https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=vazO36OnGKI
This brings us to the conference’s main event. Encountering John Verbeke’s work changed my life. I have been toiling away at a system that worked to achieve what Ed E.O. Wilson had failed to do, which was build an effective bridge from physics and biology through psychology into the social sciences and humanities. When I listened to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, I realized there was a fellow traveler who had also climbed the mountain and saw how to achieve a synoptic integration. John’s neoplatonic 4E cognitive science vision is absolutely brilliant, and we have shown in our various cognitive science show series that our perspectives fit together like hand in glove. Indeed, I would venture to say that the knitting together of our views represents the best example of a meta theory arc achieved to date. I think the combination of our views connected with various visionary leaders assembled here today enables to give our hope that major advances are occurring in achieving conciliance. And so now it is my great pleasure to introduce someone who is an important inspiration to so many, someone I’m proud to call my academic hero, someone who is leading the way after Socrates to show us how to get out of the current wisdom family and level up in the 21st century, my good friend and philosophical fellowship, Professor John Verbeke. Thank you, Greg. That was very, I don’t know, I’ll just thank you. I hope I can live up to that. It’s, I, of course, think the same of your work and I am glad we have found each other. So everyone, I’m very happy to be here. I’m going to give a challenging talk. I’m going to say that right up front, because I want to give a talk that tries to get at the nuts and bolts of what we’re going to need for everything else we’re doing. It’s ambitious and this argument is also preliminary to a degree. My hope is that we’ll work it here a bit. That’s what conferences are for. And then I’m going to take it into a series that Greg and I are going to be doing called Transcendent Naturalism. So that’s the state of the talk and that’s the degree of challenge I expect it’s going to confront you with. But I hope that I can lead you successfully and clearly through it and also inspire you to undertake this project with an appropriate kind of confidence. That is the main goal that I’m after. All right. So my core proposal is deep conciliance. The kind of conciliance that would legitimate and afford the cultivation of wisdom is a conciliance between science and spirituality broadly written. And I will propose that that will not be realized until we can make a case for strong transcendence. Greg invoked it a minute ago. We can transcend previous sensibilities. Okay. Until we can make a case for strong transcendence that is developed and defended within purely naturalistic terms. And what do I mean by naturalistic? Naturalism is the claim that we are only allowed to build our explanations, making use of the entities, the laws, et cetera, given to us by the natural sciences. So first thing you should ask is what do you mean by strong transcendence? I mean a transcendence that is more than a psychological process. It’s one that has epistemological and ontological import and impact such that the process of transcendence is not only psychological improvement, perhaps like what you see in Jung, but is also importantly reality disclosing. It discloses reality. It provides to us truths that are otherwise inaccessible to us. Now, in order to do that, I’m going to propose to you a notion of extended naturalism. Current naturalism is you are only allowed to propose things that are derivatively consistent from the results, the entities, et cetera, given to you by the natural sciences. So you can’t, right, you have to do something that’s derived from physics, derived from chemistry, derived from biology. When I propose to you that that is not actually a sufficient account because it is a mistaken view of how explanation works. Yes, explanation does derivation from your premises, but it also has assumptions that ground and make plausible your premises. This is something we’ve discovered. Therefore, we should extend naturalism to not only what is derived from our sciences, but what is consistently assumed by our sciences. Now, I’m going to give you something that is presupposed by all of our science, and it will sound trivial to you, and then I hope to make it clear to you why it is absolutely not trivial. One of the fundamental presuppositions of the natural sciences is that natural science really exists. That’s it. That’s all I’ll need. That’s the fundamental presupposition. Okay, I will argue that strong transcendence is plausible within a purely extended naturalistic framework. So how will I do this? I will do this by providing a convergence of arguments. These arguments will be independent, but they will converge to a shared conclusion, and I will call this a metaconvergence argument. So I will craft a metaconvergent argument to the effect that reality is inherently leveled, and I’ll make clear what I mean by that, but this is in the title of my talk, Leveling Up. I will then argue that there is a metaconvergence argument for the claim that knowing is ultimately a form of conformity, and I will explain what that means. I will then argue that these two metaconvergence arguments fit together so that one has strong transcendence. We will then argue that one has strong transcendence within purely naturalistic terms, namely, you can transcend, and as you do, levels of reality are correspondingly disclosed to you, and you thereby level up, and that is a strong transcendence within purely naturalistic terms, and this is just a way of redoing Plotinus’ core argument for neoplatonism, and if you think neoplatonism cannot ground a deep spirituality, you have not paid attention to the entire history of the West. Okay, so what’s the convergence argument? So I’m going to give you arguments, and then what the conclusion they lead to, and they all lead to this conclusion of leveling, and I’m going to do this in terms of emergence and emanation, and I’ll explain what that means. So the first argument is from Blackowitz, from this book called The Essential Difference Toward a Metaphysics of Emergence. Now, thick book, not going to try and give the whole talk on it, because that would take me hours and hours. I’m going to try and draw one key crucial move that he makes and make it plausible to you. So he’s arguing against what’s called reductionism. Reductionism is the idea is a flat ontology, that any idea we have of levels in ontology is ultimately illusory, and only the bottom level is real, and this is a pervasive view within many scientific communities, and it’s very common in our culture. You’ll hear it in things like love is nothing but chemicals in the brain. The level at which we experience love isn’t real. All that’s real is this lower level of chemicals in the brain, and this, of course, leads to various kinds of nihilisms, etc. Now, Blackowitz makes very clear what you need in order to bring about such a reductive argument. So the reductive argument says that it’s based on this assumption, or maybe a fundamental premise, that what’s real about something is what it shares with other things, how it’s identical to other things. So when a property is in common, the more in common it is, the more it conveys reality. The less in common it is, the less it conveys reality. What do I mean by that concretely? So I have a table, a lake, and a block of gold, and then someone will say they are all made