https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=87L9yNzNWMk
Three. Welcome everyone to Voices with Reveki. I’m very excited about today because this is somebody I want a lot of you to meet. Some of you might have met him already. He’s been on Paul Van der Kley’s channel, but nevertheless I’d like to introduce Brett Anderson to you. And Brett, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell everybody the story about who you are and how you and I came to meet and why we’re working together. Sure, sure. So I am a PhD student at the University of New Mexico. I study evolutionary psychology there, but what I really do research on for the most part is something called the diametric model of autism and psychosis. And so this is just the idea that autism spectrum disorders and psychosis spectrum disorders are cognitive and genetic opposites. So how does that lead me to you? Well, so what I’m really interested in is one of the implications of this model, which is that there is a continuum of individual differences in both clinical and non-clinical populations. So we all fall somewhere along this continuum. And it has something like autistic-like traits on one end of the continuum and positive schizotypy on the other. Now, positive schizotypy is not the best term for that side, but I don’t have a better one. And it’s sort of like on that side of the continuum, sort of low level manifestations of the positive symptoms of psychosis. And that sounds kind of dysfunctional, but it’s not. There are actually benefits to being high in positive schizotypy as there are weaknesses and there are strengths and weaknesses associated with the other side of the continuum as well. So I am interested in understanding the nature of this continuum. So two basic questions, why did it evolve? So what sort of evolutionary forces led to the evolution of this kind of continuum? And what are the cognitive underpinnings of it, the cognitive scientific underpinnings of it? And so I was looking for a theory that could explain variation along this continuum, a cognitive scientific theory that could explain variation along this continuum. And I think I’ve read virtually every theory of autism that there is, obscure dissertations and all this. There’s not a lot of theorizing on the positive schizotypy side, because most of the theorizing on that side of the continuum has to do with psychosis and schizophrenia. And there is a qualitative difference really between positive schizotypy and schizophrenia. There’s some qualitative break that happens there. So that wasn’t very useful to me. But so I was reading these theories about autism and pretty early in the search, I came across this predictive processing theory, putting forward the idea that people with autism or people high in autistic-like traits, it applies to both in both of those ways, given inflexibly high weight to sensory input. Now I can come back later and sort of unpack that a little bit. It’s a little complicated. So I didn’t really get that at first, but then I read Andy Clark’s book and it all sort of came together for me. And I realized, so Andy Clark’s book, Surfing Uncertainty, which is a book about predictive processing, the paper that originally put forward this idea about autism was Sanders, van de Kroijs and colleagues in 2014. That was a paper published in Psychological Review. So anyways, when I was reading Andy Clark’s book, I sort of had this light bulb moment and I realized this is what I’ve been looking for. This is the theory I’ve been looking for, because what I realized is that it does a good job of explaining autistic-like traits, but the opposite configuration, so giving an inflexibly low weight to sensory input, did a really good job of explaining positives to the typy. And so I started to write this paper. And so I wrote this paper and at the same time that I was doing all of this, I was also listening to your lectures, your Meaning Crisis series, and I was reading, I had become very interested in relevance realization. I couldn’t put my finger on why I thought it was important, but I thought there was something important about it. So I was reading the literature around relevant relevance realization. And so one day I was like in my kitchen, cooking lunch, and I just had this sort of revelation, like these are the same thing. This mechanism that I’m claiming underlies variation in the autism schizotypic continuum, precision weighting, is the predictive processing account of relevance realization. And what I realized was that, so in your 2012 paper on relevance realization, you talked about these three trade-offs, these three trade-off relationships that are inherent to relevance realization. What I realized at that point was that I had talked about all of those trade-offs in my paper. All of those trade-offs manifest along the autism schizotypic continuum, and they can all be understood as differences in precision weighting. And so I sent you an email about this, sent you an email sort of laying out this argument. And it took you a while to get back to me, you’re a busy guy. And so I kind of thought you were going to sort of pat me on the head and say, good job, but that’s not what happened. So you emailed me and wanted to meet. And so we met up, and here we are writing this paper. And Mark Miller has come in as well. So Mark Miller is a cognitive scientist who has done quite a bit of work. He worked with Andy Clark and does work on predictive processing, and he’s been instrumental in helping us to write this paper. And the paper is almost done at this point. So it’s really a synthesis of the predictive processing framework with your theory of relevance realization. And I think this is going to help both of these theories, both of these sort of frameworks, because precision weighting has often, within predictive processing, precision weighting has been accused of being a magic modulator. You can kind of change it and it does all sorts of things and there’s no real constraints. But relevance realization has clear constraints, right? Because there are these trade-offs and it has to meet these requirements. So it’s not a magic modulator, right? And we can understand how differences in precision weighting using the relevance realization framework, we can understand how differences in the weight given to sensory input can have, we can make precise predictions about what should happen when you do that. So, okay, so that’s our area of overlap there. And then of course, I also had this conversation with Paul VanderKlay, where we talked about my experience. So I got into this whole thing that I’m doing now, because of Jordan Peterson. So I had a pretty rough time in my early 20s. I had three major psychotic episodes. And for whatever reason, when I was 24, so that was about, it was probably about nine months to a year after my last one, I came across Jordan and Jordan’s lectures really helped me put myself together. And so I’ve been trying to understand what it was, what it was about what Jordan was doing that had this effect on me, because I was also not alone in this. Many people, you know, Jordan says he gets letters all the time telling him some version of this story about people being in a dark place and their lectures helped them to sort of drag themselves out of it. So I wanted to understand this. And so I read maps and meeting twice, and it wasn’t until I read it the second time that it really clicked. Now, I don’t know how much probably don’t want to go into this too much at the moment. But I’m also going to be working on a YouTube series that should be coming out at the end of the summer. And in that series, I’m going to be integrating maps of meaning with relevance realization, because the claim that I’m making is that Jordan’s metamethology, right? So he identifies this general pattern underlying many of the world’s mythological narratives. And what he says at the end of the book is that, you know, if you’re construing the world as a forum for action, which is how myth construes the world, what you need to know most fundamentally is what you should be aiming at, right? What should be your highest value, let’s say, as he says, what you should be aiming at is not a state, but a process, or you don’t want to aim at anything static, or you want to aim at enacting a process. And this process as best I can tell, right, because what does he say about the hero? The hero stands at the border between order and chaos. That’s self-organized criticality. Okay, that’s what criticality means. It means to be at the border between order and chaos. When you’re at that border, what happens is essentially what you describe as problem formulation and reformulation. It’s the structure of an insight. So you have a way, so he talks about, he calls it a story. I think you would call it a frame, but it’s the same thing. You have initial state, goal state, and then how you’re going to get from an initial state to goal state. So that’s order, right? That’s your current order. That’s the way that you’re framing the world. That’s the story that you’re inhabiting. And then an anomaly occurs, which disrupts that story for whatever reason. You have a descent into chaos, right? You have to allow that story to dissolve, essentially, and you’re breaking frame. It’s the same thing as breaking frame. And you reemerge into a new frame, a higher order, and it’s more complex, and it’s more complex because it takes everything into account that the old frame did, and it takes into account the anomaly that disrupted the frame. Right, right. Now, so this, and also, I think that efficiency and resiliency, so you talk about these trade-offs between efficiency and resiliency, I think that that has overlap with order and chaos as well. Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, totally. Efficiency is like what you want to do. You need efficiency when things are stable, right? You want to be as efficient as possible, but you also need to be resilient against chaos, right? Against perturbations to that ability. And so, okay, so, and so what my fundamental claim is going to be in that series is, so William James defined religion as the idea that there is an underlying order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves there too. And the varieties of religious experience. Yes, yes. I believe that’s where he said that, yeah. And this is basically the claim that I’m making. So I’m making the claim that there’s an underlying process, and this process is independent of us, because another thing, and I’ve sent this paper to you, that Wolf et al. 2018 paper, which is describing a general process by which things complexify, and relevance realization, I believe is a particular manifestation of that process. Yes. So it has to do with competing interactions leading to self-organized criticality, leading to a higher level of integration. Yep, yep. That’s a deep continuity hypothesis. Yes, yes. And so that process is something that’s independent of us. It’s something that’s involved in the bringing to being of everything, right? And we can put ourselves into alignment with that, right? By standing at the border between order and chaos, by enacting this process. And so that’s the basic claim that I’m making, and it’s hopefully a response to the meaning crisis, because Susan Wolf, in her book, Meaning and Life, who knows the name of it, she talks about how what you want is subjective attraction to something that’s objectively attractive. I think this process qualifies as being objectively attractive. We can understand it scientifically, we can understand it precisely scientifically, we can understand why it’s valuable, because self-organized criticality represents the optimal pattern of behavior for all biological systems. That’s a claim that’s been made in the literature. Okay, so almost done here. So that’s basically the claim that I’m making. There’s this underlying process, and it also plays, I’m also going to be making a historical claim, it plays out historically. And I think that when Nietzsche declared the death of God, essentially that was like a frameship, like a cultural frameship, right? Yeah. We lost that deep way that we were framing the world. And right. And so, and then also, you know, one more thing here about this, because there’s also a relationship to another paper that we’re writing. We’re writing this paper about consciousness and the relationship between self-organized criticality and consciousness. Now, I think there’s something really interesting going on here, because so Eric Neumann was a protege of Carl Jung, and he wrote this book called On the Origins and History of Consciousness. And in that book, he made the case that the fundamental hero myth is a representation of the existence and action of consciousness across time. And I think Jordan is in alignment with the claim. And so, you know, if it’s the case, you know, that Jordan’s metamethology is accurate, is an accurate representation of sort of a condensation of the fundamental hero myth, then I think that claim is correct, right? Because if relevance realization, right, because if there is this fundamental connection between self-organized criticality and consciousness, and I think we’re using integrated information theory in part to explain this, relevance realization becomes a theory of how consciousness develops over time, right? How consciousness complexifies and develops over time. And since relevance realization has this, I think, uncanny overlap with the metamethology, right? Then that means I think Eric Neumann was correct, right? That the hero myth, in fact, is a representation of the existence and action of consciousness across time. And so, and I think that there’s something really important about that, because, you know, I feel as if we are very disconnected from our past, and many people who are sort of scientifically minded often denigrate our traditions, denigrate these traditional institutions. There’s something wrong about that, you know, because I don’t think we can really be whole unless we have some connection to the past, right? We can’t put ourselves in this position of superiority, of moral and intellectual superiority that’s, you know, something that just leads to nihilism with that. I think it’s a path to nihilism. And so, I think that understanding how our ancestors were not idiots, right? Although they didn’t have a scientific framework within which to understand the world, what they were doing is of value, right? It wasn’t random. And see, what the hero, what the hero myth does, and this is Jordan’s claim, it provides you something to aim at, right? It provides an ideal. And the idea would be that by embodying this ideal, it helped people to achieve criticality, right? It helped people to achieve that, or the optimal, the optimization of this process. So, okay, so I’ll stop there. Well, this is fantastic. So let me, let me, let me sort of put out sort of four threads that were there that you introduced, and then maybe we can go through each one a little bit more carefully and unpack it. The first was, you know, the predictive processing, relevance, realization, integration. To my mind, these are two big picture models of cognition. And there’s, I think what you and Mark and I are discovering is there’s a deep convergence between them, which I think lends plausibility to the claim that we’re arguing for. I think, so I want to unpack that a bit. The second was the idea of, you know, that this will integrate with Jordan Peterson’s work and the work on myth, specifically the meta myth. And then that ties towards the last point, the fourth point. I’ll come to, I want to do the intervening point. You’re making a very powerful ontological claim, which I think I find very interesting, and I’m finding increasingly plausible. I came to a position somewhat similar to this in a discussion with Jonathan Paget, that there’s something deeply analogous to relevance realization going on ontologically. And that explains the ultimate grounding of participatory knowing, which makes meaning in life possible. And the connection to Wolf is something I think you and I are converging on. And so, and that’s right. And then the point about consciousness. And, you know, Greg, I’ve got some papers coming out, well, hopefully coming out, in the sense of being published on consciousness with F.E. Uggian, but also the work I did with Greg Enriquez on untangling the world knot, in which, and this goes back to earlier work I did with Richard Wu and Anderson Todd. There’s a growing convergence that the function of consciousness is relevance realization, explicitly made by bars, strongly, I think, implied, I would even go as strong as to say, is entailed by Tononi’s theory, directly required by Clearman’s theory, I think by Lao’s theory. And I go over this with Greg in detail. And so I think the case for the function of relevance or in south as well, the case for relevance realization being the core function of consciousness, which ties it to working memory as a relevance filter, which ties it to global workspace, which ties it to fluid cognition, or at least fluid intelligence. I think all that case is being made strong, very strongly. And then you rightly note that that connects with a deeper continuity between relevance realization and self organizing criticality in nature. And Leo and I published a book chapter on seeing self organizing criticality as a way of implementing relevance realization. And so I think that the way in which you’re trying to extend, and perhaps develop and explicate Evan Thompson’s notion of deep continuity, I think is very promising. I think it’s really on the right track. So those are the four, I think, strands. So let’s do the first one. Let’s talk a little bit. Let me like say a bit and then you can, right. So I think I’m going to presuppose that my viewers have some good familiarity with relevance realization theory, because I don’t know what’s going on right now if they haven’t seen it in some part. There’s lots of work out there published and in videos, right. So I’m going to take that. Now, not so much for predictive processing. We’re talking about it in the elusive eye, the nature and function itself that Greg Enriquez and Christopher Mastropietro and I are doing. Let’s give people, you know, basic idea. I mean, we got to give Carl Friston, I think, primary credit for this idea, although Andy Clark is doing a huge amount of work. And I want to bring out that Mark’s contribution is really important. He’s part of a trend of moving predictive processing from a very computational model to an embodied 4E cog-sign model. And Friston is in agreement with this move, and so is Clark. So I think that’s exactly where that theory is going. So just briefly, I’ll give sort of what I see as a general. And then if you could zero it, make any corrections you feel fit. But if you could zero in on what, you know, what precision weighting is within this and why it matters so much to our understanding of intelligence. Yes. So yeah, basic idea of predictive processing is the brain is adaptive insofar as it can predict the world. I tend to emphasize, and this is more what