have different takes on it. Right, right, right, right, different ways of naming. I like the idea that it’s emblematic, that it’s also graphic, and the graphic aspect of it is contributing to its meaning rather than being arbitrary, like the way our alphabet is to us. That’s very cool. Mm hmm. Yeah, right. You like this then. So, the next step, once they’ve found that emblem, whatever it is, they will etch that or emboss it onto the striking face of something called a naming hammer. And this is this enormous metal power hammer, like, about 12 foot tall. And you’ve got to imagine, like, let’s say they’re working with, they’re trying to summon the hidden spirit of star iron, right? So, what they’ll do is, once they believe they’ve gleaned its hidden name, they will have that embossed onto the underside of this naming hammer, but they’ll also mine some of this iron. And they’ll melt it down, and it will be poured into a crucible that gathers underneath the striking face of this enormous power hammer that holds that metal’s true name as they see it. Right. And it’s crashing down, and as it, like, slams its true name into itself, that’s when the hidden animal form is forced out and revealed. And that’s a very dangerous moment because they don’t know what it’s going to do. Maybe they have to contain or kill it quickly somehow, but maybe it’s difficult to kill. Still working on some of these ideas, but I mean, there’s quite a lot of philosophical implications or implicit ideas about nature there, and about, you know, ontology and epistemology. Does it spark anything off? Do you like it? Do you go, hmm, but what about this? What do you, how do you react? Oh, I get a bunch of associations. I mean, first of all, I get the associations from Shinto of ringing the bells or clapping the hands to try and, right, create that moment of sudden salience that calls out the spirit. And of course, those moments of sudden salience are designed to wake up, spirit, call something forth, make it sound out to us. And you’re doing that. And then I’m thinking, right, I got the idea, you know, of Aristotle’s notion of the form being imposed on the matter and actualizing it in a particular way. So, you know, if I put this form into the wood, it becomes a table. If I put this form into the wood, it becomes a chair or something else, right? And so the form is what actualizes the potential. And then lastly, I got the idea that we like we, we, we still have that idea of smashing things together in order to reveal their true nature. Of course, physics does these huge colliders in which we smash things together in hopes that we will release hitherto hidden information about the thing. Yeah, right. Something about the forceful impact seemed to make sense there. Yeah. I like, I’m sorry, shoot. I just, I’m just, I’m just being really impressed by the creative process here, the way, like, I’m getting a sense that, you know, great or good fantasy, the way magic is being portrayed is actually capturing a lot of these philosophical and scientific resonances, and then putting them into the form. And then putting them into a different reorientation so they can be recovered, to use Tolkien’s term that we like we like. I can imagine, I can imagine the opposite. People in that universe, and they do fiction, and our science would appear to them as the magic, you know, you want, there’s a symmetry relation between our world and a possible world that seems to be a good way of seeing that you’ve got a good, good fantasy, a good fantastic world going. Did that make any sense? I’m just, I’m really just spinning this off the top of my head and in response to, I’m thinking aloud with you. Yeah, good. No, it makes me think of what Ursula Le Guin said, which is, you got to be very careful about what you do with magic in your fantasy world because you need to know what you’re saying about how the world works. And I feel like within fantasy literature, there’s almost, you can feel the ancient battle of ideas. You can feel the mechanistic philosophy and the fantasy writers today who use magic as a metaphor for domination and control, and those that lean more toward the numinous end, and they want to evoke awe and mystery and reverence for the world, they want to do something different, but then you can overlap them as well. And some people think magic has to have rules and then it becomes mechanical like engineering magic. Other people want it to be mysterious and some people are trying to overlap it in different ways and how you do that, how it works, and how people relate to it, how it influences aspects of ordinary life and culture. These are all things that you’re saying about the world. You know, I think the world is like this. So I am trying to take her advice and be careful about what I’m saying, which is the motivation behind making myself, these ideas that are just being formed really, vulnerable to you, your mind. Well, I mean, I like the way you’re invoking, like, as you said, philosophies, epistemologies, ontologies. That’s very good. Yeah, I’m really intrigued in this, the power of this kind of literature to wake people up. To philosophical question, or even just philosophical wonder and again, I don’t mean philosophy in the technical sense. I mean, in that sense of wanting to come into Ratio Religio deep right relationship with the reality of things. Anyways, please continue. Okay, great. So, Yeah, within the kind of the mainstream society of this world, you know, you can imagine