out of matter, and at that level they are all identical, and what makes them real is their materiality. This, of course, is a version of materialism, which is a reductive strategy. All these differences up here don’t matter. They are not what make things real. What makes things real is what is held in common at the bottom. So why would you think this? Well, you might think this, and I believe this is the assumption behind this often unchallenged claim, you think this because as I drop lower down, I can make more generalized results. So if I say something’s a lake, I can draw predictions about sort of other lakes, which isn’t very much of reality. If I say it’s gold, that’s a bit better, I can draw conclusions about gold, but if I say it’s material, then I can make predictions about all kinds of reality. So I get what’s called a generalization, and we like that because it means we can increase the amount of things we can explain. I want you to notice that. What’s legitimating that is the sense of we’re increasing intelligibility, we’re increasing what can be more real. More real means more intelligible, and more intelligible means more generalizable, and more generalizable means that which is held in common by things. This is the core argument under reductionism. Now, there’s a tension in that, and this tension has to do with the fact that we’ve slowly discovered and has become very clear in machine learning that you don’t want pure generalization. It’s not a linear relationship. It’s not just more generalization, more intelligibility. That’s the assumption of reductionism, but there’s actually a generalization discrimination trade-off. It’s not just a generalization of the There’s actually a generalization discrimination trade-off. Discrimination is when the differences between things matter. What does that mean, John? It’s very abstract. Okay, so here’s one prediction. There is stuff near me. That prediction generalizes. I can get so much confirmation of that. Now, compare that to there are books near me. That doesn’t generalize as often, but I actually need that in order to retrieve my books. Discrimination means your generalization isn’t vague, meaning it only fits in a causal manner loosely to a situation. Stuff doesn’t fit me well causally to particular situations. I need discrimination. Another way of thinking about this is generalization picks up on what is the same across context, but discrimination picks up what is specific to a context. It makes you context sensitive, and intelligibility is actually balancing between what’s context general and what’s context specific so that you can causally interact with your environment. An experiment is about trying to get the proper causal interaction with your environment. See, there’s a fundamental mistake at the heart of the reductionist idea. Let me give you an even more concrete example. When I take off my glasses, things blur together. I lose acuity. I lose the differences. This isn’t a better state for me. I can’t interact for me. I can’t interact causally better from this state. I need some differences so that I can actually get the right tradeoff between generalization and discrimination, and what does that give me? The best capacity to make sense of my environment. That tradeoff optimization is actually what puts you into getting the most intelligibility and therefore the most realness. Let me try this another way. These are hard arguments. They’re terrifically abstract, and probably it’s only a twisted philosopher or cognitive scientist like myself that would ever consider them, but let’s try it another way. As I go down reductionism, I get to more and more how things are identical. If I go deep enough in the block of gold and the table, I’ll just get down to quarks, and they’re all identical. Okay. I lose all the real differences, or as Blackwood puts it, all the essential differences. Why is that problematic? Information, and I mean this in the technical scientific sense of information, is a real difference. In order for there to be information, there has to be real probability differences and real alternative differences. For example, if I flip a coin, there’s two real alternatives, heads or tails, and then I get information because I’ve ruled out one alternative. I have a probability distribution, 50-50, that’s real, and then I rule out one of them, one of the alternatives, and that means I have one bit of information. That’s what a bit of information is. When I roll a die, the probability is one in six, real probability, and I rule out five of the alternatives, so there is more information there. Information is essentially difference. It’s real difference. Without real difference, there is no real information. As you go down, you lose real difference, you lose real information, which means you actually lose intelligibility. Okay. Yet realness is actually judged in terms of increasing intelligibility. Okay. We need the essential differences that are constitutive. Information relies on essential difference. The differences are essential to it existing. No differences, it doesn’t exist. Information is an essential difference, and we’re coming to the conclusion, even within physics, that we have to be informational realists, that information is a fundamentally real thing, and it’s because of arguments along the lines I’ve just given you. We need the essential difference within information to exist so that intelligibility is We need the essential difference within information to exist so that intelligibility and therefore knowledge are actually possible. Science, by presuming that natural science exists, you are presuming that real knowledge actually exists. But for real knowledge to actually exist, you need real information to actually exist, which means you can’t have a pure reductionism, a flat ontology. Conclusion is there must be essential differences, which means the differences between lakes, the differences in matter between lakes and tables and blocks of gold make a real difference. That’s what emergence is. That’s emergence, when the differences are real and they really matter to your ontology and your epistemology. The second argument is very tough, tough, tough argument, and I’m relying on the work of my colleague and my student, Emre Alkay, on this. This is two arguments given by Hull in 2017 and 2018, and the reason why they’re tough is they are formal, and I mean this seriously, technically, these are formal mathematical proofs. I’m working with Emre because he’s got the chops to make sure that they are valid and they’re formally, technically legitimate, and the conclusion is they are. Somebody else, another important scientist, Michael Levin, has also done this. So I have gone through it myself as best I can. I can’t find any technical flaws with the formality of the argument. Of course, in any formal argument, you can always challenge the premises, but there’s nothing wrong with the mathematics and the logic. I won’t do that for you because that would just be endless streams of equations and arrows and matrices and axiomatic introduction, and you’ll just look at it and go, I don’t want to be here anymore. So I’m going to just basically try and do this as conceptually as possible. His basic argument is that upper levels have real causal power that cannot be explained by just adding the causal power of the components at the lower level. So a table has causal power above and beyond just adding all the causal power of the atoms within it together. This is especially the case for living things. Okay, so Hull is making use of a technical sense of information like I just gave you, which comes