https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sMmzti-dkKQ

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode nine of Transcendent Naturalism. And of course I am here with my ongoing partner in all of these COGSI shows, Greg Enriquez. And I’m here with somebody else that many of you already know. He’s been on this channel and Brett and I have worked together. I’ve been tweeting and posting about his recent work. He’s been doing integrating my work and Jordan Peterson’s work and his work on mythology and the relevance realization of collective intelligence. And so that’s Brett Anderson. So welcome Brett. I’m going to turn things over to Greg and he is just going to set the stage what’s been happening in the past couple of episodes. And then he’ll turn things over to Brett. So welcome, Greg. Hey, great. Great to be here. Super excited about today. Brett and I have not had the chance to have lots of conversations, although his voice is in my head. Because I’ve been going through the intimations of a new worldview and enjoy that tremendously. I’m looking forward to what you’ll be sharing today. Because I think it’s really relevant for the kind of work that we’re doing. So what we are coming off of are two excellent sessions with Brendan Graham Dempsey. He laid out his vision for emergence for the meaning of meaning grounded in a metamodern spiritual worldview. He articulated sort of the evolution of complexification and sort of the religious significance of that meant in the broad term. And really laid out in different language, but enormously similar overlapping structures, sort of the evolution of the integration of levels, how we relate to that, how we create ritual in relationship to this. What kind of ways we might bring together our collective consciousness to afford strong transcendence. And I’m really looking forward to listening to you today. Talk about your angle on this. I just got to say the excitement I experienced when you’re doing bridging from mythology into Jordan Peterson’s maps of meaning work and John’s work as a clinical theoretical psychologist. It brings joy to my heart and it’s lovely to have you here. So welcome, Brett. Thank you, Greg. And thank you, John, for having me. Yeah, so for those for people who aren’t familiar with me, I’m an evolutionary psychology PhD student at the University of New Mexico. My main area of research I do is on the diametric model of autism and psychosis, which is the idea that autism and psychosis are cognitive and genetic opposites. But my work on that got me into relevance realization. And so John and I published this paper last year, integrating some of that work with John’s work on relevance realization. And then I have this I have a substack where I write about topics from from mythology to the meaning crisis, complexity, cognitive science, relevance realization, Jordan Peterson’s work. And then my recent YouTube series is kind of me putting everything that I’ve done up to this point together and to what is hopefully a relatively coherent worldview that’s called intimations of a new worldview. And so, yeah, I’ve listened to the first four parts of the series. I think that your project here is really interesting. And I think the work you’ve laid out is really, really helps to bring things together. What I’d like to do here is just to introduce and of course this is something we’ve talked about before, John, on your podcast. But instead of going through, you know, I’m definitely not going to go through my whole intimations argument. But one thing that I think might be relevant to your project here is just the idea of self-organized criticality and how this idea, just this scientific concept sort of acts as a linchpin for me, at least for me it does. It acts as a kind of linchpin. Where there’s all of these other topics that are related to it, that are scientifically related to it, and it has this strange quality where self-organized criticality emerged as a theory about, it emerged as a theory within physics about the emergence of complexity in nature. But it also has this built in value judgment because within biology it’s understood, or at least the argument has been made, that criticality represents the optimal pattern of behavior for biological systems. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to share my screen here and go through a few slides just trying to show how I think that this idea is related to your concept of transcendent naturalism. So can you guys see my screen fine here? Yeah, excellent. Yeah, that’s good. Okay, so just to make sure that I’ve got this right, so in the first episode when you defined strong transcendence, you said that these are experiences that do not simply indicate psychological improvement, but they have significant epistemological oomph and ontological teeth to them. Yes. And so in order for an experience to be strongly transcendent, it must really be disclosing important aspects of reality, right? It can’t just be subjective, right? It has to connect us in some way to some important aspect of the objective world. And so here I want to go over some ideas that will suggest that the concept of self-organized criticality can help us to understand this. I think it can from a naturalistic or a scientific perspective. So, and I know we’ve, you know, I’m just going to briefly go over some of this history. I know we’ve, you know, is probably preaching to the choir here. So, Herb Bach was this physicist in the late 1980s and 90s trying to solve this problem of complexity. The problem can be stated very simply. The laws of physics, the laws of nature as we