https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=IPdDXjr1dM0
Welcome everyone. I’m very excited about today. This is the second appearance of my collaborator, Brett Anderson. And, and I asked Brett to come on. We recently with Mark Miller published a paper integrating relevance realization theory and predictive processing. And then building on that, Brett has written two essays, one integrating relevance realization with Jordan Peterson’s notions of myth and also overlapping with work I’ve been done about doing about the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And then in a second essay integrating relevance realization, self-organizing criticality, consciousness. And many of you know that that lines up with a sort of a core argument I built with Greg Enriquez in Untangling the World Not. And so I thought the essays were particularly well written and clear and accessible. And I highly recommend them. We’ll put links to them in this in the description to this video. So welcome, Brett. It’s great to have you here again. Well, thanks for having me again, man. And yeah, thanks for the kind words about my essays. Yeah, so these essays, you know, what I thought I might want to do first. So my name is Brett and I’m a PhD student at the University of New Mexico. I study evolutionary psychology there. My main research has to do with something called the diametric model of autism and psychosis, but we won’t be talking about that too much today. Before I got into the essays and what they’re about, you know, I thought it might be good to talk about like why this stuff even matters, right? Right. Right. Good. So, you know, you talk, you talk sometimes about the tyranny of the propositional. And I think you’re right about that. And I think you’re right that we’ve been too focused on the propositional at the expense of the other ways of knowing. At the same time, however, we need our propositions for we need to have beliefs and there’s a meaning maintenance model, right? So Travis Prolx and Inzlecht and Kathleen Vos have these ideas about meaning in life that and they call it the meaning maintenance model. And what they argue is essentially that a big source of meaning in life, a big source of meaning and a big source of our ability to reduce our anxiety and uncertainty about the world is that we want we want our beliefs, our experiences of the world, our actions to all be integrated and coherent and mutually reinforcing. And a big problem, I think, with the sort of worldview that’s being put forward by what I would call the sort of scientific priesthood, people like people like Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett to some degree. And I don’t have a problem with any of these people. You know, I think that they’re all very good scientists and philosophers. But an issue that I see with with and there’s differences between them. But an issue that I see with what they’re putting forward is that it’s it’s radically at odds with aspects of our experience in the world. And, you know, so for example, Francis Crick said something like, you and your hopes and your dreams and your and your love and all this stuff is nothing but the firing of neurons in your brain. And this is what you know, Ian McGilchrist calls this the religion of nothing buttery, right. And it’s sort of this very strange kind of reduction, this sort of metaphysical reduction. Anyways, I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think that worldview is right. And I think that what we want is a worldview that that coheres with our experience of the world and also that doesn’t reduce our experience to what is it clearly isn’t right, this like random, random sort of absurdities. So I think that what I’m trying to do is put forward propositions that in that reinforce our ability to to experience meaning in life and something like that, and that are true, right. Like, I think they’re true. It’s not, you know, I’m not just making stuff up. So, so getting into the first essay on this. And that essay, I put forward some ideas about the ways that your ideas about relevance, realization overlap with Jordan Peterson’s meta mythology from maps of meaning. And so what are the overlaps? So I started the essay by talking about self organized criticality, right. And self organized criticality is this idea coming out of physics, Per Bach, who is trying to understand the emergence of complexity in nature. What Per Bach said is that what he reasoned is that complexity must emerge at the border between order and chaos, right, because an ordered system is like a crystal, a crystal is uniform across the entire system. And therefore, it’s entirely if you know what one part looks like, you know what the whole thing looks like. It’s not complex. A gas is the same way. It’s the opposite. A gas is nothing but chaos. And it’s uniform throughout the entire structure complexity, right, that the integration of differentiation and integration occurs at the border between order and chaos. And the question for Per Bach was how do systems in nature get to that to that narrow window without any tuning from an outside agent, right, because we can tune a system to criticality by, for example, you know, adjusting the temperature and things like that. But in nature, there is no agent like us tuning things. So how do they get there? They must self-organize from the bottom up. And what we found is that self-organized criticality, you know, for a few reasons, it sort of failed as a general theory of complexity, but it’s become an important concept in biology and increasingly in neuroscience and cognitive science, because it turned out, so there are theoretical arguments that biological systems function optimally at criticality. So this is where we see the optimal information flow and all this. And also there are empirical, there’s empirical evidence that many biological systems do function or are at or near criticality. And this can be things such as genetic regulatory networks, flocks of birds, and most importantly, for our purposes, the brain, right? And so there is evidence that the brain functions at or near criticality. And what you argued in a couple of 2013 book chapters is that self-organized criticality is the mechanism underlying relevance realization in the brain. And so what this means, the implication of this is that relevance realization emerges at the border between order and chaos. Yes, yes, yes. And of course, in Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson said that the metamethology emerges at the border between order and chaos, right? The hero, so the mythological hero figure is like the personified representation of the metamethology. And Jordan said, the one characteristic of the hero is that he stands at the border between order and chaos. He also had an extended discussion of Taoism and the Tao as a sort of non-narrative representation of the metamethology. And he argued that the Tao is the border between order and chaos, essentially, it’s something like that. And so there’s that important area of overlap. The second area of overlap, so in a few papers, you’ve talked about the importance of insight to relevance realization. So when we realize relevance, we have to frame problems, we have to put a frame around problems to especially combinatorial explosive problems. And at some point in time, some information will reveal to us that our frame is non-optimal or dysfunctional for whatever reason, we have to break that frame. And when you break that frame, so Stefan and Dixon, in a couple of papers, 2009, 2010, they put forward some evidence that when you break that frame, what you see is an increase in behavioral entropy. And when you form a new frame, what you get is a decrease in entropy, such that there’s even less entropy than there was before. Now entropy can be thought of, now I think the technical definition is more complicated, but we can think of entropy as a kind of