out of Shannon’s information theory, and the information theory is also bound up in Shannon with what’s called a communication channel. A communication channel is a reliable relationship between the sending of a signal, which can be one causal event leading to a chain. It actually is one causal event leads to a chain of events that produces an event out here. That’s how you send a signal. That’s how you set a radio signal. You generate it here, you propagate it out, and then it’s received there. And the important thing is that you need there to be an identity relation between the signal as it’s received, the pattern as it’s received, and the pattern as it was produced. This is the essential problem of information theory. And what Shannon argues, I think nobody challenges this argument, is you don’t get the best communication by trying to get by putting the maximum amount of information through your channel. Why? Why not just completely fill the channel with all the information you possibly could? Because the idea is that as the signal moves, it’s going to degrade, it’s going to be interfered with, it’s going to be polluted. So this is the idea that the signal, you’ll lose signal. You turn on your radio and there’s static. And if the static is too great, it washes away the signal. Why is there static? Because as the radio waves propagate, they’re interfering and having quantum effects with stuff in the atmosphere. So what do you do? And this is really important. You build in redundancy. What you do is you repeat the pattern, right? So a pattern matters, and the pattern allows you to actually recover any degradation in the components, and then you repeat the pattern so that you can get any degradation in the patterns. And you might even chunk that higher. You might have a pattern of the patterns, right? Because the more you do that, the more you build up that you can reconstruct the signal when you get it at the other end. And this is all the stuff we do when you hear people talking about data compression and all kinds of things like that. Okay. Okay. So why is this important? Because what it means, Hull argues, and Levin has found empirical evidence to confirm this. Think about an amoeba. Now, if you’re a reductionist, you say the amoeba isn’t real. All that’s real are the quarks or something at the quantum level. Everything above that isn’t real. It’s just an illusion. It’s just an epiphenomenon. And I’ll come back, phenomenon, I’ll come back to those terms in a minute. Okay. But you see, an amoeba needs to actually hang together. It has to stay together to be a living thing, or it will fall prey to entropy. So it has to do things against entropy. So what it actually means is it has to send signal, which is also a causal relation. So I’ll call it a causal signal from one part of the amoeba to another. And what that means is the amoeba actually needs to be working at a higher level than the quantum level, because it needs to build in patterns of redundancy above and beyond the pure quantum level so that the signal gets through. There wouldn’t actually be a causal relation at the quantum level because we can’t get the signal to properly propagate, because the noise will overwhelm any attempt to send a signal. Now you may say, blah, blah, entanglement, stuff like that. People should stop invoking entanglement as if it’s a magic radio. Entanglement has significantly deep, deep constraints on how and where it can appear. Okay. It’s pretty clear that amoebas are not held together by quantum entanglement. Okay. So what that means is you only have the causation needed to hold an amoeba together by having levels of redundancy, patterning and patterning of patterning and redundancy of patterning all the way up, many levels, so that the signal gets through and the amoeba hangs together. You can’t explain how the amoeba remains alive, hangs together at the quantum level, because you can’t get the communication needed at the quantum level, and this is formally mathematically proved. Okay. So this means that the top-down structure actually makes a difference to the bottom level causation. It makes a real, here it is again, real difference that has an ontological import. There are no living, you can’t explain living things at the bottom level. This idea that the structure really matters, of course, was taken up and many of you have heard me go on about this book repeatedly, and so I won’t do this argument in as great a depth, but this is the Alessio Urrero’s Dynamics in Action from 1999, one of the most important books in cognitive science in the last 25 years. Urrero, and I’m going to try and make a very complex argument here relatively briefly again, read the book or watch some of my, I don’t know, 18,000 videos in which I’ve talked about this argument. But why does structure matter? So think about a tree, and a tree is a self-organizing thing, and that’s a very important point. The tree, there’s all these chemical events happening, and the chemical events cause the tree to have a particular structure it does. Its branches branch out, and its leaves go like this. Why? Why? Because that structure changes the probability of the causal events that made the tree, that continue to make the tree. By doing this, that structure changes the probability that a chlorophyll molecule will be struck by a photon, thereby providing the energy for the tree. You see causes change events, structures change, or as Urrero puts it, constrain the probability of those events. So look what happens. You get causal emergence up to create a structure that emanates constraints down, changing the probability of the events. So that events that are highly unlikely outside the tree, photons striking a chlorophyll molecule, highly unlikely outside the tree, are highly likely within the tree. That’s what the structure does. There’s bottom-up emergence, top-down emanation. That’s how structure operates. That’s how it makes, here it is again, a real difference. A real difference. For me, this goes to the fact that intelligibility is ultimately grounded in relevance. Relevance is a trade-off always between the identity between things are irrelevant, and that means even causally relevant, and the differences between things are causally relevant. And there’s no right answer. Either one of those poles is insufficient. It is the polarity that generates the intelligibility, not the poles. You can have the complete inversion of our flat ontology that says only the upper highest thing is really real, and everything below it is an illusion. That’s a kind of gnosticism. And by the way, materialism has no argument against gnosticism because they’re just inversions of each other. Every argument you go for reducing this way is logically symmetrical for an argument reducing that way. But the point is they’re both wrong. They’re both inadequate. They both actually undermine intelligibility. What have we got so far? We’ve got Blackowicz’s argument, and then it even led into Hull’s argument, which even led into Uraro’s argument. They’re all converging on this emergence emanation framework. This gets us to Wolfgang Smith’s argument. He’s made it in many places. I’ve had the great pleasure to talk to Wolfgang Smith. I’ve had the great pleasure to talk to Michael Levin. But his book is The Vertical Ascent from Particles to the Tripartite Cosmos. And his most powerful argument, he has a couple. I’ll quickly reference another one to supplement this one. But his main argument is the argument around what’s called the measurement problem in physics. The measurement problem in physics is that the measuring entity has to be at a higher