I think Mark agrees with me on this, anticipates the world, because we want this to be not just a prediction, language-based, but the embodied preparation of, you know, a prediction of the world. So prediction is fine, because that’s the, you know, that’s the historical term. But if you think about it in terms of anticipation and how it makes sense to see even organisms, very basic organisms, anticipating their world, then you’re not bound up with sort of a homuncular idea of prediction. So the, right, organisms are trying to anticipate their world. And the way that the brain does this is, this is a very interesting idea. It’s convergent with the proposal that Tim Liddelkrepp and Blake Richards and I made in the 2012 paper, which is the brain basically anticipates or predicts itself. The brain treats itself as the environment that it’s trying to anticipate. And so the idea here is the brain is basically trying to predict its own sensory motor patterns. And then the idea is, as it gets better at reducing being surprised in its ability to anticipate its sensory motor patterns, those sensory motor patterns are actually coupling it to the world in an increasingly adaptive manner. And that means it’s getting a model that doesn’t mean a picture or a set of propositions, but it’s getting this set of capacities and skills for coupling so that it’s adaptively zeroing in on a correct way of making sense of the world. Okay, I use this in quotes because you have to use these without them being bound to language. Okay, because we’re not attributing linguistic abilities to, you know, paramecia or anything like that. And so the basic idea is, and what Friston does is he has a mathematical formalization, we don’t need to go into that in great detail, around a Bayes’ theorem. So it’s a big, ultimately for those of you who do philosophy of science, it’s a Bayesian model of epistemology, of reasoning, of right, etc. What Friston basically argues is you can see all of, you can see all of cognition and perception in this model, that what the brain is doing is this recursive layered process of trying to reduce how much it is being surprised in its attempts to adaptively anticipate the world. Now what’s interesting is also, and Mark Millers’ work brings this out, is this actually aligns also with a lot of developments that have happened within machine learning, deep learning, again because this idea of the brain modeling itself in order to model the world in this, you know, in these sort of layered recursive dynamic self-organizing fashions. So all of this is converging, the machine learning stuff, all the stuff we’ve got from animal learning behavior and all this powerful stuff that Friston’s, it’s all converging. But, and this is what I’ll turn things back to Brett if he wants to make any corrections, there’s a key requirement in there, and this is how I used to sort of piss people off when I would go to talks on predictive processing, and you would always say, but what is the brain modeling and why is it modeling, like why does the brain pay attention to this rather than this sensory motor pattern of interaction, right? And that’s where the idea of precision weighting, so precision weighting is basically the mathematical way of trying to talk about where the organism pays attention, where the organism pays attention. So you find that a fair explanation of predictive processing, Brett? Yes, definitely. And so you pick up the ball now about precision weighting and why it’s so crucial and why it verged on being a magic manipulator and how and why you think, and then how that fits into relevance realization, perhaps. I mean, you already foreshadowed that a bit. Sure, so precision weighting is the predictive, Clark characterizes it as the predictive processing account of attention, and so what it means to pay attention to something is to treat the input as if it’s highly precise and precision. So technically, if we’re doing Bayesian analysis, precision is the inverse variance. What it means is that you can count on this to be important, right? You’re giving it, so when you’re updating the model, right, you have to give a certain weight to the input. You have to weight it, and so if you’re treating the input as if it’s highly precise, you’re giving it a lot of weight, right? So it’s going to have a large effect on updating the model, and that means that you’re paying attention to it. So it’s often construed as being about reliability, and there is a way in which you can talk about it where that’s true, but I think it’s much easier to just talk about it in terms of relevance. You give more weight to input that is relevant to you, right? So if you’re looking for your keys, right, you’re looking for your keys, okay, you’re going to turn up the weight on signals, on cues that identify keys, right, and then you’re going to direct your attention to those. Now, what does this have to do with relevance realization? So let me talk about the theory that I’m putting forward to explain the autism schizotypic continuum real quick, and I think it’ll help. So the idea is that people with autism give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input. So one way of thinking about perception, there are problems with this phrase, but it’s a useful metaphor, I suppose. People often talk about it as controlled hallucination, and the reason why is because you have this top-down part of perception, and that’s like the hallucination part, but it’s corrected by the bottom-up input, right? And so what you’re actually processing is the difference. So you have a top-down prediction, and you have your bottom-up input, which you take in through your senses, and all that you process is the difference between the prediction and the input, right? That’s right, prediction error. That’s the only thing that you process, and that’s sort of the justification for predictive processing in some sense, because you can’t take in everything, or you can’t process everything. The world is simply too complex, and so you have to narrow it down just to those things that are relevant to your predictions. And so now people with autism give an inflexibly high weight to sensory input. Now, a nice way to think about what this does is to think about it in terms of data analysis. So if you’re analyzing data, you can have a problem called overfitting, and when you overfit the data, what you’re doing is you’re trying to take into account every little data point, every little deviation, you’re trying to fit your model to every little deviation, and the problem with that is that a lot of that’s noise, right? You’re not going to find those same deviations if you draw a new sample, right? So what you’re doing is you’re creating a model that is overfitted, and then it doesn’t- It’s kind of a sampling bias. It’s the kind of sampling bias, basically. Right, right. And yes, and so the model is overfitted, and then it doesn’t generalize. Now, when is this really useful? So it’s useful if there’s not a lot of noise in the data, and if you don’t need to generalize very much, right? So if the environment is stable and predictable and there’s not a lot of noise, giving a high weight to sensory input is really useful, and this is why people with autism or people high in autistic traits are good at systemizing okay? And systemizing is particular when in the context of autism is particular to rules-based systems. So a rules-based system is like a computer programming language. You put in a certain input, you get a certain output. Okay, there’s no noise involved there. There’s not a lot of non-linearity. Okay, it’s highly complex, but it’s also highly precise, and that’s the kind of stuff that people with autism are good at. They’re also engineers. They also tend to be engineers and sort of hard scientists. Now, the problem with that, of course, and that’s the strength, right? Systemizing, they also have this sort of really detail-oriented perceptual style, but the problem is that they’re not good at generalizing, and socially, people are not precise at all, right? People are highly non-linear, highly chaotic, and so that style, this is why we talk about mentalizing deficits with autism. That style makes it really hard to understand people because people are extremely context-dependent and somewhat chaotic, right? Now, on the other side of the continuum, giving a low weight to sensory input, which means, generally speaking, that means that you’re going to be giving more relative weight to the top-down prediction. Now, what does that mean? Well, you’re not going to be a systemizer, right? You don’t have a precise mind, but what you are going to be is imaginative because that top-down prediction is essentially imagination. That’s what imagination is. When you go into your imagination, and this is how Andy Clark talks about it, when you go into your imagination, what you’re technically doing is you’re turning down the weight on sensory input essentially all the way, right? You’re turning it down enough so that you can just deal with this stuff sort of offline, right? You’re dealing with it offline. That’s the imagination. People with autism have a hard time doing that because it’s inflexible. They have an inflexibly high weight to sensory input. They’re not able to turn down this sensory stuff enough, but people with high positive schizotypy often tend to be highly imaginative. A couple examples of this, I think, that are clear examples are Carl Jung and William Blake. Carl Jung and William Blake both had these sort of quasi, it’s not psychosis. They weren’t psychotic, but they had