https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=xJrhJqqc5ZE
Welcome to Voices with Bravachy. I’m joined with Daniel Gregg. He’s one of my former students and a current colleague. We are working on a book together and he is Daniel is here to talk to us today about some work he’s doing on in terms of an artist collective and an alternative reality. And although that sounds a little bit off topic, it’s actually a century centrally on topic because Daniel’s main goal in all of this is to create a, you know, a widely shareable way in which people can bridge between science and spirituality, which of course is the main purview of Voices with Bravachy. So welcome Daniel. Hi, yeah, thanks for having me. I’m really excited to talk about this. I’ve had a lot of intellectual developments since I just recently graduated. I’ve had a bit of a return to the artist identity that I kind of turned away from when I was doing my undergrad. I really bought deeply into this sort of academic and scientific side of things. I was like, I’m going to buckle down and be a researcher and all of that. But a few existential transformations later, and I’m like, wait, you know, maybe there are more fun and playful ways to accomplish the same kinds of things. And along with that, I think this sort of more playful mode of engagement with reality is perhaps what we need and something that the scientific mode on its own simply can’t give us because of the very conservative standards of judgment and decision making that are inherent to the scientific process. So I take it, I mean, and, you know, obviously, you and I are working together, but I take it that this, what you want to talk about would be a significant instance of what I’ve been talking about when I talk about serious play. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Serious play. I think that’s like a really great way. That’s always stood out to me as like a really good way to talk about like what’s going on with a religious community, right? There’s this kind of reality, this mystical spiritual reality that is concentrated in the temple or in the church. And, you know, in Heideggerian terms, the purpose of the temple is to open up a world predicated upon these more spiritualistic modes of experience. And along line with the book that we’re writing, that spiritual dimension of experiences is critical for actually enabling an authentic dialogue with not only other people, but with reality. And we can judge the efficacy of that dialogue, not in terms of the propositions that we generate about it, but in how well we can relate to others, how well we can relate to the natural world, and how sustainable that relation is over a long period of time. So the touchstone is something more like wisdom, broadly construed, rather than the acquisition of sort of theoretical knowledge. Yes, definitely. And along with the wisdom stuff, something that I’m really trying to add in this book is the importance of the idea of divine wisdom, which kind of got like thrown out, which I think is kind of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, we got rid of the God thing. And then we also thought, oh, this whole systems involving wisdom, we can probably throw that out too. And I think that’s really missing from the psychological research into wisdom, right? Because if you look at just the individual character traits and personality traits, things like openness to experience, or, you know, Grossman talks about emotional complexity being really important in making decisions wisely, those kinds of things, they don’t really distinguish the sage from somebody who is perhaps a little bit more nefarious, but has like really good social skills, for example. Right, right, right. Yeah, so I think this notion of divine wisdom is really important. And the notion traditionally has been that there is some kind of creative force emanating into our reality, starting in God flowing through the angels and then entering into the hearts of the community. In Christianity, that’s often been through the hierarchy of the church, it concentrates the creative force of God through that hierarchical structure and brings everybody into this sort of systems involving world involving form of wisdom. So that brings in something and you know, it’s relevant to the book we’re writing. And it’s been sort of my concern with, I mean, I was involved with Igor Grossman in the wisdom consensus paper, and I’m proud of that work. I think there’s an excellent work that was done there. But I do think that, yeah, this notion of self transcendence, and it’s a tendon notion, because I think they belong together, of, you know, communitize with others. It’s not those are not yet finding a proper home within the current scientific discussion of wisdom. Yeah, I definitely agree. And in order to get that, you do have to have a picture of like what the wise community looks like. Right. And, you know, for that, I really like the theory of Iamblichus. Iamblichus is like the most righteous of all Neoplatonists. He’s like a really down to earth guy. I definitely agree with you. Well, that’s what you mean by righteous. You have to remember, Daniel, I’m older than you. So righteous carries a different meaning for me. Right. I mean, he’s like super cool, and he’s on to some good stuff. Right. Okay. Go ahead. So let me, let me just like flash out these projects that I want to talk about. Because what I really want to get out of this interaction is twofold. So on one side, I want to broadcast these ideas to people because I need to start recruiting people to be doing a lot of work that I simply can’t do on my own. I need to establish the kind of wise community that I’m seeking to implement. And secondly, I think, you know, it’s been a long time since we’ve had a conversation. And I think that you’ll have some really good input for how to effectively implement this. So I also want to get a little bit more insight into how to effectively carry this out from you as well. That’d be great. I mean, I consider myself a dedicated novice to this project of community building. I’ve been engaging in it for a couple, I guess, close to a year and a half now, outside of university. And of course, I’ve been engaging in it within the university, the Cogsci community for a couple of decades. But that was a very special kind of community, an academic community. This broader kind of community that you and I are talking about has, of course, unique and different features that make it especially challenging. So yeah, I’m happy to discuss that. But let’s discuss the first thing. Let’s discuss these projects and how they involve serious play, the cultivation of wisdom, the affording of self-transcendence, and communitas. So let’s start explaining them and how they fulfill these functions and why they might contribute to human flourishing in some fashion. Sure. So I’ll start with the art collective side of it. I think that’s important for grounding it. I just have some working titles right now, but I think the working titles will give you a bit of insight into where I’m going with this. So what I want to call it right now is Harmonia, and then subtitle, An Inactive Vision Collective. Oh, that’s nice. So Harmonia is based on the idea in the ancient world and in the Renaissance of the harmony of the spheres. So it was generally well understood that music was a product of motion. The vibration of strings would move the air and then that movement would initiate a musical experience upon the meeting of that movement in our sensory apparatus. Now, the ancient thinkers also looked up at the stars and saw that they were in constant motion. And they reasoned that if motion