ontological level than the thing it measures. Now, this is frequently negligible to us, but it becomes more and more pressing as you go deeper and deeper down towards the bottom level of your ontology. Now, why is that? Why does the measuring thing have to be at a different ontological level? The measurement has to have a constancy and an integrity that the things it’s measuring don’t. Because if it varies as they and is inconstant the way they are, it can’t measure them. So it has to have a property, it has to have proper ontological properties of constancy and integrity that the lower level doesn’t have. This is a return of a platonic argument. And it’s called the measurement problem in physics. And it’s a problem only because many physicists assume reductionism. The problem is, wait, I need the ruler to be at a higher level, ontological level, than the thing it’s measuring. But the only real things are the bottom, bottom things. Oh, no. Oh, no. And they’ve been doing that for a long time. Shows you how strong a grip the enlightenment gap ontology has on us. Wolfgang Smith makes the obvious, clear and platonic argument. Well, the way you do that is by having the ruler be as real, if not more real than the things it’s measuring. That’s it. That’s it. That’s the solution. That there are real levels. That the ruler has real properties, real differences from the things it’s measuring and is thereby able to measure. Real differences. Right? Real differences that emerge up that allow measurement down. Emergence up, emanation down. Do you think science depends on measurement? Yeah. So if you hold as a presupposition, the natural sciences really exist, you hold measurement really exists. You also hold that there are structures of information that communicate real causal signals that give you real information. Every one of these arguments points to something that is fundamentally presupposed by the assumption that natural science really exists and is not itself an illusion. I’ll just quickly mention another argument Wolfgang has. This argument only works at the very, very bottom level, but it’s still relevant. If you drop to the lowest, lowest level in our physics, and we’re now looking like we’re going to drop below space and time, so we’re dropping below quarks, we’re dropping into this probability wave collapse. The problem is when you get to the bottom level, all you get are probability distributions. Probability is a category of possibility. Possibility is not actuality. And so you get this very powerful question. Where does the actualization come from? If the bottom level is pure possibility, where does the actualization come from? And of course, Wolfgang puts the two arguments together. Well, the actualization comes from the emanation above. When you constrain probability enough, it becomes actuality. So I’ve given you a meta-convergence argument. Each argument, I think, is a good argument, and they converge together independently, raising the overall plausibility to a very high degree that there is real emergence emanation. They converge to an argument that I make that goes something like this. In order to do science, we need real information, we need real causal signaling, we need real structure, and we need real measurement. Therefore, if science is real, science is real, we need a leveled ontology. We need an ontology in which there is real emergence, real emanation. In other words, we need real emergence. That’s the essential differences coming up. Real causal signaling, top-down causal power. We need real structure, top-down constraint, which I think is actually identical to what whole means by causal power. That’s another argument. I won’t do that right now. We need real measurement, which means we need a real relationship between, not only do we need real emergence and real emanation, we need a real relationship between emanation and emergence. We need a neoplatonic ontology. That’s what it is. Okay. Emergence means that, emergence, some people will say, well, I’ll give you half the argument, John. I think there’s emergence up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there’s not emanation down. That’s weird. That’s spooky. The problem is, if you do only emergence up, the upper level is only an effect. It has no causal powers. Things that are only effects and don’t have causal powers, that’s what the word epiphenomenon means. An epiphenomenon is something that only is a causal effect and has no causal powers whatsoever. And then people will give examples that aren’t really epiphenomenon. They’ll say things like, you know, the engine makes a noise, but the noise, it has nothing to do with the functioning of the engine. Actually, it does because the noise contributes to heat. The heat has a causal impact on the functioning of the engine. And here’s the point, and then I’ll make it more technically. You can’t give me a real example of an epiphenomenon. So you have no other examples of this category other than the ones that you manufacture to support your claim that there is emergence without emanation. Why is there no real instances of epiphenomenon? When something is only a causal effect and no causal power, it is incapable of acting. Acting means to generate an effect, to cause an effect. Something that can’t cause effects, can’t act. That means it is not actual. It is not an actual thing. Next, if it is a pure epiphenomenon, you can’t know it because knowing it means it has a causal effect on me of causing knowledge in me. I put it to you that if something is not actual and not knowable, it doesn’t exist. That’s why there’s no examples of epiphenomenon. Oh, well, there are epiphenomenon because there are all illusions in the mind. And it’s like, oh, my gosh. And the mind is obviously a higher level thing. I’ll put aside all the tremendous difficulties of panpsychism and I’ll put aside idealism. If you try to say that the levels are epiphenomenon because they’re only illusions, then you create a profound dualism. The mind exists independently of all of this stuff out there such that it can do this leveling. You create mind as something that is radically other than everything else. And then you have Descartes’ problem of how does your mind, which is some kind of non-material thing, interact with your body that is a material thing? And the answer is, if you have that framework, there is no explanation. I think the proposal of epiphenomenon, whether out there or just in here, are ridiculous proposals. Okay, what’s the conclusion of all of this? It’s my first meta argument, my meta conversion argument. Reality is inherently leveled in the sense of emanation and emergence. But I want to make it clear. Remember what I said, it’s not the poles, it’s the polarity. It’s not there’s like a bottom and then there’s just emergence and there’s a top and there’s emanation and they meet somewhere. No, no. And this is from Regina. It’s emergence and emanation are completely interpenetrating all the way up, all the way down. You have to think of this the way you think of gestalt and feature. So let’s take a sentence. The letters are features of which the word is a gestalt, but the word is a feature of which the sentence is a gestalt, but the sentence is a feature of which the paragraph is a gestalt. We have to think of transcendence and imminence, emergence and emanation in this nested, completely interpenetrating manner. We have to avoid any dualistic polarization in favor of the polarity itself being the real, the reality. So it’s a field in that sense, rather than a thing, but an ontological field. Okay. And I’m going to move to the second argument, the second argument