mathematical measure of disorder or chaos. And in psychology or psychologically speaking, people talk about entropy in terms of uncertainty. It goes towards your example, though. One of the ways I presented is how the entropic system is one where there’s very low predictability from what’s going on in one part to other parts of the system. So the crystal is low in entropy because knowing what’s happening in one spot tells you what’s happening in every other spot. The gas is high in entropy because knowing what this part of the gas is doing doesn’t tell you anything about what the other parts are doing. Right. And what’s important to relate that to what we’re doing here, it’s like the insight is not full on entropy and it’s not full on order. It occurs at the border between those things. You need both. Well, and so anyways, when you break the frame, you have an increase in entropy, which you can think of as a kind of descent into chaos. And then when you form a new frame, what they showed was that you end up with less entropy than you had to start. So you start with a moderate level of entropy, you have an increase in entropy, and then you end up with less entropy than you did to start. Okay. That’s the structure of the metamethology. So the metamethology is you start out with a stable state, some sort of relative stability. You have an anomaly that disrupts that stability. You have a descent into chaos. And then you have through voluntary confrontation of that chaos, you have a reemergence into a higher state of order. So that’s, it’s order, descent into chaos, reemergence into a higher order. That’s the structure of the metamethology. It’s the structure of an insight. And that is what occurs at the border between order and chaos in both relevance realization and in maps of meanings. And then the third area of overlap is just that Jordan said, Jordan was very explicit about this. He said in maps of meaning, the metamethology is the process by which you determine the motivational relevance of novel stimuli. So you’re presented with a novel information and it’s information that radically disrupts your current belief systems, values, whatever it may be. And you have to determine, the hardest problem that there is, is to determine at what level of analysis you should incorporate that anomaly. So one of the examples that Jordan uses is like, if you’re on your way to a job interview and the elevator gets stuck, how much should you freak out? Is it just, are you just wasting five minutes or are you losing out on your entire career, your entire future career? What is the motivational relevance of this elevator getting stuck? We’re constantly having to solve problems like that where there is no, and I think you’ve argued, there’s no algorithm for this. There’s no algorithm for it. It’s a continual process by which we’re constantly trying to find this dynamic balance between sort of blowing out our entire belief system and values or not changing things at all. And so anyway, so that process is what occurs at the border between order and chaos and it is relevance realization. What’s the significance of this and why do we see this overlap? So in maps of meaning, what Jordan argued and he’s argued this in his biblical series as well, and Eric Hull has made a somewhat similar argument to this. Anyway, so what we’ve done is that we observe people throughout history who are doing great things, right? And we observe people for all sorts of reasons, but we tell stories about people and we’ve told stories about people who do heroic things or great things. And we have all these particular stories and human beings love to tell stories. There’s a paper published in PNAS in like 2018 where they looked at the percentage of communication among this hunter-gatherer group and 80% of their nighttime communication was telling stories. So we love to tell stories, right? It’s a huge part of what we do. But we also love to engage in abstraction, right? We love to generalize. And so what we do, what Jordan Peterson argues is that what we do is we’re kind of looking for the line of best fit, right? That something we’re looking for a pattern or a story that can incorporate the wisdom that’s inherent to all of these particular stories. And we tell that, and it’s a fiction, right? But of course, it’s not a fiction in terms of being a lie, right? It’s a fiction in terms of being the underlying pattern that’s not, it’s, Eric Hull calls these, they’re more real than real, right? They’re more true than reality to some degree, because they have a generalized ability that’s not inherent to any of the particular stories. Now, why does that end up being relevance realization? Why does that end up looking like relevance realization? Well, because the general pattern underlying optimal behavior looks like that pattern, right? It occurs at the border between order and chaos. It involves the ability to frame and reframe the world when necessary. And so if we have abstracted out the general pattern underlying optimal behavior in the world, it should look something like relevance realization, right? And so that’s what it is. And part of the importance of this, I think, is that it connects us to our past, right? So I’m a big fan of this literature, the cultural evolution literature. And one of the lessons from that literature is that tradition has some epistemic authority. And the reason why is because, and this is very different from the way that I thought when I was younger, because when I was 19 and kind of dumb, I would say things like, just because something’s been done this way before doesn’t mean we should do it this way in the future. But what the cultural evolution literature sort of indicates is like, actually, it is a good way to do it. It is a good reason to do things. Yeah, Ceteris Paribus, you should listen to it. Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been doing it this way for 10,000 years, you know, and we’re not extinct, right? So that’s a pretty good indication that it’s not entirely dumb. And I think that it’s actually, and I don’t have any research about this, but my intuition is actually that this is a source of meaning as well, and that being disconnected from our past and disconnected from our traditions. Well, I think you maybe touched on this in your book about domicide, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, being disconnected from our traditions is a source of nihilism. And what Jordan’s ideas and maps of meaning do, and what they do is they connect us to our past in a way that we can actually believe, right? We’re trying to figure out what was implicit in these stories rather than the explicit historical interpretation of them, which I think most of us don’t believe that anymore. We can’t believe that anymore. And you can even see at the time of the Greeks that like, at least Plato and, you know, in Socrates, they’re not really believing the historical, but that doesn’t mean they throw the myth away. Yeah. That was fantastic. Now, I have three sort of threads I want to pick up with you. And one is, it seems to me there’s two ways in which this argument can be deepened, if that’s the right word. One is the idea that, you know, and there’s a lot of work, not just work that I’ve been doing, but also discussion I’ve been having with Jonathan Pagio, and then a lot that’s come out of, you know, the 4E, especially extended cognition, the three papers that I published with Dan Chiapi about the groups of scientists moving the rovers around, about extended cognition, you know, the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And I think you could make a plausible case that myth represents, you know, relevance realization at the level of collective intelligence within distributed cognition, especially intergenerational, distributed cognition, and Zach Steinwerth, that intergenerational is where cultural ratcheting occurs. And therefore, it’s a pivotal place, the pivotal