was the source of music, and if the heavens were in motion, then there would also be some kind of heavenly divine music, which had a state of harmony, a state of divine harmony. Everything’s working in order, right? Harmony is when things are complementary. They work with each other in cohesion to create a state of beauty and a state of harmony. And if you look at the function of the mystical experience, according to like, Latinus and Iamblichus and these other Neoplatonists, what is happening is a harmonization of the soul. All of the parts of the soul are coming to operate in a harmonious unity. And as a part of that harmonious unity, you get the powers of agency, and you also get the power of God’s divine providence. You get to participate in the creative force of God. So that’s something that I think is really important, I think it’s, you could say something more of a metaphorical lens. But I think that that metaphor enables a really profound relationship with reality. If you understand the universe as music and harmony compared to mechanism and logic, you get very different relationships out of reality. So part of this art collective, and the projects that I’m going to be running with it are meant to educate people into a universe which is predicated on the metaphors of music, harmony, and the living being compared to the more recent worldview in which we’ve been situated in the one dominated by technology and logic and formal systems, all of those kinds of things. So the inactive vision part of it, refers of course to inactive cognitive science, the idea that an organism has the kind of conscious experience that it does, because of how it learns to negotiate its embodied relationships with the world, by acting in the world, it carves out its conscious experience. And so I think that we’ve also been missing out on an important kind of knowledge, right? This kind of participatory knowledge that you like to talk about so much. And so the inactive vision, I think is something like this participatory kind of knowledge that being in a transformative space with art and play and metaphor, it will enable people not to necessarily grasp propositions, but to experience the embodied vision of what it’s like to inhabit a particular kind of world in order to take that world out into the world beyond, which is exactly how you’ve described religious practices in the past. Right. So this sounds like, and that would make sense to me, it sounds like this is making use of the arguments I’ve sort of drawn from LA Paul and Agnes Callard about the aspirational project, the kind of knowing that involves a transformation of your existential modes, a transformation of your participatory knowing. So it’s not that you come to possess or have new propositions, you come to be a different kind of agent in a different kind of arena. Is that a fair way of putting it? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Radical arena transformation is precisely the kind of thing I’m going for. So it would be also therefore radical agency transformation too, wouldn’t it? Yes, yes. Yeah. Okay. And so that would also be, so I mean, this sounds like a way of really doing a couple of things, deepening the sense of being mode and the developmental aspiration therein, but it also affords people playing in this alternative reality, if I’ll put it that way, or augmented. I sometimes call it the trans world, where I’m using a tokens notion of fantasy, not as an escapist other world, but as a different way of returning and seeing this world or something like that. But the idea of serious play is that it allows you to get a participatory and perspectival taste of that other world without having gone over into a full blown sort of abandonment of everything that you have here. Is that the idea? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I’ll clarify exactly the project that is going to carry this out in a moment, but I also wanted to mention this thing about the transformative experience paradox, right? Which I’m sure people who listen to this are very familiar with the problem that, wow, how do I become that other person that I am not? Because my preferences are not even those person’s preferences. I don’t even know how to relate to that future character. Right, exactly. So that problem has been solved in the past by having a community of people who are sustaining a vision of life that you can then bind yourself to. Yes. Right, the Buddhist community, the Christian community, those are places that you can go to find the answer to who that you you should become actually is and what that looks like. So within our culture, we actually, I think, need to have some kind of space, some kind of situational arena that solves the problem of the transformative experience paradox for people. We have to have that answer available so that when people experience deep dissatisfaction and they feel that call to go on what might be called the enlightenment journey by diving into transformative states of consciousness, trying to become wise, trying to become satisfied, to overcome suffering. That’s an impossible task or at least a near impossible task to do on your own. And the Theravada Buddhists, they would claim, for example, that the only true Buddha is the one who initiates this kind of novel practice, this kind of novel way of life, which is a really tall order to expect of anybody. I think it is like a wise thing to say, well, we have people who can set this vision for life and then we have a community of practice who binds themselves to this vision. It’s like a distributed computation solution to the transformative experience problem. So I mean, one answer that I sometimes get when I talk about this with people is they say, well, we already have sort of a socially acceptable way in which people go and experience this kind of serious play to engage in this kind of transformation. It’s called therapy and people go and see therapists and how they undergo. So are you just proposing, I know you’re not, so this is a bit of a softball question, but it’s an invitation question. You’re not just proposing some kind of art therapy. You’re proposing something greater than that, right? Something far greater than that because therapy is highly individualistic and all that it can do is bind you to the way that things are now. But the way that things are now are instrumental in everybody’s suffering. The quote that’s always stuck with me from like my early days as a psychedelic enthusiast is the quote by Krishnamurti, which goes, it’s no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. And I think therapy is great and I think that psychedelic therapy is also an amazing and wonderful thing, but we have to look at transformative experience and the project of wisdom aspiration in a way that I think parallels how we can talk about drug policy, for example. There’s a number of different strategies you can have. You can have a harm reduction strategy, for example, which seeks to simply remove the harms from drug use. Or you can have a benefit maximization strategy, which recognizes that things like psychedelics or other substances are radically profound and powerful and then looks to integrate those kinds of things into our culture in a way that maximizes the benefits safely and rationally. And so I think that thing kind of goes also just for transformations of self and transformations of consciousness in general. And I very much see one-on-one therapy as something that is just incapable of maximizing the benefits of transformative experience compared to something that is more culturally relevant and culturally active, which is why I think that an art collective