a fantasy world going through an industrial revolution, except the industry is steeped in this kind of magic. This dark alchemy is what they create a lot of their technologies out of. For example, one one technology they have are these, these engines that are similar to steam engines but they, they are sympathetically linked to the passage of seasonal meteor showers. So, so for example, I mentioned the star iron that they mine. They, they force these, these withering like creatures called draconids from the interiority of this metal. And with their hearts. They, they, they calcify that the hearts and they combine them with with sand and soda ash and they create a kind of glass, these glass orbs form a part of these engines. And when particular meteor showers pass over the country. These orbs respond, they do things they they heat up they would probably do more than heat up if they were allowed, but they’ve just created a utility out of that. And so, what you what you have is, I’m trying to create an economy and a set of technologies And I think to the ecology, and the ecology of the stars and the cosmos. This idea of an ecology of the cosmos and the cosmos as some kind of dynamic living animal is something that I’m really, really interested in. And I know it has roots in in in Platonism, and is very strong in in William Blake, and I just feel lit up by that the idea, you know, and this is a slight tangent now but just to give you a deeper sense of it. There are certain beetles, many animals actually but there are certain beetles dung beetles. They can navigate by starlight. They have two pairs of eyes they have one pair of eyes which sees the ground, and they have another pair of eyes that can perceive starlight very precisely so this was a mystery of how the hell do they do they get their balls of shit, all the way back to their holes, and they’re quite far away, and a fairly straight line, because they have to like, put their head down to the ground and push with their back legs so they’re doing a sort of little handstand. And it’s this other sort of the pair of eyes that’s perceiving the stars, the relationship between the stars so they know which way to go. They’re navigating by starlight. Anyway, that’s just a little, a little link between an animal and the stars, but you could take the essence of that and you could amplify it and go deeper with it and that’s that’s sort of what I want to do. So this this idea of, of the engines that this particular nation uses a link to the passage of meteor showers they don’t know why, maybe it’s got something to do with the origins of that iron in a particular meteor because don’t know if you know, I mean, I think it’s a good one that the meteor showers that visit us like the Leonids the Perseids the German it’s, they come at the same time of year, and they are linked to particular comments that they’re there. And they’re beside the, the trail of certain comments. So, there are these celestial visitors. Right. And they come, you know, on a regular basis, pass pass by and I find that really interesting and a way into this idea of a, of a dynamic living cosmos that’s not only contained within within the planet but it’s, it’s trying to it’s trying to expand and deepen the sense of of ecological thoughts and the ecological thought of the heart, to use Hillman’s phrase in out into the, the cosmos as well, to include those, those celestial presences and have a, you know, I mean, because a lot of time with with people in the ecology movement or nature lovers. Often it’s contained within to the forest or right right to Gaia, but there’s a lot of of influence, you know, there’s a lot of exchange. I think, I think our system scientists would say it’s fairly one way, it’s, it’s like it’s more like things are coming into the planet like meteors starlight this sort of stuff, but the planet is not giving back out into the cosmos. You know, I don’t know about that I’m still, I’m still researching but that’s what I’ve heard some system scientists say when they’re talking about is the planet, a living system or not, that being one of the criteria I want it to be though. So this is where I could be deluded and caught in my own illusions, you know. Well, a couple things come to mind, they’ve just made a camera, based on what they’ve been able to figure out from phyllobites from the fossils, and the similar thing two sets of eyes, one for down and one for up very precise. Again, so that pattern. Evolution has kept finding that pattern of, of sort of two sets of eyes. When you’re doing touch each one, you have two sets of eyes. You have eyes looking out, which are the visible eyes, and then you have eyes looking in which are the. And there’s two eyes, there’s your introspective and your introspective eye looking into your mind is interception and looking into your body. Sorry, it’s introspection and looking into your body is interception. And so you’ve got the like stereoscopic vision you’re looking into your mind, introspection looking into your body interception and then you have your two eyes looking out, left and right to give you depth. And so you’re trying to get a depth this way and a depth this way and then a depth between them. And that’s the kind of awareness you’re trying to build. And so this idea of opening up multiple sets of eyes. I think if you could bring them a little bit more to the surface. I don’t think that’s just an example I think that’s an exemplary pattern, and there might be something