locus for relevance realization. And you can really say, look, myth is doing this really important job of doing intergenerational relevance realization on the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And that is the primary locus where cultural ratcheting happens. And cultural ratcheting is one of our primary adaptive advantages. I think you could strengthen the argument by making that connection. Well, I’ll list all three, and then we can go ahead. The other one is, it seems to me, it’s not only the meta myth, but not only the product, but the ongoing process, namely the way, you know, myth is usually bound up with ritual and other things and storytelling. And what I mean by that is this idea, isn’t there something analogous to the data compression, which, you know, gives you high order, and then, you know, the particularization, the variation that gives you more entropy, because what I can say is, you know, we have this, you know, prototypical story, Oedipus, and then Sophocles does a variation on it. And yet that feeds back it. And so in the perpetuation of the story, you can also see relevance realization happening, because you’re going to get the compression that Jordan talks about, but you’re going to get the continual variation on it in the storytelling. And then it’s going to, it’s also going to constantly evolve as a story. And then that idea is very consonant with the previous proposal I just gave you. So those two go together. So now the one, this one, this isn’t a challenge, but this is something I brought up before and something I’ve sort of, I don’t know if I brought it directly up with Jordan yet, and I should. I think it came up when I was talking with Lex Friedman, because you, you, you’ve got, I propose that there’s, there’s two components to this, and this may actually also strengthen the argument. And this goes towards the notions of finite transcendence that Drew Hyland talks about. You have a lot of hero, there’s a, there’s this whole hero, but there’s also a whole set of stories around hubris. And they come together, of course, in Greek tragedy, famously, you know, Oedipus is part of the hero myth, but he’s also demonstrates hubris. And that’s, that’s the Genesis. And tragedy seems to be this thing we love to do, because it puts these two, and you know, this is a Nietzschean proposal, right? It puts these two into opponent processing. And we’re trying to sort of stereoscopically see beyond them and get this sense of human beings as being simultaneously finite, but capable of transcendence. And that also seems to me to be something that should be added into the proposal that, you know, there’s another dimension, you know, it’s the tragic or comic, because you can also turn that around and make it comedy, but it’s the tragic comic dimension. In so far as the heroic meta myth, and the hubristic meta myth are also playing off against each other. And like I say, they clearly come together in Greek tragedy. So those are the three proposals I want to give you. Yeah, so in terms of yeah, so in terms of the ratcheting idea, and how this is collective intelligence, I think that’s absolutely right. So we are and we have to do the differentiating part two. And then I think the reason we have to do it is because those general myths become, they become cliche, you know, they become, become sort of too abstract, right? And we need to bring it back down to earth a little bit. And we bring it back on to earth by telling more concrete. And so something like Harry Potter, right? Harry Potter, that story has all these mythological themes, right? But it also has the detail that myths don’t, right? It has it has it’s differentiated in the way that myth that myths aren’t. And it’s something that that speaks to us clearly. Now, I think we need we you know, we do both of these things, and we need the myths are abstract because they think because they have to be because they have to apply to every person in the civilization, right? Whether you’re a plumber, or a soldier, or a teacher, or whatever it may be, right? This has to be so abstract that it makes sense to you. But we also have this need to, to differentiate more in that in that differentiation, absolutely feeds back onto the general idea too. And so I do think there is this sort of opponent processing thing going on. And also, you know, you talked about the collective intelligence intergenerational. And I think that’s extremely important, you know, I think it was Chesterton, GK Chesterton, who said that, you know, one of the greatest biases of modern culture is that we, we think that the living are privileged over the dead, or we privilege the opinions of the living over the dead. And, and, you know, this is a sort of our throwing off of our traditions and all this. And I do think that, yeah, so we are, when we come to have a proper understanding of what our ancestors are doing, we can see ourselves as a part of this living tradition. Yes, little addition that we are participating in, we’re participating in the process by which we are continually trying to figure out how to live a good life, right, how to live the best life we can. It’s not. Well, I was just gonna say, you know, to Chesterton’s point, and this is, oh, what is it, is it Glenn, Glenn Denning in his book on the philosophical history of Europe, throwing off the tradition, it’s just part of the tradition we’ve inherited from the enlightenment. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a very traditional thing to do without realizing it. And so, yeah, I think that I think I just wanted to reinforce your point around that. Please continue. Sure. Yeah. So when, and so we’re differentiating and integrating now you talked about tragedy. And I think it’s something really important here, you know, and Nietzsche, Nietzsche got it, you know, I mean, you know, I’ve read some books about the birth of tragedy and Nietzsche’s first book, and he really thought, I mean, tragedy was a synthesis for him of, of course, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which is really like the order and chaos. Yeah, and, you know, I’m still fuzzy on how this relates to the hero myth. So now one thing I would say is that for Jordan, when Jordan is using the word hero, I think he’s not using it in the way that we in the way that the Greeks, we shouldn’t think of it in the way that the Greeks use it. Because when Jordan uses that word, he just simply means the optimal pattern of behavior, right, whatever that may be, right, with no no particulars in mind. But I do think, I do think that this the tragic hero, like there’s something really important about that. And I don’t know what it is, right? I don’t know what it is. Nietzsche was picking up on it. And Nietzsche was also picking up on the integration that they had, you know, for him, it was extremely important that these things were integrated with music. And yes, yeah, and all this stuff. And the chorus and the chorus as well as the actors, right? There’s all these opponent things going on, right? That are really, really interesting. Yeah. Yeah. And there is something about music, you know, it’s strange to me, like all of my, many of my favorite thinkers have very strange things to say about music, you know, Jordan has some strange ideas about what music is, Ian McGillchrist as well. I think you’ve talked about, you know, music as well. There is, yeah, music is one of those things where if you really take it seriously and you don’t reduce it to mental cheesecake, you know, as Pinker does, it sort of disrupts the nihilistic aspects of modernity, I think, in some sense. Yeah, I think it bespeaks the importance of non-propositional ways of knowing. Yeah, well, fair enough about how Jordan uses the notion of heroic, although he tends to use examples that are the hero in the standard sense. And I haven’t seen him talk as much. So my criticism isn’t meant to be a deep one. It’s meant to be a