is necessary because we need to start informing the narrative structures at play in our reality if we are to engage in the sort of broad world transformation that will just produce happier people by result of being a better world. Okay, that was very well said, Daniel. That was very well said. You’re being quite eloquent today, which is very enjoyable. Thank you. Writing this book has been helping that clarity a lot. Well, I’m glad. I’m glad to hear that. So I should mention for those of you who are interested in the book, Daniel and I have done a previous video where we talk about the book. And so if you want to go and check that out, I’ll put a link in this video to that previous video. So we won’t just keep alluding to this book and you have no idea of what we’re talking about. But now let’s turn to the more specific proposals that you have. So please. Okay, so here’s what I think the religion that’s not a religion requires. I think this is a necessary element. So for a while I had been trying to plan this project, trying to conceive of it. And I’d been thinking in very serious terms. We have to have a building and it has to have meditation teachers and we have to teach people philosophy and all of this stuff. But then I was talking to someone, I know you’ve been on their podcast, Tim from Voice Club. Oh, Tim Adolin. Yeah. I was having a conversation with him and he was questioning me about, well, is this kind of thing very viable if we need social distancing measures? And just that was enough to click in my head. I was like, holy crap, I could make this a game. I could make an online run alternate reality game that has occasional in-person activities, but it has resiliency against perhaps a second wave of COVID or some other future issue that might emerge however long down the road to run this as kind of a decentralized platform. And so as I got thinking about how I could run that, I came up with the idea for The Great Awakening. And so The Great Awakening is the name of this game. I think it’s very culturally apropos because that’s the hashtag that you see always on this QAnon narrative stuff, right? It’s very interesting and intricate kind of psycho-spiritual warfare that people are engaged with, the deep state against everybody else. It’s a bizarre thing. We can start talking about it, but I think that the way that people make meaning is already, as you say, it’s like an agent arena relationship thing going on. I think that we can articulate consciousness in general as a process of augmented reality game generation. And then if we did something like that, we’d probably all be a little bit better off because we’re all just playing games at the end of the day. How seriously we take those games depends on the parameters of the game. And the games that we make sense of determine our action. They determine our relationship to the world. So in the question of what is the best game that we can play, I thought that we probably need to really clearly get some alternative game out there that can interface with people’s meaning-making powers and to draw them out of this descent into self-deception and foolishness and bind them to a cultural hyper-object that is in their better interest. Can I ask a question? This game is not meant to exclude people undertaking the task of training skills of mindfulness or rationality or anything like that. What you said might have been taken to convey that. No, actually that stuff is a part of it. So let me lay out what it’s going to look like. So basically it’s a live-action role play secret society simulator, a LARPS. And so what happens is you, actually let me start with the sort of cosmic narrative in which it’s situated. So there’s a god, his name is And Then. He is the god of stories and time. Because his name is a play on the structure of stories and then and then and then and then. And so this is one of the primordial old gods. So if we think back to like H.P. Lovecraft’s cosmos, he has like the outer ones who are like massive forces of chaos and incomprehensible cosmic power. And Then is one of those. But because it’s so fundamental to change into time and then permeates everything. And so he’s a force that can become personal and can address us as an individual. And especially because human beings, we have such a profound capacity for storytelling and for story generation. And Then is particularly close with us because we kind of maximize that latent power for creation within the And Then structure of reality. So And Then is very deeply concerned about the narrative structures that are at play in our reality. And building on Federico Campanhas’ Technic and Magic, I’m calling the deity that governs the current narrative structure is Technic. Right. So Technic, he likes production and he likes capital accumulation. He tries to reduce everything into a productive analytical series. Formal systems are the only things that are allowed to exist in that kind of reality system. And the necessary end of that is our annihilation. The incorporation of everything into this flat ontology of serial production. And Then is concerned because he doesn’t want us to die. He’s very fond of us because we can give him greater and more interesting things to do. And so what he does is he sets up a secret society called the Academy for Existential Excellence. And his task is to incorporate people into a new way of being, a new kind of narrative structure that can then replace and topple the old one governed by Technic, which is leading to our demise. And so as a part of the existential, the Academy for Existential Excellence, it’ll be about a three month journey. And in the first month, you’re doing mostly coursework and wisdom based practices. So, you know, meditation, we could do courses in logic. I’m getting Alex Jedavik, who just finished his PhD, to do a course on natural agency and the metaphor of the living being. Right, right. As like a better way to understand evolution and agency. So there’ll be some good rigorous cog size stuff in there, but it’ll all be embedded within this playful narrative, which will also have some kind of semi-fictional content that’ll be entertaining and educate you into the history and the story of this particular narrative. Right. And after that first month and a half, though, things start to get weird because the alternate reality that M. Then is trying to get us to move towards is starting to phase into our reality. The members of the Academy are called Synthesis. I really like synthesizers as a metaphor for consciousness. The synthesizer is like your basic dynamical system. It has like a space of all possible sound. And then with different oscillators and effects, you like change it so that it has a different kind of outcome. Right. So I think that the individual consciousness is kind of like a synthesizer in that respect. We can like apply these warps and oscillations to it to like change the output. And so you learn the skills of synthesis, which is basically a skill of like magic and channeling. And the point of this educational system is to have a whole set of minds synthesizing new beings and new cultural entities into reality. And so as a part of that, once enough power has been built up by people doing these practices and congregating and maybe performing some ritualistic acts, et cetera, then it gets interesting because that alternate timeline that we’re trying to coordinate ourselves with starts phasing into reality. So there’s a number of immersive theater shows, which will allow people to go and visit and participate in this alternate reality that we could have been living in now if only we had done things differently a few hundred years