https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=c5h9f0g-8Mw
Welcome everyone to episode three of Transcendent Naturalism. I am joined again by my good friend and constant partner in these COGSI shows, Greg Enriquez. Greg, it’s great to have you here again. This has been a wonderful journey. We sort of tag teamed. I laid out a structural argument in the first episode and then you filled it in and you basically answered the question, yeah, but what are the levels and how are the levels related to each other? And I thought the two fit. We seem to both agree that the two fit hand in glove. There was a hand in glove phenomenon there. A conforming hand in glove. Yeah, the botanist would be happy. A meta-arguments, absolutely. So what we wanted to do was pick up on some threads that were left last time. This will probably be the last one which is Greg and I and then we will start moving to the videos that have other people in, other interlocutors, so we can really explicate, challenge, and grow this proposal to make it as viable as possible. But there was three threads and we’re going to examine them in this order. The first thread was extended naturalism which was talked about at length in the first video and I want to sort of push deep on it because it had this notion of extended naturalism, if it does overlap well with the neoplatonic framework, for the neoplatonists that extended naturalism gave a profound sense of the sacred. And I want to talk to Greg about what you might call the neoplatonic one, which of course got taken up into Christian neoplatonism, gets taken up into Sufism, it gets taken up into Kabbalah, so my claim that it’s capable of generating a rich spiritual framework for people I think is pretty non-controversial and I want to see how that interacts with Greg’s synthism and get into the discussion there. Then we’re going to move into a more proper discussion of what does sacredness mean within extended naturalism and why this is important is we have, for historical reasons, I don’t know what the verb is here, moved into, I’m trying to be as non-prejudicial as possible, an understanding of the sacred as the supernatural and of course the thing that is excluded from extended naturalism is supernatural. Does that mean that the sacred is excluded? I want to talk about what that means, so that’s the challenge there. And then the third one is back to what is meant by strong transcendence and we have a formal definition and we’ve worked it out. Now we want to, and we’re both trained in psychology, we want to move into what you might call the psychology of this, although the argument is that transcendence is not just psychological. Right, it’s not just to make yourself feel better. Yes, yes. Put it in simple terms. So the main idea was that strong transcendence has epistemological and ontological import. It requires that the idea is that there are truths about reality that are disclosed only when one goes through a transcendence which also gives you access to different levels, kinds of knowing, things like that. And along those we hope to talk about three phenomena. These are not meant to be exhaustive but just exemplary, but three kinds of phenomena which people express, traditionally express, a sense of transcendence. One is in ritual. Rituals often give people a sense of transcendence. They decenter us. We’ll talk a little bit about that and how does that fit within this framework. Of course there’s altered states of consciousness, most importantly mystical experiences, higher states of consciousness. These are often the basis of claims for experiences of transcendence. And then there’s the question of whether or not these are the basis of claims for experiences of transcendence. Do they fit within extended naturalism without merely explaining them away as illusions or epiphenomena, but the way that really stays within the province of strong transcendence. And then last is people express a sense of transcendence and belonging to a more encompassing order. So this is expressed being homed and people will make sacrifices for that identity that transcends their own identity. Of course a prototypical example is people will sacrifice their life in war for the sake of their country, for the sake of their home, which seems a very odd thing to do. And again, I’m going to repeat, I’m not claiming that those are exhaustive. That’s not the point. I’m not trying to give an exhaustive list. I’m trying to pick out three that are exemplary is to see if we can glean anything from our discussion on them. So we’re ready to go. So let’s start with the first one, the extended naturalism. And so I’m not going to review all the arguments, both the structural argument and the content arguments, because we’ve already agreed the conciliance between them is very powerful and they need each other and they support each other in a very powerful way. So I’m going to take it that we have what I’ll call something that is convergent. It can’t be identical to because we are post-nominalist, we’re post-scientific revolution. We can’t just go back to neoplatonism. So it’s something like a current analog to late neoplatonism in which there’s emergence all the way up and emanation all the way down. And you get in somebody like Regina, you get the claim that there’s a one, at the bottom, and there’s a one at the top. But because the polarity is more important than the poles, there’s a oneness between the one from emanation and the one from emergence and that’s all the way. And then those are sort of, I feel him niggling at me because I wrote, John, I wrote this big book and you’re trying to compress it all into a few sentences. So but I think it’s fair to say that that he calls that the oneness between the one of emergence and the one of emanation. He calls that God because he argues that it has many of the properties of God, especially as found within classical monotheism. And I’ll distinguish classical monotheism from current monotheism in a second. In that God is in some sense, he’s trying to get a model of creation that is not the making of an artifact, but rather creation is this way of understanding an emanation that calls