provocative one. I haven’t seen him talk about, you know, Ariadne or how Oedipus is at first is triumphant and then he falls, right? And so I see the Greeks, and this is Drew Highland’s point, that this is Plato’s central project to get us to accept finite transcendence. If we accept only finitude, then we’re just the playthings of the gods. If we accept only our transcendence, we think ourselves to be gods. And so you’ve got the heroic pull pushing us and saying, no, no, no, you don’t be servile, don’t give in, right? Seek the better, seek the good. But you also have the hubris saying, no, no, but remember, you’re never going to stop being in the finitary predicament. You’re never going to free yourself from mortality. And I think that’s kind of, it’s analogous to, you know, Gertz’s notion of religion as a meta-meeting system. It’s sort of creating the space within which we can find the optimal path. It’s that those poles, I’m almost thinking of them like magnetic poles creating a field that properly constrains and affords us finding the through line, the path towards the good. Yeah, well, I think that’s right. And it’s a big part of why we’re having this crisis of young people who are especially lost and anxious and all this stuff, I think, you know, like we don’t have that, like nobody’s giving anybody a path anymore. And you know, for like, you know, I went through this as a young person, right? Like, I didn’t really figure out what I should be doing until I was like 24. And it was, you know, Jordan Peterson’s lectures were a big help in that. But nobody was, we don’t have that kind of guidance. And especially, well, in many societies in the past, there were like initiation rights that you went through and all of this, but the young person, right? You went through these and you were given a clear path as to where you should, you know, where you should be moving. And there was a worldview that supported that path and said that you were participating in this important, you know, this important narrative or process or whatever it may be. And so, yeah, we don’t have that. And so you talk about the religion that’s not a religion and non-theism. It’s still not clear to me where I stand on these things. That’s fine. It’s very much a work in progress, right? Sure. And my recent article, my most recent article, which I probably haven’t got a chance to read, it’s very long. It’s like a 13,000 word article. But, you know, I make a case for a conception of God, right? And the thing is, it’s not, you know, you talked in your podcast with Lex Friedman. And by the way, I’m very glad to see that that happened. You know, I think your ideas are very important and it’s nice to see them getting some, getting some well-deserved attention. Lex was great. He was excellent in that. So I appreciate it. It was great. It was a great podcast. But anyway, so you talked about that as some of the some of the characteristics of theism. And I’m thinking, well, you know, what I’m arguing for doesn’t have those characteristics. So am I theist or a non-theist? I’m not an atheist. I’m fairly sure about that. But, you know, am I theist or an atheist? I’m not entirely sure. But what I think, what I’m trying to do, my overall project is to show that we are participating in a process that, or at least when we are behaving optimally, we are participating in a process that is independent of us, that is scientifically coherent and supported by empirical and by our experience in the world. And it’s not. It has real sacredness to it. I mean, that’s your point. It has real sacredness to it. I mean, and that argument is converging with a lot of arguments I’ve been making, not to take anything away from your argument. I haven’t read it yet. And there’s one wrinkle in there. And people have, some people have noted it. I said to Lex, well, the thing is, non-theism looks a lot like classical theism, but it doesn’t look like what is now considered common personal theism. Right. And so when non-theism, you have to be really careful about what the contrast class is. Right. It’s clearly opposed to atheism and popular, right. And personal theism. It’s not so different from classical theism, which looks a lot like non-theism in important ways. And so I’m saying that because it’s a sense in which I hear you properly saying something like pertinent to now, but it’s not completely cut off from tradition. That’s what I’m saying. It’s not completely cut off from the tradition in an important way. Yeah. Well, I think these ideas were implicit. They were implicit in those traditions. Yeah. And we were acting them out. And we were, when you listen to a story, right, there’s a moral of the story. The moral of the story is not explicitly told to you by the story. It’s implicit in the story. When you perform rituals, right, you’re acting out a pattern of behavior. It’s not explicit. It’s implicit. And what we have to do now, I think, I mean, I think what we have to do now is make that implicit, make what was implicit, explicit, or else we’re in danger of losing it, right. And make it fully compatible with the scientific worldview because, you know, science has this epistemic authority in our culture that we can’t get past. And I don’t want to, I’m in love with science, you know. Yeah, me too. You know, I’m in love with the scientific enterprise. And so whatever I believe has to be, has to come out of that in some sense. Right. But there’s one point I made, and I think I made it when I was talking to Lex, I made it other way. We don’t have, we, like, if we’re committed to naturalism, which is the idea that science has a particular epistemic authority about the nature of nature. But we, that’s not only are we committed to the implications of science, we’re also committed to the presuppositions of science. What science is necessarily presupposing and that the scientific method can’t itself establish. And so, right, we need an extended naturalism. And once you do that, the kind of stuff we’re doing here becomes readily coherent with naturalism, I think, in a very perspicacious manner. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is, you know, this is the rule for me, right? Like, everything has to be within a naturalistic framework. I don’t posit anything outside of a natural, outside of a naturalistic framework. Even if, even if I’m open to the idea personally, because I can’t make an argument for it. And, but, you know, this idea, and, you know, maybe somebody who you would be interested in is Bobby Azarian’s new book, The Romance of Reality. And in that book, he is making the case for, so he’s sort of, it’s a synthesis of the emerging science of complexity over the last 30 years or so. And he’s putting forward all the implications of this newfound scientific endeavor. And, you know, one of the implications that he’s arguing for is that there is this general process of complexification. It is not an accident or a byproduct. It’s, it’s inevitable in some sense. This is something, you know, Lee Smolin, a physicist, Lee Smolin. Yeah, we talked about this. We were, where were we? We were on a panel together and we talked about this. So, yeah. Lee Smolin. Yeah, Lee Smolin, yeah. Yeah, well, in his 1997 book, The Life of the Cosmo, which is a great book, you know, he talked about this emerging science of complexity and the newfound understanding of it was going to change the way we look at the world, because in the sort of Newtonian reductionist worldview, life is an accidental byproduct. You know, it’s just sort of an accident of these random collisions. And what he argued in The Life of the Cosmos is that when we understand, you know, our very understandings of space and time and location require a complex world. They require, that’s the end. And what that means is that. It’s a classic neoplatonic argument, right? That, right, you, you, you don’t start from the inside. What, how do I know? And then what’s the world like? You