https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=n5UA5jCtGXI
Thank you for watching. This YouTube and podcast series is by the Vervecki Foundation, which in addition to supporting my work, also offers courses, practices, workshops, and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis. If you would like to support this work, please consider joining our Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes. Welcome everyone. This is an episode of the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode 12. Welcome everyone. This is an episode of the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode 12 of Transcendent Naturalism. We have Jordan Hall here again, his second appearance in the series. Both Jordan and Greg are regular members of this community. They’ve been on this channel multiple times. And of course, Greg is my ongoing partner in all of the Cognitive Science shows. I’m looking forward to hearing further development of the argument that Jordan had already built in episode 11. But I’ll turn things first over to Greg after saying welcome, Jordan. Yeah, so this is super exciting. Jordan was laying out some, I think, pretty cool visionary stuff about the phase transition we’re in, which I like to label the fifth joint point. The stuff he was talking about, languaging, I really found to be powerful, the various three languages, how they may evolve. And I think it’s a very, very important frame for us as we think about a strong transcendence. How are we going to collectively manifest intelligence in this moment? How are we thinking about it? And to do that, few people better than Jordan Hall. So it’s lovely to have you here for us. Nice, thank you. So last time, the big frame was this notion of practical eschatology. And the combination of the fifth joint point as being a sort of keyhole, or eye of the needle, and then the combination of the category of extended transcendent naturalism as a framework that might give us the ability to move through that, the eye of the needle. And we’ve spoken about concepts like perhaps a model of the essential nature of language, the Aristotelian form of language, and the Aristotelian form of the digital, as the digital as an Aristotelian form of mediation in general. And I think what we were really playing with was something like, how do we actually, what’s the toolkit that we can use to navigate this transition? So the proposition is that we are present and accelerating towards the transition. There’s a number of characteristics of what it looks like as we move towards it. And the question is, how do we ground ourselves properly to be able to navigate through it? And so for example, the hypothesis was something like, we might be able to actually use an abstract framework of language to identify that language actually has a triadic structure that includes this characteristic of trade language, family language, and sacred language. In a relatively simple approach, we can look at and play with the way this plays out in history and how it shows up in how human beings have struggled with things, for example, like religion, because we try to do sacred by means of the trade language. But I think in the larger frame, what we would say is something like, if that’s actually something like an invariant, if that’s part of the nature of language in a fashion that is, let’s say, coming from the transcendent, it’s part of its ontological structure, then we can use that to help guide us in terms of the kinds of things that we might either be able to do or may in fact need to do as we accelerate towards the fifth joint point. And at the very end, by the way, we started getting into some of the structures, we were getting a bit of a handoff into the Silk Road. We talked about the Neoplatonists, the Christian Neoplatonists, the Zen and this structure of precisely the same idea, like what are the ontological characteristics and what are the methodologies that we can use that can actually allow us to properly navigate a system where the paradigmatic models and the operating models that we’ve been able to use in the 20th century are no longer able to be up to standard. So let me bridge to that, to a little bit more on that, because I think we’ve seen really good examples of that recently. And I think our culture, the nature of the culture war and the way it shows up gives us some good examples of how the legacy is strictly inadequate, because spending a little bit of time about that, if we feel comfortable, say, yep, it sure is, then we can step forward and say, okay, what does this new toolkit look like? So I don’t know, I imagine you guys have been doing this, I don’t know if you’ve paid any attention to the way that the AI debate has been evolving over the past, even just like literally since our last call over the past two months. We had a big event in the OpenAI board shuffle, which put a lot of attention on it, and brought forward a lot of sense making, like what’s happening, what’s going on here, what’s the landscape. But the thing that I want to bring forward is that there’s a very clean, dual, and pure adversarial cultural dynamic that seems to be an attractor. So the system is moving towards something like EAC, or effective accelerationism, or accelerationism on one side, and something like safetyism or doomerism, depending on which side of the equation, on the other side. And what happens is that the system increasingly becomes polarized, you’re only able to have one of those two positions, and the positions become adversarial to the point where communications between them devolve into silliness. Like I’m watching significantly serious, intelligent senior people, like this is named Yan Kulan, the guy at Facebook, the AI guy at Facebook, and Max Tegmar. I’ve been watching their dialogue going back and forth for the last few weeks, and it’s effectively over the last couple of days been reduced to grade school insults. And the point I think is actually that we don’t have the capability, here’s the problem, we don’t actually have the capability to think adequately about what’s going on. And so we’re actually reduced to defending our preferred positions. And so you fall to a preferred position on the basis of your underlying value structure, your cognitive biases, maybe your local incentives, whatever particular thing has you to fall into a position. And then all we end up doing is defending that. And of course, that becomes rhetorical in nature at the end. And I think we can look at a very large number of characteristics in the cultural environment, the culture of war, obviously, what’s going on in sort of like woke versus mager, something like that, which looks almost identical, but there was this evolution where the notion of liberal conversation, which all of us have to remember, where you could actually have profound disagreements in an intelligent way with an expectation that because you’re having profound disagreements and intelligible, we can actually find your place to a solution that everybody actually feels is a pretty good solution. We remember that, but we’re not there anymore. Now we’re in a place where the only thing that can happen is increasingly irrational, pure conflict across the boundary. And there’s nobody, if you’re in the middle ground, you’re just getting shot on both sides. Yeah. And so the hypothesis is that’s what the