https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=thHJP9M1Ev0
So, welcome everyone to Voices with Breveki. I’m here with my very good friend Jordan Hall. We were just noting the fact that although we’ve been forming quite close friendship, we’ve actually never met in person. So hopefully someday that will happen. But right now we are going to meet and enter into the DeLogos. And the topic I’d like to talk to Jordan about is what seems to be happening right now. And I think it’s in concert with his general ideas about moving from game A to game B. It is a reconsideration of what rationality means. Jordan and I have talked about reconsideration or what I now term a reinventio of faith and related terms. But it now strikes me that given the rise of what’s been called a metamodern approach to rationality, a reconsideration of what rationality means after or maybe during the postmodern critique, what’s happening with the emergence for e-cognitive science in which the Cartesian framework on cognition is being undermined. And of course, the Cartesian notion of rationality is the predominant one. And so if that model of cognition, the Cartesian model of cognition is being undermined, then that predominant model of rationality is being undermined. Some of my work has been about trying to rehabilitate the notion of rationality in a more Socratic fashion to make it more dialogical and more concerned with overcoming foolishness and self-deception and affording transformation. So there’s a lot out there. And that notion of transformation links up with Jordan’s work. And then possibly also, what does that mean for the relationship between rationality and faith? Does the reinvential of both of them bring them back in consonance together in the way they used to be so seamlessly found together and mutually affording and mutually interpenetrating in the work of the Neoplatonists, Plotinus being an exemplar case. But of course, you see it in Proclus and Demacius, etc. So that’s sort of a rich context that you can take and play with it as you wish and start to riff on it. What do you have to say to that proposal? Sure. Well, the things that come up quickly are. Well, the first word that actually came about was creation or creativity and also to some sense, innovation. And before we started recording, you use the word algorithmic to refer to the notion of the Cartesian sensibility, maybe even the Cartesian reduction of rationality. Yes. And I think that that’s the place like that. The how do I say this? OK, so to the degree to which we find ourselves making the error of identifying rationality with algorithmic, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, right, specifically, because that kind of rationality consists of. It’s funny, I mean, I can’t help it, there’s certain aesthetics here. It consists of the sort of the ultimately rather boring process of optimization. Yeah, it’s a it’s kind of a search function in your inventio. Is that right? Inventio? To search and to discover. Yeah, inventio means to both search and discover. Yes. So it’s the search piece of that. It’s the proposition. It’s a fundamental hypothesis that the universe is in some sense prefigured and unchanging and that what we do is we search it. And our job is to search it well, I mean, to search it efficiently. So to find the shape of the phase space in which we are in with the least amount of searches, the least amount of energy in the shortest time with the highest fidelity. And the problem of that kind of rationality, the visual image I have right now is like of a wall, like a brick, a stone wall and like a laser scanner that’s trying to map that into a 3D model. Yeah, that’s what you’re trying to do, right? You’re trying to really convert reality into a model of reality with velocity and fidelity and with the least amount of energy, although a laser is pretty expensive energy. And that’s cool. And it’s super useful. And quite often we find ourselves in environments that are of that sort. But here’s the thing. And I’ve actually had this conversation three times in the past couple of weeks. So I guess it’s right. At the end of the day, that is prefigured on a rather unproven and I would say somewhat self, how would I say this, self contradictory metaphysics, an assumption, in fact, an axiom that the universe is strictly non-innovative. Right, right. Somehow there was a big bang. This typically comes from folks who are kind of coming from the more, let’s call it, not even scientific, but scientistic world, maybe computational, which is sort of a subset of that. But they’ll take the standard model of physics and accept that’s the story. So the notion is, okay, well, yeah, there was a moment. In the beginning, there was a big bang. So there was one point where creation happened. Not quite sure what the hell that’s all about. How we went from nothing to something. But I do know this for sure. Once we’re from nothing to something, that was the end of that. Then it’s just been kind of like the playing out of somethingness in what appears to be time. Because under the standard model of the standard model, it’s all kind of like a single fixed light cone and the sense of time is actually false, which I don’t, it doesn’t make any sense. The sense of time is the point. It’s the sense of it. You can’t have a false sense of sensing. Anyway, that’s a whole other digression. So the problematic there, of course, is we’re talking about this notion of strong emergence. It’s funny, we’re dropping into that dialogue, that set of languages. And the problematic of the question of strong emergence is to say, look, if you accept the premise that your ontology and your metaphysics has a slot called innovation at all, like more than nothing, and if something is not there, then it’s not going to be there. At all, like more than nothing. And if something can come from nothing at all, even once, then the burden of proof is in some sense on you to demonstrate that it’s not always happening. Like, why wouldn’t that just be constantly going on? What would be the thing? Like, why would it be the case that creation happens once and then doesn’t happen? Okay, then what happens is that you flip and say, well, what would it look like to say that we’re actually in a fundamentally creative universe, that novelty is always happening, by the way. And more importantly, there’s a real serious novelty where it comes and becomes part of the fabric of the universe in which we’re seated. Right. Well, the problem is this, right? The problem is that the model of algorithmic rationality is premised on a finite state space. Yes. If you’ve got a combinatorial explosion where the n is infinity, then your computational capacity to search that has to be also infinite. Right, right. Well, that kind of puts the kibosh on that because if you have a truly creative universe, if there’s no bounding on the size of possibility