from emergence and an emergence that responds. And so God is actually creating out of himself, but also within himself. So everything, God is included in everything, but not enclosed. God is beyond everything, but not excluded kind of model. And he, go ahead, go ahead, Greg, please intervene. Yeah, I’m trying to, I’m not familiar. So how similar is this to like Spinoza’s God? I mean, so it’s similar in this way. Spinoza makes a distinction between nature nurturing and nature being nurtured. And the nature nurturing, of course, is the top down and the nature being nurtured is bottom up. And he claims that, of course, they are ultimately one. And he claims that like, and this is what I was going to get to, like the Neoplatonic one up here, God is, it’s substance, but it’s not substance in the sense of stuff. It’s God, God is the ultimate reality. So God is in infinite, and like by substance, he means something that exists on its own. He doesn’t mean stuff or even an Aristotelian subject. He means something that can be understood and exist on its own. Right? So an ultimate, ultimately real thing, non-thing, because God is infinite with infinite attributes. Each attribute is infinite. So God is infinite source of intelligibility. And in that way, he’s very similar. What’s, and then the bottom up, this is in Spinoza in a really interesting way. And I’m not claiming these two are equally balanced in him. It’s one of the things that’s right. But Spinoza has this notion of everything has a canadus. Everything is organizing and trying to preserve itself and determining itself. And so this is very much an emergence. Right? But that is also from God, right? The boats and the canadus. The thing that might not square with emergence and emanation is he seems to be a very hard-lined complete determinist. But then he bends it because he seemed to move towards compatibilism. And now we’re getting into the intricacies of Spinoza. And perhaps we could put that aside. I think it’s similar enough, especially with our limitation on any neoplatonic framework of not reading the polarity as justifying a two-worlds mythology. Spinoza is very, very strong on that, which is what we’re both committing to in this argument. Did that answer your question? Yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s certainly, there’s a fairly high level of abstraction here. But I will say this. There’s a line that I am tracking that’s very resonant with the basic structure of Utah. And what I mean by that is there’s the bang-knower-God relation that I kind of collapsed into wisdom energy. The energy and really energy information source and the organizing intelligibility of that source is the bottom-up, top-down polarity in Utah. And so that manifested. And I say that as somebody who’s not well-versed in this background, but then see that very, very parallel on my own journey, very strongly represented. That’s what catches me. And it’s like, oh, OK, I think I can track that with a fairly high degree of resonance. Yeah, good. I think that’s right. And of course, we do have these two frames. I’m not claiming this is an exact match, but we do have the two frames in physics. We have the bottom-up, a kind of primordial oneness that isn’t the number one. And yet we also seem to have this tremendous set of top-down constraints that are somehow also one. And so what do you mean the oneness at the quantum? We’ve got this weird entanglement. And it somehow resonates with the singularity from which the universe emerged. But there’s the differentiation principle is also somehow in there. And so I think the neo-Neoplatonic framework I think actually can sit very well with this. Right. I mean, you did lineate and level up the dialectic between what is reductive physical amounts about the unbelievable generalizability of the world. And when you do that at the substance level, I think you can sort of go down into go down and back in the time and you get this sort of energy information, implicate order or whatever. Right. And that’s the thing in which everything shares. We see that quarks, if we do it just to matter and don’t worry about sort of the energy matter, you say, okay, quarks and electrons, the fermions build matter. And then that’s just unbelievably generalizable. But as you pay generalizability in and of itself, it’s not really intelligibility. That’s right. Generalizability in relationship to the capacity for differentiation held in appropriate dialectic. And so this is what represented on the coin is there’s a one many, a generalizable differentiation polarity where the poles between the two is going to afford intelligibility. And it’s the right relationship of that, the right ratio of that, that is fundamentally key. Right. That was well said. Very eloquent. So let’s say that we’ve made this at least elitially plausible. It fits well with the argument. It fits well. It’s not sort of antithetical to science. It’s at least adjacent to it and really resonance and powerful ways. And so here’s where we can drop the first penny, right, is that when you look at a lot of people, and there’s even some very good literature on this, in the classical tradition of even the Abrahamic religions, God is identified with that. You know, the top of the… I mean, our language is failing, but with all of that, with the whole emergence, emanation, oneness that is not the number one, that is the source of intelligibility, but is also the conversion of potentiality into actual… all of this language, in fact, was invented in the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic framework. Now, they thought of that in many people, so Maximus, Dionysus, Regina, Aquinas. There’s been a huge revival. Sebastian Morello has written a very good thin book on this, The World is God’s Icon, arguing that Aquinas should not be understood and is a resistive Tillion. He should be understood as a Neoplatonist. The analog in the ancient world to him is not Aristotle, it’s Plotinus. So this is a very rich sense of God that’s very different to what I want to now call common theism. Common theism is the view of theism that’s very prevalent for many people today. And this is the idea of God