acceleration into the event horizon of the fifth joint point actually looks like in the context of an inadequate logic. That’s the hypothesis. And that the only valid adequate logic, and you have to kind of reach to get here, but I’m going to throw this out, is something that actually comes through the transcendence. We can’t get there in the algorithmic, in the semantic, in the category. I would say, what would you call it, John? I would call it the simple rational or the way the rational is used by people who call themselves rationalists, as opposed to the way you’ve been refiguring it. Utilitarianism isn’t going to get us there. That kind of narrow rationalism, narrow rationalism categorically can’t get us there. And all of the forms of debate and discussion can’t get us there. And so we actually have to shift over here to this new environment, which is essentially what we’ve been talking about, at a minimum, because that’s the only thing that can possibly allow us to get, how do we say it right? The ability to access the intrinsic intelligibility of reality so that we can then have a way of having a confirmation or grasping on something that is strong enough that we can be guided by it, we can be oriented, and then be able to make effective choices on that basis. I’d like to respond at length to that, because it was excellent, and I think the move towards talking about a fundamental logic broadly construed, not a particular formal logic, but logic broadly construed, and I think is exactly the right move. And then the thing you said at the end, and I want to propose, and it follows on the stuff about the Silk Road and Zen Neoplatonism, an argument I’ve been still working on and trying to develop more and more, I want to propose looking at that logic in a profound way and tracing out some interconnections and articulating them and trying to see what seems inevitable to us as a real alternative, but it takes a profound, a new logic, meaning a fundamental new relationship to language and logos in order to access that intelligibility that you just talked about. But I also want to argue that it is the proper vector that follows out of adopting the orientation of transcendent naturalism, namely the vector that’s trying to give up a sort of common sense theism, the normal two worlds mythology, etc. And what I want to do is I want to talk about a common set of presuppositions that have become more and more pronounced as they have become separated from a sort of religious milieu, even though that religious milieu in some ways also contributed to this. So I want to start with this idea that one of the things that we can get blinded to, and this of course is a Wittgensteinian idea, is that the subject predicate structure of language, which is across all three kinds of language, well sorry, I think is across two of the three that you mentioned, and that’s part of what I want to explore with you, that that is taken as something fundamental about the nature of reality. And this is the idea that reality is ultimately made out of substance, which doesn’t mean stuff, at least initially, it means things that can independently exist. This is an Aristotelian notion of substance. And then that ultimately is going to bind you, given a lot of work and wrestling to a kind of nominalist epistemology, that there are no real relations except in the mind. And of course, that makes the mind ontologically different from the world, because the mind holds real relations and the world doesn’t. And so nominalism also gives you a kind of disconnecting dualism. I think there’s an inevitability between a substance ontology, a nominalist epistemology, and a dualistic psychology. I think they are bound together in a profound way. And I think once you are in that framework, adversarial processing is all that is really available to you, because you are locked inside a mind that is locked inside a substantial individual that has no real patterns by which you can connect to other people. So I think this, I mean, and you can see what I’m doing here, I’m building on Filder’s argument and adding some of my own work in it. Now, I think what religion does insofar as it has, to some degree, shifted our appreciation, our apprehension, our apprehension, onto the non-propositional, has put us into religio. And I agree with Matt Rossano that religio and religion in that sense is about the priority of relationship. I think religion acted as a counterbalance to that. Although I do think the Aristotelian strand that came through Aquinas and gets taken to its extreme by people like Occam and then taken up again by Descartes, who is deeply influenced by this, I think is nevertheless problematic for the reasons I just articulated. So like I say, you get this worldview in which your view of reality is substance ontology that is bound to and mutually reinforced by a nominalist epistemology, and both of those push you into a kind of dualistic psychology. And then that engenders adversarial processing, especially as the counterbalancing of relationships that is typically evidenced in a lot of religious frameworks falls into the background. And I think part of what we are witnessing is an advent of the transcendent, the sacred, the sacred language, which is a language that tries to invert that, which is the language, the way language is used in the Neoplatonic tradition in Zen. I would also say in Taoism and Vedanta, in which the subject predicate structure, the substance ontology, the nominalism, all this stuff is fundamentally called into question. That is clearly the case in Neoplatonism and Zen. I think Filler’s case for this in Neoplatonism and Heidegger’s attempt to recover this, I think is a profound masterpiece. I think that book is astonishing. I think the evidence coming out of the Kyoto school that this is also what’s happening in Zen is crucial. So we are getting to the place where we are not seeing, yes, that beautiful and astonishing book. That book and Religion and Nothingness are the two bookend books for me on my pilgrimage on the philosophical Silk Road. I think then, I’m arguing it, you don’t care what I think, I’m arguing that what Zen and Neoplatonism are trying to get us is to say, no, you have to do this fundamental reversal, which is to see relata, the things emerging out of the relations. Relationality, pure relationality is the ground. That explains why intelligibility and being are bound together because they’re both inherently relational and so forth. That argument is developed. I think this argument has important revocations for reinterpretation of Christianity, especially as it’s presented in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Filler makes a fantastic argument that the, and I mean this in the philosophical sense, the symbolon of the Trinity actually is a profound proposal that the experience of ultimacy as sacred is to experience ultimately as relational. That the Trinity is to say that ultimate reality is inherently relational and our relationship to it is properly relational. This also goes for some of the statements that God is love, God is light, which are also deeply inherently relational things. And of course, this goes into Heidegger’s notion of Al-Athayic truth. I don’t want to get too burdened, but what I’m trying to say is this is a profound inversion, a fundamentally profound inversion. And I think