space, then what that means is you actually have a infinite universe, which means that your algorithmic efforts are, well, they’re practical, right? But they’re not fundamental. They cannot ever be absolute, nor could they ever be the kind of thing upon which you could put, you might call, a solid foundation, like a firm for sure forever, which is, you know, that ideology, that effort was the, what was his name, Hilbert? The guys in the early 20th century league. And Russell and Whitehead, right? And of course, Whitehead is coming to mind. Exactly. You want to get this shit locked down. We’re going to spend like 10 years writing a big ass book to lock this shit down. Can’t do that. That was like, okay, that’s the great demoralization of the early 20th century. Right. And but I think that, and Whitehead, I think is the guy who kind of, he recovered, right? He bounced off. He’s like, okay, I got to adjust to reality, which is a really powerful move. What’s that look like? And then you get this process of the notion of, okay, we’re actually in a creative universe. Yes. So our challenge is now, in fact, in some sense, shifted from a epistemological one to an ethical one. Yes. The question is how, in fact, just do we live? How do we make choices? Yeah. On an ongoing basis in a space that is, on the one hand, for sure, not strictly definable, either practically or theoretically, and it’s going to be constantly surprising. It’s going to keep throwing up new shit that didn’t even exist in the universe a moment ago. Now, if that’s the task of rationality, we’ve got a much more interesting problem. And sorry, that was quite a dialogue. No, no, no, no, no. No, that was excellent. I really like that. Off the cuff, entirely improvisational. Well, obviously not entirely. I’ve thought about this quite a bit. But so the thing, the last image that came up, and I think it’s really beautiful, is like the, like what I think is really the grounding of that algorithmic sense, but the grounding is more honorable, which is the, like the stonemason or the architect, the notion of like tools for designing things well. And if you want to design a wall, you really need to have a rock solid algorithmic mapping of the constraint space that you actually find yourself in. And the better you can actually know, okay, it’s going to be this tall, and this is the sway, and here’s the variance, like that kind of stuff. Like that kind, that quality of rationality that becomes increasingly necessary, the more fine-grained the techne that you’re engaged in. That’s the grounding. Like you’re really thinking about it from the point of view of essentially the artisan’s rationality. Yeah. Then you’re like, okay, cool, because the artisan’s rationality is also at the bottom, practical. It doesn’t have to have this obsession with knowing everything. It just needs to be able to, or having a notion of I need to get to a perfect mapping. It’s just my job is to have the right kind of mapping to do the job that I’m doing very well. It loops back to the ethical, from the epistemological back to the ethical, in this case also the aesthetic. Yeah. I want to build a beautiful wall as well as a wall that stands, and a wall that was a good wall to build, that is actually a good choice all in. Wow, you can go a lot there, but let’s stop there. Okay, that’s really good. I like you bringing in because that’s exactly what I want to do. I want to consider more the ontological aspects of rationality as well as the epistemic. It’s funny because of course Socrates was a stone mace. There’s a weird bit of irony in your imagery. A couple of things occur to me. One is, first of all, even within, the Cartesian framework also undermines. You went outside of it and said, look, it doesn’t glom onto the metaphysics well. You can also look inside of it in a complementary fashion and say, it doesn’t sort of hang together. We of course alluded to Godel there. You can’t get a formal system that’s simultaneously complete and coherent, etc. Then there’s all the work that I do around the fact that if you try to even have, even if they’re a fairly complex universe with just a certain number of entities and possible relations, even if it was fixed and you try to sort of solve problems in it, you’re going to hit combinatorial explosion. You need relevance realization. I was talking with Jim Carson about this last night. Right. Then the knack of rationality is typically to, you have to somehow steer between the skill and the algarismic and arbitrary. Neither one of those are adaptive. Right. Now James and the pragmatists come up and say, well, the adaptivity is now the crucial normativity. Rather than certainty, it’s reliable adaptivity that we’re talking about. For me, and this is part, only part of what reliable adaptivity means, is overcoming ways in which your design, which was previously functional, is now becoming malfunctional. That’s sort of the key moment in adaptivity. Right. For me, what that looks like epistemically is overcoming self-deception. I had this framing. The reason I use this framing is because it has worked. But now it doesn’t frame the situation well. I have to break out of it in moments of insight and restructuring. And so immediately what’s coming to mind is the idea that, okay, we’ve got to make the rationality zero in on adaptivity, reliable adaptivity, which means, and now here’s where for me the ethical comes in, the virtues that make us reliably capable of dealing with self-deception. And then on the other hand, then this is where it comes onto your metaphysics. It’s like, well, yeah, maybe one of the reasons also why this Cartesian thing collapses internally is because it ultimately isn’t grounded in a correct picture of reality, as you’ve already argued. And then if reality, and so I take the same lesson you did from Whitehead, if reality is actually ultimately complexifying, right, so that there’s emergent things generally happening, then there’s also another aspect of rationality, which is what are the virtues that put me into right relations, reliable right relationship with this? And those are the two sides of adaptivity. There’s the self-corrective side, and then there’s the connected side. And so that becomes more prominent. And then the question now shifts to what are those virtues and what do they look like? And then there’s sort of one more aspect to that, which is, and this sort of bridges between the metaphysics and the epistemology. See, so I take it, and you’ve seen the arguments, and so I don’t want to repeat them here. I take it that relevance realization is like the core adaptive function of cognition, and I take it that therefore the corresponding metaphysical property we’re looking for is intelligibility. What is it about the world that allows relevance realization to glom on and work so that we get reliable adaptivity? I take that as sort of my starting point of my