understand them can be written down on a single sheet of paper. They’re very simple and deterministic. And given these relatively simple and deterministic laws, why is it that the world we see around us is so interesting and complex? And so he did a lot of work in the 80s and 90s trying to understand this problem. He published this book in 1996 called How Nature Works, The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. And it’s more complicated than this, than this, but just to simplify things a little bit, he basically said that, you know, he reasoned that complexity must emerge at the border between order and chaos. An ordered system is like a crystal. A crystal is not complex because when you know what one part of the system looks like, you know what the whole thing looks like. A gas is not complex for the same reason, but it’s the opposite. It’s uniform throughout and therefore it’s not complex. Complexity must emerge at this narrow window between order and chaos. And the question is, how is it that systems in nature self-organized to that narrow window from the bottom up without any tuning from an outside agent through the interactions of the parts of the system with their environment and self-organized criticality eventually failed as a general theory of complexity in nature, although it’s not, it wasn’t necessarily wrong. It was just incomplete. But it has become very important within certain corners of biology and neuroscience and cognitive science for a variety of reasons. So I’m not going to do the whole, and feel free to interrupt me anytime here, by the way, but I’m not going to do the whole sort of argument going out, you know, laying out the scientific evidence for this, but these are just some propositions that we can extract from this literature, which is that complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos. At that border, there is a general process that occurs and its contours or its outline is the same at every level of analysis. So when you look at the molecular level of analysis, you see the same general process of complexification that you see at organic levels of analysis and that basically looks like competing interactions that create tension within the system that leads to this critical point, to this avalanche event. And then out of the avalanche or after the avalanche event, there can occur an integration, which is a higher level of complexity. And so the argument has been made in the literature that biological systems function optimally at the border between order and chaos, which means that they function optimally when they are participating in that process by which complexity increases. And so that means that self-organized criticality has this strange property, or at least to me, it has a strange property of being a scientific concept with a built-in value judgment because the border between order and chaos is good in some sense, and there’s nothing good about being outside of that border if criticality is correct, right? So if that really does represent the optimal pattern of behavior, then there’s a built-in value judgment with that scientific concept. So I’ll just pause you there for just a second, Brett, just to make a linkage here in relationship to what… Some of what Brendan Graham Dempsey was doing was building bridges of his worldview to that of Baba Yazareen, who really are basically articulated sort of the view of the universe as a learning system. And it learns through basically trial and error, it experiences sort of the edge of uncertainty, it assimilates, it accommodates on that edge. It grows and then it breaks, and then it has to reorganize itself in relation. Brendan didn’t use the model of self-organizing criticality specifically, but the parallels, it’s not even parallels, they’re the same basic process. So I just wanted for folks listening in terms of the consistency, you’re hearing once again another line that’s pointing to a very, very similar entity here or process. Right, so the… Go ahead, John. Yeah, I want to make a link too, and then you can respond to both, Brett. So I think, Brett knows this, I think Greg does too. In 2013, Leo Ferraro and I published a paper on how you could map relevance realization on a self-organizing criticality, and then I did later work about how the insight process is making use of Stefan and Dixon, the insight process of frame breaking and frame making, which are processes of sort of sped up relevance realization can also be understood in terms of self-organizing criticality. So the connection also to relevance realization, insight machinery is also quite tight in a lot of ways. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I think the process that Bobby Azarian is describing, and I believe Brendan Dempsey as well, is the process that occurs at the border between order and chaos, right? That process of complexification that he’s describing in the Romance of Reality is the same as this general process of complexification. So Brett, do you also think, I mean, we made the argument that, you know, the integration maps onto Piagetting assimilation, and the differentiation maps on to accommodation. Do you think that you could understand Piaget’s notion of equilibration also in terms of self-organizing criticality? There’s people talking about that in the literature too, yes. I 100% think that Piaget was picking up on that pattern, yes. He understood it implicitly, of course, he didn’t have the physics. Right, of course, he understood it. And I’m going to talk about that when I get to, so I’m going to go through these five different aspects of worldviews. So Ann