as the greatest being, the super thing, the greatest agent, and that we can talk about God in very anthropomorphic terms, and we’re talking basically correctly. Now, many of the features of common theism do not have a strong basis in classical theology, and this is something that came out of my very wonderful set of discussions with Bishop Maximus. So I think one of the things that you and I both share, and this is an atheism in the sense of a non-theism, in that we think that all the debates between common theists and atheists are misplaced because they understand God as a super the supreme being. And this of course comes with, I want to be very charitable here, with the struggled relationship between this Neoplatonic conception and the God, even if there’s one or maybe there’s multiple, but Christianity and other things, Judaism perhaps. I can’t get anybody to agree on this. This is why I keep hesitating. But let’s call it the God of the Bible, and we can seriously put into question of whether or not the God of the New Testament, the Old Testament, are the same God, because we’re not saying the Christians are right and the Jews are right, but this broad sense that what we might call the post-Christian notion of God that survives within the post-European world. The theological scholar Karen Armstrong wrote a book called The Case for God, and this got me, this is how I entered this, it was through her where she was like, all right, the classic notion is God, is that what you move toward as you experience transcendence? Yes. So that to me just, oh, then that’s not making an ontological theistic claim. That is identifying a process and being, which we’ll obviously come back to, strong transcendence, the capacity of a universe to generate strong transcendence and the capacity to move strong transcendence, like, what’s God on the map, just as a reference point in a particular way? I like this, and this notion, yeah, that it’s what you’re moving towards, but it’s also what is affording the movement, you already did that, and Karen Armstrong would agree with that. This was actually made, I guess, something like an official doctrine within Eastern Christianity with the notion of epic tasis. God is the ground that supports continual self-transcendence, that you don’t go to a resting place of stillness and sort of one-ending vacation party or something like that. It’s in fact that God is the ground field, if you could mix both of those metaphors, in which and through which human beings continually self-transcend. I just had an image of model of hierarchical complexity, actually, just there, and it was just imagining the emanation emergent design space of recursive potentiality. Then that generative awakening capacity in the universe as it seeks its variation, selection, attention to create increasingly big loops of epistemic, ontic relation, thinking being relation. I think that’s great. Yes, that’s certainly what I am, the radius of that, actually, Michael Levin now talks about cognitive light cones, the radius of that epistemic in terms of its potentiality. When I look up to the elephant sun god, that radius then is an imagined eternal radius of possibility and motion. That to pull an epistemic form on the ontic that would afford that thinking being relation to be as realizable as possible. So it sounds to me like you’re a realist about this, that when we’re talking about these things, they have a real reference. They’re ontologically based, they’re not just psychological construct. Am I hearing you correctly? Yes, I actually sort of, we haven’t talked too much about this, but I would technically define myself as a realist, ideaist, idealist. This is weird. But essentially what the tree of knowledge would suggest is that we can create a somewhat transcendent realist position through physics. And what I mean by that is there are propositional networks that we can afford a pretty damn good mapping of our physicalist ontology to the ontic, at least to the extent that we can get anything that we can say is real. And my proposition for that is if other propositional aliens were around, they’d look at the matter dimension and have an atomic theory of matter. That’s sort of the way I’d describe that. And that would be my justification for a particular kind of genuinely anchored realism that then creates structural functional relations that then create constraints in relation. Then you get a biopsychosocial history of epistemic ideas, which then manifest in folk psychological social construction. Hey, John, let’s do transcendent naturalism. And there’s a particular historical biopsychosocial constructed epistemic that allows us to grip and embody our phenomenological realism that’s also embedded in a physical realism that we need to make coherent. And then there’s a capacity for full-fledged abstraction of ideals, mathematical forms that would topologically specify certain kinds of relations and topologically special certain kinds of ideal relations. The latter essentially being the transcendent god capacity and the form of being mathematics on its basic extraction of logical possibility. And what the tree of knowledge basically identifies is, oh, here’s your ideal, here’s your idea, and here’s your real. And it affords an actual coherent relation, I would argue, between a real idea idealism that is actually aligned. And you don’t have to then really choose. So it’s not idealism or realism. It’s idealism in relationship to realism in relationship to ideas that can then be specified coherently. Okay, that was good. I’m working on that paper and argument as we speak, John. So we just bumped into sort of like the U-Dog ultimate metaphysical framing on real idea idealism. Yeah, I’m trying to put it in relationship to other things that I’m familiar with. I mean, one, of course, is the platonic framework in which Plato is a realist about ideal entities. And then they, and then, of course, we have thoughts about that. I mean, to me, if you put it this way, your being, which is going to be a reference closest to the real, and then you have ideas and ideals, okay, and it’s finding the right relation. And I think I think Utah can map