ask, what must the world be like such that it is intelligible to me and such that I can be in it to find it intelligible? Yeah, well, and so that what that means to some degree is that an explanation of complexity is an explanation of how anything exists at all, right? It’s an explanation of creation in some sense. Yes. And so, you know, Bobby Azarian in his new book sort of puts forward this idea, look, there is this general process of complexification. It underlies, it underlies the emergence of new phenomenon in nature. It’s the emergence of novelty in nature. And there’s, it’s a general process. And what I’ve argued, what I argued in my newest article is that relevance realization is this process as it, as it manifests in cognitive development, right? It is a process of complexification as it manifests. Right. So we don’t just represent the process epistemically. We instantiate it ontologically, which is the grounding for participatory knowing. We participate in it. Exactly. Yes. We participate in it. And our participation in it is because, because it occurs at the border between order and chaos, right? And that’s criticality. And because criticality, and this is the argument that’s been made multiple times in the literature, criticality represents the optimal pattern of behavior for biological systems. Our participation in this process is optimal. It is optimal. And it not only is it optimal, right? It’s our participation in the process of creation itself. Right. And that keeps it sacred as far as I’m concerned. Right. It makes it sacred. Yeah. It lines up with some of the conversations I’ve been having with Rich Blundell and John Stewart and other people trying to make that point. But I think you’re making it very clear. Unfortunately, we need to pass to the other. Yeah. I say, because we said we talk about it. But it, but, but, but it’s relevant because there’s a sense in which, you know, part of the aspirational, spiritual, sapiential endeavor is to get consciousness to realize how life and cognition are being realized, if I can play with that word realization. And so you made an argument about consciousness, relevance, realization, self-organizing, criticality. And it’s convergent, as I said, with an argument I made, extended version with Greg Enricus and Untangling the World Knot. And I’m trying to get some papers published around it right now. So, I mean, not to take anything away from you. Like we didn’t talk about this. Yeah. You just, right. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I haven’t, I haven’t watched the world not. So if we converged on it, it was a true convergence, right? Yeah. Exactly. That’s my point. Yeah. Yeah. So, so what I, what I argue in that, in that essay is that there is this very uncanny overlap between scientific ideas about, so the scientific study of consciousness and relevance realization, and also the metamethology for maps of meaning. So what’s that overlap, right? So I talk about, and what’s, what’s interesting about this is that we see this overlap in these disparate literatures that have different assumptions and they’re not, you know, these are different theories of consciousness and we see the same pattern play out. Exactly. That was part of the argument I’ve made. There’s a convergence argument for the high plausibility of the proposal precisely because of that phenomenon. You’ve got these, you know, pretty much independent and then they’re converging on this. So please, please. So the first one I talk about is integrated information theory. Yes. Integrated information theory posits that, you know, consciousness is integrated information. It’s, you know, and it can be quantified through phi. Phi is a measure of complexity, to put it simply, it’s a measure of, well, one way of thinking about it is it’s a measure of the extent to which a system exists above and beyond the sum of its parts, right? So it’s more than the sum of the parts of the system, the extent to which the system has emergent properties that make it an entity that is more than its parts. But you can also think about it as the extent to which the system is simultaneously differentiated and integrated. And so there are mathematical models which have shown that phi is maximized at criticality, right? Phi is maximizing the criticality. And in the empirical work around this is that, so, you know, so we have the mathematical models and then the empirical work from that literature is showing that what sedatives do when they make you unconscious, and what they do is they take you out of criticality. They increase the amount of order in the brain, right? So criticality is the border between order and chaos. Sedatives tilt you towards order and then because consciousness, right? So the idea here is that consciousness emerges at criticality or consciousness. Criticality is necessary for consciousness. So sedatives take you out of criticality and they take you out of consciousness in that way. And then we also have the mathematical models. Well, I just want to do two things to buttress that. There’s a stuff around also like things like propofol and general anesthetic. When people fall out of consciousness, they fall out of, you know, sort of fractal small world network organization and they fall into more local, you know, regular networks, which, and there’s deep interconnections between wiring as a small world network and firing and self-organizing criticality. If you’re self-organizing criticality tends to create small world networks and small world networks tend to afford self-organizing criticality. So that’s convergent. And the other thing is if you look at, so Tononi proposes a sort of his version of the Turing test. And what he actually, the test is whether or not the system can detect that things are inappropriate, that they’re not relevant to the picture, like a potted plant in front of a computer or a fish in the sky. Like it’s basically the ability to, right, do relevance realization and do proper problem formulation. And so even in, so he not only is the model in terms of the constitutive model, but his model for how we would sort of behaviorally test for it also converge on the idea that what’s happening here, a system is conscious is doing a relevance realization. Yeah, I need to read that. Hey, I don’t think I’ve read that about his sort of Turing test. I need to look at that. Yeah, so that’s all convergent. And so that’s integrated information theory. We see this, it emerges at the border between order and chaos. The next literature I look at is global workspace theory. And they’re explicit about this. Shanahan and Bars proposed consciousness as the solution to the frame problem. It’s not, it’s explicit. It’s an explicit publication. It’s right there. Exactly. He said, you know, DeHaan, you know, my understanding of this comes mainly from the DeHaan’s book. And this is what he says, right? The function of consciousness is to bring relevant information together into a global workspace, you know, so that you can deal with it. And so, but what we also see with this literature is that they put forward some signatures of consciousness. So some empirically verifiable signatures of consciousness. And one of these is called the ignition event. And so what happens in the ignition event? So if you present something subliminal, so you can present stimuli subliminally to people where they will react to it, where you can prime them with a subliminal stimuli, but they can’t tell you what it is that they’ve seen. Yeah. Right. So it’s backward masking and all kinds of things. Yes. Right. So if you present something that’s subliminal, what happens is that you see local neural activation, right? But global. Now, if it, if it passes the threshold into consciousness, then you see this, what they call the avalanche, the ignition event, right? You know, right throughout the whole brain, right? It becomes a, and so, and it is this, it is a threshold event. Now, what