Zen and Neoplatonism are both pointing to it from very independent, but nevertheless, convergent directions. And I think this is how we are needing to learn to speak. If we are going to be properly people who are coming to terms, and I’m using both senses of the word, coming to terms, coming to language, but also facing up, maturing our relationship to the advent of the sacred right now. And I think only that ultimately has the capacity to reorient us to relationality that would overtake the, I think, default automaticity of adversarial processing that is becoming so pronounced today. So that would be the argument, extended argument I would make in reply to what you said, Jordan. Greg, you want to say something? There’s a number of things I could say. I’m not sure if you want to pick up on that, and then I can bounce off of that. Well, I mean, let me just start with, to use the zoomer phraseology, that was lit. Obviously, because I’m actually, I’m literally on the Cappadocian father, so I was like writing smack dab in the… Isn’t that a great book? It’s amazing, as you say. So it’s very expensive, by the way, so it’s worth the price. It’s also well made. Goes in a library. So it’s weird. Sort of just not, how about I say it right? Yes, but in this very weird way, everything you said, from one point of view, we’re talking about something that sounds crazy abstract, like absurd, peeling through the Cappadocian father’s articulations, the pure relationality of the Trinity is just like, wow, what is going on here? But in the context of practical eschatology, we suddenly, this stuff grounds all the way down. As you said, if the architect, and by the way, I don’t know if you saw it, the look on my face, but the degree to which I was about to jump out of my shoes as you were dropping this thing in lock step, yes, you get locked into adversarial processing. And if you’re actually locked in, and when you’re locked in, there’s no getting out. So you made a mistake, you made an error here, but because of that, in some amount of time, you’re going to end up here and not even understand what the heck’s going on. And so a grounding in the proper ontology, which is in fact, pure relationality, then is the thing that allows us to recover the capacity to then ultimately do the kind to get out of the wicked problem, the conundrum we find ourselves in. Yeah, it’s pretty profound. So it’s weird to find ourselves in a circumstance where in some sense, the most abstract possible things that we can be talking about are in fact, the most practical and necessary in the immediate term. Yes. And before Greg replies, I just want to reply to that one point, which is, this is precisely why my, the walking the philosophical Silk Road will be a pilgrimage. These, let me be a little bit pretentious, please. Just these truths, ultimately have to be disclosed existentially. They cannot be disclosed just in abstract propositional discourse. And so they have to be exemplified in existential transformation. And I, in that sense, it’s a pilgrimage in the sense that I’m going to be doing this and trying to make myself as profoundly receptive to the advent of the sacred as I possibly can. And I, because I totally agree with what you just said, Jordan, if this was, if this, if, if I was expecting people to find conviction from a merely propositional argument about this, that would be in fact, a mistake. I think the argument is important because it gets people to pay attention. And that’s has a value. But I think ultimately this has to be disclosed through, you know, existential exemplification of a genuine, I don’t know, receptivity, service to new relationship to the advent of the sacred. That’s, that is precisely the point of the series. It is not a series that is just informational in that sense. It can’t be. All right. That’s beautiful. So I’ll angle this surprisingly enough from a Utah vantage point. So as a scientist, I was tracked basically in the epistemological justification model. And what I mean by that is, oh, there’s correspondent theory of truth that I need to then create an abstract mind that then maps, right? And, but something happened to me in 1996 when I tapped into justification and then started to try to see how I could map and justify that scientifically, because then I realized that I was actually embodying ontologically the hunt for epistemological justification. And ultimately justification theory then shifts the angle dramatically from, oh, our task is in philosophy and science is to build epistemologically defensible structures that we will then try to defend against another epistemologically so that we have the right correspondence. And it is the race to do that with precision that is the ideal of what we are trying to achieve in the surface of truth. When in fact, ontologically, you’re a justifying eight. And we should probably start there in relation. And that’s a different move. And if you’re there, the likelihood that you will be trapped by your epistemic frame, I think is lesser. And so one of the things I would propose is our ontological understanding of our natures as we move from primates to persons and then move into this, I would like to propose those I AI folks who are trying to say, hey, accelerate or doomer is like, let’s at least pay attention to yourself as justifying agents first in relation, as opposed to trying to decipher what the epistemological justified position is in the ambiguity we find ourselves in. Right. And this is not the postmodern move, right? The postmodern move, which points and says, hey, they’re all just systems of justification. So we can throw them all out and say, no, there’s a theme going on here that is actually grounded. It’s connected to this long development of the history, right? It’s actually, it’s part of the stack. And so here we sit at this part of the stack. So John is saying, hey, here’s what happens in the context of justifying apes when justifying apes find themselves locked into a particular path. If there’s a trajectory you get on that creates a God, inexorably self-terminating onto epistemological reciprocal closing right there. Yeah. Don’t get on that track. And what you’re saying is let’s start here. And you use recognize, hey, guys who are engaging in this conflict, you’re effectively doing nothing more than throwing shit at each other. So let’s find this other space here that is, it’s the sapiens part of homo sapiens. And we can play in that. And herein lies our salvation, something like that. Exactly. And then I would add that the sacred ultimately then is the, can be thought of in relationship to what’s going to transcend, right? And then orient us relationally. Mm-hmm. Right. So last time, one of the other things that came up and it feels very timely is that category of the monomyth and the work that, shoot, what’s his name? He’s a friend of yours, John. Brandon, is that his name? Brandon? He was doing work integrating Jordan Peterson’s stuff with your stuff and with a little bit of Nisha. Oh, Brent Anderson. Brent Anderson, sorry. Yeah. Nosh of the monomyth, I think largely this sort of is a way of a way that people can grasp of what you were just saying, Greg, which is, okay, there’s in fact something going on at the level of the transcendent that the process of an evolutionary search and culture space, and then ultimately a narrative myth, the poetic