the specified relationship between those. So at the very least, if you combine idea and ideals in a particular way, you get thinking being conformity. And I’m differentiating ideas from ideals from an angle that I’m afforded in relationship to what Utah gives me. So let me try, I’m trying to then to map, I’m in a weird position here. So I’m feeling a little bit epistemically queasy about it. But I’m trying to take on the role of people who will potentially interact with this. I’m trying to map what is usually talked about, both in the common and the classical theism, whether the classical is this one wanting polarity. And it seems to me that the Neoplatonists are talking about something that is at the level of being, they’re talking about the ground, right, of being, both the bottom ground and the top ground. So when they’re doing that, are they doing something analogous to what science is doing, in that they are pointing to aspects of reality, but that perhaps can only be disclosed from certain states of cognition and consciousness or something like that? I would say so. I mean, what I would say in relationship to this is you have, again, there’s the substantial no-thing-ness that’s going to take the real actual potential, and I’ll just call that energy. So there’s that referent. And then we’re going to then create the ultimate intelligibility. If that referent is going to explode across a multitude of both differentiation and sameness, then you have an ultimate logical form that’s going to create a topology, which many people in mathematics, sort of the ultimate nature of math is sort of a topological relation of logical analytic possibility or relation or whatever. And again, I’m not a mathematical philosopher, but that’s a reasonable assertion from set theory to category theory to topology in mathematics. That sense, you can then, okay, I’m going to circle this entire possibility that creates the topos of the set, and then I’m going to differentiate the logical relations within. And to me, that creates a one-many substance differentiation and a one-many ideal form differentiation, and it is the mapping of the two. Right. So it’s the mapping, right. And so is that conformity relationship? Because there’s two sides of it. One is, epistemically, we are mapping the two together. But is that map, is that mapping pointing to a truth that they actually belong together in some ontological sense, independent of our epistemic mapping? I think this is where you get the leveling up argument. Yes, that’s what I was trying to get at. Of the grammar of our cognition. And now if you look at like the tree of knowledge, what I’m basically saying is, well, math and God is up here at the ultimate oneness, right? Energy’s down here. And then you have what in between? You have the emergence of a biological intelligence, a minded animal intelligence, and a justifying human intelligence that we then are getting in right relation, both top-up, bottom-up, top-down in the cognitive grammar that is afforded to us as a function of the evolutionary processes themselves that is actually tracking. And so I think you do an evolutionary epistemology, like, well, yeah, the structure of the grammar is mapping the structure of events or at some level of modeling. There’s a gripping conformity. And this, when we get into phenomenology, the most real and the most meaningful is the tightness of the grip. Yes. So that’s when we feel the phenomenologically most real. Okay. So I think this is really good. I hope I’m not upsetting you because this is this I’m really- Oh, you’re not upsetting me. I’m just scared. I’m just sad. I’ll just tell everybody. This is the right at the edge of my thinking. I’m brainstorming this. No, no, no, no. It really worked it all out. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what I meant. I didn’t mean you were epistemically powered. I didn’t mean that at all. I meant I’m drawing you to the very limit. Right. I’m at the limit of my sorting this out. That’s what I’m- By the way, I’m reading religion and nothingness by thanks to you. Damn. That is, I’m halfway through that. And that’s actually, I’m finding that to be like, oh, okay, I can- Yep. Yep. Yep. And then Neoplatonism is going to be the next series is on. And then Ani is going to figure largely in that. Okay. So I want to propose to you that that ripping, that’s what classical theism meant. That’s what it was pointing to. And it got lost into, it got the two worlds mythology separated those two and then reified them and then reified them in an oppositional manner. And we get a lot of the problems of common theism today. Agreed. That makes very good sense to me. Okay. So that means the next thing is there was a sense of sacredness. So we’re moving to the second point that came out of this, which was, you know, this- Actually, let’s just summarize because we went, we bounced around. Can I just summarize what we mean by it? Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. All right. Let’s ground us a little bit. What we’re doing here, folks, if you didn’t catch it, is like we’re grounding our extended naturalism. Okay. And we’re basically saying, hey, as we talked about last time, I’ll just summarize. We need a picture of reality that includes the knower about reality. We need both physics and a theory of the physicists as to how they would manifest. And any theory of intelligibility includes the natural science as an intelligible entity that has to actually have some sort of ontological status in the world. Yes. Okay. And then fundamentally then our metaphysical ontological epistemology has got to be a wholism between the known and the knower and our knowledge intelligibility is inherent around the conformity of those two frames. Yes. Yes. Okay. That’s the- and so that’s the extended naturalism that’s quite different than a physical reductionism where you can assume that the knower can just be an abstract representationalism of underlying deterministic cause. And if we get to the root of the bottom of that, you can go all the way up. That’s what we’re rejecting. And so we’re giving- and what this means fundamentally is then the relationship of thinking