in the relationship between the orbs and the meteorites that are picking up on difference, you know the coordination of different sets of eyes, right, external and internalize or something like that, because that would that would also. I mean, I am a strong advocate that some of the, you know, some of the science that should go into science fiction I know it’s not science fiction but I’m just saying, some of it should be cogs I as opposed to physics or chemistry, and I think the same thing could be the case also for fantasy. Well, you know when people when human beings are really trying to get really powerfully connected so they can pick up on the nuance and the complexity and flow with it like in Tai Chi Chuan, and write other martial practices. They cultivate these into these two is into. Inter-penetrating and inter affording sets of eyes. I just think they’ve. I don’t think that’s just an example of what you’re talking about I mean that might be more of a more general pattern and it might help to enrich the correspondence that you’ve been talking about between the orbs and the meteorites it’s just a suggestion. I think Tom Cheatham about this and about the idea of kind of alchemists on glass makers being able to make different lenses, a change of perception. And you know that makes me think of, I’ve done quite a bit of filmmaking and photography, as well as, you know, deeper like vision Right. It’s amazing. It’s amazing how one eye helps the other. Yes. Yes. And yeah, being able to have different lenses. It makes me think of the what what Keith said, we’re lived by was it Hillman will live by powers we pretend to understand, you know, this is a You know, this is a, yeah, that psychological viewpoint. And if you, if you don’t know, but Hillman says ideas that you don’t know you have those ideas have you. That’s another way of saying, we’re lived by powers we pretend to understand. I think of some convergent from the panache ads, which it’s not anything that the eye can see but the power by which the eye can see that is divine, which is again, again, this different this different way we wait so there’s yeah there’s the outward. There’s the outward aspect of site, but there’s also there’s also this inward aspect the mysterious aspect, the, the, the non site that makes site possible. And that of course was a big theme in in Nishitani’s work, how at the essence of everything is an otherness. The one thing fire doesn’t burn is itself right the one thing that water can’t make wet is itself and the one thing the eye can’t see is itself. And this kind of otherness within identity. You could also be playing with that with the with your with the mythology of your world. It’s very fascinating how you can start to do a lot of serious play with all of this and get people. It’s interesting. I’m really trying to zero like you get them sort of the adjacent possible so they get the taste and the texture of this way of thinking, and then it becomes more easily transposed. Into this world it’s like a like like like like the way a good ritual works right a ritual has to be different but adjacently possible so that transfers well. Fascinating about that human beings do this kind of stuff. Feels quite dangerous doing this now what we’re doing because if you’re too like Murakami you know the writer Haruki Murakami he he’s in the same situation. If you’re too like Murakami you know the writer Haruki Murakami he says something really kind of ridiculous but very interesting to entertain he said, if you’re too intelligent, then you’re going to have trouble writing novels. Too intelligent, and what I take that to mean is like Da Vinci said something like too much intellectual dries out sensuality, and you need you need the like the passion of the senses for imagination. The most important thing with a fantasy novel especially numinous fantasy is that the reader just goes at some point when they’re reading. Oh, that’s just so fucking cool. And for me, you know, there are different ways to inflex that so fucking cool, but it’s, it’s all it’s just so fucking awesome. It’s that they they’ve, they get the chills. And you say, reverence is the virtue of war and that’s what it’s about. Yes, when we’re doing this I’m like, all right. Stay loose, stay light you know you got to play with these ideas and don’t get caught by them. William Blake’s been helping with that in two ways one in in staying loose. And two, I think I’m just going to steal his urizen, you know, his mythology, there’s no point trying to reinvent the wheel there, I’m going to riff on what he’s doing. Cool. He, he, he’s taking this. This thing that’s that’s kind of ruling the world at the moment that McGill Chris talks about as the god of know the, the high functioning bureaucrat that is in control of the world. Yeah, the left hemisphere. And there’s this book called the god of the left hemisphere by, I think a colleague of McGill Christ’s, who is drawing parallels between cognitive science and Jill bolt Taylor, I guess you know her. Of course. You probably know her personally. Personally, but I know of her work. Yeah, yeah, and and Blake’s insights and mythology and work, yourism, as the god your reason. Yeah, also horizon. The way that the world that we live in is pretty well completely dominated by yourism. Would you say, would you agree or not. I think yeah, in so far as it’s dominated by the tyranny of the propositional. Yes. And trying to see the world as a formal system. And the only problems