for conformity. So the enlightenment gave us the idea that the mind and what it knows share no important properties and what the mind does is it forms representations of the external world. And that means ultimately you end up with Kant, you’re actually trapped behind. If the representations have no properties in common with the world, right? You can’t possibly know the thing in itself, the way the world is in itself. You’re trapped inside here. And then Kant’s involved in endless performative contradictions because he writes the Critique of Pure Reason to give to other people who presumably have minds accessing the reality of the book that’s somehow independent from his mind, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Clark makes the point that Kant’s whole proposal is one large repeated performative contradiction. And performative contradictions are just as important as propositional contradictions. Okay. So I’ll put all of that aside. I want to talk about a book that is knocking me back on my heels right now. I would put it in the top five up there with Religion and Nothingness by Nishatani and D.C. Schindler’s Plato’s Critique of Pure Reason. It’s Catherine Pickstock’s book Aspects of Truth and New Religious Metaphysics. All of her books are great. After Writing, the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, brilliant book. Truth and Aquinas, brilliant. I want to meet this person and talk with this person. Again, complex, sophisticated, punishingly powerful argument. She just thinks of every possible reply at every stage in her argument and says, here’s my devastating argument against your reply. So again, I’m going to try and sum this. So the Enlightenment gap was built by having all of these impassable distinctions between knowing and being, between knowing and the world. It was built on all of these distinctions. This is how we kept the gap between the mind and world in place, mind and being in place. And Wyckant is the hero of the Enlightenment because he actually epitomizes all of these gaps I’m going to talk about, all of these distinctions. And here’s Pickstock’s point. All of these, all of these distinctions, all of these gap preserving moves has been completely undermined in the past two centuries of philosophy. I’m not going to give you the arguments. I’m just going to rattle them off. You can go and look at the original arguments. You can look at Pickstock’s book. What’s the one, the analytic synthetic distinction, analytic truths only in the mind, synthetic truths only in the world, quite devastated, the analytic synthetic distinction. It doesn’t hold. You can use it pragmatically, but it doesn’t hold in any absolute, in which is what you need for the Enlightenment gap. It doesn’t hold in any absolute sense. The distinction between a conceptual scheme and its content destroyed by Davidson. Kant also did that, by the way, made use of that. The fact value distinction, people often call Trump, this is the is-ought fallacy without realizing that that has been completely undermined. Hay-Spear has a devastating argument against it. Putnam has a devastating argument against it. Vervecky has what he thinks is a devastating argument against it, that would namely any fact you try and pick out is already gone through massive amounts of relevance realization, and relevance is a valuing or a value to or judgmental process. There are no value, there are no value-free facts, and there are no facts, there are no values that do not have facts within them. Stop trumpeting the is-ought fallacy. It is also only operative at certain levels of assumptions. But Hume’s argument, Hume’s argument depends on that I can’t introduce this premise, x is good, because if I introduce this premise x is good, then you should do x, and then the argument falls. So Hume actually needs Moore’s argument that I can’t give any natural definition for goodness. What’s Moore’s argument? Moore’s argument depends on the analysis of the synthetic distinction. That whenever you propose something as good, pleasure is good, and then I can ask you, but can’t pleasure be bad? Well, then that can’t be the definition of good. That depends on the analytic synthetic distinction, which as I’ve already noted, everybody agrees has been destroyed. There is no argument. Really hear this for the is-ought fallacy. It’s just that most versions of it are elliptical, and that’s why they are invalid. All right. Here’s one we think we may be able to still rely on. The theory-data distinction. Well, there’s my theory in the mind, and there’s the data in the world. Quine and Dooham completely destroyed that distinction. They’re not going to be able to do anything about it. They’re going to be able to do nothing about it. The theory completely interpenetrates data. Data completely interpenetrates theory. All of the distinctions, and you have to trust me on this. I only did one in a little bit more of extension. All of these distinctions have been completely undermined. Well, maybe what we can do, the move that started with Frege, what we’ll do is we’ll create a third realm of logic, propositions in logic space, and that’s the realm that actually mediates between the knowing and the world, and that keeps everything still distinct because logic is the bridge. Then you have, well, okay, well, what’s the ontological status of logic? You get a And then as they attempt to answer that question, you get incompleteness proofs. You get paradoxes like Russell’s paradox. You get paralogics. You get all kinds of non-logical relationship between different logics and different logics. You get all kinds of non-logical relationships. You get all kinds of non-logical relationships between different logics. That whole argument only works as if something like classical logic is the only logic. It is both consistent and complete. It generates no paradoxes, and all of that that I just said is false. Is false. Logic can’t do the job you’ve set it to do. And again, this is now widely admitted it’s just that the news hasn’t gotten out. There’s no distinctions. There’s no absolute distinctions. Things bleed together. You can’t keep them apart by the knife edge of logic. That’s collapsed as a project, which means there’s a real interpenetration of knowing and being. A real interpenetration. Because you have no argument for that not being the case, and all of the current arguments point towards it being the case. Now what Pickstock does is she actually says, and then she makes an explicit argument, that means you have something like a conformity theory. The conformity theory is that the fundamental principles of knowing and the fundamental principles of reality have to be the same, or you couldn’t get an interweaving. If you’ll allow me the analogy, and it’s only an analogy, the shape of my hands has to be relevantly similar and built on the same principles in order for me to interweave them together. I like to use the metaphor of the grammar of knowing and the grammar of being have to fundamentally be the same grammar, or you can’t interweave them together. They couldn’t speak to each other. Now this argument from Pickstock converges with an argument made by myself at Raulston College, and if you want to see this argument in great detail, you can look it up. I was surprised that this has become one of my most popular talks because it’s also one of my hardest talks. It was about levels of intelligibility and levels of the self. So if you want to see this argument in full, stretched out over two hours with a half an hour of Q&A afterwards, to convince you that it’s plausible, I invite you to do that. I won’t do that here