being is essentially there’s a conformity that we have to- that points to. So that’s the ground. Now that’s going to set the stage for issues of sacredness and strong tangents. Excellent. And Greg inadvertently maybe or perhaps intentionally was alluding to an amazing book by Eric Pearl. I was. Yes. And it covers this argument and Pearl in fact makes the argument that there is- that this was basically the tradition that gets taken up even into Aquinas and he could also made it similarly for Dionysus and Maximus. And you pointed me to that book and I enjoyed it. Yes. And I was referring to it subtly but thank you for making that explicit. Yes. And so- and Pearl has basically argued for something sort of like around non-theism because I think- I have to be careful about this but I think he’s- I’m surmising that he’s worried about that how theism has come to mean what is now called common theism and that’s problematic I think for him in certain ways. So given that and Pearl even says this in the book. He says, you know, there’s something about when you- when you come to a realization of what we’ve just talked about there’s an experience- he says there’s a religious experience or a sacred- experience of sacredness at least. And I- of course the terms religion and spirituality are massively contentious and academics have no consensus on it. I’m going to- I want to talk about- I’m going to use the word spirituality when I’m talking about sort of more individually and religion more collectively not because that’s definitive because it’s helpful so we can just talk and I’m going to really think about these in terms of some kind of apprehensive- apprehension of the sacred that puts some kind of normative call on people very very broadly. The sacred and that puts a call on me and so the notion of the sacred then that I think can satisfy that definition be- but with be within extended naturalism is an apprehension of, right, and not just a conceptual apprehension we’re talking about a full perspectival participatory, right, apprehension of what we’ve been talking about when we’ve been talking about this one for lack of a better term and that that you get a sense of sacredness as an inexhaustible infinite and therefore at times paradoxical, right, right, fount of intelligibility and if you don’t- if you think paradox you’re not allowed to invoke that you better take a look at physics and what’s happening in physics because there’s- it’s rampant paradox- complementarity is an invoke- it’s just- it’s basically telling you accept the paradox it’s both- it’s both a particle and a wave but it can’t be but yes but it is right and etc etc that doesn’t mean you’re allowed to be indiscriminately paradoxical but it’s like when you push, right, you- it’s- so this experience of the inexhaustible is I get it but I don’t get it that’s the sort of core paradox, right, it’s gripping me I’m getting a sense of more real but it’s also given me a sense that I could never actually fully comprehend it so it’s- there’s a- there’s a moreness and a withdrawal there’s a shining in and a withdrawal simultaneously that seems to be at the core- is this what you talked about with in After Socrates? I’ve sort of learned ignorance, is this that space? yes yes yes and yes part of the proposal of well you know that’s why I end with Erogena and Kuza is the way we can properly stance ourselves- I’m turning stance into a verb- the way we properly stance ourselves to have that apprehension of the sacred is learned ignorance precisely because it’s the state that most allows us to apprehend the what again with inadequate term in this way this inexhaustible but nevertheless not comprehensible in the sense of I can’t get my cognition to grip it, right, and that and you know Nicholas of Kuza the vision of God or any of these people and again you don’t have to- I don’t mean to offend anybody take a look at other traditions first of all other Abrahamic traditions, Sufism, the mystical branches of Judaism, you can also see important analogues not identities important analogues in Vedanta in Taoism in Buddhism and Zen etc. Nishatani’s religion and nothingness is it gets very much and when you’re at the very limits of intelligibility you start to get into these paradoxes of you know the the essence of fire is not fire because fire can’t burn itself and all this is weird these weird things and the point of those is not to do pseudoscience the point of those is to show the incapacity of propositional knowing to get this into a complete and consistent formal system because as we know there’s no such damn thing as a complete and consistent formal system, right, okay so the proposal is there can be and this is why this is why I wanted to push on you my friend because I think there’s an experience of sacredness but I think it’s not just projective I think if we’re talking about real conformity there is something in being that is also conforming in the experience of sacred so that there it is meaningful there’s not a it is not a Kantian thing in itself beyond it is meaningful to talk about the sacred as the being side of the experience of sacredness that’s the point I wanted to make how does that land as reasonable or plausible for you? Yes but we got to unpack it. Well I’m happy to stop and unpack it if you wish. Yeah I mean so. So first of all but you think the argument is at least prima facie argument worthy of investigation. Absolutely absolutely I mean I’m reminded of a conversation Zach Stein had with the Iman Gilchrist on the concept of value in the universe and there’s a lot of resonance there I mean if you’re wondering well wait a minute how can something be sacred well as I said to some people who are asking me about that conversation well at an analytic scientific well I describe the core of the nervous system as an investment value system and that valuing is both epistemic but there’s an ontic grounding and an ontic epistemic relation and there’ll be then ontic epistemic patterning around valuing in a particular kind of way and the core of what’s aesthetics is going to relate to that so for me then this then is like okay there will be there is a particular kind