quasi hallucinations in life. They had sort of involuntary imaginative experiences. They were also extremely imaginative, both artistically and I would say in other ways as well. They were really able to get a grip on big picture things. That’s what positive schizotypy is for, I think. It’s for getting a grip on the big picture because if you’re giving a low weight to sensory input, what that means is also you’re going to be ignoring details, right? You’re not paying attention to the details, okay? What you’re trying to do, what you’re getting is a gestalt picture. This applies to, I mean, I think it essentially applies to everything. You’re trying to take in the gestalt and so you’re not going to be as good of a specialist, right? If you’re a hard scientist, what you want to do, you’re not trying to get a big picture view of the world, right? You’re trying to specialize in some highly particular domain and drill deep into that, okay? You’re not going to want to do that if you’re high in positive schizotypy. What you want to do is be on Carl Jung, right? Carl Jung and this extremely big picture view of the world, right? And so anyways, okay, now. No, that’s good. That’s good. So relevance realization. But we just finished because you gave both the positive and the benefits for the audience. Oh yes, my bad. Right, right. Okay, so what’s the downside of the generalization function of positive schizotypy? Absolutely. So apophenia is one of them. So apophenia is considered the predisposition to false positives. Now you can think about this. So if you have noisy data, right? You have noisy data. Well, if you’re going to see a pattern in the data, if there is a pattern in that data, you need to be giving a low weight to sensory input because that’s the only way you’re going to find the line of best fit. Now what’s the downside? Well, you’re also going to sometimes see patterns that aren’t actually there. You’re going to impose. This is under fitting. This is kind of under fitting. When you under fit data, you’re essentially imposing your assumptions onto the data. You’re imposing your model onto the world. This is romantic. This is romanticism, essentially. What we really want to do is press out against the world, our imagination. But anyways, that’s the downside of positive schizotypy. Oftentimes, people who are high on positive schizotypy tend to be conspiracy theorists. They tend to be into these unlikely models that they make sense of the world. So if you can accept some of the assumptions of a conspiracy theory, you can have a coherent model of the world. Of course, the problem is it’s not actually in alignment with the facts, as best we can tell. But so they’re very interested in comprehensive models. That’s what it looks like to me. They want something that is coherent. I think that the autism side is more concerned with, let’s say, accuracy instead of coherency. It’s something like that. It sometimes reminds me of a little bit of the Godelian trade-off between consistency and being comprehensive, and that no system can actually get both. Also, I’m hearing in this overfitting to the data and underfitting to the data. Then that makes me think of Marlo Ponti and Taylor and Dreyfus’s notion of relevance realization, optimal grip, and this cognitive construct of fluency that we use, that there’s something in the brain that’s tracking fluency. I’ve argued that I think it’s exactly when we’re optimally gripping the world, where we’re getting to a place where it’s the most plausible self-interpretation of the modeling of the brain is that it’s finding the sweet spot within that context, within that data set, between overfitting and underfitting to the data. That’s what fluency is and optimal gripping is. There’s increasing research that fluency is a very powerful constraint on human cognition. Right. Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. What I would point out about that is that I think part of the reason why this autism schizotypic continuum evolved is because there are some problems that aren’t really solvable within a lifetime. For example, you can’t know ahead of time whether the environment is going to radically change. You can’t know whether some volcano is going to erupt and it’s going to kill the crops and you’re going to have to migrate. You can’t know these things ahead of time. The question is, how much do you prepare? How much do you prepare for radical change? The answer is you just don’t know. I think that’s part of the reason why evolution has produced this continuum. We’re hedging our bets. You have some people who specialize for a particular domain and some people who say, well, I’m not going to specialize. I’m going to try to accrue. I think that the autism schizotypic continuum can be useful to construe this. One focuses on specialized knowledge and one tries to focus on what you can call wisdom. I think that what wisdom is, it’s like this is stuff that applies to all situations at all times. A wise person knows what to do when they don’t know what to do, when there’s not rules and procedures available. I think that’s what people high and positive schizotypic focus on. Now, the thing is, if you’re in a highly competitive environment, that’s not that great because you really want, if you were going to be competitive in, let’s say, some parts of academia, you need to be a specialist. You need to focus in on this one thing and that’s how you win. But if things change and that specialization is no longer viable, then you’re better off having this more generalizable knowledge of the world. But yes, as far as, go ahead. No, I was just going to say, I think that point there provides a bridge into the second point because what you’re basically arguing for, and this is something that I’ve also done some convergent work with Gary Havahadnesson on, is the idea that we shouldn’t look for relevance realization just within embodied brains. We should also be looking at within populations, within distributed cognition. So all of us are doing relevance realization and balancing, but there’s also a distribution of precision weighting, let’s put it that way, in the population that allows the population as a whole or at least groups to do relevance realization within distributed cognition. Is that fair enough? Absolutely, yeah. And then that, I think, ties into the next of our four points I want to try and get through with you, which is the idea of myth as relevance realization for populations across time in a certain fashion and how that ties in with Jordan Peterson. I’ll be talking to him at the end of this month. Also, Kurt from Theory of Everything just recently did a talk with Bernardo Castro, very excellent dialogue. But Kurt is also trying to get Jordan and I to come together on theories of everything to talk about myth together. So I’m hoping that happens. But so we’ve got, okay, this is cool, and then this maps into attention or intelligence. We’ll come back a little bit later if we have time to consciousness. But what you just said is a perfect link between here’s what’s going on individually, relevance realization, and then here’s what’s going on collectively. Because the point you’re making, just to emphasize, and this goes back to Batta Concrispy when they originally made this, we’re all on this continuum somewhere. We’re not talking about pathological subpopulations. We are all on this continuum somewhere. Therefore, as a group, we are doing broad scale, right? Distributed cognition, relevance realization. Dan Schiaffi and I are exploring the idea that, and we’ve got some work on, you know, with about the rovers on Mars, one of the articles is going to be published soon. The basic idea is what Tim Morton calls hyperobjects. These are large scale things that don’t fit reliably with an individual scale human cognition like evolution, global warming. And what you need is you need distributed cognition, which you see, for example, in science. You need distributed cognition and relevance realization within distributed cognition in order to come into a cognitive grip, perhaps optimal, on these hyperobjects. And I take it that you’re suggesting something very analogous and convergent with that argument, that the relevance realization within distributed cognition, right, is what allows us to get as a we rather than as an I, allows us to get a grip on some of the hyperobjects that have a more longitudinal existence for us. And that’s what myth is doing. Is that a fair way of talking about it? Yes, I think so. I mean, I think that what myth is doing is trying to convey the optimal pattern of behavior, right? It’s something like that in a very abstract way. And it has to be abstract because it has to apply to everybody in the civilization, whether you’re a plumber or a soldier, whatever, right? And so it has to be abstract, right? It can’t be too particular. But and so, yeah, so here I’ll put forward a sort of hypothesis about what I think happened to get to myth, right? And this, you know, I don’t have any certainty about this. This seems like it’s plausible to me. But so the idea is that, you know, we’ve been ever since we could talk, we’ve been telling stories and doing rituals and all of this stuff. And I’m going to focus on the story. I talked about this a little bit with Paul, too, but I’m going to focus on the story just because it simplifies things. But you can imagine the same sort of process playing out with ritual as well. But the idea is that, you know, somebody does something great, let’s say, they figure out, you know, a new way to bring down wooly mammoths, whatever