ago. But that we can match ourselves up with down the road if only we engage in this process of synthesis effectively. And at the end, there will be this grand ritual initiation. I have an art collective called Kamatika. They’re from the UK. They’re also networked with the Imperial College people researching psychedelics to build transformative profoundly altering ritualistic performance experiences. So I’ve been talking to them about having some kind of grand initiation at the end, which will then make you sort of a permanent member of this community of the academy. That’s cool. So it sounds like something like the Eleusian mysteries at the end that they add in the Hellenic culture. Yeah, it’s very, very mystery school vibe. There’s a number of secrets that have to be initiated in lots of symbols that’ll be primed throughout the experience that will take a central role in that final ritual culmination. So what can, there’s lots of practical questions, but maybe a more high level question first. What connection is there between the game and what you’re calling the art collective? Like, what’s the relationship there? So the art collective is the thing that is going to implement and build the game. I see. I see. It’s also going to be something that I take at home’s the final stage of the initiation sort of practice that is that is that like they’re going to help create that space in which that occurs? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I need to establish an art collective because I need a number of people with like skills. I need people for doing like set design and stage design. I need people to help me produce video content for the online courses and all of this. So the collective will be the community of people that are responsible for constructing and building and then carrying out the game. You’re also, I guess, going to need people who are good at programming and video game production and things like that as well. Well, there’s not going to be really much on the, you know, it’s an alternate reality game, but that doesn’t mean that there’s like virtual reality stuff necessarily. It’ll be kind of like a live action role play. So, yeah, right, right, right. Okay. So most of it is taking place in sort of the imaginal space. A lot of it. Yeah. And then there’ll be, there’s like an online platform called Mighty Networks that I want to run it off. It allows you to have a social network that also allows you to run courses off of. So that’s the online platform that I want to use. And then it’ll be, you know, you go on Coursera, you find online courses. It’ll look very similar to that, but it’ll all be sort of networked in with this larger narrative structure. Right. And so the goal is that people will come out of this in something analogous to having belonged to a church or to a temple or something like that, or a mosque for an extended period of time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That’s cool. And who’s going to like moderate it? Because I can also imagine that this kind of game will attract attention from bad faith players who don’t want it to succeed for various reasons, right? That is possible. There’s a lot of logistical things that I need to work out, and that is for sure. Right now I’m very much in the phase of like idea generation and story generations. I’ve been focusing mostly on world building. Right. For moderation, the particular theater shows that I’ve come up with, which I don’t want to share because, you know, spoilers would kind of ruin the effect of the game. Right. I have ways of incorporating people who are like part of the game as sort of in-situation moderators to kind of control moments like that. Right. So like I said, so this is very much the live action, the larping, right? So are you after something like what happens in deep form? Are you after the bleed phenomena where the line between the play environment and the everyday world bleeds, and you start to get a transformative relationship between them? Is that, is bleed sort of the goal that is being sought? Yes, absolutely. While it is situated in a playful context, I do think that the metaphor of life and music are much better ways for modeling reality, especially if we’re looking at how we develop the right kinds of participatory relationships with reality. So I think that, you know, not only are they, is this the optimal framework in terms of it promoting the best kind of relationship, I also think that it’s like a lot more true than a strictly mechanistic view. And so you can look at like, for example, the work of Dennis Walsh and Lee Smolin, Roberto Unger. There’s numerous people coming out now trying to resurrect this idea that the cosmos is something more like an organism in how it evolves and changes, and how the process of creation carries out. So yeah, it’s playful, but it’s also like, I think that this kind of reality is like literally true, at least those fundamental propositions that it’s grounded upon. So it’s kind of a Whiteheadian version of Neo-Platonism then. I think you’ll have to elaborate that reference for me. So, you know, Whitehead basically tried to bring back, you know, an organic model, organic metaphysics, but in a way that was very Neo-Platonic, but he tried to do it in a way that would ultimately be consonant with two projects. One was what he called religion in the making, the title of one of his books, and the other project was getting at, get, and these two projects are supposed to be linked, getting us into a metaphysics that is also, it’s just a better way of interpreting and understanding our science, but interpreting and understanding it in a way that is consonant with the religion in the making. That’s very much his project. Yeah, yeah, that sounds just about right. That’s interesting. I’ve been putting off reading Whitehead for a while. Maybe that’s been a mistake. I wouldn’t, do not start with Process and Reality, which is one of the hardest books to read. You might want the book that might be, the two books that would be relevant to your project might be, I think, Science and Education, maybe, or at least a really good book would probably be Religion in the Making. Oh yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. Excellent. I’ve also come across a recent thing sent by my friend Simon Cook. There was this guy in like the early 20th century who was a part of the sort of socialist movements in Russia. He was one of the ones who got sort of, you know, ex-communicated and not taken seriously, but he had this project called God Building, and I was like amazed. It seemed like very much similar to like what you’re trying to do, what I’m trying to do, and the idea was to like look at how religion was positive and to construct a religion that would best meet the needs of a society that could meet everybody’s needs. Who is this theorist? His name is Luna Charsky. I’d like to know more about it, and so I’ll thank Simon for passing that on, but yeah, if you could send me some links about it or anything Simon sent you on it, I would appreciate that. Yeah, there’s one good paper. There’s unfortunately not a lot of his books still left out because he was kind of like forgotten about. I think maybe he was a bit too kind to religion for the Soviets to really latch onto, so there’s one paper and he’s like, yeah, I just got like the first like really good translation. All of the other copies are like, you know, too brittle to be scanned, and so there’s no actual direct copies of his book that can be read in like an English or other more Central European language, but that paper does a really good job of outlining the core principles, so I’ll send that to you. Please, please. So