space, which is obviously a piece of culture, has been discovering progressively over time. And there’s a process whereby we may be able to become a lot better at that, like no longer be doing it just by hunting and pecking and trying and failing, but actually say, okay, what does it look like to perceive this in the transcendent in its particularity? And it’s just the same way they say mathematics isn’t the same thing as just trial and error, right? It’s just a whole discipline. We can actually use mathematics to navigate the transcendent space of math in a very rapid and powerful fashion. Say we need to do the same kind of thing in this category. I want to make sure we don’t lose one thread here. I just want to emphasize that this is consistent with transcendent naturalism, even though we’re in the heart of neoplatonism and Zen, we’re talking about a relationality that is actually found at the bottom and the top of our physics. And of course, the quest is to find how those relationalities are properly related together. And of course, we’re struggling with this in a profound way. And I think part of it is that we’re still locked in to this, what I call a monological framework. And so I just wanted to make that point that even though we are talking about things that are taking us towards ultimacy, the sacred, even mystical experience, reaching into the ineffable of our, like as Greg is pointing to, the ineffable provenance of our biological embodiment and also into the ineffable heights, as Jordan just put it too, of our aspirational transcendence, we are not invoking something that needs to be in any way adversarial to physics. Physics presupposes this relational in a profound way. And I think that argument is well established. I’ve made it elsewhere, we’re pulled, I made it at the Consilience Conference, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m not going to repeat all of that. And so if we say that naturalism is also what is presupposed by our fundamental sciences, then we are not saying anything that takes us out of naturalism. But it is a profound reorientation. I want to say something different, this re-receptivity, this reopening towards the sacred that is nevertheless something we’re talking about here. I can’t remember the person who wrote this material. I was reading the book and I can’t, it starts with, but his basic argument is, you know, we’ve been really wrestling with Ultima C maybe 40,000, 50,000 years, which in terms of the history of the universe is very, very brief. And we’ve only been kicking it up past the Axial Revolution to this level, thinking that we’ve got the relationship to the ultimate is really immature. And so we’ve got to return back to being very open to novel and I mean profoundly novel expressions of Ultima C as sacredness. And so I just wanted to say all of that is now the left consistent with transcendent naturalism. And that’s the point about this. This is a different thing we’re talking about here, right? Extended naturalism and strong transcendence is consistent. In fact, it’s afforded by everything we’re talking about here. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a revolutionary import to it because I don’t mean political, you understand that. But I mean, it has a profound philosophical revolutionary aspect to it. It’s about a deep, profound transformation, reorientation, re-inhabiting of the very grammar of our cognition so we can recouple it to the grammar of reality so it can speak to us in the new ways it needs to speak to us again. So I want to try and hold these two things together. We are not stepping outside of any, we’re not taking up any adversarial relationship to naturalism in any way. That would be part of the problem. But nevertheless, that doesn’t mean it’s business as usual either. That’s the thing, it’s beyond both of those. So many different directions to go. So let me just throw one in. I’m not sure if this is a useful path, but it keeps coming up so the brave leads to get out of my head Nothing like epistemic hygiene. A lot of it’s cleaning up the detritus, you know? Well, the fundamental orientation, the grounding of that inversion that takes the participatory and flips it back on top. Saying, hey, a big part of this reciprocal closing trajectory is getting caught in the propositional. And therefore, in the category of religio, and I guess what I want to do is I want to create some space. So the category of religio, what we will actually find for the most part are things that are closer to therapeutics, things that are closer to relationship therapy, things that are closer to dispositions and character building exercises. As you were discussing, it’s like the basic disposition of humility as a primary way of being in relationship to reality. That comes from the category of religio. And that’s sort of part of the basic ingredients. 85% of religio is how to become one who is properly able to be in relationship with the universe, with other people, with yourself, right? All that kind of stuff. And then you’ve got this layer on top. It’s like, okay, if you’ve gotten to that point and you’re fulfilling this practice as well, here’s a little layer of kind of like the rule book of what that looks like when you write it down so that you can remember it and convey it to other people effectively. So that’s part of it. Now, this is very challenging. This is like wrestling in our world, very challenging because it’s difficult to scale that, right? And our receptors are so propositional. We want to do, like I look at the argument around, say, how do we navigate AI and regulation and things like that. The only thing that’s legible is to say, well, I’m going to write the definitive statement of propositions, the argumentum sumum totali, that once they read it, they’re just like, oh shit, I get it. You’re right. I’m wrong. I will change my behavior. And the point is that that’s, so one, that it blocks the ability to actually do the thing that can work. And of course, such a thing doesn’t exist, right? Because at the end of the day, Greg, we’re justifying apes. So what we actually have to do is become, funny, what’s that called? The two natures. We need to cultivate our higher nature, cultivate our second nature. Our base nature gets us to the level of being justifying apes. But if we’re not going any higher than that, then our justifications are actually just tools, a one step extended tools of power and control and winning, right? But if we can actually cultivate our higher nature, our second nature, something in there taps into this category of the transcendent, which we have oodles of evidence for, right? Everything that we’ve done for the past 15,000 years is the fact that, no, you can access that stuff. It’s there. It’s part of reality. It’s part of nature, quad nature. And we can access it and use it in all kinds of cool ways. Triangles are not made up. Triangles are a thing. And we don’t need to spend too much time worrying about the history of philosophy, trying to figure out how to partition it. What we can recognize is that, yeah, if you get the triangles or a thing, if you get the curves or a thing, if you get the calculus works, then you can do stuff. But all of that is happening. What happens when you cultivate this higher nature? So, sorry. No, I’m just coughing. Go ahead. That was great. So I was, so I’m thinking