they figure out a new way, they invent a new technology, whatever, right? We tell a story about that person. And we tell we’ve told, well, eventually, what’s going to happen if you’re a part of a tribe, right? So you’re going to have these particular stories, but there’s too many to remember in one lifetime, too many to tell in one lifetime. But you don’t want to lose the wisdom that’s inherent to these stories, right? Because there are important lessons to be learned, there are important lessons you want to appropriate. And so I think that we sort of find the line of best fit. Something like that, right? We sort of, and you know, it’s not a coincidence that people high on positive schizotyping tend to be storytellers and novelists, right? That’s what a story is, you know, and it’s sort of finding the line of best fit. I think it’s something like that. But we’re trying to find the line of best fit that some story that can convey the wisdom that’s inherent to these many particular stories, right? And so we tell that and it’s a fiction, right? But it’s not a fiction in terms of being untrue, right? So Jordan talks about it as being hyper true or meta true, because it’s completing the general pattern underlying these mythological narratives. So we continue to do that, right? We continue to sort of to sort of find this general pattern in these stories, right? Because then we’ll have some other fictions and then, you know, civilizat- or tribes will come together into a civilization and their particular narratives sort of have to battle it out a little bit. We know this sort of happened in Babylon and Marduk sort of won that. And so this is another sort of process by which we’re sort of distilling out, right? Distilling out the most general pattern and what we have converged on, right? And of course, no one person did this, right? It was something that happened across time and across many people. What we’ve converged on is, you know, in their own particular ways, there are important differences between mythological narratives. But as I think Jordan convincingly argues in Maps of Meeting, there are important similarities as well. There’s a general pattern, right? This sort of death and rebirth pattern, right? This descent into chaos and reemergence, where you see it with the Buddha, right? He leaves his orderly home to go on this journey, right? And his journey suffers and all this, but then he achieves enlightenment and he comes back, right? And so that’s another, you know, that’s a descent into chaos and reemergence. And so we sort of stumbled onto this, you know, through this process of telling these stories, telling compelling stories, right? And so that’s sort of this distributed cognition. It’s distributed across both space and time that has led us to this pattern, which as I’m going to make the case in my YouTube series, has a lot of overlap with the pattern that you call relevance realization, right? It has a lot of overlap. And so you think that it is the optimal pattern of behavior, right? That is what is optimal, you know, sort of self-organized criticality standing at the border between order and chaos. And then you need to be able to reformulate problems when necessary. You need to be able to enact frame shifts and see what this is getting at. And I think this is important because, you know, we don’t want to rely. See, and we’re at the point in our, I think, cultural history, let’s say, and, you know, I don’t want to make any teleological arguments here, but I think it still looks to me the case. We’re at the point where we can’t do this thing anymore, where we have a set of propositional beliefs. We adhere to that. That’s our culture. Anybody who doesn’t believe is on the outside. Anybody who does believe is on the inside, right? And so maybe a solution to that problem is to find out what the beliefs were actually about to begin with, right? You know what I mean? So you want to see in maps of meaning, you know, Jordan, you know, he talks about these narratives and what they’re doing, you know, it’s not about the narrative. The narrative is there to facilitate a mode of being. It’s something that you enact and embody, right? It’s participatory. It’s something that you participate in. And so, you know, we want to see that our ancestors were trying to get at this mode of being, right? It’s a mode of being. It’s a way of being in the world, and they were encoding it into these stories, into these narratives, but we need to understand that mode of being and understand how they discovered it as well. So anyways, I think I’m getting a little off topic. Does that sort of mean- No, no, no, no. I think that’s good because that sort of brings it, that sort of ties in a little bit with the ontological point four. We’ll skip the consciousness thing for a bit, come back, because the point four was this idea that, you know, this pattern, there’s deep continuity, to use Evan Thompson’s important idea. I hope not use it, not misuse it. You know, there’s deep continuity between the way self-organizing criticality implements relevance, realization in the brain. You can see self-organizing criticality within evolution. That’s what punctuated equilibria theory of evolution is. You can see self-organizing criticality at work in the world at large. That’s the work of Hervok, and you also mentioned, who was the name of the- Wolfman College 2018. Yeah, that’s right. And so there’s a deep continuity between self-organizing systems all the way up to cognitive systems. And then what you’re also doing is you’re also opening it up and saying, it’s not just within individual organisms, it’s also within populations, especially populations that have the cultural capacity for history. And I take our capacity for history, and I don’t mean written history, I mean the fact that what’s called cultural ratcheting, we don’t start from scratch because we preserve the heritage of distributed cognition and we constantly ratchet upon it. And that is one of our distinct and huge advantages. And the point you’re making is that myth is a way of tracking that evolution of that ratcheting up. But what we’re doing in that ratcheting up, at least what we were doing mythically when we were cultivating wisdom, is we were getting into, we were getting better at better at sort of, I want to use something like resonating, connecting to, this is the point you made about meaning and connecting to this larger reality happening in the universe at large and putting us more in sync with the world, which helps both our collective adaptivity and our individual adaptivity. And then your point is that sense of being connected to something that is inherently valuable to all living things, at least you could say that, is to connect to something greater than ourselves and that has a history greater than us and has an extension greater than us and existence greater than us. And that would give us a profound sense of meaning in life. That’s a sense of sacredness that could address the meaning crisis. That’s what I’m hearing you say. Is that a fair take on it? Yes, yes, it’s definitely fair. So let me talk about self-organized criticality real quick. So this was the idea was originally put forward right by Peter Bach, who is this physicist, and he was putting it forward as a solution to this problem, which is that the laws of nature are relatively simple and the universe, we know it’s headed towards increasing levels of entropy. So why do we see all this interesting stuff happening? Why is there some complexity and where does that come from? And so self-organized criticality was originally put forward as sort of a theory to understand how complex systems, because he makes this argument that complexity essentially emerges at the border between order and chaos, right? A crystal is like an ordered system and a crystal is not really complex because if you know what one part of the system looks like, you know what the whole thing is. Gas is kind of the same way. A gas is chaos, but again, it’s homogenous. It’s not interesting. Complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos. So how do systems get there without any tuning from an outside agent? Well, he created these models that showed how the interactions of the parts of the system can intercalate. Now, his explanation was incomplete because it doesn’t explain hierarchical complexity and the reason it doesn’t explain hierarchical complexity is because self-organized criticality, it technically produces fractal patterns, self-similar fractal patterns, and they’re the same across scale, right? They’re self-similar across scale and so you can’t get hierarchical complexity. Now, this is where the Wolf paper comes in because the Wolf paper says that the way that you get hierarchical complexity is through competing interactions. So you have competing interactions. Yeah, which is like the opponent processing that Blake and Tim and I proposed was at the heart of relevance realization. Absolutely, yeah, and that’s why I say that relevance realization maps onto this really well. Yeah, just beautiful. So they say that what you get is competing interactions and they lead to these frustrated states or you can think about it as tension, right? Tension and this happens all the way down, right? Molecular all the way up to galactic and life and everything, right? And so you get these competing interactions leading to frustrated states and that leads to self-organized criticality, right? So that’s at least self-organized criticality in these avalanches, which is this punctuated equilibrium pattern that you see and