basically what you’re doing now, you’re giving an explanation and a justification for an appeal to try and get people to start forming the art collective that will generate the game. What’s the name of the game again? The Great Awakening. The Great Awakening, right, which by the way was also the name of several religious revivals, both in England and the United States historically, so it has a precedence that way too. So how can people reach you, get involved, join, what do you want, like what needs to happen next? Well, I’ll leave my email. Also, my website has a contact form that you can contact me from there as well. I’ve got to do some building for like more of an online infrastructure to give and broadcast information about this, but for now email or contacting me through the website is perfect. I mean it strikes me that now is actually a very good time for many people since COVID has shifted schedules around a lot for a lot of people. Yeah, it’s been a blessing and a curse. It’s given me a lot of time to work on a lot of music production, to work on this book, and to also kind of conceive this project. It’s been kind of nice, although I definitely am finding I’m yearning for that more collective kind of experience. Sure, sure. So is there anything else you want to talk about in connection with these two projects? I mean you’ve been very eloquent so far. We can talk about literally anything. Like this project is the culmination of basically all of the research, all the study that I’ve been doing, so I don’t know where do you want to take it? I mean we could talk about mystical experiences, the spiritual dimension of experience. There’d be questions like that. It would be like, but they might be more practical and I’m worried about those questions being premature because of the stage you’re at. So if I ask them, don’t feel that you’re obligated to have an answer right now, right? So you know my questions might be what do you do when people have various mystical experiences? Because people have variation in that. How is that going to be integrated into what’s happening to them? How are you going to help people distinguish between mystical experiences and perhaps psychotic experiences or other kinds of breakdown issues? There’s that concern. I would not want to be involved in creating yet another game that contributes to the virtual exodus from reality. And so what would be the constraints in there that actually… So I mentioned Tolkien. Tolkien has the recovery theory where he distinguishes between good and bad fantasy in terms of recovery. Bad fantasy is escapist, right? Good fantasy is you go there, you go through something like an anthropological experience to become inculturated in that other world so that when you return to this one, you see it in a new way. The point is to recover this world through the augmentation of the fantasy world. And I think that what you’re proposing is of course the second, not the escapist first, because we have lots of escapist games. We have lots of them and they’re proliferating and they’re actually being quite destructive of individual and collective lives. So my concern would be how to structure this so that it doesn’t become escapist and instead how it affords recovery. So the framing of the game just inherently promotes that kind of return to the natural world and this kind of recovery of not only meaning but also of active agent-oriented participation, right? Because the whole premise is that the world around you is kind of messed up for a lot of reasons and we can relate to the way in which it’s messed up by articulating it as this kind of person, technique who has this kind of power and force over the world. And then the school, the academy, is put into direct opposition, collaboration, participation with that reality. So the whole point of the game is to grapple with things that are happening in the here and now. Right, excellent. So that will be a strong thematic thing throughout all of the game. So that people can… Yeah. And what I really want to do is I want to be able to facilitate perspectival shifts so that even when somebody’s not actively in a game scenario just out in the world, they can see an advertisement or see a business or they’re searching on Amazon one day and maybe they’re like, oh my God, I can really see how this is sort of bound to this entity, technique. I want to be able to shift these kinds of, promote these kinds of shifts in perspective in the everyday world. Excellent. So how would you also keep it symbolic and metaphoric so people don’t generate just yet another wacky conspiracy theory out of all of this? Yeah. So I mean, the conspiratorial aspect is kind of great. It’s a little bit tongue in cheek, because you’re participating in a secret society. And right now in the cultural mind, there’s a lot of talk about secret societies and how they’re manipulating reality. There’s this narrative where Obama created the coronavirus as part of a democratic communist takeover. None of this really makes any good rational sense. I mean, sure, maybe there are some nefarious things happening with the coronavirus, but like, I don’t know, the whole narrative where it’s webbed into this thing where America is the prime actor in all global affairs. And so therefore we need to vote for Donald Trump. That seems a little bit like the wrong kind of way to go. So what I really want this game to do is to be able to capture and interface with these tendencies that people have towards conspiratorial thinking to allow for a more healthy avenue and arena for expression. So you’re trying to trigger that machinery, but exact it for the training of wisdom, basically. Yeah. Yeah. Like there’s a need that’s being unmet in people, which is promoting them making meaning according to these maladaptive schemas, right? Because I would say that the embodied relationship of voting for somebody who is an incoherent and possibly fascist mess, that’s not a great relationship to take to reality. And those beliefs are promoting that relationship to reality. They’re promoting that action. And if you look at how global affairs have been in the last like 50 years, we have been far removed from a world that is built on truth. Everything is show. Everything is theater, right? This is an explicit part of the conservative ethos. I remember back when there was another wave of this worry about sort of fascism, especially in the United States, there was a lot of talk about the post truth world and how what people perceive is a lot more important than what actually is the case. So a lot of political actors and a lot of new sources will attempt to broadcast information warped into this kind of narrative that promotes an action in their favor, as opposed to actually broadcasting and demonstrating truth. This has also been very common in Russia. I was watching a documentary with my roommates just the other day, and I learned that one of Putin’s right hand guys is he comes from absurdist theater. And so he has made the political arena an absurdist theater act, trying to constantly destabilize people’s perceptions. And to do that, he stages protests, he uses like secret service money in Russia to fund entire opposition parties, different human rights movements that harass the president and everything. And then after a while, he came out and was like, yes, this is what I’m doing. I’ve basically just been paying everybody to have these political conflicts. And now nobody knows what the hell to do, right? And so they don’t know what to do because they don’t know what’s real. They don’t know what to act on. They don’t know what propositions, what beliefs to use as a way to inform their