because, well, I would destroy the conference. So here’s the argument in GIST. Massive convergence from so many different areas of psychology, even though, as Greg has forcefully argued, psychology is fragmented, nevertheless, massive convergence, the cognition is simultaneously bottom up and top down. It’s coming bottom up from perception, it’s coming top down from prediction, and they are, top down from prediction, and this is not top, bottom, it’s top, bottom, like this, interwoven, recursively, all the way up, all the way down. It’s coming to fruition, for example, in the predictive processing frameworks, the recursive relevance realization framework that Greg and I have been building, and then the integration of those two together in a paper just published last year with Brett Anderson and Mark Miller. Here’s a question I want to ask you. If reality does not have this grammar, this structure, why does cognition have it? Why does every cognitive, every attempt to get intelligibility, which is our measure of realness, have this structure if reality doesn’t really have that structure? The opposite side of the argument. If reality didn’t have that grammar, if reality didn’t have that grammar, if all of that is illusory, then the mind is trapped within itself in an absolutely solipsistic, meaning the only mind that can possibly exist is only yours. Skeptical, you really have no knowledge possible of the external world. Specious, it only lasts for a second, because if you try and talk about the memory of you, you’re now pointing to things in reality that aren’t within the mental space, unless the memory is an illusion, which means you are an illusion and the whole thing collapses and you’re back down to a specious. Think about this. All that’s real is a momentary blip of absolutely solipsistic skepticism. I put it to you, if your I put it to you, if your ontology leads to that, you don’t have an ontology because it is inherently oxymoronic in nature. The grammar of knowing and the grammar of being have to be fundamentally the same. The contents can be very different. The contents can be very different. This is like the idea, which is sort of maybe coming to the fore right now, of Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar underneath the specific grammars, such that we can always translate English to French and French to German and German to English, et cetera. Not perfectly, that’s the point. The specific contents can vary considerably, but they can be translated to each other because they share a fundamental universal grammar. So that’s the conclusion of the second meta argument, that at bottom, sorry, that’s the conclusion of two of the arguments. I have one more. Sorry, sorry, made a mistake of the meta argument for conformity. But that second argument also concludes in there must be ultimately knowing is grounded in conformity. Here’s the third argument, and this is an argument. You can see versions of this argument in Gibson, Marlowe-Ponty, Heidegger, and John Vervecki. I hesitate to put myself in that company, but I’m trying to give credit also. This is the argument for what I have termed transjectivity. Transjectivity is neither subjectivity nor objectivity. It is the real relation that binds them together and grounds them. To use earlier language, it’s the polarity between the poles of subjectivity and objectivity. Transjectivity has to be as real or perhaps even more real than subjectivity and objectivity in order to be able to join them together in truth, because that’s what truth is. It’s a real relationship between mental states and the world of some kind. And this, of course, is Heidegger’s famous argument for al-Athiya being deeper than any coherence or correspondence theory of truth. In the end, they have to connect, really contact, or truth doesn’t exist. And then Pickstock builds on that argument. This is why it’s called Aspects of Truth. You need truth to be ontologically real or everything collapses. And in order for truth to be ontologically real, transjectivity has to be ontologically real. And of course, you may have heard Vervecki make the same argument for relevance, that relevance is inherently transjective, relevance realization, actually. Relevance realization is the polarity claim, but that relevance is actually co-created by the world and the organism. You may have heard Gibson say that perception is co-created by the environment and the organism because it generates affordances, which are real relationships between the environment and the organism. You may have seen Barella and Thompson and DePaulo say, life is transjective because it depends on a real relation of adaptivity between the organism, the inner world of the organism, and the outer world of the environment. So truth, relevance, life, perception are all inherently transjective. And therefore, you need a conformity theory in order to have any and all of those. And then of course, the idea is that truth is a concept of all of those. And then of course, the idea is that truth, relevance, perception, and life are all needed in order for there to be any knowledge claims whatsoever. Conformity is a relationship, not a pure identity, but the sharing of principles so that mutual shaping is possible. The co-determination, co-identification, co-realization are all possible. And we’re coming to the realization, pun intended, that that is a fundamental reality. Okay, so now we have the meta-convergence argument that conformity theory is plausible. A real emanation, emergence, leveled ontology. When I say leveled, by the way, there’s not like there’s only three or something like that. It’s a continuum. That’s what I’m trying to get with the polarity. And you can slice it at various places. Okay. But reality really is an emanation, emergence, emergence, emanation, and I’ll do it both ways to not prioritize, continuum. And that’s the ontological reality. And knowing at its deepest level is a conformity, a sharing of principles such that there is a co-shaping. Now let’s put the two arguments together. There are real levels in the way I’ve qualified, please. There is real conformity. There are real levels within knowing. There are real levels within being. There is real conformity between them level to level. By moving your knowing at a participatory, not just a representational level, but at a level of actual conforming, by moving your knowing to the different levels, you disclose real levels of reality. You level up. That’s Plotinus’ argument. That’s his argument. Check out Pearl’s amazing commentary in translation of Aeneid 5.1 on the three primary levels of reality, usually translated as the three hypostasis, but hypostasis is actually not translated as substance. Substance, by the way, was originally a level word. Substance is that which is the most important level of reality. Substance, by the way, was originally a level word. Substance is that which is underneath. Substance. Hypostasis actually is better translated, and Pearl makes a good case by it, by levels. Pearl makes the argument that what Plotinus is saying is levels of the self, qualitatively different ways of knowing. Self-transcendence is always matched by reality self-transcendence, if I can put it that way. Leveling up within discloses leveling up without in a way that is interwoven in profound contact. This is the case. Notice, however, that I have made Plotinus’ argument completely within the framework of extended naturalism. I have only relied, in fact, on one fundamental presupposition that then has direct entailments that the natural sciences really exist. Now, you can bite the bullet of all my arguments and