of relation there is a particular kind of relation and that relation especially if we’re going to use it like a transjective kind of a psychological framing that relation can be specified through that kind of okay logical I think let me try this on you then because I what you just said I think so and we’ve talked a bit about this before and we actually talked about in a conjunction with with with Zach and this isn’t exactly what he says but it’s you can see the influence I think there’s an ineffable roundedness to our experience that we are pointing to when we use the word soul no and I think there’s an ineffable there’s an ineffable what do I want to call it there’s an ineffable aspect to our self-transcendence that we point to with spirit that word spirit is pointing to right hold on one second so I told you I’m on the edge of this okay so idea is going to actually connect to mind to insolent yes the embodied perspectival subjective experience of being the the cognitive behavioral and action procedure is going to be actually then a transjective real like what the fuck can I lift this goddamn thing up and then the ideal the symbolic ideal is going to connect to the transcendent if we go to Zach’s I just I never so his three lines of you know developmental skill, insolent and idea I mean transcendence is actually going to be pretty damn close again I told you I’m right on the edge of this tribe no no no and and and look I’m not trying to nail you down no I know I know I just you know me I’ve I’ve learned all of us as academics you’re like okay I do want to work this out I don’t know I like I in fact I think it’s inappropriate to try and say we’ve nailed this down we’re really exploring this because no right the only the only thing I’m trying to do is to show these and I think I’m using this word correctly the spiritual rich the richness of the framework that we’re working on right that you it’s got a lot here it’s got a lot it can give I think now what I was going to say was you’ve got insolent and then you’ve got the self right and that’s sort of mediating between moment and of transcendence and what it’s doing is it’s trying to get them organized so that they nexus for with agency in the world these are not just these are things that actually empower your agency in the world and sounds like you’re agreeing with that and then what I what I wanted to say is all of that that’s the soul spirit self side of sacredness and then there’s something each one of those picks out aspects of the world or who knows as god or nature that it conforms to and that’s the sacred right so sacredness is the transjective relation here’s though here’s where I’m going now I’m going to if you go back to read E.O. Wilson’s original conciliants okay as codal naturalists right and stuck but what is he groping for he’s feeling it he’s wishing for he is seeing conciliants in nature and what is he actually insane there is a way in which we can unify our epistemological ontological structure in there and the beauty and the potentiality and the agency and what that would mean for things yes right moves him in a religio way yeah yeah very much finds him it gets him this is oh my god what else could matter more jack yes yeah right what else would have more meaning and there you go that’s guys completely obviously atheistic naturals but you can see his soul spirit longing yeah yeah yeah right okay well that’s what I think I think I’ve made a good enough case then that this can all we can really deeply bring in soul language self language and spirit language and we can do it in a deeply transjective way and we can say we can we can get we can point to these right the the this side of the poll remember the polarity is what matters not the pole but there’s this side of the pole is the spirit self soul side and there’s right there is corresponding right things that are entering into the co-determination the conformity just like relevance is transjective and meaning is sacredness is a transjective experience and there’s the there’s the the spirit self soul side and then there’s that the emanation emergence polarity side and those two are plugging together when they play together in this way you get sacredness that’s and you talk language of marrying the coin to the tree at the level of you know that’s the marriage of that and then find yourself that’s finding right relationship to is to then orient toward ought not that it’s those things are all then woven together in the valuing relevance road structure but they are then and that’s what the idea is oh my god you marry a ritual of unbelievable sacredness right yeah in a particular context that affords potentialities across various increasing levels uh you know of of epistemic ontic realization now if if we could take it that there is a possibility that our argument is significantly correct that there’s a real distinction between classical theism which i will now call non-theism to broaden it beyond the Abrahamic religions right i i think to me this so i got socialized and theism meant belief in a personal knowable god yes a pretty reasonable definition so that’s that’s what that’s what the but what i’m saying is that we were you and i were both educated that that was the only the only way to think about it totally the classic version is different than the common yes right and so to not fall into endless confusion and also to open up the resonances between the classical Abrahamic tradition and the non-Abrahamic traditions i’m going to talk about a non-theism but the point i wanted to make is that means there is a chance for at least very deep and you know moving towards each other but also moving beyond where you were between what we’re proposing and the traditional religions yes totally yes totally once you again if god is moving towards transcendence if that’s a way to summarize you know in a sort of a nutshell and we are basically arguing there’s an extended naturalism that’s available to us to differentiate the sacred so we can be oriented toward a strong transcendence yes i mean the parallels there are quite profound yes and and i won’t get into another argument i’ve been making popular which is