that we have to encounter a well defined problems. Yes. What of course, there’s ways in which the world is not ruled by that. Because the reality of that not being true, of course, slams us in the face periodically. Periodically, like you, Kobe, it comes out of nowhere and disrupts everything. And our, our, our, our machinery that we thought would run forever. You know, it’s still not properly functioning, because of the way it got slammed in an unpredictable unexpected way. Yeah, I think our. I want to, I want to say that what you said is true, but there’s a, it’s tragic in the sense that it’s ultimately ultimately. Even more than that, there’s a sense in our culture. Of a barely suppressed anxiety. Because in some way, we know that that. God that you’re naming just to pick up on some of your themes. Is a Demiurge if I was to be a little bit Gnostic, it’s not really, really how things run. And then what we do. In order to try and address that. Anxiety is we pivot and we go to the other extreme. And, and this, this is, you know, this is one of froms point and then we, and then we pursue a kind of destructiveness. And we become in love with the capacity to destroy and wreak havoc and be a troll and all kinds of things, because that’s the only way. Like it, like, just give me one more moment on this. Like you have, you have this. You know, all it can be is this machine and then it’s not real. And then the opposite has to be something that’s totally like totally. Non intelligible, pure chaotic, pure destruction, pure loss of form. And I see our culture actually vacillating between these two things in a powerful way. We have, we’re think, look at, look at our popular art now. And how. Fascinated it is. With dark and nihilistic and destruction and the whole hermeneutics of suspicion and right and right. And then you have to put that that it’s like, it’s like the shadow side of the official vision of progress and the well functioning bureaucracy that will make the world completely safe and predictable. So I actually see our culture constantly vacillating between these two. Sorry, that took a bit. I wanted to make something clear. No, it’s good. I want to respond to that. But I also want to fire another idea from the story at you. And I think I will do that. Because what’s going on in the story is there are a small group of people that are trying to catalyze a kind of magical Renaissance. And I’m drawing on Florence here. The late 1400s. Right. Where they were trying to resuscitate elements of kind of pagan animism and neo Platonism pouring into the city at that time. That’s super interesting. It’s so enlivening, you know, these guys, magicians like Da Vinci were part of for chinos. I like to imagine it magic school, Neoplatonic Academy and scholars are kind of debating the nuances of this but basically something was going on there. And so if the culture at large in this world is predominantly Euro Xenic, you know, dominated by the God of the left hemisphere and utilitarian and reductionist and weaponizing an economy focused for some good reasons as well. For some like reasons that you could get behind that to do with pulling people out of poverty. So not black and white. But at the same time, I’m imagining a kind of a confederacy of city states in the mountains in the north of this country, where something’s brewing like it was in Florence at that time. And they’re trying to make it happen. And there’s a little window, perhaps like there is now to do something to to transform the culture. So, so, being up against it though being being like a lot of the time in fantasy, especially in the past it’s been saved the entire universe from the dark Lord God whatever. I like the idea that that’s not even on the cards at all. They’ve already won the world’s entirely dominated by, by by the forces of capitalism, tourism, etc. And so, you know, you win the heroes win if they just somehow managed to live a soulful life. They’re not gonna, they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna completely transform the entire world and live happily ever after. But it feels like we’re in such a dark unpredictable time now that we’re in our lives, when it’s kind of a weird word. Yeah, to live well, I feel like I can get to, if I get to my, my deathbed, whenever that is. My question will be, did you, did you go for it. Were you, were you a champion of soul psyche, did you try and do what you could to, to help some sort of Renaissance of of soul making and culture. You know, one, one has a deeper quality of connection between people and, and the rest of the world. So that’s, that’s why I want these, these characters to be well at least some of them. You know, if they can contribute even a little bit to that, then they’ve, they’ve, they’ve done their jobs. So, there’s more to say but any, any reactions on that, John? I think, I mean I’m biased but I mean I think you’re bringing in the meeting crisis into your story. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and they’re and you’re using fantasy as a way of trying to get a message across about insolent, you know, Socratic self-knowledge, being more attuned to the ligaments of reality, people falling in love again with the world. I think that those are very powerful themes you’re bringing in. And I, and then I see that the, I mean it’s, it’s not dramatic irony but it’s like dramatic irony in that your book is actually in the real world, exemplifying what’s going on within the story, within the fantasy world. You’re hoping that the book has that, your story, right, or book, whatever it turns out to be, right, has that capacity to help people in our world wake up to the possibilities of insolent, of being, you know, getting more properly attuned, leading lives in which they feel connected to things that they want to exist even if they don’t exist. Yeah, I think that’s very, very powerful. I guess the thing is, and this is what I find is a hallmark of great writing. How do I want to say this? Give me a sec. You can’t, you can’t do what we’ve done. You can’t, you can’t lay out the theory in this sort of right propositional descriptive, I mean you have to somehow get people to exemplify it and show it and demonstrate it. And without ever telling it. I mean they may see a little bit of theory here or there but right, I guess then the trick, the trick, that’s the wrong word, the key thing to do is to write this such that it’s, it’s exemplified as opposed to explained. Does that make sense what I’m saying? Yeah, you have to cast a spell. Yeah, oh I see. Or the spell that you cast needs to be one to do with waking up. See, so you’re not entering deeper into the illusion of fantasy wonderland. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that, see, I like the way you do this, how you move seamlessly between talking in the fantasy world and then using the magical language to talk about the work that you’re actually doing with the fiction. I think that’s really, really interesting and powerful. So they, to use a term you’ve, right, the term you used before, they bleed into each other. Right, in a really powerful way for you. Is that, am I saying something that’s landing for you? Yes, 100%. So, what’s that, what does that, and I don’t want to do what, like, I don’t want to do analysis but you know paralysis by analysis or vivisection to kill the life. But, so, you know, I’m trying to be, I want to be dialogical about that but what’s that like, you know, what is that, what I’m trying to get, what’s that, what’s that, what’s the phenomenology of it and how does it, how do you experience it and how does it translate into you, yourself waking up? As a reader or a writer? As a writer. The way, the way you’re bleeding between these two worlds. You said you said that was 100% and thank you for that. And then, what I want to know is what does that, I want you to give a lot more meaning to this word than it’s usually given. What does that feel like? What does that feel like? To have that, how does it, how does it, how does it impact your thinking and your perception? Well, in a way the goal is, is the bleed, as you call it. Yeah. You’re not disappearing into a meaningless fantasy wonderland that’s pure illusion and is the opposite to waking up, it’s falling asleep. Yeah. It’s more, it’s more, you’re waking up to the, the intrinsic awe, which includes beauty and terror of nature and life and your own, your own part in the story. So that’s, that’s the goal. And because that’s difficult to do, it makes the work very difficult. And so often it’s, it’s a struggle to get to the bleed. But you have it as like a, like a guiding star, and then you’re going, okay, like you were saying before, if you’re going to lay out the theory in a story, you’ve just killed the story. Yeah, for sure. You can’t do that. You’ve just written a shit or a mediocre story. And so, sometimes I work direct from, from dreams and images and sometimes I work from ideas as well. And when I’m working from ideas, I’ll go, okay, how can I take this, this philosophical idea that I’m interested in Shinto or Neo Platonism, or whatever, and, and kind of like, dress it in different clothing, or, or, or how can that idea meet the uniqueness of my imagination in a way that it becomes something that excites me when I think about it. And then it’s probably like personification is absolutely crucial, I think. personifying ideas as characters. So ideas should be characters. And then they should be trouble. Those characters should be troubled and incorrect. And in conflict with each other. I mean, this is a common thing that writers talk about conflicts, the heart of story and Le Guin for one was not into that reductionist simplistic idea of that’s what’s stories about that’s the only thing stories really about conflict she didn’t like that. But it is important. And so, you know Shakespeare did that a lot, he would have characters embodying certain worldviews or ideas and set against each other, you know, quite, quite precisely you know, like, like, like a composer. Might have an idea for one part of the music that’s informed by part that she just came up with. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking when you said that I was immediately thinking of Brutus and Cassius and Julius Caesar, and how, if they could just properly integrate they could avoid the tragedy that is going to befall them. And so, that’s because they’re so different from each other but they form this friendship, and then they’re right and the, you know, the Buddhist is this, you know, stoic and then Cassius is basically just, you know, an impulsive, immoral person. And they’re, and they’re, and they’re, and they’re doing this thing. And it’s a race to see if they can properly integrate before tragedy befalls them. And of course they don’t. But that’s what for me gives that story this powerful momentum. And so, I’m just using that as an example of what you said about how Shakespeare did this great thing about, you know, ideas and worldviews and viewpoints become characters and the relationship between them, the dramatic relationship between them also is playing out. There’s a nice, there’s a nice play on words there is playing out. You know, the relationship, the whole set of relationships between the worldviews and the positions. It’s really, it’s really, I’m really fascinated by all of this because I’m really fascinated about the connections between drama and ritual. Victor Turner made that famous, right. From ritual to theater. And then how that then translates into fiction. This is what I’m trying to get at. I’m trying to, I’m trying to get at. Your, your answer is good. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not dismissing it but I’m trying to get at how like what are you noticing different in you, like, like, see you’ve written, you’ve, you’ve, you’re writing or you’ve written a story with really good bleed. What’s like what what do you find yourself doing in your life, or thinking, or how you’re interacting with other people that’s different how does it transform you, because that would be true bleed. Right. It wouldn’t just be the, just the, you know, a sensation or an experience it would be an actual transfer. Did that make sense as a question. Yes. I have to say that at this point. I haven’t done it yet. Oh, I’m a journeyman at best. I spent a long time learning the craft, but I haven’t really put put some short stories and book of poems and essays out there but you know, the novel, a longer story, I haven’t done yet. In fact, I’ve been working on it a long time in different ways and it’s very difficult for it to match your own internal ambitions. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, in the past, all the millions of words that I’ve written, and just sort of burned. I see that as practice. Now only just now I’ve got the skills and practice necessary to to do something half decent. And, and you know, if it’s decent. If it if I think it’s decent. And it’s come close to me in my own internal standards, then that will be an enormous relief. That will be a transformative moment in my life, and some kind of bleed will have occurred. When it does, then I’ll be able to tell you but right now. Yeah, I’m still cooking. So, fair answer. Good answer. It’s right now it’s still a proper part of your sort of Socratic aspiration. I get that. That’s, that’s excellent. Well, yes. Do I have time for one more question. Yes, yes, you do. Okay, great. I wanted to ask you about this right. So, I mentioned before this idea of the cosmos as like a living animal. This was almost a normal idea in certain cultures, even set certain cultures today. But in Renaissance Florence, that circle of Neoplatonists and artists, scientists of their day. I think they had the idea, you know, and the experience of the stars and the night sky was completely vivid and alive and imagination and matter were interpenetrated much more than they are now. They don’t have to caveat everything like we do philosophically. I just wonder john. There is, there are certain people that would dismiss the idea and say it’s hocus pocus. The idea of the cosmos as somehow sentient. What do you think. Well, first of all, let me answer it. Historically. One of the things I do when I talk about this period. This is work, this what I’m saying is based on work by Mark Taylor is we tend to tell the story of the scientific revolution of the Aristotelian versus the Cartesians. Here’s the math. Here’s the mathematical science versus the non mathematical science and Aristotle loses and Descartes. And of course, after Descartes Newton and Descartes wins. And that’s sort of the official story. You have to understand how Cartesian we now think science is we think of science as math and graph. There’s no graphing there’s no math and Aristotelian science. So they cart wins in a very profound way. But there was actually a third contender. There were the neoplatonic magicians using magic in the way you’re talking about it here. And what’s really interesting is they had a very different view from both Aristotelian and the Cartesians. The Aristotelians think of matter as pure potential. And then the big revolution with Descartes is no matter is a real thing and it’s pure extension. But it’s inert and emotion it inertial motion motion is inert. And whereas in Aristotle, it’s things are driven by an internal drive. And so the right but the the the neoplatonic magicians emphasize that matter isn’t inert, that it’s, it’s real, it’s not just it’s it’s actual, but it’s self organizing and dynamic. And there, there is the possibility of action at a distance things don’t have to be touching each other in order to affect each other. And that life represents a different way in which matter can exist. That isn’t the same as how it exists outside. Now, both the Aristotelian Catholic Church and the car and the Cartesians agreed in rejecting that and so what happens is actually a significant chunk of the Catholic Church abandons Thomism and sides with Descartes in order to form an alliance against the The neoplatonic magicians, because if self organization is really deeply possible, then you don’t need God as a creator. And if action that is a distance or pause is possible, then miracles aren’t anything special. So they saw the neoplatonic thing as way more threatening to Christianity than the Cartesian view the Cartesian view that has given us the well functioning bureaucrat as the