say the natural sciences don’t really exist, in which case, however, you lose all arguments for reductionism. So that is a self-defeating move to make. I have argued that we have strong transcendence within naturalism, extended naturalism, and therefore we have deep conciliance between spirituality and science. Thank you very much for your time and attention. All right. Okay. Thank you, John. That was an inspirational and moving, complex, rich, and deep argument. What I would like to do is I would like to offer some summary. I really encourage folks to take some notes. There will be various times in which we can have some interaction we have until 1020 today, but we are going to see these as ongoing conversations. So you have made a compelling case, and it is, of course, one that I find compelling and found my own way towards in relationship to this idea of a leveling up emergence and constrained by a leveling down polarity. It gives us rise to a new ontological structure or old ontological structure from a neoplatonic point of view in relationship to knowing and being. Can you share a little bit, then, about what maybe a reductionist might offer as a criticism to ask the question, well, then, does this give rise to almost an infinite proliferation of causal structures? Is this, is there, what are sort of, can we organize this in a particular kind of way? Are there ways in which we can make sense out of it if reality is so incredibly, the concern might be, is the reality so incredibly pluralistic of emergence and emanation that it would shoot out into being essentially incomprehensible? Do you have any frames in relationship to that? And then we’ll dialogue about that, and then what I would like to do after that a little bit is then shift gears and think a little bit about what the implications are for meaning making and everyday life. Yeah, I mean, the argument for that, I think, is, would also be a neoplatonic argument, again, put through a naturalistic spin, extended naturalistic spin, but you, and you can see a version of this in Spinoza, which is, you know, if I have these constraints and there’s nothing that is constraining the constraints, then I open up a gap of non-intelligibility between them, and then I’m actually losing realness as opposed to gaining it. So you get the idea that the constraints have to be constrained until you get up to sort of the or constraint. And of course, the idea that there might be a law of all laws is, you know, something that’s trying to be found within relativistic, and some people maybe even might think that Einstein’s relativity is that upper level, and then, and then that, of course, the problem we’re facing is how do we get, I would argue, I’m not an expert in physics, but what I consider myself an expert in is problem solving. The physicists have been trying to solve the problem since Einstein of integrating quantum and relativistic, and they complete, they continue to fail repeatedly, and they get very enamored by some, look, nobody talks about string theory anymore, it’s gone, it’s over, pretty much. There’s a few defenders, but it’s like, there’s too many problems and it fell apart. Now it’s quantum loop gravity, and it’s already made some predictions that have failed to be confirmed. And so it’s already, it’s already wobbly. And I’m not going to try and pronounce on the future of physics, but I’m going to do a meta move and say, you know what you should do when you keep not solving a problem? This is called the notice invariance heuristic. Try and step back and notice, try and find an underlying presupposition that all the failures share, and then change that presupposition, because it’s quite likely that that presupposition that is shared by all the failures is what’s causing all the failures. It’s a heuristic, it’s not an algorithm, but it’s a damn good heuristic. Here’s the presupposition that I give to you, reductionism. The presupposition that is causing all of the failures to do the proper integration is a reductionism. So I think that means that we can sort of propose that we’ll need the polarity, but that doesn’t mean that we lose the integration as we go up that we already have in physics. Of course we do. It doesn’t mean we don’t lose the proliferation of possibilities as we go down in quantum mechanics, and this looks so much like Plotinus. You have pure potentiality that is maybe infinitely, at least indefinitely largely proliferated, that gets actualized and informed as you go up. And so that would be my answer to that question. I was very careful to say that’s not a deductive proof. It’s heuristically driven, but I think it’s nevertheless plausible. Well, do you think I’ll put it, how about if I put it this way from my spin on it in relationship to my own journey and sort of making sense out of the world in this very similar way, I definitely abstracted out the idea that there are different kinds of information processing and communication networks at the level of life, mind, and culture. And would it be then fair to say, given your argument in relationship to that, that those kinds of emergencies at life, mind, and culture mediated by different kinds of information processing communication networks would be the kinds of constraining structures that would give rise to a particular kind of taxonomy for the emanation emergence structure. But notice what you’re doing. You’re structuring the constraints so that they form an overarching constraint. I completely argue that. That’s, in fact, what whole is, that’s whole’s formal proof. Right. Right. And it gives, I think it gives sort of mathematical teeth to your proposal. And I mean, and I’ve meant this as a compliment, you’ve got, you have re-inventioed Aristotle and Aristotle is a proper part of the Neoplatonic framework. Lovely. Okay. So at that, to me, what I’m trying to emphasize there is what this means for unifying knowledge and conciliance. And of course, the overall structure of the conference is unifying knowledge and then orienting toward a wisdom commons, orienting to address the wisdom famine. You have certainly dialogued a lot about this year after Socrates series, fundamentally is about this. What is the implications would you say for this ontology, for the wisdom famine, for wisdom commons, for folks to be engaged in life in a different sort of way? So the proposal of wisdom is a proposal of real self-transcendence that makes a real difference to how you fit into, fit with yourself, other people, the world, which is also meaning in life. All of these notions are inherently aspirational. They inherently involve self correction, which will go back to whole, right? That requires redundancy. It requires structuring, patterning, all of these things, self, all of these terms, wisdom, right? There are terms that rely essentially on notions of self transcendence, strong transcendence, not just psychological improvement, but you actually are better fitted. This is the transjectivity to a world. It’s not just completely internal, like perhaps it is for young, at least early to middle young. It’s all just like what used to bother me about young as well. God is actually the self and it’s all this type. Oh, but in reality, it’s just a little part of your brain, which is about this big going, that’s not God. That’s not God. Now young towards the end realized that and he, with the idea of the psycho, he was trying to get, there’s something in here, right? And there’s something out there that are using the same grammar because he knew he realized, I would argue, that he needed the transjective connection. He had to get out of his Kantianism because that God was