like, how do we, how do we, what do we do in that space? Like the, the, the, the, the, if the receptor sites in the world are all looking for an adversarial processing propositional argument, but in fact, that is precisely the wrong even basic approach. So we’re over here and we have to find some way of actually getting something like a, a new participation, as you said, a pilgrimage and existential landing and grounding that has the right kind of movement. So it’s a little bit like, it’s very local, right? It’s very, it’s very hands on. Somebody told me the other day, I was talking to him. He said, well, remember Jesus only had 12 disciples or 12 apostles, right? There may be a reason why it has to stay. He didn’t, he didn’t sort of stand and broadcast out and say, I’m down to 50,000. Let me get on TV and have a super like go off. It actually is something about in order to be able to properly disciple, in order to be able to actually become one who can, right? To actually undergo the process of transformation of self-realization, right? And so that’s the transformation of self that is the actual payload, right? Not the, not the language and repeat ad nauseum, but the actual change in self that become one who can, that’s just to be very intimate. So an intimacy that is not the nature of what we’re expecting in a post highly mediated mass media, social media environments. Well, I have a response to you about this and then I’ll shut up because I want Greg to start, but I think there’s a dichotomy there that you yourself have proposed. We are now capable of overcoming. We can have both the intimacy that we need and we can also have the force multiplier of civilization because of the way the virtual space enables that possibility right now. Of course, I’m thinking of your Sivyam proposal that we always had to choose between them. And that was always a dangerous risk laden disease vectored choice. Well, living in cities is actually really, really, really bad for 17 reasons, but we get a force multiplier in our ability to solve problems. And there you go. And that’s worth all of this other stuff, right? But the idea is, well, we could have the intimacy of the disciples because they were disciples before they became apostles. We could have that and we can, but we can also have the network of home churches that allowed Christianity to overtake the Roman Empire. And that’s also available to us. In fact, we have an empowerment of networking that’s available to us with the virtual and with a proper use of the AI. And we could do both. In fact, I would put it to you that part of the new language is the language that will somehow treat properly and ontologically and epistemologically the virtual in relationship to the intimately actual. And we don’t have that language yet. We don’t. And part of the way the sacred is going to speak to us is a language, not just theoretical, but a language that will allow us to inhabit something like what you proposed in Sivyam, where we can be at the intimate level that is needed, but we can also be at the civilization level that is also needed in an integrated fashion. We don’t have the language for that, although it will be a profoundly emanational and emergent language of relationality. It will be totally bottom up and totally top down in some profound way. And I think that this relationality stuff, I can see it in sort of in a presentient way. I can see, prescient way I should mean, or something like presentiment way, that this move to the ground as relationality prepares the possibility of the language that allows us to speak the virtual and the intimately actual together in profound relationship. And that’s, I think, one of the profound ways in which the sacred is needing to advent itself. So I give it back to you that I think actually your proposal says we don’t have to choose between those anymore. We are now afforded and the sacred is potentially calling to us that we can transcend that dichotomy as well. And we need to do so in order to address the meta crisis that we’re facing. I would give that argument back to you. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if you want to respond to that. No, do not throw the ball over to your court. Okay. It’s a set shot. I’m taking it, don’t hit it like a lot of people. You like you spiked it. I’m not going to put it back up. Right. Well, I mean, to me, basically, so one of the things that I think that Transcendent Natural is trying to do is we are trying to, you know, we are framing the relationality of which we find ourselves in and affording us a capacity to narrate the ambiguity and the potentiality of what we can be headed toward. And in that, what I am hearing laid down and what I’m certainly resonating with in relationship to that are what are the grounding values, and I mean that all the way down the ground, the problem value space that we are inhabit, and how do we orient in relationship to that aspirationally? And what do we need to consider in order to manifest and give the possibility of manifestation of the necessary contingencies around our intimacies, around our trade, and around our sacredness. And that’s what this conversation sort of is about, is about, fundamentally is about, hey, what is the operating system that takes into consideration a frame that enables justification systems to engage in effective opponent process at the propositional level that orients us pragmatically and perspectively, procedurally, participatory in our intimate relationships with the world and does so in a way that engenders life across the stack. So for me, that is what I’m groping for with Transcendent Naturalism. I think that’s right, and I think that was beautifully said. I think that this is what I’m going to, let me try this, Greg, and see how this lands with you, that there’s a new language coming. I don’t mean it’s not one of the three types Jordan talked about. There’s a new language, post the substance nominalist, dualist language. There’s a new language coming that would allow us to ground deeply into the fact that we are justificatory apes, but also allow us to open up to new kinds of collective intelligence and distributed cognition space that also are needed right now to guide us. And that’s what I was proposing with the Sivyam project. And the Sivyam project needs, I’m saying it needs this new advent of the sacred in order to give that language, not just as abstract theory, but exactly what you’re talking about, for the actual enabling of us becoming persons within this new kind of community. And this is the horizon of the fifth joint point and the kind of third attractors we need to be moving toward. Yes, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. So something that comes out of this then for me is a question is, let’s say, okay, let’s grant ourselves a big if in conditional reasoning. If this is true, let’s say it is true in some important way what we’re talking about here. And if it does have culturally revolutionary proposals, something analogous to an axial revolution or the triplet of the Renaissance, the Reformation and the scientific revolution kind of change, which is what I think it is. Because I keep wrestling with this. And I’m thinking about, you know, I have this ambivalent relationship to what happened at Ark and things like that. I’m tempted to use the distinction of being in the