model of how reality unfolds. So, what’s interesting is, there’s an important way in which I would argue that the neoplatonic magicians are right but way ahead of the time. And I now think of this self organization and entanglement and action at a distance and the curvature of space and real relationships and real affordances and life having the capacity to evolve. And I say all of those things of the three contenders, all of those things fit much cleaner in the neoplatonic magician framework than they do in either the to mystic Aristotelian or the Cartesian Newtonian framework. So, there’s a sense in which, if you’ll allow me, I want to stop saying that it’s neoplatonic magic because it was labeled as magic, precisely as a way of trying to dismiss it to the realms of the irrational and the evil. Right. And I know you don’t use the word that way but I tried and say, let’s just call it the neoplatonic philosophy of that time. So that’s my historical, my historical answer. What did what lesson do I learn from that about now. First of all, I take seriously and respect people like Bernardo Castro who thinks, something like absolute idealism is true. Right. Or other similar things. I don’t agree, but I don’t think that what he’s doing is crackpot or lunacy or anything like that I think it’s a position that is is very thought provoking for me makes me reformulate some of my ideas in a key way, and a position I respect especially as he articulates it. Now all of that being said, and the fact that I’m deeply influenced by Whitehead, who has an organic metaphor reality. If you’ll allow me to use though right sort of a white head Ian framework as a way and Whitehead saw himself as a as a neoplatonist all the philosophies just footnotes to play though. I think a neoplatonic Whitehead Ian view of the cosmos is one that I fundamentally agree with. I think, asking that question in. And here’s where I want to be really careful, and I hope you’ll be charitable to me. I think asking that question in terms of whether or not the universe is sentient or conscious is asking that question from our Cartesian framework, rather than genuinely moving to a place outside of that framework and beyond that framework that is more like what the neoplatonic philosophers are saying depends on your understanding of the word sentience. Yes, it does. But in response to what you just said, I would say that the most pervasive understanding of the word sentience is precisely a Cartesian one in our world now. And the same thing with consciousness. And so I don’t use those words because I think it’s an uphill battle to try and get people to really fundamentally reuse those words. And so this, this often happens and across purposes, people will say something like, I think the universe is a consciousness. And then I’ll say, oh, well, this is what we mean in by consciousness we mean this interior subjective experience, blah blah blah and they’ll go oh that’s not what I mean by consciousness And then I’ll go, okay, then what you’re saying goes from sounding really provocative to being completely obscure, because now you have to tell me what you mean and then what will happen is, it’ll be consciousness ends up meaning something like sort of the fact that reality is in some way profoundly organizing or something like that. And so I’m hesitant, maybe even resistant to using some of those terms, like saying the universe is alive or sentient or conscious. Because I don’t know if we can use those words in a way that is not going to set us at talking across purposes. So I try to come up with different terms. I talk about relevance realization and things like that, that helped to bridge and get us thinking in the way that I think the the philatonic philosophers thought, rather than using the language that I find is too entrapping. Relevance realization that’s like a Trojan horse. Very much, very much and and Heidegger is doing the same thing. Right Heidegger is trying to replace the language of subjectivity and objectivity with Dasein and Mitzine and being in the world and like, and all of those, those, those sound more mystical relevance realization sounds more technical and therefore more palatable to the Cartesian mindset. It is, it is because it, but what, but, but I mean here’s the hope, I mean, it is palatable to the Cartesian mindset, but nevertheless the experience of relevance is well, no pun intended, deeply relevant to people. And it does reach them at the core of their life and then you can, and there is something mysterious about it is like, why are you finding this relevant and not that. And so I think relevance deeply connects to meaning in life and religio and connectedness, which is something we’ve been talking about. So yeah, it’s, I, you might have thought intended as a compliment but I’ll take it as a compliment. I think relevance realization is a Trojan horse that allows us to actually cause the fall of Troy. Great, I love it. I love it, John. I mean, this is why I’m so into like you and McGill, Chris and Alfred North Whitehead, David Abram, you know, it’s like I’m taking this idea of the entire intelligence and consciousness is inside our schools and expanding and deepening that and softening the boundaries between us and the more than human cosmos. Excellent. Excellent. Oh my friend I’d like, I always like to give my guests the last word. I think I just had it. Okay. Thank you, john really appreciate it. Pleasure. Thank you so much, Ben, it was a great pleasure.