relationship to reality. And so that just allows the powers that be to push their agendas and to have minimal opposition in that fact. And while it’s very clear to see that happening in Russia, I think it’s also very clear to see that happening in the United States, which of course influences how we do things in Canada. Right, right. And so the idea again is kind of the way a parable looks like it’s making use of narrative, but then undermines it from within that narrative habit. And so what you’re trying to do is sort of trigger a lot of these habits, but undermine them within so you get, well, a great awakening. So people start to awaken towards an orientation towards one of the sort of central features argued for wisdom by Socrates, which is to recouple what you find salient to your seeking of what is true and most real. Yeah, absolutely. And I’m glad that you brought up Socrates here because I’ve been thinking in terms of, so in the book that we’re writing, one of the things that’s really important is the distinction between different theories of knowledge. Right. So we have the correspondence theory and the conformity theory. Right, right. So I think that both of those are true. I think that the conformity theory is the foundation for knowledge. The embodied relationship that an organism takes to its environment, which promotes its continued existence, that is the organism knowing its environment by conforming to it. Yes, exactly. Participatory knowing. Yeah, yeah. And so like most of the kinds of knowing that we have are like that. I think participatory, perspectival, and even procedural knowledge are about conformity. Yeah, yeah. Whereas the propositions, that’s a very small slice of knowledge. It’s like the after effect of just like this massive neural output. That’s when you finally get propositions. It’s like the crust on top of how we know reality. Yeah, and that’s where coherence and correspondence come out as more crucial. Yeah, yeah. So in relation to Socrates, I’ve been thinking about his propositions of claiming to not really know anything. And I was thinking, hmm, that makes a lot of sense if you think about that in terms of the embodied relationship. If you act as if you know nothing, I think that you’re much more likely to have a prosocial and adaptive relationship with reality, one that allows you to change your frame in an ongoing way to pick up on the nuance of the present moment. If you’re too dogmatic about a proposition, that acts as a kind of Bayesian filter, which makes unlikely things that you don’t expect. Right? If you think that this proposition is always true, it’s going to impair how you’re updating your beliefs, because maybe in one context it isn’t. And I think that that’s like actually a pretty good lesson for how to deal with the weird situation that we have now, where there’s a lot of conspiratorial narratives, there’s a lot of genuinely fake news, we don’t really know what to do about it, there’s a lot of propaganda out there. So as opposed to trying to orient ourselves towards knowing deeply what is propositionally true, I think that if we followed that Socratic method and acted as if we don’t really know, but we’re just trying to have the best kind of relationship with reality, knowing what to care about, right? The one thing that Socrates did claim to know. I think that’s a pretty good lesson that could be taken up to mitigate some of the harms of the current narrative chaos that we’re situated in. So the kind of play is not only serious play, it’s Socratically serious play. Right. And you, of course, there is a huge element of playfulness within Socrates’ performance within the dialogues. There’s a lot of play in there. Well, that’s interesting. I like that. That’s a very interesting way of bringing it in. So what’s sort of the, I mean, this is probably, this is definitely a premature question, so I take it that you can answer it very vaguely and schematically. But what’s sort of the timeline you see for this? I would love to be able to run the first rendition of this next spring summer. Right. That’s great. Wow. That’s really cool. Yeah, it’s gonna be a lot of work, which is why I need to like, you know, get it out there that I need help and I need to like build a collective of people to help. Because like, I don’t know, I’ve done a lot of organizing, but I tend to take on way too much work and try to do everything myself. And I was thinking about this project and I was like, there’s no way that I could do anything remotely like that. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I also suffer from that besetting sin as well, that I take away too much. Is there anything else that, I mean, I’m hoping that because you’re on the voices with Reveki, you’ll be invited, you should be invited to the Discord server. And I think there’s like over a thousand people there. There’s a very extensive community, so you get to interact with them and be involved with them. They’ll have a live Q&A with you. So that’s one way of also helping you get it out. I’ll promote this video, of course, on my platform. Is there anything else I could do to help? I feel like we could talk about that stuff in the after math of the video. I’m really interested in talking about some of the more specifics theoretically. I’d like to have people have a good thorough understanding of like where I’m coming from, what I’m trying to achieve. We can also bring in some of the stuff about the book as well, because that’s basically the foundational document that’s really helping me orient my implementation of this project. Well, there’s a way I can bring the practical and the theoretical together then on the question, do you think it’d be possible to coordinate the release of The Great Awakening with the book? Because they would probably therefore mutually afford each other. Yeah, that’s possible. Let me think about that. Hmm. My intuition right now is that I think just because we’ve already done like a crowdfunding campaign for it and we have a bunch of people waiting for it, that it might be good to get that out there as soon as possible. And then I think that also just having the book available to be read and then telling people that there’s like a game that you can like play to learn more and to have some more education in these concepts. I think that might be a good way to go about it. And the reverse, once people start taking up the game, you can point them to the existing book. Yeah, what I’ve been wanting to do is to build an online course about the book, because it’s a little bit dense. But I was thinking that I could just have that course be a part of that game. Oh, that’s cool. That’s cool. So this game will take a long time to play, you said about three months. Yeah, at least that. Yeah. How much per day would people be committing time? That’s a good question. I’m thinking of something along the lines of like a part-time university course load. So maybe like 10 to 15 hours a week, something like that. So it’s, you got to really set the time aside. But the more you give, the more you get out of it. Of course, like any good game. So now up back to a more theoretical level. Tonight on Peter Lindbergh’s Dastoa, I’m going to be talking with James Carrs, who wrote the Religious Case Against Belief, but more relevant right now. He wrote a book that I’m reading called Finite and Infinite Games. And he distinguishes between trying to play a finite game and trying to play an infinite game. The goal of the finite game is to end the game so nobody can play it anymore by having somebody declared and entitled as the winner. Whereas the point of the infinite game is to figure out how to constantly adjust