world, but not of the world. The ancient Christian, the ancient Christian, the ancient Christian, the ancient Christian, that ancient Christian distinction. I’m trying to fumble my way towards what are we supposed to be? What is our right relationship in all the ways of right? Right handedness, moral rightness, but right fittedness. What is the right relationship to what, you know, the current huge machine, right, which, which Jordan used to talk about, right, with, you know, the A and B and the different churches and things like that. And I’m finding, and sorry, the easy answer is to just pretend some sort of romantic place where I can stand apart from it and I’m free from it and I can pronounce upon it. And of course, I’m attracted to that. And, you know, there’s a part of me that loves that pretentiousness because it makes me look special and important. And I’m trying to call it into question right now. It’s much more, I’m talking about, you know, how we have all, and I’m not going to make any specific points here, but we are all wrestling with, you know, different ways in which the current American religious civil war is ramifying everything and making the adversarial processing worse and really foreclosing on the, on the sacred being able to take us back towards ultimacy. In fact, locking us into kinds of ideological idolatry, to use biblical language. How, how do we now properly, virtuously and with virtuosity live? And I try to mean this, like the way a character in an Albert Camus novel is asking the question, how should I then live? Even though I’m in the city, what is it, Orlan or Oran, and it’s in plague and everybody’s dying, nevertheless, how should I then live? Right? How can I be a saint without God, to use Theros? And I’m not claiming any atheism here. I’m just using that as the tenor of the kind of question I’m asking. I’m not asking this question. I’m like, I really wrestle with this now and it’s, it’s becoming even more and more. And there’s people that are close to me. And you know, which people I’m talking about, who have been personally threatened by this idolatry and in a profound way. And it has caused in me anger, because I love these people. I love one person in particular around this. And that they matter to me a lot. And I want to know how to live right with that. Because the pretense that that could be held over there, or the other pretense, well, you have to join one of the sides. And that’s just the only thing left you. I reject that too. Sorry, that was a long convoluted thing. But do you under it had to be because I’m struggling. I’m struggling to articulate something. Yeah. Well, I really I’d like the way that you, you brought it into the right place. Like at the very end, we got to the spot where it’s like, okay, this is personal. And this is hard. And it’s, it’s relational in the concrete, right? Not abstract. Exactly. And we’re all we’re all facing it to a greater or lesser extent. Everybody is facing it to a greater or lesser extent. Yeah, that distinction that you made between being in the world, but not of the world. And that sense of like the school of St. Stephen, like what’s it supposed to be the what was it called the proto man of proto martyr? Yes, that ability to have an orientation towards something that is so profound, that even as you are being stoned, you’re continuing to actually tell the truth, right? That that level of this is the mirror image of the notion of cathedral consciousness that we had talked about. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you’re naming it, but the answer is you have you have to actually be in the world in the manner of a saint. As an aside, by the way, I don’t think you do that without God, but we can just talk about what exactly that means. Yes. That’s powerful, isn’t it? I mean, it really does require something like a combination of a humility and a groundedness in a piece that is actually coming from the place the transcend. So it’s funny, the previous conversation had the languaging of the transcendent, the access to the transcendent as a way of orienting our choices in a way to navigate through the fifth joint point, almost from a design perspective. Yes. Now we’re talking about it from an existential perspective. Yeah. Right. A way of having something like encouragement, a courage to be and a way of being at so such profound peace that the tribulations of the world don’t move you. And it’s interesting. It’s like, it’s like, this is such a silly visual image, but what I’m seeing is almost like you’re holding a laser pointer and you have to hold that laser pointer with precision to get the thing to happen. Sorry, I’m Gen X and I watched way too many cartoons. It’s animated in my mind. And you have to be able to end and there’s like an earthquake or something or you’re on the ocean. And so you have to have simultaneous precision at this level, but also peacefulness at this level. So even as the world is moving, your ability to hold that precision is just untouched up to and including your debt. Right. So something that it didn’t work out and you didn’t make it. The ability to be completely transcendent in that fashion, like living in a place where the, and this is that the classic, how do you say it, paradox, when the only way to properly live in the world is to actually be of the world, but not in the world. The only way to properly live in the world is to actually have that relationship. Yeah. To be in the world, but not of the world. Is that what you’re saying? Yeah. So the only way to be of the world is to be in the world, but not of the world. I see. I see. The only way to care for the things you care for is to actually be in this place of peace that allows yourself to be in a space of, let’s go with the Buddhist side, like a non-attachment. These things are, they fit, like it’s actually perfectly fit. And then there’s the access of the lived. And this is, sorry, in the back of my mind, I’m having conversations with like the people in the big AI community. This is happening as well. And I can say in my life, like it’s very simple in my life. Most of my life, 85% of my life, we got a little one just came in. In increasingly intimate, increasingly nurtured, increasingly honest, increasingly, what is it? See and be seen, like healthy, real relationships and learning how to reconstruct that. Remember this part of the story of the family language as part of our architectures. How far we’ve gone, how much we’ve left behind of what is in fact the necessities of actually truly being just a human in the world. So most of my life is reconstructing that. And the hypothesis, the city of hypothesis is that it’s only by actually being a whole human that you have the capacity to do things like enter into DLogos, whereby we actually then unlock the capacity to do the kinds of things we need to do to be able to think clearly about this thing at all. So it’s like that therapeutic move and the sacred move. Like it’s not being in relationship to the sacred for reasons of, I don’t know, I can’t even imagine, like for formal reasons, certainly not for formal reasons. The whole point is that the sacred is like, what was it that Christ said to the living water. It’s like, hey, it’s because it’s living water, because it actually is the thing that gives you the aliveness that then allows you to become a person who can step