that we need to get a lot clearer about how we can tap into the spiritual sapiential somatic aspects of our spirituality in order to deal with and do it in a much more globally integrative manner if we’re going to deal with the looming challenges that are with the advent of a gi it’s it’s well the chyros at the moment is upon us yes we better let’s get ourselves aligned in right relation because shit’s happening yes so great i i’m gonna propose something here because we’ve used up almost all of our time we’ve only got about 10 minutes or so maybe 15 i think we should have a fourth in which we talk about strong transcendence because i want to go in depth about ritual altered states of conscience we didn’t we yeah and belongingness to a world view and just uh lay that out a little bit uh more um and i’d like to take maybe five minutes to foreshadow what i’d like to do with that get your responses and then maybe we’ll wrap this up so we’ll be there’ll be a fourth of just you and i and then we’ll start with everybody else all right that sounds good i’ll drop another concept before you do that in that i’m playing with okay okay please and and and this may relate to the sacred and in this context okay i stumbled on a way on a interesting polarity what i call inconsequential versus consequential history yes yeah uh where inconsequential history basically what’s the radius you talked about epiphenomenal and it’s not really a phenomenal but there are definitely different radius of causal impact so if it exists it will have a causal impact but different things will have the amount of causal impact across time so the feedback loop where we get a cell that can replicate and explode into possibility space of life that’s causal impact that is you know that’s got consequential history okay uh so then so then the issue is like okay what are the moments and why they give rise to consequential history okay this these consequential history moments then are going to because of the by definition the impact they carry when we get pulled towards certain kinds of sacredness there’s going to be something in relationship to consequential versus inconsequential oh pull our attention oh okay um both in terms of awe and horror by the way yes consequential can be disastrous all right um but what are the consequential histories that move towards a conforming awakening of the antidepressant epistemic that affords that growth in awareness agency we agency etc etc there’ll be the certain kind and so so that’s what i will throw in there basically like oh are the things that are sacred the things that afford this kind of emanation emergent process are the consequential events i think that’s very good there’s a there’s a that’s really good that’s juicy good there there is a potential convergence so maybe we could talk a little bit about it next time but i forget the theorist i’ll make sure i get the name jim rut had just passed the name on to me well he is talking about meaning in terms of consequential decisions decisions of consequence um now um of course there’s there’s the philosopher in room he immediately leaps out and says well there’s a problem uh with that is it purely quantitative because everything has sort of infinite rippling effects throughout the universe and if you say no a consequential decision is one that has costed consequential effects and consequential means important to relevance then you haven’t really said much other than meaning is about relevance which maybe what i did like about the proposal and then i’ll come back to say what i think can be how can my criticism can be responded to is it brings in decision into meaning that has largely been not there in things like purpose and coherence and mattering right but the existentialist kirkgaard of course pivotal among them and you may know our friend christopher master pietro and i have been having some very powerful discussions about this kirkgaard has emphasized the importance of of the act of decision for meaningfulness and so i think there’s something right about this bringing in this decisive dimension and i was trying to get at how could we get a non-circular account of consequential decisions that could feed back into an understanding of you know maybe a missing dimension in in meaningfulness and so this is right off the top of my head too and so we’re we i’m not saying we can resolve this now but maybe there’s something about consequential there i mean i think it has also to do with your your juncture points i think some consequential decisions are consequential because they are they actually impact causally they’re causally relevant to our survival right and that’s why they’re meaningful because those decisions then of course there’s ones that are are are consequential to our development of mindedness then there are ones that are consequential to our ongoing development of our personhood absolutely there’s so there’s one way we can talk about consequentiality is how far up the stack does it move you and this has something probably also with maslow who did not create the bloody pyramid by the way as we found out many times but there’s something there and that’s new platinus too going up right the various souls but i’m also thinking is there so i got a vertical from your work but i’m also hearing a potentially horizontal is that right or will you get the horror well the horizontal basically is scope okay so the vertical is the stack and then this horizontal is what’s the space time aggregate dimension essentially so then okay this is kind of like a so then okay this is consequential for me okay so you get a you get a cancer cell in you and then how much does that spread across and then it is spreading you and then if you if they’re okay you die well all right but at that concept that that cancer cell came from hiroshima and hiroshima well then the the consequences in that across aggregate so i would say to me immediately if i were to say okay well what’s the horizontal well the horizontal is a what is the scope the aggregate scope of the impact across okay so there’s two things good good good good good so it’s both right so one way we could understand meaningfulness is