that is, and so, he talks about it as a tipping point. And what that is, is the critical state, right? That’s what criticality is. Criticality is a tipping point. And when self-organized criticality, the model for that is the, is the sand pile model where you get these avalanches, right? These avalanches that occur at criticality. Now somebody made this, made this explicit, Tagliazzucci in a 2017 paper, said that, yeah, that tipping point is criticality. And he explicitly linked it to integrated information theory as well. He said, look, you know, consciousness is maximized at the, at criticality, which is the border between order and chaos. And it’s also where we see this ignition event. So we have this convergence from global workspace theory and integrated information theory, theories that are very different from each other in some ways, but, but they converge on this. And then, so there’s that. So we have, you know, in both of these cases, we see, you know, relevance, so we see an explicit connection with relevance realization, but also we see in both of these cases that consciousness emerges at the border between order and chaos. Right. And so, and then further adding to that argument, which I’ve done, which is the work of Bohr and Seth, right? That on, that what, what, what consciousness does is it restructures the data in order to deal with novelty, complexity, and ill-definedness, which also is convergent. And what we do is we draw, like a lot of the people that the function of consciousness seems to be higher order relevance realization. The global workspace overlaps with the stuff on working memory, that working memory, Lynn Hasher stuff is higher. You bring all that stuff into the global workspace. It’s not just inert there. You’re doing, you’re doing more relevance realization. That’s why chunking works in working memory. And, and, and, and so again, the convergence is huge. And then now a meta point, which has been recognized, right? So I’ve argued and, and that we, we have, we have, well, we have three questions we have. What is the nature of consciousness? How can something like consciousness exist in, like, it seems to have all these non-physical properties in the physical world. That’s the nature question. Then you have the function question. What does consciousness do given that so much of our intelligent behavior does not require consciousness? What’s the function of consciousness? And then third, what’s the relationship between those two questions? I make an argument going back to Descartes that those two questions should be answered in an integrated fashion because you can’t talk deeply about function without talking about nature. And you can’t deeply talk about nature without talking about interaction and for biological things that’s function. Right now, ITT is a nature theory and he pretends, although in his test, he obviously has an implicit functional theory and bars is very explicit in saying the global workspace doesn’t handle the hard problem. It doesn’t address the nature, but if you put the two together, you get this. And what’s powerful, and this is part of the argument, is that recursive relevance realization gives you an ability to start talking about some of the phenomenology as well. It empowers you to talk about salience, landscaping, it empowers you to talk about adverbial quality, like the here-ness of experience, the now-ness of experience, the togetherness of experience. And those are the aspects of consciousness that do not disappear in the pure consciousness event. The adjectival quality, the intentional structure, but that doesn’t go away. So, right, that is pointing at something essential or crucial about consciousness. So, I’m making two meta points that I made in my argument, the conversion with Swart. First of all, notice that you’re providing an integrated answer to the nature and the function question, and by linking SOC to relevance realization, you can also have a proper bridge between the functionality and central parts of the phenomenology of consciousness. Yeah, it’s very, man, I wish I could remember Whitehead. Whitehead is so difficult, but he talked about this difference, right? So, like, you talked about the pure consciousness event, and Whitehead talked about these two modes of consciousness, and what he said about somebody like Hume. So, David Hume, he was only focused, I mean, I wish I could remember the name of it, it’s going to slip me, but he was only focused on the mode of consciousness that is, when I’m looking at this water bottle or whatever, I’m looking at relations in the world. Oh, so, presentational, because he has all these, Whitehead has all these, I’m sorry, presentational immediacy, right? That’s the first mode. And then causal efficacy, the mode of causal efficacy is- And prehension. Yeah. Would Whitehead say that Hume’s mistake was when, because Hume said, you know, we never observe causality, and Whitehead’s like, no, we observe causality all the time, in us, right? Like, it’s, you know, our own intentionality and also what happens. Hume actually presupposes it in his epistemology that’s the basis for his skepticism, because he presupposes, right, a causal relationship between impressions and ideas. In fact, he proposes that one becomes the other. I would have to think about that for a while. Well, anyway, yeah. Anyway, the reason I brought it up is because we talked about this pure consciousness event, and there’s a philosopher, and I’m bad with names today, but he wrote, he just wrote a book, I’ve got it laying around somewhere. Yeah. Peter Shostak, anyway, he’s a Whiteheadian guy, and what he argues is that this mystical experience that you experience with psilocybin and things like that is consciousness in the mode of causal efficacy. And so- Oh, I’d like to see that book. Could you hold it up again? It’s called Numenetics, and he’s got some essays online. I can’t say his name, but- Yeah, yeah, yeah, Numenotics. I’ll try and remember that. Sure. So anyway, I think there’s some convergence there. When that brings us to the next point in the essay, which is about psilocybin and the literature around psilocybin. So the third literature I look at is the Entropic Brain Theory, which is a- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, Carhart-Harris, and it’s a theory that was informed by the scientific study of psychedelics. And so I said earlier that what sedatives do is they increase order, right? And you talked about moving towards a more regular network, which I think is basically the same thing, right? It’s the same- Yeah, yeah, totally, totally, totally. What psychedelics do is they increase entropy or chaos. Now, the thing is, and this is something that- this is not Carhart-Harris’ idea. This is another idea in the literature. We’re not at perfect criticality most of the time. And it’s because- and no system is, because criticality is something that’s difficult to achieve. And you’re not there all the time. In fact, most people, most of the time are slightly subcritical, or most of the time, we’re slightly tilted towards order. Now, there are some events that happen that are probably going to put us into the other side, into chaos. But most of the time during normal waking consciousness, we’re tilted slightly towards order. Now, what I think would happen, I think you’ve said something very similar. I think you- yeah, and you’re- I mean, I think when we’re in the flow state, in fact, we are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But most of the time we’re not, right? Most of the time we’re tilted towards order. What psychedelics do is they increase entropy. Because you’re tilted towards order, they actually move you closer to criticality. And so that’s where you get the phenomenology of psychedelics. And that’s why you have these insights, right? So the mechanism underlying the changes that occur in people through psilocybin and other substances like it, is you have these systematic insights. So that’s convergent. Well, this is an argument I’ve made, inspired by Daniel Bregan, Woodward and others, right? That’s similar to what you see in neural networks. They overfit to the data. And so you throw noise into them and think Stefan and Dixon, or you do dropout or anything, right? You basically, in order to prevent the overfitting, you make the system critical for a short period of time so that it gains the capacity to explore more of the search space. And then psychedelics are basically doing something like that for us. Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. What they do is they get you out of these ingrained habits, right? It’s why they’re so good at helping people to quit smoking. And there’s danger involved. There’s danger involved. And so I don’t remember his name. I probably wouldn’t say his name anyways. But there was this YouTuber. It’s just a good example of what can happen with these things. But there was this YouTuber who publicly did ayahuasca and he had a psychotic break. And it was all streamed on his YouTube channel as a result of the ayahuasca use. And this is something that can happen. For him, what was happening, I think he was living a very vapid lifestyle. He was living a very shallow and vapid lifestyle. The psychedelics made it very clear to him that that lifestyle was not a good long-term solution and he didn’t have anything to replace it. And so he adopted it. This is why I argue. I argue on one hand, we should not have prohibition on these substances for adults. But on the other hand, they should be set within a sapiential ritual framework in which people have already participating in all kinds and ecology of practices designed to give them rich resources of insight, of self-transcendence, but also for bullshit detecting and for self-correcting a bias that they should be set within a ritual context. Absolutely. And it helps to avoid this problem because what happened with him, and I think what happens with people who take psychedelics sometimes is they adopt a spiritual framework. But it’s something that they construct themselves. It’s something that’s very, it’s not functional. And they adopt these sort of spiritual ideas, but they’re not functional because those ideas have evolved over many, many thousands of years. Our best ideas in that realm have evolved over many thousands of years. Yeah. I made that argument in Awakening to the Meaning Crisis and elsewhere. People come out of these experiences proposing radically at times contradictory ontologies. And you have to, right? And so I don’t put much store on the propositional insofar as it’s an attempt to make a metaphysical claim. When the proposition is trying to describe the phenomenology and the sense of being called to transform their lives and move towards it, then great, I listen to it because there’s tremendous convergence. But even with the ayahuasca, people will say I was there and the shaman blah, blah, blah. And then they adopt that particular mythology. And I say, but you can travel like literally 50 kilometers down the Amazon and the shamans have a totally different ontology doing the same ritual. The pluralistic argument, what do you make of that? And then they do it while it’s real for me. And then I say, that’s not how real works. Real is it’s not shareable between us. It’s not real. You’re saying it’s subjective and use that word. Right. So I, and this lines up with some of the work we did in a lab where the relationship between meaning and life and mystical experience wasn’t carried by sort of the phenomenology. It was carried more by the functionality, by the insight machinery itself, by the making sense. So, cause I mean, you could, I’m going to make an analogy here. You could see the avalanche and get so entranced by it to think the avalanche is it, right? The avalanche is it, but no, no, no, the avalanche is only it in so far as it affords the new, the new emergent structure. Yes. Well, I mean, it’s like, you know, what I’ve said before and what, what do I know about enlightenment? I don’t know anything about it, but what I, what I would say, if I was going to say anything is that enlightenment is something you do every day, right? It’s not an event. It’s not a single event, right? It’s like, you know, it’s like, this is what people get. They get this feeling of, oh, I’ve seen the light, right? I’ve seen the truth, but that’s, you know, it has to be brought down to earth and you need help bringing it down to earth. Usually every tradition says that every, every major wisdom tradition says that, you know, Plato, even you see the sun, but you don’t stay there. What do you do? You go back down into the cave, right? It’s repeated again and again and again. And yeah, for me, my thing is, you know, ultimately, if your altered state doesn’t call, bring about altered traits that allow you to reliably ameliorate perennial problems of absurdity and anxiety, et cetera, and also afford that amelioration and others, I’m not going to call that enlightenment. So I reverse engineer enlightenment. Enlightenment is whatever state trait virtues allow people to significantly address the perennial problems. That for me, that for me is how we should, because why would I care about it otherwise? Well, it’s a process, right? It’s not an event, right? And it’s something that’s extremely context dependent because an enlightened person in 15th century China is probably not going to look like an enlightened person today. You know what I mean? But that makes sense if it’s ultimately about enhancing relevance realization. It’s like evolutionary adaptivity. It doesn’t mean all organisms will look the same. It predicts exactly the opposite, that you will see organisms varying with the variation in the environment. Exactly. Yes. So, okay. So back to the consciousness issue with psilocybin. And so what we see with this with this idea is that, yeah, so psilocybin, so the phenomenology of psilocybin, people describe it and it’s hard, you know, again, you’ve said this, and I would say too, you shouldn’t take the phenomenology at face value, how people describe it. It’s important to point out that people describe it as something like an expanded state of consciousness or an intensification of the conscious experience. They also talk about, you know, and Yaden and others have talked about this, the noetic quality of it’s the auto normativity. It’s more real. It’s really real. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, there’s something very important about that. And I think what it is, it’s like that critical state, which is a process is what’s really real. I mean, I think it is what’s really real. It’s the grounding of everything that’s real. And so you’re there like that, that auto normativity is not an illusion. As far as I’m concerned, it’s actually pointing to something very real. You are at that point participating in this process that is really real. Right. And your consciousness and cognition have the potential to be organized to cognitively realize the participation in the realization. Yes. So, and so this indicates that consciousness, or at least something like the intensity of consciousness or something like that, or the expansion of consciousness, however you want to put it, emerges at the border between order and chaos. And when you’re there, you are doing something like relevance realization, because when people have these transformative experiences on psychedelics, they’ve realized, well, like the guy, even the guy who had the psychotic break that I talked about, he realized that what he was doing was non-optimal. And so I consider that to be an instantiation of relevance realization. So of course. Yeah. And so that is what happens at the border between order and chaos. It’s associated with this intensification of consciousness. And so it’s converging with the global workspace theory and integrated information theory