too small to put it in sort of a slogan. And so if we want real spirituality that talks about real self-transcendence and wisdom, real connectedness and meaning in life, real conformity, we need the argument I just made. That’s lovely. I certainly, we do have enough time, I think, for folks want to raise their hands, we can call on folks. I’ll make one comment, invite Peter, Andrew, Masiya, Corey here to offer a comment. But how does this sit? I think it will sit okay. Obviously in your wonderful series, you helped on the meaning crisis. You’re very clear that it’s not so much the meaning of life that we are looking for, but it is meaning in life. And it seems to me then that if we think about this rich ontology of emergence and emanation and the capacity for transcendence, we can expand the complexification of our lives and get richer gripping of our meaning in life and we’ll feel the mattering of that. Is that a fair summary? Yes. And notice that invoking complexity is to invoke a leveled ontology. There is nothing complex at the level of individual quarks. Or whatever low, right? What you’re saying is there is really, there’s real self-organization of real patterns that make a real difference. That’s what you’re saying when you invoke complexity. And if you think reality is complex, which I think you should, and then another way of putting it is I’m saying there is real complexification of cognition that couples to the complexification that actually exists within reality. Lovely. Greg, we have a couple of questions. We can go in order. Brendan’s first. I’ll pull you up, Brendan. Hi, can you hear me? Yeah. And before you begin, Brendan, I wanted to, I want to do a plug. Brendan and I recorded a conversation yesterday on his channel that overlaps with this in some very important ways. And is also the first place where I’m going to make sort of the first public argument for Zen Neoplatonism. So just wanted to shamelessly plug it, but it’s completely relevant because that conversation goes into depth of certain moves that I made at a higher level within this argument. So I just wanted to do that first. Yeah, thank you. And that was a great conversation. And this was a wonderful presentation. So thank you very much. This is excellent. And yeah, quick question, or two questions that I think are kind of related. One is you talked about strong transcendence. And I want to know if that is the same thing as we’re analogous to strong emergence, which has a kind of specific definition in complexity literature. And then related to that is this notion of emanation that you’re talking about seems to be very much this like linked to the notion of supervenience, the notion that like certain patterns of information constrain their lower level parts, which is itself, as I’ve encountered it, related to the idea of emergence. But you’re seeming to kind of balance emergence with emanation. But it seems like the idea of emergence, as I’ve read about it, at least strong emergence has in its very notion, kind of definition that there is a supervenient aspect that is a top down thing. So those are two questions that are sort of related. And I just know. So no, strong transcendence is not strong emergence, because strong emergence is the proposal that there is no explanatory, no intelligible, no intelligible relationship between the lower level and the upper level. And that’s what allows you to like to propose a kind of property dualism, so that there are properties at upper levels, and properties at lower level, and there’s no intelligible relation between them. There’s sort of this raw miraculous emergence. That is not what I’m proposing at all. In fact, I’m proposing the opposite. So in that technical sense, strong transcendence is a powerful version of weak emergence. The problem I would then say is most people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about when they invoke weak emergence, because they make a mistake. One I think you just alluded to. Well, there’s emergence and all I mean by supervenience is just the result of emergence. No, emergence without top down constraint, which really makes a difference. And that’s ultimately what we mean by reality. You know, the models of causation are sort of what we mean by causation is reliably making a real difference. And right, if you have emergence without emanation, you have epiphenomenalism. And epiphenomenalism is oxymoronic. You can’t leave it elliptically at only emergence, and then tack on this notion of supervenience. You have to invoke an equally real emanation to avoid the epiphenomenalism. So that’s how I would respond to the two questions. Wonderful. All right. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Those are great questions. Greg, do you want to do one more? We’ll do one more with Tyler and then we can wrap it up. We do want to start around 1020. So people have some time. Yeah, we’ll bring Tyler up. And just remember, John will also be moderating another session. So I’m sure there’ll be some question and answer there. Yeah, but ask questions about the people who are presenting. Right, please. I ask everybody to do that. That would be discourteous if we did ask me questions about my talk. Can you hear me? Yeah. Thanks. Go ahead. John, so if you could, what I might say are principles of a meta theory. Could you please define meta theory as a term and a concept? I didn’t actually use meta theory. I used meta argument. And so I would go the other way around. So this is around notions of plausibility. Plausibility is built on the idea that the more independent, and this is a communication theory argument too, the more independent lines of argument and evidence I have for a conclusion, the more plausible it is, the more trustworthy. Why? Because if I only have a single channel, there’s a good chance that the bias and the prejudice within that channel has led to my conclusion. But if I have independent convergence, right? Right, right. But at some point I wrote down that you said, so meta, it was toward the end, you said, so meta theory is plausible. I thought I wrote that down. If I said that, I misspoke and I apologize. Oh, so you really meant the meta argument. But what I would argue is one of the things, but just let me finish. You want this convergence and then you want elegance. And what I tried to do is give the trustworthy side. The elegance is now taken up by, if we get that conciliance, we can then explain a lot of stuff, right? And when you have massive convergence and massive elegance, you have plausibility. So I think the generation of deep understanding, deep plausibility by doing meta arguments, meta convergence and meta elegance arguments is a proper part of generating a meta theory. Okay. Okay. Okay. All right. Wonderful. Well, we are at time, John. Thank you so much for such a stimulating talk and for sharing your wisdom so broadly and across a number of different domains. I know we’re going to have a lot of interactive sessions coming up. We got three excellent symposia coming up at 1030 on involving philosophy and visions of society and governments, visions of education. I hope folks check those out. John, you’ll be in one of those on philosophy with Rick, Iris and Chris. So folks, I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference. John, thanks so much for your participation. Andrew, Masiya, Peter, Corey and everybody else involved with the program. Thank you so much for helping this to happen. I really appreciate it. And we’ll be looking, folks, to give opportunities for people to share questions and we’ll try to get back to you on those if you need more chance to answer.