when you have that avalanche and reintegrate, you reintegrate into a new level of integration and a new level. Because of that inherent tension, that tone-off. Yes, it resolves the tension, right? It resolves the tension. Yeah, and man, I mean, you know, I haven’t read Hegel, okay, but I’ve read some books about Hegel and I mean it’s really similar to what to how Hegel talks about the dialectic, you know, it really is. I think so, which is part of my interest in the neoplatonic idea of dialectic because the idea that we can do a practice that’s transformative of cognition and consciousness that can put us more in touch with the relevance realization machinery within and the intelligibility realization machinery without. I think that is my hope right now. This is my rational hope. This is what my work is driving a lot towards and I think you’ve had some like just brilliant insights about how to connect this stuff together. It’s just astonishing. So I just want to congratulate you. I’m so glad you reached out because working with you has turned out to be such a joy. It’s just so, so exciting and you know, we’re planning, like you said, a paper on consciousness. We’re just going to keep working and I assume that Mark and you and I will continue to do some work too. So that takes it back then to the fourth topic, which was number three on the list, which is the holy grail of cognitive science, which is consciousness. And so like I said, there’s already deep convergence between everything you’ve said and a lot of convergence within the consciousness business that, you know, the function of consciousness is relevant to realization. So I think that already is a big argument in favor of your proposal. But you’re doing something very interesting in that you’re not really struggling with the function or the nature problem like Tononi. You’re not avoiding them, but you are trying to make a connection between that and sort of, you know, Jungian and post Jungian thought in a way which I think is very exciting. And you touched on this when you did your little intro, but now can we zero in on that and unpack that because I think that’s really exciting. Yes. Thank you for saying that, by the way, John, and I feel the same way. I mean, I’m beyond excited to be working with you. So, but yes, about consciousness. So, yeah, so consciousness is like the holy grail, right? You know, I’m always sort of hesitant to even go there because I’m very sensitive to woo, right? Because I know that the work that I’m doing is like borderline woo. You know, I know it is. Me too. But I’m not, that’s not, I don’t want to be like that. I’m not a new agey type of person, you know, and so I’m sensitive to those things. But, you know, there is something interesting going on here because there is this convergence. We see it in IIT, so integrated information theory, where there are these models that show that where you get maximal integrated information is at criticality, meaning that that’s when you get maximal consciousness. And global workspace theory has this one of the signatures of consciousness, according to global workspace theory, is the ignition event. And the ignition event has been characterized as a phase transition, phase transitions occur at criticality. And somebody else, Togli Azzucci, 2017, explicitly integrated this. And he said, you know, basically, the conclusion of his paper was that the ignition event is a self-organized critical event in which phi is maximized, right? So we have that information. Now, there’s also something interesting going on with psilocybin research. So I assume most people are aware that recently there’s been this sort of resurgence in research on psychedelics. It’s been utterly fascinating. Psilocybin has been shown to help people with depression, addiction, death anxiety, and cancer patients. People rate it as one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their life. Carhart Harris and colleagues, so Carhart Harris is the guy who’s done much of the research on psilocybin. He’s definitely the most well-known person. And his theory, just put forward in a couple of papers, is that the mechanism, and I would say one of the mechanisms behind psilocybin experience, I think it doesn’t tell the whole story, but I think it’s an important part of the story, is that it moves you closer to criticality. And people talk about their experience with psilocybin as being an expanded state of consciousness, right? They talk about it as a higher, there’s room for disagreement on whether that’s an appropriate characterization. But if it’s the case, right, that phi, let’s say phi is maximized at criticality, then it is literally an expanded state of consciousness, right? It’s literally more phi or more consciousness at criticality. And so the psilocybin experience also lines up with this theory. And the cognitive signs of insight, I think also lines up with it, because when you have an insight, right, for a cartoonist and we’re characterizing somebody having insight, we put a light bulb over their head. It’s this flash of awareness, this flash of conscious awareness. And of course, Stefan and Dixon, in their papers, they characterize an insight as a phase transition, which occurs at criticality, right? And so that also explains why you get that sort of flash of conscious awareness when you have an insight, right? It’s critical, it’s at criticality. And so I think that there’s convergent evidence, and I think we can make a pretty good case for it, consciousness, essentially, there’s this tight coupling between consciousness and criticality. Now, how does that connect to myth? Well, in Maps of Meaning, Jordan says that where you want to be and where the hero, the mythological hero figure, stands at the border between order and chaos, and that’s where you want to be, it’s the right place to be. And of course, as I said in the introduction, when you’re at the border, what happens is this metamethology, which is the same as the structure of an insight, right? And of course, that is what happens when you’re at the border between order and chaos, you have an insight. And so I think that’s endlessly interesting that those things perfectly match as far as I’m concerned. But this idea that part of… Go ahead. Well, so, man, I’m going to forget his name, Ray Brachier wrote this book called Nile Unbound. And he’s sort of putting forward all of the implications of the Newtonian worldview, right? And it is nihilistic, it’s extremely nihilistic, and he’s unapologetic about it. And he sort of says, consciousness is an accident. It’s a byproduct, it’s all this. This is what you have to say if you’re working within a sort of that Newtonian framework, right? There’s no room for consciousness in the world. There’s no room for our experience. It has to be downgraded to kind of an illusion. That’s what like Daniel Dennett seems to do as well. And there’s something really wrong about that. I mean, I think there’s something that’s… It is nihilistic, you know? And you know, if it was true, that would be one thing, we would have to deal with it. But I don’t think it’s true. I think that what this indicates is that consciousness is a manifestation of the same process, right? Because of course, relevance realization is how consciousness develops in us over time. Relevance realization is a manifestation of this process that is involved in the emergence of all complexity in nature. And consciousness is a manifestation of that process as well. And so, you know, I think… We deeply belong. What you’re saying is we deeply belong. Yes. Yes. We’re not out of place. We’re not some weird anomaly. And you know, if it’s true, and I think a good case can be made for this, that I mean, the increasing complexity over time is not some accident, right? It’s built into the logic of things, you know? And if that’s true, and if phi, because phi is essentially kind of a measure of complexity… Yeah, that’s all it is. And, you know, that means that something like us was almost inevitable, right? It’s not, you know, you don’t want… I don’t… I’m sensitive to teleological things, okay? It’s not a telos, but it’s like it’s built into the logic of this process. And so… There’s a distinction within teleology that’s coming out of the work of my colleague at U of T, Dennis Walsh, philosopher, biologist, and one of my students, RAs, Alex Dijedovic, between conducive and sort of productive teleology. There’s a teleology, a model that’s where teleology is like the way an artisan produces something. And that I think has largely been… I mean, we’ve given that up since the Enlightenment. I think trying to bring that back is just going to face tremendous counter arguments and counter evidence. But conducive teleology, the idea that there are constraints that are constantly conducive towards certain… Like, you know, the way you have attractors in state space, right? Things like that. And that we’re constantly finding that state space is typically not distributed randomly, but in terms of attractors. So there seems to be ways in which there’s conduction, things are conducive towards, you know, stability in terms of their existence. It is a very platonic idea in some ways. I think that notion… I don’t like calling it teleology because, well, I think Dennis and Alex are right. Technically, that’s right. People just don’t hear that when you say the word teleology. They think of productive teleology. They think of the analogy of the artisan. And then they will start to misinterpret the way evolution works, for example. There’s no contradiction between evolution and conducive