metaphysics, and this is why I’m so attracted to neoplatonism, because neoplatonism is, the tradition is, when I want to understand being, what I pay close attention to are the properties and processes of intelligibility, right? What is it, how does the universe have to unfold such that intelligibility is possible? Now, the difficulty we might have with the neoplatonic, and I get this, is it’s a perfectionist one. It gives priority to static, and that I’m putting aside. So I’m putting that aside, and I talked about that with James last night. But it brings to mind this issue, and you might even see this emerging in the physics. See, one of the arguments I have against reductionism is an argument actually about intelligibility. It goes like this. The one thing that science presupposes, and this is Nicholas Maxwell’s work another, science presupposes rational intelligibility. It’s a presupposition. It can’t prove it. It presupposes it, because, right? And so, okay, well, fine. So what? Who cares about that? Well, the problem is, intelligibility seems to require complexity. It seems to require some relationship between differentiation and integration. So here’s the issue. That means that all of the integrated differences that are in this world of my experience, that’s where the ground of intelligibility is. And if I drop down to the bottom level, all the particles and forces are identical. Where does all the difference come from? And if you say it’s only epiphenomenal, then you’re saying the intelligibility is only epiphenomenal, and then science becomes a huge performative contradiction. There has to be something real about the informative intelligibility of reality for science itself to be possible. And so I think if you, we should now think about rationality as the set of virtues that make us reliably adaptive by overcoming self-deception and affording right relationship via a metaphysics of intelligibility, creative intelligibility. That’s what I would propose to you. So the thing I would maybe want to add or shift. Please. I mean, prior to this, we talked about the fact that you’re about to enter into some conversations with Forrest Landry. And so what I would say is that word metaphysics, the word I wanted to put was embodied. Something about embodiment. We’re not talking about it as strictly semantic or propositional. No, no, no, no, no. And of course, Forrest very specifically called it imminent. With the imminent he is referring to that, right? The body immersed in life. Yes, totally. So given that, given that characteristic, and that’s, you know, it’s worth kind of highlighting it, because if you’re looking at this from the outside, there may be a tendency to get a little confused in the concept of metaphysics as being about propositions, as being consensual. Yeah, we’re very much talking about it. Maybe you used earlier in terms of the same way that we talked about faith, right? It is this is not a credo. This is a a fully embodied skillfulness. So it kind of doesn’t matter in some strong sense where your adaptive intelligibility comes from. It may may prove frontal cortex, linguistic propositional mapping. It may come from a gut response. But the point is that that’s just different, different places in the evolutionary timeline of your organisms adaptive fitting to reality. I would strengthen it more, Jordan. I would say more. Because I mean, I think, well, again, I have independent arguments. I’m not going to repeat them that the relevance realization that that’s at the central of this is definitively. Sub propositional, right? I mean, it can be reframed and transformed with the propositional, but that that activity and this is, I think, prefigured in the pragmatists and even in the phenomenologists that reliable at activity is not much more at the level of our procedural skills, right? Our perspective, you know, situational awareness and ultimately our participatory knowing the way we are dynamically coupled. And so when I was talking about the rely when I’m talking about rationality, the intent is to deliberately extend the notion of rationality beyond the Cartesian limitation of it to propositional management. It has to be. That’s why I invoke the term virtue. It has to do with skills and states of mind and existential modes. And that’s what virtues have to do with, right? Right. Those virtues. So this so this then, you know, is another way of putting the kibosh on the Cartesian or the narrow algorithmic model, because that of course is strictly about propositions. Yes. Sliding around. Yeah. And brings me back to mind of the notion of like the, the og stone mason, for whom the skillfulness in relationship with reality is like ratio rationality ratio right to get the get the things in the right proportion. So I think the answer in some sense is, yep, that’s it. I think, like I said, when we when we introduce the topic. I mean, from my point of view, there’s this kind of two moves here. One move is the move of how do we further this. So my answer must be, you’re making I agree. And I had to say like, I don’t want to make this like to say this right. To me there that’s quite evidence like I don’t feel confused about that. I don’t like maybe like no, yes, for sure. And I can kind of go at length defending it but the challenges. Cool. Now how do we have to become more rational? How do we begin the process of collaborating on the space to actually be better at it and more fully richly insightfully. And then there’s the other move is this is the part that I personally have a lot of time for is like the defensive move like the back end move. I would say, well, how do I continue to explain this more and more clearly and more precisely and to some extent more effectively so that those for whom this is not obvious. You know, cross the line. I don’t mean persuasively, except in the positive sense, which is to say, okay, hey, therapeutically, I’d put it there. I’d like to propose that you’re stuck in a box that box is not helpful will not serve you. And in fact, lots of people have talked about that box for a long time. We don’t need to be stuck in the box. There’s actually a whole different thing here, which by the way, isn’t a box like there’s no edges to it. The point is, yeah, when you’re kind of when you’re when you find it when you when you’ve lived your whole life stuck in a box, infinite space has a bit of a felt sense of what’s that called when you’re feeling dizzy like when you’re vertigo right. It has a felt sense of vertigo vertigo, but but that’s like you can actually it’s possible to navigate and orient and and to get really good at like flying through infinite space. And it’s more fun. And by the way, better maps to reality so therefore it’s also more likely to not kill you and everybody else. I can’t handle that last piece. It’s fine. This is actually kind of a cool there’s all kinds of so many different ways to connect. You