stuff. But it would also converge with what we were talking about earlier, because you get that sacredness, that sense not of just thinking, but participating in a fundamental principle of reality itself. Yes. And this is, you know, the sort of worldview that I’m putting forward with my writing is meant to legitimate that. And I’m not doing it because I want to legitimate it. Right. I discovered this stuff beforehand. I mean, I’m doing it because I think it’s true. I think it’s but it does legitimate it. Right. It legitimates it. Believe me, all of you watching, that’s, that is true of what Brett is saying. Right. Yeah. And so in some ways, me too, because I was somebody had who had to direct you moving away from religion. But I won’t go through my whole story, but the meeting Socrates, it turned me around. And then I found my way back to talking about the sacred and transformative experience. Yeah, when I was an undergrad, I was a I was a Newtonian reductionist, man. And like I said, you know, we are nothing but our genes and stuff like that, you know, like I was I’d adopted that worldview fully, and I’ve moved away from it now. Because, you know, the last four or five years, I’ve been, you know, reading incessantly. And like that, it, you know, the stuff that I’ve read, I’ve just made that sort of world, you just sort of become non viable to me. And so anyways, it’s because I think that this stuff is actually is actually true, but it also has this functional role to play. And so, okay, so those are the three literature. And then I also talk about the cognitive science of insight, which we already talked about. But insight is a self organized critical phenomenon. It’s associated, as you pointed out on the meaning crisis series, it’s associated with this phenomenology of, you know, you put a light bulb over somebody’s head to indicate that they’ve had an insight, you get this flash of conscious awareness. So an insight, you know, it occurs at the border between order and chaos, it has this structure, which is the meta mythology and also, you know, breaking down. You get something convergent with inflow, which, you know, you know, I’ve argued is an incase, you have the super salience of the world in the inside experience, sorry, in the flow experience, in the sense of ongoing discovery and, and real connectedness out one minute. Yeah, there’s, there’s, there’s just a lot of converging arguments that’s happening here right now. And so those are the four, you know, literatures around consciousness that I say, well, consciousness and all of them, you see that consciousness emerges at the border. Convergent, like, like, yeah, again, not to take anything away. I mean, basically, this was the argument I went through in untangling the world, not it’s like, and I also, you know, I teach a course on the cognitive science of consciousness and my students will, yeah, yeah, this is the argument John’s been building over five or six years. So wow, that’s just, it’s good that we both got me, I feel better about it, knowing that, you know, we both sort of, sort of coming together on these ideas. Well, I mean, you, I think are, I’m sorry, I’m trying to say this as neutrally as well. You are equally apt at, you know, seeing big patterns of convergence, which is one of the things I look for when I’m trying to do synoptic integration, and then you’re good at, you know, creating the synoptic integration. And that’s what these papers are doing. That’s why it’s not, it’s, it’s not only the amazing content, but it’s also the manner in which you’re making the argument, you know, you’re making this convergence argument, a plausible, a profound plausibility argument for synoptic integration, which I think is so needed in science, so, so needed in science. Well, thank you for saying that. Yeah, there’s a very good essay about this written in the 1960s, about how scientists are incentivized to make bricks. But what we really want to do is build houses. Yes. And all of the funding is for making bricks. And yeah, yeah, bricks. Right. What we really want to do is build houses. Right. And so we absolutely prioritize innovation over integration. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And so for me, like, I mean, this is, you know, I do empirical research because I have to, I’m a PhD. But as far as I’m concerned, everything, you know, the empirical, like we have, we have so many empirical studies that need to be put together. Yes. And integrate them. There’s an ocean. There’s an ocean of factoids out there that needs to be put together. And so that’s what I’m trying to do, you know, in my scientific career. Hopefully I can build a career out of that. But as I said, it’s not, it’s not particularly incentivized. And, you know, part of the reason is because those papers take time to write. They take a lot of time. So you can’t publish 20 of them. No, no, but they do. I mean, they do have long-term capacity. And I point to you, to our common friend, Mark Miller, a former student of mine. And he has found, you know, he’s carving out a great career. And I think your talent and the fact that you’re getting stuff published is going to open doors for you. I really do. I think, I think, I think there is more and more a turn to this, people recognizing the need for the synoptic integration. The way I’ve seen the change in the orientation towards cognitive science as a entity at the University of Toronto in the last 10, 15 years, it bespeaks what I’m talking about. It really exemplifies that. Good. Well, that’s a, that’s hopeful news for me because that is what I’m going to do. You know, that’s what I love to do. And that’s what I’m going to do. So whether it helps my career or not. So yeah, well, well, I mean, I think this is a good place to bring it to a close. If you could send me the links to the essays, I’ll put them in the description for this video so people can read them and reflect upon them. And I always like to give my guests the last word. It doesn’t have to be summative. You can just do something that’s sparked in you, or you can make it summative if you want. But like, what would you want anything to you want to say now potentially to draw together or to foreshadow something else you might want to talk about another time or both? Sure. So to foreshadow something else. I mean, I think there’s more to be said about the ontology of this and also how it relates to myth. You know, there’s an interesting connection I pointed out in the essay, a book that you recommended to me, or you recommended in the meaning crisis series, which was Alicia Herrero’s book. Yes, a profound book. Right. It’s a great book. It’s a difficult book, but great, but great. And in the final chapter of that book, she talks about how phase changes can only be explained via a narrative. Right. Because they rely on particulars. Well, an insight, right, what occurs at the border between order and chaos is a phase change. And so that’s why we see this, that the mythological narratives, which is the general pattern, have the structure of a phase change. Right. And so she also makes the argument that narrative gets our cognition sort of organized in a way that’s optimal for tracking dynamical systems in the environment, which I also think is a very good argument. Yeah. Well, I think it helps to avoid overfitting. Yeah. This is what Eric Hull, Eric Hull has a, he used to me this paper about dreams, right, and dreams. And he’s talked about myth as well. So anyways, you know, other than that, thanks again for having me. It’s been a great conversation, in my opinion. The convergence and it’s real convergence, especially around the consciousness stuff, is really, really, really cool. And I’m so excited about this. Of course, we’re going to continue working together. And so you’re going to be on again. That goes without saying. And again, I just wanted to thank you so much for doing this. It was excellent. Yeah. I enjoyed it.