teleology. That’s part of Dennis’s point. In fact, he’s offering, I think, a better account in his work on the philosophy of biology than sort of, you know, what’s called the grand synthesis. I can’t remember where… The predominant framework in biology is the synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian natural selection. And now there’s even an anthology edited by Dennis Walsh, basically criticizing that and how within a biology, theoretical biology, and the philosophy of biology, people are pushing towards something like the kind of dynamical system, complex system, self-organizing criticality model that you and I are discussing. And within that conducive teleology has a proper place. I don’t like using the term for, not for theoretical reasons, but for rhetorical reasons. People inevitably mishear that. They hear it as destiny, which is not what you and I think are talking about here at all. I would absolutely conceptualize it as an attractor in a dynamical system. We think of it as a pole, and that’s kind of a teleological thing, but of course it’s also a manifestation of the causal interactions from the bottom up. It’s a resolution. It’s a resolution. That’s why I try to speak of it as the integration of emergence and emanation. There’s sets of constraints, right, that why it goes to this attractor, but there’s also ways in which the things are interacting and there’s the emergent behavior. You have to have the two integrated together in order to account for what’s happening. Yes, absolutely. But yeah, so back to consciousness. I think that this helps to dispel this notion that we’re just accidental byproducts of random particles moving about in space. Because I don’t think that’s true. I think that the universe is far stranger than that in some sense. This is why I will always refrain from using teleology to explain things. I don’t rule out teleology in general, because the universe is too strange to rule out some notion of there being some reason for it, something like that. But I don’t go there in my YouTube series because I don’t need that. I don’t need that. I mean, this provides a… So in what we’re trying to do, because I mean, it’s really… See, I think that criticality in our day-to-day life manifests as the flow state. That would be my hypothesis. Well, I mean, Leo Ferraro and Herb Bennett and I published a paper in 2018, once a chapter in the Oxford Henbook of Continuous Thought, where we proposed a continuum between fluency. And then Tobolinsky and Reber proposed that insight is a fluency spike, a sudden increase in fluency, where again, fluency isn’t just the liability, it’s optimal gripping. And then there’s a continuum between insight and the flow state, but the flow state is a cascade of insights. And then there’s a continuum between the flow state and higher states of consciousness, which are flow states on the level of our existential mode. And so, yeah, I think that’s also where your work and my work is very convergent. Right. And what’s really interesting about this is in Maps of Meaning, Jordan made the argument that meaning, that sense of meaningful engagement, that’s what keeps you at the border between order and chaos. That’s the instinct. It’s a deep instinct. And I think that’s really important, to address the meaning crisis, because it means that meaning is real. It’s real and pursuing it is adaptive. Not only is it adaptive, it has utility for one, but it’s not only that. It’s also because as we’ve talked about, people want to be a part of something bigger. They need to be a part of something bigger. It’s not just useful, it’s ontologically grounded. That’s what you’re saying. Yes, it is. And so when you’re pursuing meaning like that, what you’re doing is you’re putting yourself into alignment with something that is not just subjective. You’re putting yourself into alignment with this process, this process that is involved in the bringing to being of everything and the ongoing complexification of everything. And so, you know, and… Well, that’s why I’ve been trying to give teeth to this notion, which is both epistemological and ontological of transjectivity. Of a real… Oh, my mic is suddenly declining here. You know, of this real relation between real patterns within and real patterns without. And that this is something we need to use more… I’m sorry, not we need to use… We need to place more squarely within our existing epistemology and ontology, in order, like you say, to get a more appropriate account of things, but also to realize a better way of living within reality. Yes. Yeah, I mean, it’s funny. I was listening to one of Jordan’s lectures the other day, and he was looking for that word, right? He was like, I wish there was a word that’s something in between objectivity and subjectivity. That’s something that can indicate… Because he was talking about relevance, right? He was talking about relevance. He didn’t have it. And so, yes, I agree. I mean, we need that to become a part of the conversation, because it is important, this idea of something being transjective, right? It’s not objective or subjective, necessarily. Now, what I would say is that this process that I’m describing, I think it is objective in some sense. Right, right. So in the sense that it exists independently of us, and it’s valuable, regardless of what we think about it. And let me bring in one more thing here, which I think is important to this. One way that you can think about this ongoing complexification, especially at an evolutionary and cultural level, is as the increasing scope of non-zero-sum games. And so this has to do with the idea of meta-stability, as well as a meta-stable system, right? The parts of the system are able to… Well, different ways of thinking about it. They’re able to meet their own needs. They’re able to express their individuality. At the same time as they’re integrated into a functional whole, right? Well, this is what a non-zero-sum game does. And Robert Wright has this book called Non-Zero, which I think is a fantastic book. And he makes this case that this increasing scope of non-zero-sum games is sort of built into the logic of biological and cultural evolution. And I think in the case that he makes is also extremely concordant with the Wolf-It-All 2018 paper, because he talks about it as competition begets cooperation, right? Competition begets cooperation at all levels of analysis. This is convergent with Carstens’ work on the distinction between finite and infinite games, one of his final works. Yeah. And I’m trying, with the help of a lot of people, and I’ve mentioned them multiple times with Christopher Mastapietro, Guy Sendstock, Jordan Hall, Peter Lindbergh, a whole bunch of people like also Paul VanderKlay and Jonathan Pangeo, I’m trying to come up with a way of turning this, this act of communicating and communing into something that is loving and in the sense of caring for and enjoying and involved with an infinite game, that infinite game. And to get us to play that game, seriously play that game, as opposed to what our culture is telling us, which I think is largely false, that there are only zero-sum games. There are only zero-sum games. And I think that’s just demonstrably false, and it’s demonstrably misleading and often maliciously misleading, because it’s done basically to put people at large in the service of particular vested interests, for whatever reason. And this is neither crypto-Marxist nor crypto-capitalist, right? They’re trying to exploit us for their own gains. And so having that zero-sum model in politics, in economics, in everything, deeply serves the powers that be. So it’s kind of a Foucault critique I’m making. And so I think recovering dialectic into dialogos, especially in the face of what Jordan Hall argues for, which is the rate of complexification in our culture is going up, not just complexification is going up, but the rate of change is also increasing. And so we need to recover this ever more rapidly than we ever have before. Yes. So I want to say a couple things about this, so that you can think about this from an evolutionary perspective. So evolutionists talk about these, so they most commonly talk about two ways to attain status, right? One is dominance, right? Intimidation, force, all this. And for humans, we have a particular way to achieve status, which is prestige, which is people voluntarily confer status onto you because you do useful things. You’re just a useful person, right? And let’s see, there’s another strategy too, which is sometimes talked about, it’s less common, but there’s also leveling, right? So if you want to increase your relative status, you can bring down the people at the top, right? So you can sort of level out things. And if you’re somebody who’s low on the hierarchy, that means that you increase your relative status. Now, what I would want to argue is that these two strategies, the dominance and leveling strategy that evolutionists talk about manifest in pseudo-religious ideologies. Right, right, right. You know, fascism was an extremely sort of dominance oriented. Of course, the left-wing radical ideologies are all about equalizing everything, right? Now, prestige is a non-zero sum game. And the reason why, of course, because I give you status, you do useful things that benefit me and my family, right? And so there’s a trade going on there, right? You get status, but I don’t die, right? And I benefit from your heroic endeavors, let’s say. Now, and so you might think about this as, you know, why would we follow somebody, you know, if you’re a hunter gatherer, why