Taves, Ann Taves is a psychologist who studies worldviews from an evolutionary perspective, and I think she has some really good work. And she’s argued that these five questions all have to be either implicitly or explicitly addressed by any functional worldview, and that would be ontology, what is real, axiology, what should we be aiming at, what should our highest value be, praxeology, what should we be doing in relation to that, epistemology, how do we know what’s true, and cosmology, where do we come from and where are we going. And I think that self-organized criticality has implications for all of these. And so I’m just going to quickly sort of go through them. And I think that, yeah, I think it’s connected to relevance realization too. So in terms of ontology, Lee Smolin wrote this great book called The Life of the Cosmos back in the mid-90s. And he argued in that book that our newfound understanding of complexity in nature was going to change our ontology about the world, because there is in some sense, there’s some sense in which nothing exists outside of a complex universe, right? The very notion of complexity, an explanation of complexity is an explanation of how anything exists at all in some sense, right? That’s basically the implication of Smolin’s argument. And so given that complexity emerges at the border between order and chaos, there is in some sense, there is some sense in which reality itself just emerges at the border between order and chaos. That process of complexification underlies the emergence of novel phenomenon in nature. And then in terms of axiology, so as I’ve said, multiple authors in the literature have argued that criticality and the process that occurs at criticality represents the optimal pattern of behavior for biological systems. There’s a bunch of different quotes you can pull out of the literature about this. One of these is from John Begg’s recent book on criticality in the cortex, where he just suggests that optimal information transmission occurs at criticality in the brain. There are a variety of reasons for why this is the case, and there’s good evidence. I wouldn’t actually say that the evidence is overwhelming, but at this point, there’s relatively good evidence that movement away from criticality is associated with all sorts of problems like Alzheimer’s disease and so on. That’s interesting. Do you think, because I’ve been teaching this for quite a while, and as you said, it was always respectable, but at the border. Do you get a sense that it’s because I remember reading an article in 2018, I forget, I think it was by Jose Adel, but we’re arguing that there’s a movement towards a consensus around this, that criticality is playing, could give us a general framework for understanding what’s going on in the brain. I mean, my reading of the literature is that that’s the case. Now, of course, I’m not in that world in the neuroscience world, the people literature, but my reading of the literature is that there’s more research being done on this all the time, and the controversies around it are being settled one by one, basically. And so, yes, I think that this is the future in terms of understanding emergent properties of the brain. Criticality provides a very useful framework for understanding emergent properties in the brain, and I think that’ll continue to be the case. Right. Yeah, Stephan and Dixon, there they are. Well, so in terms of praxeology, I think that we can understand this in large part through the phenomenology of criticality, because we have good reason to believe that insight, as you’ve talked about, insight emerges through criticality in the brain, or insight is a self-organized critical phenomenon. That’s Stephan and Dixon. You have argued, John, with your colleagues, that the flow state emerges at the border and chaos between boredom on the one hand and anxiety on the other, and it’s associated with criticality. The psilocybin experience has been explicitly associated with criticality, Carhart-Harris and colleagues. And then, I would also argue that the peak or the mystical experience that has been documented many times, of course, we can’t study this experimentally, but given what we know about the psilocybin experience, given what we know about insight and flow, I think you can make a strong case that this is also a critical phenomenon, that this is associated with criticality. And I would argue that all of the above is true. All of that is true in large part because relevance realization occurs at criticality, as you’ve talked about, as you argued in that 2013 paper. Criticality is the mechanism by which relevance realization is instantiated in the brain. And so the relevant praxeology here, I would suggest, would be, to use your language, John, an ecology of practices designed to promote these manifestations of criticality. We know what they look like, we know what they feel like, and now we can have a sort of scientific understanding of why it is that they have this epistemological authority. And insight has that, I forget exactly, what, onto normativity. And psilocybin experience and all that. Well, that onto normativity is not necessarily an illusion because that process that occurs at criticality is real. It’s very real and it has real causal efficacy. And I’m not saying that it’s always like, we’ve talked about this before, I mean, there’s dangers associated with psilocybin and dangers associated with having certain kinds of insights even. But nevertheless, it’s still a necessary process. And then epistemology, as you talked about. Can we pause on that for just a second? I’ll go ahead and add. So