know, I mentioned earlier that in my personal life a lot of the conversations that I have that are of this sort, come from a particular subclass, and a big part of that subclass is what you might call the rationalist community in that rationalist community is folks who work on things like computation computers, computer science, and particularly folks who work on AI. And that I think is a place where the ethical and the metaphysical actually get very interesting, because the proposition is something like If you try to run the AI project through the Cartesian model of rationality, the algorithmic model of rationality. Two things are going to happen. One is ultimately you will fail for the reasons that we’ve just described. And in the meantime, you might actually do a lot of harm. Yeah, and that’s something to be wary of right because you know it’s the master and his adversary problem. Reality is is that we can actually subordinate our choice making infrastructure to strictly algorithmic rationality. Yeah. Wow. Okay, let me let me let me really settle in this one because we’re seeing a lot of this these days, I’m going to raise a particular character Bill Gates, right. I will propose I don’t know Bill Gates personally at all. So I’m going to propose is I’m definitely proposing a character who I am projecting maps to the real human Bill Gates and probably wrong. Yeah, but there’s a kind of a algorithmic logical. And the Syria taking itself as the master almost like managerial in the actuarial or accounting sense that that character plays and technocrats. There you go. The techno crap. To the degree to which we subordinate our choice making our ethics to that character in our own selves or in our larger collective extended selves. We will in fact be making less effective choices. Yes, because our ratio our rationality is much larger than that narrow piece. If we subordinate that larger to the smaller, the millisecond that what we’re dealing with is outside of the scope of what that smaller is appropriate to deal with. We’re making bad choices. And there’s lots and lots and lots of that. Like this is the metaphor here. For example, a metaphor was that discovery in the 80s of the beginning of complex science complex system science and nonlinear dynamics and kind of like the old hand to the forehead of oh shit. Yeah, I totally forgot Newton nailed it. You know, calculus and Leibniz and linear equations were super useful. They’re so useful that we reduced all of science and all of all of all of our scientific work to linear to that terror subset of reality that linear equations can map really effectively. Oh, wait, but we forgot. It’s only about like that much of reality. Yeah, all the rest of reality, which is all the most important stuff or most of the most important stuff is strictly nonlinear. And so there’s a linear equations would never have worked. But because the tool was so damn effective, we kind of got myopic and maybe that’s very similar to your notion of bullshit. We bullshitted ourselves. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. From being in direct relationship to reality. So this this intrinsic intermixing like this react this recognition that the the bullshitting yourself, and particularly the the seduction of modernity of getting in suckered into taking the emissary as the master taking Strictly logical computational algorithmic rationality as the whole of rationality is, you know, it’s punching yourself in the face. It gets advantages. It has optimization capacities. It’ll actually always win short term fights because it can optimize for the finite domain of the of the of the domain of the short term that you’re identified. But it will always lose oftentimes catastrophically for everyone involved in the long term, because it just it’s errors continue to build. But it’s it’s mania for maintaining its integrity continues to build like the whole bullshit kind of drum. And then you have to go through some sort of one of these horrible moments of clarity hit rock bottom moments to shake your psychology out of that. And so anchoring at the ethical right, which is what you did right you anchor rationality ethical. Ethical. It’s a disposition and a practice of maintaining a capacity of integrity and conformity with reality superseding opt to anything that is optimizing anything that will be locally effective but at the cost of reducing global effectiveness is the basis of rationality is that You taught me this term, by the way, I can never remember it. Neurology the the brain going back and forth this thing. Self organizing criticality. Know the reboot like the, the process where you were the brain. No, it’s not model free methods. It’s the fun. I just it’s like it’s like it’s this term is identified itself as the word that I always forget to say. I wish Mac to burger about this yesterday and he just like he named it. Anyway, I’ll just have to use the description, but it’s that it’s that notion of like there’s a process of the network becoming optimized for particular domain. And then there’s a has to but there has to be more fundamental mechanism like a tripwire that pops, it says okay go back to base like go all the way back to sort of equilibrium ways. And then and then come back like a cycle that has that is the basis. Yeah. So, sorry, I’ll give you a moment because you seem to be contemplating something. Yeah, no, I actually I think the right thing is, it feels like right now there’s something that you’re holding that when you bring it back in, I’m actually actually can feel like there’s a space here and there’s a thing here. And this thing here ain’t mine. And so until that’s in place, I’m just kind of holding say okay when’s that inside. Well, okay, well, I had a lot to do. There’s a lot in there was so rich. So I think there’s also a place we could start with at the beginning where you talked about the two projects. The one is what is rationality mean and also persuading other people. And it actually goes into this because what we’re talking about now, and this is this is to undermine another one of it’s not even a Cartesian thing it goes back to Ockham. How can you get this move where you don’t have to go through any fundamental transformation in order to get the truth. And so, if we, if we put that notion that there are that the universe, the universe demands transformation from us with the notion of the cultivation of virtue, we’ve seen it now rationality, sort of located in these two things, the transformation of character and the corresponding transformation of communities, because those of course, and that was Aristotle’s point, we’re inherently political animals, those two are bound together and this is, in fact, I become more reflective on my own. In fact, I become more reflective on myself through dialogue with you. There’s increasing evidence that reasoning works best in distributed cognition. So let’s when