would you follow somebody into a hunt? You know, because we know that leadership is extremely attractive and you’re putting for hunter gatherers, right? So why would you voluntarily give this man an advantage in the mating market? Well, if he’s somebody, and this is I sent you this paper, Garfield or Hagen and Garfield, right? So they talk about this and they don’t use the term non-zero sum games. They use another term for it, but it means non-zero sum game. What they’re saying is that the reason why leadership evolved, that kind of leadership psychology is because some people are better at discovering and facilitating non-zero sum games than others. And that’s who we first add us onto. And so I want to connect this to Agape, what you talk about as Agape, because see, I think that Agape in some sense is, well, talk about Agape and logos, right? So, you know, when Jordan Peterson talks about Christianity, he often talks about the logos and that you want to, you’re trying to enact and embody the logos. And I think that the logos is more about this sort of, well, I think it’s related to what Richard Tarnas talks about it as the symbolic masculine in his book, The Passion of the Western Mind, right? It’s just striving forward achievement and telling the truth is also an incredibly important part of that. But it is somewhat individualistic and all that. And that’s all well and good as far as I’m concerned, right? You don’t have a community unless it’s made up of competent people. But so the idea would be, and see, I think that Christianity was a representation of this idea that what you want to do is enact and embody the logos in the service of Agape. And what is Agape? Well, you talk about it and, you know, I’ve mentioned this to you before, you talk about Agape as something that you dwell within. And Jordan talks about the logos as something you enact and embody. Now, I’m going to be making this argument in my YouTube series. I think that maps on the Agent-Arena relationship. I think that what Christianity was doing was putting forward this Agent-Arena relationship that you can aspire to enact and embody the logos in the service of Agape, the logos being you as an agent, right? Which you’re enacting and embodying. Agape is the arena. Creating this Agape arena. Now, what is the Agape arena? Well, I think what it is. So if you have that kind of Agape love for somebody, I mean, one way of thinking about it is that you are setting it as a conscious goal to see that person enact and embody the logos. You’re trying to manifest that in them. You want them to become who they could be. And if we can accept that love, right, that kind of love at a community level, I think that’s an infinitely scalable non-zero-some game. Because what we’re doing, if we did that, let’s say we put that as the highest value in a culture, hypothetically here, we would be rewarding people for their ability to facilitate others’ enactment and embodiment of the logos. And then it’s like a recursive thing, right? Well, I’ll just stop there. It’s sort of, I think that- No, no, I think this is amazing because first of all, I like this connection that that move you’re making is brilliant. You’re just on fire today, by the way. It’s a pleasure to be here with you. I mean, I think one of the things I’m trying to do with the logos is afford a practice that bridges between embodying the logos and dwelling within an Agape arena, because that’s what’s happening in these circling practices. So I like that way of putting it. It also lines up with- I’m doing a lot of reading right now. This is Paul Tyson’s book, Returning to Reality, Christian Platonism for Our Times. And then I’ve also got the anthology on Christian Platonism, because I- and he’s basically arguing that this is the correct ontology right now. And he’s not just doing a historical thing. And I’m thinking about this, of course, because of my ongoing discussions with JP Marceau and Paul Vanderklee and Jonathan Pajot and Mary Cohen. And it was occurring to me that one of the explanations you could give for why we keep sort of converging on Christian Platonism are things deeply analogous to it. Because you can see, I think you can make a very strong argument that Sufism is doing the same thing. Because what Christian Platonism gives you, Platonism gives this huge emphasis on the logos. But it has enough discussion of love in it. Obviously, the symposium, for example, and the phaedras, right? It’s got enough discussions of love that it can link to the Christian proposal of agape. And what Christian Platonism is doing and why we keep coming back to it. Or you see something very similar, like I said, in Sufism. You have the logos being integrated with this denotion of the beloved and the lover, right? And so you’ve got agape and logos keep coming back again and again as sort of the core, what verse Lewis calls sort of the core spiritual grammar of the West, very broadly construed. Because now I’m not excluding the Islamic world. I’m including it in what we might call the Abrahamic West, if that’s allowable. I don’t know what word to use. I don’t know what the noun should be these days. And I get the reason why the nouns are in contention. But we also need words so we can talk. We have to be charitable as we try to come up with alternative terms. So I think, I mean, so I’m building a historical argument why we keep returning to, you know, Christian Platonisms or Sufism. Or I think you can get, you can find serious analogies also within Buddhism, where you have Zen on one hand and Pure Land Buddhism on the other, emphasizing, you know, Pure Land is really emphasizing more sort of, you know, agape or or Karuna. And Zen is really emphasizing more Dharma and logos. And Dharma and logos are very good translations for each other, by the way, as many people familiar with the Kyoto school will know. So I think there’s a broad historical argument that I’m sort of working on right now that converges with the proposal you’re making about how to integrate Jordan and Jordan Peterson in my work together. Right. Yeah, I think another way to look at it from a historical perspective is in terms of the masculine and the feminine. So, as I said, you know, the logos really maps on, I think, nicely to Richard Tarnas’s symbolic masculine, those values, but agape, I think is, I think it’s like the fundamental feminine value. And, you know, that paper that I talked about earlier, Hagen and Garfield, who put forward this theory of encephalization, and they said that men were essentially selected for their ability to discover and facilitate non-zero sum games at a cultural level. OK, that’s leadership. Now, they also talked about women, too, because it’s actually a puzzle as to why encephalization, so encephalization, meaning the evolution of our very large brains. It didn’t have to happen to both men and women. Right. We see sexual dimorphism all across nature. If it was only selection for leadership in men, we would have seen sexually dimorphic brains, but we don’t we don’t really see that. There’s a little bit, but men and women are basically the same IQ. So and they say that women were fundamentally selected for their ability to discover and facilitate non-zero sum games among their children. Yeah. In context of motherhood. And, you know, I think there’s something really interesting going on there. And the agent arena relationship. So by the way, what that means is that I think you could reasonably say that women were for selected for their skill at cultivating agape, something like that, and that men were selected, let’s say, primarily for their ability to enact and embody the logos. And I think that there is now obviously there’s overlap there. You don’t want to. It’s not a clear difference, but it’s on average. But anyway, so. Oh, and so the agent arena relationship, I mean, I’m going to make the case that this has been represented mythologically in masculine and feminine terms. So the mythological hero figure is almost always male, but nature is almost always represented as feminine and the earth. Right. And the world that we occupy is oftentimes it’s a container. Right. And, you know, Jung would make the case, Jung always make the case that a container is a fundamentally feminine symbol. Right. But anyways, I think you can make this case that mother nature is the arena we occupy. It’s always been represented as feminine and also the word matter. Right. The word matter is from the same mother. Right. And that’s we live in the material world. Right. And we are. And so I think that you see this masculine, feminine agent arena relationship play out and throughout mythological narratives. And so, you know, we can connect ourselves. We can at least see that connection. And I think, again, I think it’s important to see the connections between what we’re doing now and what our ancestors were doing. Right. And so yeah, I’m curious what you think about that. Well, unfortunately, Brett, I have to go because I have another meeting I’m already one minute late for. But this has been fascinating. I think that’s really important. And I’d like to talk about it more. So I’m going to invite you right now. Let’s do another one of these maybe in a few weeks. I’m going to release this one probably today or tomorrow. And let’s pick up on we can concentrate more on myth in the second discussion we have. And then we can do that more at length. How does that sound? That sounds great to me, John. So thank you so very, very much, Brett. It’s just been amazing. Thank you. Great. Thank you, John. See you. Take good care. Bye bye.