and modify the rules so that the game can continue to be played over and over again. I’m very interested in this distinction because I see debate as a finite game, but I see dialogos as an infinite game and trying to figure out. And therefore the way we do debate should not be the way in which we try to do dialogos. You can incorporate smaller finite games as moves within an infinite game, but they always have to be encompassed within the larger project of maintaining play. And that no one is seeking to be entitled. So obviously the finite game is much more in the telek mode and the infinite game is much more paratelec, etc. So it sounds to me like one of the things you’re trying to do also is to take people who are used to playing finite games, virtual games, and educate them in how to play an infinite game, which is the love of wisdom. Because we never become gods, we are always in the infinite game of trying to become more and more like the gods, to use a Socratic model. Yeah, that sounds exactly like what I’m trying to achieve. Within the neoplatonic framework, theosis is one of the primary goals, becoming godlike. And so that’s very much informing how I’m structuring this game. And it is very much an infinite game because there are certain perennial problems that spirituality is intended to solve, our tendency towards self-deception, tendency towards nihilism, all of those things. And so those things are never going to go away. So you have to have an ongoing game that can consistently interface with these to mitigate these perennial problems perennially. So it sounds like therefore people might play the game multiple times. Yeah, yeah, I want to be able to change it as it goes. So the game that I’m developing right now is very much tailored towards the needs of the current culture. But as the needs of the culture change, then there will be different scenarios that can meet those needs. Excellent, excellent. There’s also like a permanent community that you get initiated into. So once you go through a round of the game, then you sort of graduate, you get like a degree in the game and you’re a part of that community, kind of similar to like a Freemason degree. And then you sort of unlock new capacities. So there’ll be certain member-only events that you can go to. I want to have like a big yearly party where this alternate timeline phases in and you can like hang out with these alien beings for a little bit. This constant festival, this return to this other reality. So it’ll be something that’s ongoing, that is mutable, that changes, that allows ongoing participation to meet the needs of the current time. Perhaps that community will also be a reservoir of distributed cognition for updating and revising the game. Yeah, yeah. What I want to do is I want to have that people who graduate the game, I want that to be the hiring pool. Ah, right, right. That’s cool. That’s very, very cool. Yeah, so if this grows large enough, which I hope it does, I’d like it to be like a very large and comprehensive media production thing as well. And I’d like to have members who have gone through the game be the primary people who get hired to work on projects. And like way down the line, you know, the current narrative apparatus of our current society, you know, the studios of Hollywood and Disney, all of these people that create and sustain our perceptions and determine what archetypal symbolic narratives are activated in us. These institutions are doing these things because they want our capital. And I think we would be foolish to think that the stories aren’t influenced at the end of the day, only by that which will maximize capital. And so I’d like to have a system of media production of, you know, movies, comic books, something like a Marvel universe within this cosmic narrative that can be broadcast out to people. But then there’s the central mystery school that if you want to learn certain core truths within this extended universe, you go and you participate in the game to like really get the full depth that’s being hinted at in all of these narratives that are happening in this alternate timeline. So kind of like neoplatonic Christianity then? Yeah, yeah, it’s very much similar to that sort of sacramental liturgical kind of lifestyle, which you see being reenacted by things like cosplay culture and the Marvel universe. Like people desperately want to live in these kinds of immersive universes. Yes, very much. Right. That’s very good. That’s very good. I’m wondering if there’s a connection between playing finite games and seeking escape and playing infinite games and seeking recovery. That’s something that’s worth sort of reflecting on and trying to draw out. What comes to mind first when I think of that is something like Call of Duty or Modern Warfare, which is a finite game that you can infinitely play. It’s something that is simple enough that you can have your attention be yoked to it for, you know, hours, days, years. But it does have this winner-loser structure, so it’s very much a finite game. You could put it down and leave afterwards, but very often people attempt to infinitely replicate their experience with this game. I think League of Legends is one of those games that’s like notorious for this, for sucking people’s attention in. Right, right, right, right, right. So I think maybe there could be like a modal confusion thing happening where the attempt to escape to the finite game infinitely is more a symptom of this mass exodus. Yeah, yeah, that’s well put. I like that. I like that as a way of responding to my question. I think that’s very good. I like that. So what about people who have established religious traditions? Do you think they’d want to play this game? I hope so. You know, as you do as well, I try to be as respectful as possible to all kinds of religious philosophies. And you know, sometimes that goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. Well, let me tell you, there’s a little bit more behind my question. I am influenced by verse Lewis’s argument that neo-Platonism is sort of the grammar of the spirituality of the West, you know, of the mystical traditions within Christianity, within Islam, within Judaism. And the degree to which I think you’re trying to plug into that grammar might afford people from different faiths being able to participate in the game cooperatively and even commune together through it. Yeah, I think that’s about right. I mean, neo-Platonism, I agree with that thesis, and I’m definitely deeply influenced by that myself. And it’s what I’m trying to implement here. So I think that shared cognitive grammar will be something that people can readily attach to. I also think the fact that I’m trying to reinitiate people into a world based on the ideas of life and music also is helpful in that project, because that is the world in which these older traditions are situated. That’s much more amenable to a Christian world than is this mechanistic world. When we tried to fit God into that world, he died. Yes. So would part of the course is also be the more philosophically challenging project of taking. So, I mean, this is analogous to the argument I’ve made about sacred technologies. You adopt them for certain reasons, and then they permeate, and then you end up being exacted, your cognition gets exacted, and then your experience changes, and then you come up with a new metaphysics to try and make sense of that change, like the axial revolution or something like that. You’re going to be inducing all this in people, but there’s still the very difficult project, which not everybody has to undertake. I acknowledge that right now. But some people will need to, and some people