I’m talking about transformation of character and communities, I mean that whole thing. And that’s where virtue actually sits. Right. And then I was thinking, well, the way to persuade people, the Socratic way to persuade them isn’t to go in and try and just defend or refute. The way to do it is to, right, is to actually undergo the transformation of character and communities in a way that makes beautiful a new way of being for people, so that they are drawn to it in through love, rather than trying to persuade them. Yes. Right. Right. So you get drawn into a new paradigm, not because somebody’s destroyed the old paradigm, you get drawn into a new paradigm because it’s got some beauty to it that wasn’t available in the previous paradigm. At least that’s one reading of Cure that I think is- Right. And another way of saying that is that it awakens in you the broader, larger, richer rationality that has always been there. Yes. It rekindles that and kind of seduces awake or spring times the winter of your soul. And by the folding of that, you then are brought into it. That’s wonderful. I love that. It’s spring times the winter of your soul. That’s really good. I like that. It’s really wonderful. I’m sorry, I’m just enjoying that. So then, and then part of, and this is more in Plato, it survives in Aristotle, but you see it more clearly in Plato, that cultivation of character, right, one of the essential virtues to rationality that is inherently aspirational in nature is reverence, which is the appropriate, right, because reverence is This way humility and that way mystery, that there’s always more, right, there’s a moreness, there’s always a moreness and inexhaustibleness to reality that I need to always wonder about. And wondering means to be humiliated in the sense of calling into question anything you have, yourself and world, right, but not in the negative sense of humility, but in the, that’s why I prefer the term wonder, right? Right, and wisdom begins in wonder, the Socratic maxim. And so that seems to me that if we take these notions of the transformation of character, the cultivation of virtue, and think about the aspirational nature of rationality, and then we put, and then we bring in the notion of the needed virtue, and I’m making it an epistemic virtue here, the needed virtue that reverence is the right thing to do. And if reverence is needed for this kind of rationality, then it sounds like we’re starting to close the gap between rationality and faith in an important way. Yeah, very much so, very much so. And so, I guess my mind turned to the quite practical. Yeah. Because there’s, there’s like an arc. I guess I guess it’s sort of an S curve, we gotta say that all the time. There’s an arc here, meaning, say for example in terms of a paradigm, there’s a moment of excitement in the formation of a paradigm. There’s a moment of confidence and effectiveness in the coalescence of a paradigm. Yes. And then there’s the moment of kind of like repressed, repression and bullshitting, and also like the peeking out of curiosity and possibility in the senescence of a paradigm. I bring that up because, again, it is very much my proposition that we’re in the mother of all paradigm shifts right now. And so, reality is bringing forth the proof, but also the necessity of the reawakening of these very, very virtues. There is no better time. There’s no time where it has been more needful to be truly virtuous in this sense. Change, it is a common, and therefore the virtues that are associated with the ability of what does it mean to be individually and collectively able to hang together in the context of big change, is the most central. And so it’s not just sort of in some sense an academic exercise. Oh, wait, hold on, we remembered what rationality is and it looks like this kind of thing and therefore it’s like, no, by the way, it’s anchored in the practical eyes and the practicals are right here. Yes, yes. That’s very helpful. This is not in the least bit an academic exercise. This is very much a therapeutic and adaptive, right? You already said, Dean, adaptive capacity. And we’re at the tail end, very, very tail end. We’re hanging off our fingernails of a paradigm that is quivering like nobody’s business and with huge magnitude. And, you know, if history has taught any lesson that the best way to get a sense of virtue is to look back at those things that were the things that gave rise to adaptivity during moments of crisis. Yes, I agree with that. I think that’s very well said. I just wanted to riff a little bit longer, and I think it’s constant with what’s happening here on on reverence, like, there’s a continuum from insight to wonder right into our reverence and then reverence is the virtue that keeps us valuing and oriented towards insight wonder and That’s why I’m understanding it. And the reason why this is important is because insight is that moment when you realize that your framing is inadequate. And, and we have good evidence that the insight machinery is the same machinery you sort of need in order to overcome self-deception. And we’re going back to the the adaptivity model of rationality, right, but wonder and are also a calling to accommodation, a calling for you to to to transform how you conform to reality so that you come again into right relationship to it. The more we can, the more rationality, the more our virtues, right. Are empowered by reverence, the more they’re going to empower the machinery that reduces self-deception and that also draws us motivates us into a better right relationship with a bigger reality. I’m using bigger here as a metaphor, of course. Now, and then you said this is very, very practical. It’s about virtue, but then a very practical question comes out of it. And here’s, and this is part of what I think is what I’ve called the meeting crisis. People Don’t have a worldview that makes them have reverence for reality in general. People have aesthetic experiences and they have this and that, but it’s fragmented. There’s nothing that, you know, there isn’t a home. And this is part of this is part of what drops point of his book, right. It’s why he says reverence is the forgotten virtue. Think about how much we treat being irreverent as somehow a good feature of a person. Right. And so we’ve lost and you know, and the cynicism and right, right. And, you know, I understand why, you know, it’s all the stuff that Daniel Schmuckenberger caps about. But nevertheless, if we want, I’m making a design argument here, a practical argument. If we want this kind of adaptive aspirational rationality, we need a way of being in which we can be a better person. In which reverence is a pervasive and proper virtue for us. A reverence for reality, rather than as Heidegger said the way we’ve turned everything into a standing reserve. Mm hmm. Yeah. So Okay, a little bit, little bit. I mean, sometimes obviously yes. And I want to say that in a way that so that it lands. But one of the things that I want to do is maybe. Okay, try this. This is nice. Okay. If we take this as a as a as a as a true statement in the strong sense, and therefore as a virtue in the strong sense, then we have a very fun thing we can do. We can discover in the most banal. The opportunity for exercising that capacity. Yes. I’ll give you an example. It came literally came to me just this morning. In large parts of North America. We have a heat wave. Right. Really hot. So I’d like to invite a practice. Yeah. Yeah, this is good. So go outside, get hot. Hot and thirsty. Then, find a way to provision yourself with a very cold beverage. I see water, good spring water would be good. Nice tea if you come from the south. And then drink it. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Then be conscious of three things. The first thing. The first two are not in any particular order. One is to recognize that you did it. Fucking pulled it off. You needed a cold drink, and you’ve got a cold drink, meaningfulness in the, in that sense, means to an end. Yeah, which is not trivial. That’s a real deal. Like you knew it, you need to be done you pull it off. That’s a real thing. Second, be aware of your body. The felt sense of meeting your needs so artfully. By the way, it feels really good on a hot day to have a cold drink. This is why Coke sells it, right? Why they turn it into a standing reserve. But then, now here’s the tricky one. The third one is the tricky one, which is how it moves from meaningfulness into reverence. The second one is see if you can notice in that moment of awareness of the meaningfulness in both the practical sense and in the sense of the felt sense. The always there, always present, sense of connectedness or sense of flow, sense of being, right, sense of consciousness, whatever you want to call it, right? I’m having, this is amazing. I’m almost going to become a Yungie here because of the synchronicity. So I’ve been starting, you know, I do the morning meditation class and we sort of went through everything that I could teach them from, you know, the Eastern tradition, Buddhist and the Taoist traditions. And now we’re moving to the Western tradition and we’re starting with Epicureanism. And Epicureanism, of course, is completely misunderstood in modernity. Epicureanism was not about being sort of hedonistic and partying. It’s about trying to find those pleasures that are the most reliably accessible to you, right? That’s the key move. So, you know, and proportion your effort to how reliably accessible that pleasure is. And give priority, by the way, to mental pleasures over purely physical indulgences because they have wider scope. So the language of mental and physical is a little bit anachronistic. It’s like give a way of rephrasing that is give priority to the more meaningful pleasures than to the ones that don’t carry with them. Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. So take that. And so I’ve been teaching and this comes from Evan’s work and others. I’ve been teaching them a practice for realizing the state that’s at the key of Epicureanism. The thing that you want to get to is called ataraxia. Ataraxia is often translated as as peace or tranquility. And it’s often sort of understood in sort of, um, privation terms. You’re free of tumult, right? But there’s actually a very positive content to ataraxia. So the savoring exercise looks like this. It’s like so Epicurus was in a garden. It’s about like you go for a walk and you’re trying to go for a walk where there’s living things initially to do this practice. And what you do is you savor. What does that mean? Well, first of all, no sentences or scenes in your head. Mm hmm. Empty headed coupled to the world. Okay. And then open up perception. Open up your sense of like how combinatorial the explosion. Notice all the details. Let your let yourself be flooded with right with that. But so that’s the bottom. The top down is activate your prehension. Prehension is how you project patterns and look for all the patterns and let let that also come into full activity. So, you know, and so what you get, okay, got it right. You get this tremendous sense of the presencing of everything. And it’s it’s this participatory sense of just the presencing of being. And it’s a kind of flow state. And what what you get, and this is what my students are reporting to you, is you get this sense of the pure joy of being. The pure joy of being. And now what happened then to push once you learn to savor in this sort of very natural thing, you start to translate it to things like well, drinking a glass of water, eating your food, and then you move it up into savoring speech. Yeah, it’s what you something you do and you because at the core of epicureanism is the virtue of friendship, where it’s not just people are being buddies, but friendship means this ability to enter into philosophical companionships. As Lahir talks about where what we do is we learn to savor the presencing of intelligibility in human connection. And that is always easily accessible for us. And it is a pure kind of right celebration of just the joy of human being. And that almost always brings with it, as you indicated that sense of connectedness and flow. It brings with it a deep sense of reverence. There’s a sense of reverence that emerges from that because the world like the world seems, you know, that you get all these symptomatic patterns. Because you pick up on all the texture gradients and the emotional tones and the tempo of the intelligibility. You know, Rusin’s book Bearing Witness to Epiphany that there’s a magical musicality to our intelligibility. Everything is patterning in a way that music is just the tip of this whole iceberg of the way in which things can be experienced as a flowing intelligibility. And so just consonant with what you were talking about, I’ve been teaching them this Epicurean practice and it’s very profound for as you said, I’d like the way you put it for even in the most banal thing. All I’m doing is going for a walk in my neighborhood or all I’m doing is drinking some water. All I’m doing is talking with somebody. Right. But I can, if I put myself in the right virtuous stance, I will recover this joy of being that is properly. I think one of the things it affords is a sense of reverence. Yeah, yeah. And I think it’s beautiful there. And I feel like it’s like the same movie maybe we’re talking about fate is that it regrounds that sense of reverence. I think it’s beautiful there. And I feel like it’s beautiful there. And I feel like it’s beautiful there. And I feel like it’s beautiful there. It’s like the same movie maybe we were talking about fate is that it regrounds this thing that has been kind of thrown up there in a, I guess almost like a, it’s almost like you’re just building a capacity, like flexing a muscle or being able to like