to be connected to reality in in mattering and in intelligibility so we’re not abandoning any of the previous but in a way that affords you to make consequential decisions where the consequence is measured both by the vertical stack and the horizontal scope now one so so far so good does that sound that sounds reasonable to me absolutely right and and and and if we what i’m saying is if we can get it into meaning of lifeness then moving it into religio and sacredness is not far away right right so the one thing about the scope is so and we don’t have to solve this but so everything has actually an indeterminately large number of causal effects right right and so what you want what you want to say though is something like you want to make a distinction between causation and causal relevance um because what you want to say is you know those attenuating effects that are happening at the edge right they don’t they right they right they don’t generate they’re they’re not going to figure in any important explanation of things so see what i’m saying it’s more i think just just to avoid us an easy refutation right it is about causal relevance is definitely causal relevance is does that cause does that cause serve in an important explanation yep absolutely absolutely and then i was again this at the edge of my thinking but anyway there’s a specific entity that i am considering that i can get into more detail but that it is at one level completely inconsequential and yet it seems to carry an enormous potential for consequence okay so another way of thinking about it imagine a particular intersection of unbelievable possibilities that if people became aware of at the time that they would then explode but prior to awareness it simply sits as a inconsequential potential right so i’m so there’s another angle on and then and then i’m trying to work out the little eye dose of a structure functional aspectualized relationship of the ability to see this potential to become actual and then the inner relationship of then acting upon that to make that happen in the future so then you are bringing a particular intersection talk about the sacred okay you find this thing and then how do you relate to it and how do you relate to others in relationship to it in relationship to the transformation of an inconsequential into consequential okay so that’s another layering of this entity which brings in specific epistemic perspectival relations but then it becomes transjective and now all of a sudden you go from oh this is going to be anything to this unbelievable moment in history that then springs forth its network to all other historical yeah yeah and as it does that it then blows from an inconsequential to a consequential entity so how about this as a proposal for what you just proposed a meta proposal a proposal about your proposal it sounds to me that what you’ve done is figured out a way of articulating not exhaustively but again an important example exemplary of right of how a transformation can actually disclose reality that’s what i’m trying exactly that’s exactly what i’m saying and this is that’s a strong transcendent that’s going to be that’s good there’s a strong transcendent element for that right and then the second part of my proposal is the way you described that that could be the case both for individuals but especially at the level of collective distributed the collective intelligence of distributed cognition precisely that’s good let’s remember all of this and let’s bring it into then the discussion so what i want is it okay if i move towards the foreshadowing of what we want to please absolutely yeah no i’ve derailed this a little not to roll but uh yeah let’s go absolutely so what i want to make is i want to make i want to break there’s been a series of arguments then they’re all online and i’ll point to them so i’ll i’ll try and get the gist of the deep interconnections between an extended notion of rationality and ritual um and what they are what that means and how that can not explain them away but explain their power their real power and in a way that’s conforming with this notion of sacredness and extended naturalism so that we can explain how and why within extended naturalism we get strong transcendence within ritual experiences and then i want to do a similar argument building on already existing arguments about altered states of consciousness again um not explaining them away but also not relying on uh supernaturalism or any kind of multiple worldism where oh i’m gonna i go and talk to the space aliens there were an ultimate dimensions or things like this um uh and so i want to lay that out dialogically with you and then one that i haven’t done much work on i’m just doing preliminary and so we can both sort of uh water heaven with with our tears as we throw the our projectiles but um this notion again of transcendence in a sense of belonging uh to something belongingness belonging to a greater more encompassing world view but not just world view world community um etc and really unpack as much as we can at least initially and i think then we will have three ways in which we’ve concretized the struct so we’ve got the structure laid out by the my argument the content laid out by your argument and then the two of us together are working out yes but what are the particular avenues of phenomenological experience of transcendence that can be explained with the structure of the content and that’s that will give us i think what we need uh and we uh and then we’ll have sort of this core four that we can refer to and then we can ask our interlocutors to work within that framework they’re of course free to challenge it but they have to at least work within it in their discussions with us perfect that sounds brilliant okay well great work today as always thank you very much my good friend thank you it was always super enjoyable friend and it’s it’s uh it’s really um it’s really wonderful to see you at the edge of your thinking you get very on fire and alive and it’s i’m groping for the real john we all should a man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what is the heaven for take good care my friend take care