will want to undertake the project, the philosophical project of, okay, I have this, and then here is this mechanistic worldview that is still wrapped up in science and certain models. The philosophical project of trying to integrate and bridge between them seems like something that some people are going to want to pursue after playing The Great Awakening. That is something that I want to work on as well. So, with these worldviews, I think that we would do well to recognize them as models, as opposed to what reality actually is. I think that this search to need to know certainly what the stuff of being is, is kind of a confused search. We are, I think, always kind of at a remove from phenomena. We are always translating being into something that makes sense to us, and by doing that, we are abstracting it. So, it’s not that the cosmos is literally like an organism, or that the cosmos is literally like the machine, but we can utilize different ways of relating to reality and understanding it to articulate it in those terms, and then to act on it according to what those terms motivate us to do. So, what I really like is this object-oriented ontology framework, which is also built into this sort of Heideggerian view of nature and the relationship to nature. So, within object-oriented ontology, it articulates all objects as similar to the medieval view of these inherent substances that are kind of beyond phenomena. There’s this little kernel of ineffability in everything. There’s always going to be something that we can’t grasp. And so, what we’re tasked with doing is establishing a relationship with that which we simply cannot know literally. And so, we have options. We have the model of life, or we have the model of mechanism. And these actually map fairly well onto right and left hemispheric processing. So, if you look at the work of Ian McGillchrist, master in his emissary, he goes on at length to talk about how the implicit intuitive, effective processes that are more common to the right hemisphere promote a relationship to reality, which is more like a relationship between a lived being and another lived being. And then, with the left side, which has all of your language articulation functions, that is much more heavily involved in tool use and tool manipulation. So, these two modes of life and lived relationship versus manipulation and mechanism map onto very basic neurocognitive parameters that we’re never really going to get out of. So, reality is always going to be something in between these two modes. And we have to be able to learn to oscillate between them flexibly and to learn when one provides the optimal relationship in this situation and when the other one does. And so, educating people in the fact that how we understand reality is always about the participatory relationship with it and that these explicit modes are tools that we can employ, I think that that will do wonders to facilitate this integration of these modes. And in line with McGillchrist, I do think that it’s correct to say that because of the sorts of things that are being processed by these right hemispheric areas, that that should be the master and the other should be the emissary. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You probably know that some of the viewers will know I had a really wonderful conversation with Ian on rebel wisdom. I hope to have another one in the future. Yeah, I think that’s very well said. And I sort of, I think of wisdom as what you’re talking about. One of the things wisdom should function to do is optimize the relationship between the left and right hemispheric ways of constituting the agent arena relationship. Mm-hmm. And that’s why I think insight is such an important phenomena because insight is a moment of reconfiguration where you get at least a momentary optimization between the right and the left hemispheres. And that’s why I think insight is such a central feature of wisdom. So, the game should be very insight-provoking, I hope. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Insight-provoking and also giving people the explicit tools to make sense of the insights that are being evoked. Exactly, exactly. Always. You need both. Okay, well, that’s about our time. Is there anything you’d like to say something? I think, Daniel, you were extremely like just bang on today. It was very eloquent, very rich, very flowing, and highly enjoyable. But I’d like to give you sort of the last word. Yeah, let me see. Geez, I feel like I can tell that I was very flowy today because like it feels like it’s been like 10 minutes, you know? Let me see. Oh, God, what do I have? What’s the last thing that I want to leave people with? Hmm. Oh, yeah, I’m kind of at an impasse. What’s coming to me right now is this quote. I’ve been reading a book on Krishna, so I think I might just want to like read this quote and then expand on it for like a minute. Okay. It has to do with the importance of play. And one thing that I didn’t know is that the story of Krishna is called the divine play. And the metaphor of game and theater is saturated throughout the story. Oh. Yeah, so it’s really interesting. So, he’s born at a time of maximal wickedness. And his role is to introduce like playfulness into reality. And that playfulness is what helps to alleviate the wickedness of men, to overthrow the demon king. So, it’s really interesting because usually you have these kinds of like cosmic God narratives, and it’s like very serious, right? Even like the Christ story. Krishna and Christ have a lot in common. But, you know, Christ goes through this drama where he’s like murdered and it’s very dramatic. But for Krishna, he like, you know, steals butter and he plays music and he’s like a playful little kid. Right, right, right. Let me just, where is it here? Oh, yes. So, this is, I think, a prayer to Krishna. Hail to the divine child who has taken on a form for sport. Seeing his playful exploits, even the minds of the serious will be swayed. May that playful form lead me to the end of the game of life. And I’ve noticed that for people that I know who have become deeply involved in spiritual experiences, utilizing psychedelic medicines and so on, it’s really interesting how frequently people come to the insight that life is like a game. But I think, you know, some people will claim life is literally a game. My soul chose to be incarnated in this arena for particular game purposes. But I think that if we understand that as an embodied participatory relationship, it is genuinely the case that life is better live if it’s understood as a game. Right, right. And this seriousness, you know, clinging to things, clinging to my truth, what I want, what I think needs to happen, those are the kinds of things that promote suffering and promote actions that cause very physical harm and suffering. So, I’m really looking forward to trying to introduce a little bit of playfulness, to embody that Krishna spirit, to sway the minds of the serious with a little bit of play. Because I think that’s what we all really need, especially right now, you know, the world’s been very serious for the whole of 2020. It’s kind of hard. I’m emotionally struggling as a result of it. And I know many people are as well. And I think that a little bit of play in our lives will go a long way to helping us all live better. Well, thank you, Daniel. I take it though, you don’t mean that that play is just frivolous, or the goal is just fun? Oh, no, it is an incarnation of the energy of Vishnu, the sustainer and preserver of life. Okay, that sounds like an excellent place to end it. So, thank you very, very much. It’s been wonderful. Thank you, Daniel. And thank you.