dance or have balance at all. But that’s, that’s, that’s it. As you do it more and more, it just becomes more and more, I mean, easy, right? More present, more available, which by the way, life will give you all kinds of cool opportunities to have agonizing experiences and you can flex your reverence muscle in the context of that. And it gets even more capacity. And then, right, and then the point like the kind of the nail on this thing is say, and yeah, like this is simultaneously, it’s not weird whether this would be the case simultaneously, or I guess, simultaneously, this will give you the felt sense, all the felt sense of joy of life. It’s a good thing, like it’d be nice to have that all the time. Yes, it gives you the felt sense of joy of life. But what it also is, is it’s the actual, the reason why that’s the case is because it’s actually the most adaptive way to be. Yes. It’s the way to be in yourself in relationship with other people and with nature. It gives you the ability to be most fully aware of what’s really happening and able to be most fluid in yourself to be able to kind of flexibly respond and conform to what’s going on. That’s the thing. As you deepen the savoring practice, you get, you get what I sort of call it shamanic shape shifting. What I mean by that is because it’s a participatory thing, like, and this is sort of sounds very Zen too, but you know as you’re walking along and you’re, you’re like think of the way music is outside you and inside you at the same time. Right. And when is your, like here’s the, there’s some sand on the sidewalk and there’s a texture gradient here. Well, you actually feel yourself sort of shaped to that. And then you zoom out and you that’s situated in the here’s a tree and there’s a sky and then that zooming out is also a reconfiguration of your sense of identity and then what you get is you get in that trajectory of the shape shifting I’m using that metaphorically of course, right. Which is maybe part of the basis because shamans actually did that kind of manipulation of identity. Right. So, in what you get is you start to get in that trajectory, you start to get a felt sense of, wow, there is this reservoir of identities possible within me. And even more so a reservoir and not like my abstract possibility like a pregnant power in things that you know and you’re so you get a felt sense of that creativity you’re talking about that the world is actually always pregnant with more, more, more ways of being. And I have something smaller, but in correspondence, I have more ways of being there are also available to me in real life because I have evolved to adapt. I’ve evolved to adapt to fit to this book. Does that make sense when I’m talking about you? Yeah, absolutely. I was just I was kind of, I was trying to be there like actually be in that place, noticing for example that it gives rise to a really nice like a real profound sense of care and carefulness. Yes. But also at the same time, like there’s also a sense of like potency. Yes, yes. A place from which creativity is sourced, which is great, right. You link your creativity and your carefulness to be very closely linked. You’re not accidentally inventing things that are too dangerous. For example. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it seems funny how it seems funny how like each time we do this, it does seem that these words, these terms that we’ve inherited. They all have a place, like they all have a meaning in a context of meaningfulness. They’re all very grounded, like they’re all very connected. And it shouldn’t be surprising, but the thing where we do at the tail end of minority, it’s I guess somewhat surprising. And even like the old saws, like virtue is its own reward. Yeah. Well, now we can understand exactly what that means. Yes, yes, yes. Right. And it’s funny, you can just It’s like as I’m rethinking about the notion of the religion is not a religion. Yes, right. It seems like the real, like the task that lies before it. It’s really just it’s twofold, almost like one move, another move. One move is the one we’re doing right now, which is the the dusting off and the renovating all this stuff, like just wisdom and virtue and making it simpler so people can actually remember like, oh, okay, I get it. It’s just like how to live in a way that is both simultaneously maximally adaptive and maximally nurturing and most like joyful. That’s cool. That’s good. Like, why wouldn’t I want that? Oh, and it turns out that there’s like, we kind of know how to do that. We can begin to do it. We can build practices at it and get better and better at it. And there’s a self reinforcing element that is even a little bit better at it. You’re positioned to get even more better. And everybody who does that is better able to help each other like the fellowship concept of all of that is in that art. And then on this other side, though, is to say, okay, all right. Now, how do we what do we do to prevent the thing that causes us to get off track? Yes. We keep getting off track. We had lots of people over the past say a lot of these same things. Many of them actually been successful and initiated renaissance of virtue. We keep getting off track. We keep getting these reciprocal closings. Yes. How do we get to the nub of that and kind of nip that in the bud? Because, well, on the one hand, we’d just be a lot better if we didn’t do it. But on the other hand, I would propose we kind of need to stop doing that. Yeah. We need to really no longer. I think the right phrase is fall off the wagon. This is a one. This is a one time wagon. We’re going to get on the wagon. Now we’re going to stay on the wagon. What’s that look like? What’s the set of practices that has closure over the set of I guess you would call it sin or the set of errors. Yes. Yeah, choice or disposition that causes us to fall off the straight and narrow path. Yeah, that’s the content. That’s the content of this thing. I really like that because I’ve been struggling in the context of civium a lot of thinking about what’s the culture. And it’s so easy. And I’ve done this now a lot over the past week. So thank you. You once again sort of reminded me what’s the, what is both the easy and also right answer, which is at the end of the day, it’s these practices. The culture has nothing to do with what color dress you wear. It’s not fashion. It’s not rituals, qua ritual. It’s what are the practices that reliably cultivate virtue in individuals in relationships and more broadly. And any instantiation of a civium must do that well. Yes. And then of course there are many variations on that theme. As you said, you listed like 15 different versions of each of those different pieces and that’s cool. Like you do meditation. Is it a walking meditation? Is it more savoring? Like, is it coming from this tradition or that tradition? And this kind of work on those psychotechnologies, but the meta psychotechnology, like the toolkit, the collection and what is the checksum that you’ve done a good job is all very straightforward. Like you need a toolkit that reliably cultivates virtue developmentally, like appropriate to human beings, real being in individuals and in relationships. That’s the content. And then over here in this, you know, kind of like, okay, let’s figure this shit out soon. And what’s that? Like, what’s the thing that like really, really, really nips sin in the butt? Like not just aspirationally. Yeah. And I don’t mean this for, I’m not going to propose like with hermetic closure, but does a lot better job than we’ve done in the past. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s the key question. And it’s funny because one way of reading a lot of the Socratic dialogues, I mean, you can read them in the Atlantic dialogues, especially the most Socratic ones. You can read them as you know, probing about virtue. But there’s, I’ve also noted that there’s this probing about just this, because Plato is sort of perplexed that why aren’t more people attracted to what Socrates is offering. And why, and, and, you know, why do you have the El-Sobites phenomena? Somebody who was even deeply attracted to Socrates, falling in love with Socrates, being taught by Socrates, tasting what Socrates was offering, and then nevertheless, turning in, turning into a, you know, a very simple, venal kind of guy. Like, and Plato was like, you know, and he tries to fire a fire soul, and he tries all these things, the ways we, and that’s helpful because knowing about the self deceptive machinery, I think is very helpful. But there seems to be a deeper, like, I’m tempted to not try and answer that question right now. I want to, I want to sit with it. I want to come back to it. I want to talk to you about it again. Because this is really like, sorry, I mean, this is a metaphor. This feels like a black hole question. I feel lots of things are going into it, but I’m not getting anything coming back out of that, right? This, right? So let me throw one thing in on the fire. Yeah. Or in the, in the, in the Hawking’s radiation domain, which is Tyson Yoncapurta. Do you know him? We talked about him? No. So he’s somebody who’s come into my experience recently, maybe in the order of like three or four months. He’s, his book is called Sand Talk. Oh, this book keeps getting mentioned to me. Yeah, it’s, I think it’s the, it’s the thing that begins the process of the answer to the question. So his point, well, he makes many points, but a point that’s super relevant here is, look guys, we kind of did that. The Australian Aborigines put together a complex of psychotechnologies that maintain something like the direction of sustainable, non catastrophic continuity for like 30,000 years. Yeah. You guys have, you guys have civilizations that last like a thousand years are damn excited about it. You know, that’s, you know, you’re, that’s adolescent level. And so we’ve kind of, we’ve got that toolkit. Now I have two critiques, but the critiques aren’t critiques that I think are catastrophic. Right. What one critique is? Yes. You know, maybe within certain variances, you know, may, may have been that you just didn’t run into a circumstance where your toolkit reached its limit. It could have just been circumstantial, but nonetheless, like I’m not going to shit on it. That’s a, that’s a hell of a track record over a whole continent and lots of language groups. But we are definitely in a new context. So we need to maybe be thoughtful about what that, what that looks like. And then the other one, which is, I think actually ends up being a solved problem, which is, okay, you’ve built something which had incredible integrity on the interior of this particular protected niche of Australia, which also produced spiny echidna and platypus, but was hyper vulnerable to the exterior. Yes. So, meaning a bunch of Australian, like whatever, a couple hundred Australian criminals show up and immediately just destroy 50,000 year old civilization. So, so whatever we build, you know, there’s, there’s a lot, I think, and maybe even the majority to be taken from that indigenous wisdom. It just needs to be mindful of the reality of the contemporary context. What does that mean? What transforms? And then think really, really hard about that last bit. Like, what is the perturbation that generates? Is, you know, is it just because by nature our thing has to be global? So there is no outside. Like unless aliens come, as long as we actually maintain continuity, the whole of humanity is now contained within a single meta community, single community to us, so that the integrity of the interior is all that we have to accomplish. If that’s the answer, that’s neat. That may just be where we are. That’s cool. The other one would be to actually have a profound sense of what gives rise to what I would call game A, and what gives rise to that particular thing that its entire existence is precisely that it can prey on that indigenous mode. Yeah, yeah. And then extinguish that. And then, so that’s, I put that out there, like maybe for next time. We definitely have gone, we’ve covered a lot of territory, so it may be a good time to call. Well, let me just give two minutes of reply to that because, I mean, one of the issues for the aboriginal, I mean, there’s issues around population density. And what the Europeans brought was they could get, although they might have had fewer people, they knew how to coordinate them together in a much more dense fashion. And, you know, and agriculture gives you that, and civilization gives you that. Yeah. So I’m one, I mean, and to be sort of technical, the aboriginal culture was precisely not a civilization. There are no cities, right? And so, and so this is not a complete thought, but we may be manipulating, right, population density in the right way in your civium model to, right, address that concern that we sort of get, we can be dense, population dense in the hypersphere, but we don’t have the density in the biosphere that we’re actually ecologically invested in. Because that’s what the civium does. That’s your point. It splits the two and pulling the two apart might be like that you can take what is needed, right, the low population density, the Dunbar level of human interaction, which really seems to constrain sin, right? You could do that on one end, but you can, but there’s no outside threat because you also have your other foot properly in the most complex and dense civilization that has ever been. I mean, I put it to you as an open question we can return to that maybe the, I mean, maybe one way of reconceptualizing the civium is that it may get at sort of a root cause of sin. Yeah, yeah, that’s, that’s a, that’s food for thought. Yeah, I think so. I think so. All right, man. Okay, thank you very much, my friend. It was really, really wonderful as always.