into these kinds of things in a much deeper, more profound, more mature, more nurturing way, which then is to simultaneously unwind the reciprocal closure of actually being on the wrong ontological basis. And then it actually opened up this capacity to begin collaborating with people to invent this new language. Like even that, like just think about what it takes to say, hey guys, guess what? I got good news and bad news. Good news, we can solve the ALM of all. We can also solve the closure of river and we can get the entire human species through the keyhole of the fifth joint. The bad news is we have to actually become pretty darn mature and we have to build an entirely new language and we’ve got to do it pretty quickly. So, you know, the design spec is there, it’s doable. Here’s the shape of the space of the problem space. Here’s a whole bunch of articulations about why we get stuck and what sorts of things can’t work and why it seems very frustrating that you end up just getting into fistfights with people who you were having a conversation with the moment ago. Here’s what the answer looks like. And the answer has this weird look where intuitively it actually feels nice. Like it’s like, you know, it should actually, you know, become more healthy, you know, find something. It’s gonna be weird. You’re gonna go to what’s his name? Sam Altman. It’s like, Sam, you’re gonna kind of need to figure out how to be a better friend. And I’m not saying this in anything like a critical way. Like we’re all gonna need to find out how to be a better friend. Like that’s a minimum requirement because part of the character rich is we’re saying that the ontological primacy of relationality means that until you’ve actually embodied relationality and the skillfulness of navigating relationality, you’re not accessing the cognitive functions that are necessary to be able to process this kind of thing. Or you’re operating blind. We need to open your eyes and those eyes are called relationality. Something like that. But there’s a whole bunch of stuff there. Sorry, I went way off the… Well, no, that was great. That was really wonderful. I really appreciated that. I think at some point I’d like to come back to that you can’t do without God. And I think part of what we’re doing is to respeak, re-logos God. I’m trying to think of God as obviously a non-theistic, post-nominalist, neo-platonic, non-theistic. In that I’m trying to think of God as a sacred, an experience of sacred love for what is ultimate. And that when that happens, that’s what we’re talking about. God is not just that we’re in relationship to ultimacy or not just that we’re having an experience of sacredness. Because I can experience, and I think it’s proper that I do, Sarah as sacred, but she’s not ultimate. And even though she is mysterious in the sense I will never be able to fully grasp her, and that’s a good thing because that’s what makes her really real to me, she’s not ultimate. But when we have that kind of reciprocal opening and the experience of sacredness with respect to the ultimate, and here’s where I’m deeply impressed by that, and I think that’s a great experience of post-sySTE donating in that sense. Not everything is going to happen because we have it. It’s always a place that would have been dangerous for the ultimate to actually happen先生 but it don’t happen anyway. That was not the absolute truth. It was when wetlandsists first came out in april 6,aid,, but that saying has never been agetsed than it is now, or even later, That’s a notion of God that is profound but still within the purview of transcendent naturalism. It doesn’t require a supernaturalism. It doesn’t require a lot of other things that seem to still for many people be requirements and things that keep the Asian sense of sacredness and the Western sense of sacredness from being able to talk to each other. I’ve got a really good book edited by Cobb, who’s a White Hedian theologian, and it’s called The Emptying God, in which Masoabi talked about the fact that the New Testament presents God as that aspect that empties itself. Christ empties himself. I think it’s in Philippians that Paul’s talking about this. Then he says, well, isn’t this also convergent with what Buddhism is talking about, how reality ultimately empties itself? Then there’s a dialogue between Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity about this new way of trying to understand God and Shunyata as convergent rather than oppositional, adversarial, or minimally orthogonal from each other. That’s the kind of thing that I’m really, really hopeful for, that I see people are doing that kind of thing. But I don’t think, like I say, I think this is still consistent within a transcendent naturalism. I agree. So Masi and I, my partner, we built a utah credo that has beliefs, values, and mantras. And as you were talking, I was very much called to our first belief, as you were talking, Jordan, in particular, when you were talking about the combination of the laser and the waves. The first belief is I believe in the garden fractal. So the garden then is the symbol of wisdom, and the fractal is across various layers of spheres of influence. So it is this conversation versus my weak versus however long you would extend the influential light come of contact. And then it’s following principles in relationship to that fractal. And then the last belief is I believe in the concept of God, concept of God, whereby, hey, what is the shining light? And what is my orientation toward loving goodness, truth, and beauty in relation so that I can be a good ancestor? And so for me, then, I need to hone in on the garden fractal with this conversation and be in relation to the microcosms and meso-cosms. And then there’s the macrocosmic structure that then extends the potentiality of my vision, which at least could potentially extend to the back half of the 21st century, and then to place yourself sacredly in relationship to that across sort of the arc and to hold the laser towards that as you navigate the waves. So you and your partner are taking up like an ecology of practices, you’re taking up ways, a new way of being in community and in communion with each other. You of course have done a lot of work trying to craft new language. Is this lining up for you with what Jordan was talking about? I mean, what he’s talking about is, you know, Plato’s sense of inner peace. It’s not the mere absence of inner conflict. It’s shalom. It’s the fertile fruit, you know, fruiting piece. It would help me to know, even as your friend, if that is the case for you, is it engendering that in you? Completely. Again, we’ll hit the garden metaphor. There is a growth of fertility, engagement, aliveness. And there has been a need, especially given my history, you know, grown atheist, modernist kind of structure. There has been a real need and calling to institute ritual sacredness in the week. And so every day we do a credo, we get up together, we pick a belief, we pick a mantra, pick a value in relation. And actually, generally Thursdays, which is Life Organism Day, plant seeds, grow trees is our mantra, which we picked. And I believe in the garden fractal is the belief. And I shall nurture goodness, truth and beauty was our value for today when we did our credo. So every morning we get up and we identify a belief, a value and a mantra that we will live by and that we will sort of use to remind and remember ourselves about what aspect of our existence we want to cultivate, nurture and do that within this context. The beauty of our weak structures that then shades itself through the different dimensions and layers of our existence, I think, in a way that has been fruitful. So there’s a way in which just what just happened now is exemplifying what I’m talking about. This is something very intimate into and I don’t. Thank you for sharing it. And I don’t want to pry into your relationship. But this is grounding in the very concrete intimacy. But we’re doing it on Zoom so that it can go out into the virtual world. So the exemplification that is properly lived at the intimate level is no longer silenced by the fact that that light cone is very limited by sort of the reach of human vision and speech. Right. Now it’s getting no, you know, Greg is grounded in the intimate. He’s exemplifying something. But that is being exemplified now to the virtual domain in a profound way. That’s what I mean. And trying to navigate that carefully. Well, I think that’s that’s the great hope, right? Potentially. Yeah. So I came to think I was I was like paying so much attention to what Greg was saying that I think I lost the grounding. I remember the specifics of. John, if I think about this notion of substance ontology as being root to an inevitability of adversarial processing. And then I think about the conflict that emerges in doctrine. Religion. So I think we have a religion that’s not a religion. But what’s the second half of that? Well, the second half of that is the things that are captured by the ontological substance ontology that leads them into an inevitable adversarial processing with each other. That’s when you get exactly exactly right hand side of not. That’s it. So then we have OK, what does it mean to explore the space of religions that are grounded in a relational relationship ontology? That’s a very fruitful and encouraging like I had a felt sense like a optimism of hope, actually. And I’m using the definition that Paul uses. I hope was a sense of like a sense, a conviction for things wished for like, huh, this feels like the thing that can be done. I can feel a future state where this is a path that will bear fruit. The seed is planted and I can I can see that tree. I can taste the apple that will come out of it. There will be a time for it to come. But there’s this path. I can see it because there is no intrinsic necessity. The relationality is relationality. There’s a richness to it. It’s like, hey, wow, these guys over here have been doing it this way. These guys over here have been doing it this way. That’s kind of neat and interesting. Like there’s a kind of identity to it that opens up and not necessarily because all the ways are all it’s indifferent, not because they’re indistinct, not because some ways aren’t better than other ways, not because I haven’t got a. Yeah, trying to hammer that nail in with a screwdriver. Let me tell you about this thing we invented called a hammer. Check this out. Like, hey, that’s nice. Thank you. Right. That kind of an idea. Um, but because it’s not locked in to adversarial processing situation, it’s not grounded in that in such a way that you’re stuck. Um, let’s see. Yeah, so then I was I was working backwards. I think I was actually working backwards with you on this notion of, OK, what is the embodiment of this notion of God that works in this fashion? What are the characteristics? And, you know, and of course, we’ve got we’ve got we have we have a cheat sheet. We’ve got things like pure relationality. What does pure relationality look like? Like, how do we actually think that through? Fortunately, we don’t have to. Other people think about that very precisely. We can sort of import a big chunk of that and start doing some integration. This notion of of relationality, like, I mean, sorry, we have to be able to have a relationship with God. But it’s not a thing that we have a perception of. It’s not a thing that we have a mental model of. But it’s not a thing at all. That’s the point. Right. It’s not a thing at all. Right. It’s a possibility of relationality. And the qualities of relationality, the entire portfolio of the qualities of relationality, that are available in the category of reality. And so that’s like getting your head around that. That’s a serious, nice metanoia. And it’s funny as I go through it, like when you bring in Sarah, I’m like, oh, yeah, because I’ve met her. I have a feeling like it’s feeling here. I mean, oh, yeah, OK. Now I kind of I get it, right. I get that thing. A re it’s not really rehumanizing. It’s actually it is exactly. It’s a re-enchantment, a re- bringing back the sacred in the fashion that we’re probably properly able to truly be in relationship with the sacred. And that, I think, is that we need to be careful to make sure we continue to stay on that path. Like every time we slip into a modeling of it or an articulating of it, we have to remind ourselves that that may be useful to help bridge the gap. This is the sacred language piece of it. Right. Yeah. Every time we accidentally find ourselves resorting to the habit of using trade language to be related to the sacred, we have to say, oh, wait, hold on. Oh, by the way, we just throw that out there. The my my sense of things is that things like Zen and I’ve talked to Zen priests about this, actually things like neoplasmism. I have not talked to any of the neoplatonic priests about this, but I can make that assumption. Part of what they were doing was actually recognizing the necessity of exquisite care because they knew they were actually using trade languages in the context of civilization. Mm hmm. I think things like reading. Yes. Yes. Yes. Hey, so for us to do the sacred thing, we have to be- the Sufis are really careful. Like they’re the Sufi approach, right? It’s very Zen in that sense of we’re going to say something to the whole point. Is that supposed to actually throw you for a loop, pop you out of the trade language trap, re-enter reorient you into a new place where sacred language is available. And now check this out. Like the whole other thing going on here. You thought you were reading X, but it actually is completely not X. But we have to put you through a process of reawakening your capacity on that front. Gentlemen, this is I think that’s a great place to end because it came like fully full circle with that last remark. And I need to go, but this has been a very heartfelt episode and I wanted to thank both of you. I wanted to as always thank my partner in this, Greg. And we always give our guests the last word, however they want the last word to be. Well, I can say that what I’m- throughout the entire arc of this conversation, what I felt was I can’t wait to share this. I feel very empowered right now to have what I would say are meaningful conversations across a wide spectrum. It’s a lot of things in here that I look forward to sharing with others. And for me, my measure is that, okay, have we done something that’s actually worth sharing with other people? I think the answer is yes. That feels really good. And thank you by the way, John, for opening up with the- before we started recording with, I just want to play. So we were in a space of- We were, that’s a lovely way to start. Relationally and dynamically.