for me, behavioral investment theory, then, is a framework that grounds animal mindedness, which is basically… I like to describe it as a weak neurocognitive functional view that John makes a strong neurocognitive functional view with a recursive relevance. But the fundamental argument is that the nervous system is an investment value system. Okay. So what ought to we do? And I don’t mean that ought in a moral sense, but what we do as animals is to seek a particular dynamic state in relationship to our work effort expenditure. And that would be found, I argue that’s found sort of on the complex edge of order and chaos. So the investment value structure is just another way of delineating this point of tension along those lines. So I just offer that as another point of… And I would offer a meta argument at this point. I mean, it’s not that all… Well, at some point, we were all working independently, and other people. There’s a lot of convergence towards this from independent theoretical frameworks, independent labs, independent universities, independent researchers. Now, that of course is not a proof, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, you get this convergence, and it seems to be tremendously theoretically fruitful. So it’s both convergent and elegant. So this is becoming, I would argue, a very plausible proposal, one that deserves to be taken very seriously. I think so. Yeah. And that’s… Yeah, to me, it’s very interesting. We’ll talk about Jordan Peterson’s work here in a minute too, but just because it’s also got that integration with his work, because he discovered this pattern totally independently of the criticality literature, totally independently of the cognitive science literature. And he discovered basically through studying the psychoanalysts and mythology and all this stuff. And so that’s a very strange integration of ideas, but it all comes together, I think, really nicely. So, and then in terms of epistemology, so we’ve already talked about how insight, which obviously has epistemological implications, emerges at the border between order and chaos, associated with self-organized criticality. Now, of course, there are a lot of evidence I’m going to leave out here. I’m just going to basically state it. I think that the left hemisphere… So we have these two cerebral hemispheres, the leading theory within the scientific literature on the the leading adaptationist explanation for why we have two hemispheres is essentially that the left hemisphere is designed to function optimally in routine situations or highly precise or routine situations. And the right hemisphere functions in situations where we don’t know what we’re doing, but also keeps an eye on the periphery. So we have this… We have different attention styles associated with each hemisphere. And basically the left hemisphere is specialized for order in the right hemisphere for chaos. That’s Elkonen Goldberg. He put forward that idea in the 1980s. More recently, there was a scientific American paper published in 2009, where these three animal researchers made the same case based on the animal research, independently of Goldberg. At least they didn’t cite him. So I assume it was independent. So anyways, and then P.J., of course, and we’ve already talked about this, I think that assimilation and accommodation line up perfectly with this. And when you read some of P.J.’s work on this, I think that he was clearly picking up on the same pattern. As you said, he didn’t have the words to put it in modern language. And then I would argue that Kuhn is essentially doing the same thing at a collective level. Whatever the flaws were with Kuhn’s book, I think that he was picking up on this very real pattern by which scientific theories evolve. This, which is the same as… Really the pattern that he outlined is the same as the structure of an insight. It’s just occurring on a collective level. Where normal science is what you’re doing within a paradigm, which is within a frame. You’re working within a frame. You have the anomalous information, which disrupts the frame, the descent into chaos, the revolutionary period of revolution, and then the re-emergence. And that’s something that, given that it’s associated with insight, given that it has the same structure as the metamethology and all that, we would assume, and of course there’s no way to experimentally do anything like this, we would assume that that’s associated with criticality as well at a collective level. I think that’s a decent assumption to make. I think it’s reasonable. I mean, and if you look at the left hemisphere is… I did this with Ian McGilchrist and I said, can’t you map the left hemisphere onto well-defined problems and the right hemisphere onto ill-defined problems? And he basically agreed with that. So I think that you could also tie his work in there. And I think the thing about Kuhn is in normal science, you don’t have much exploration of problem formulation. You have the explication. You’re basically searching the search space that has been properly formulated, whereas during the revolution and the paradigm shift, you’re getting all this problem. You’re getting massive problem reformulation. And so I think that you can strengthen that argument. I’m strengthening that argument. I think it’s an even more powerful match. And then, of course, and you’re going to get to this, this leads to sort of the deeper question. What’s the through line between all of these? Right. So keep going. One of the things that maybe we can circle back to is that I’d like to talk a little bit about is sort of the microscopic, macroscopic, maybe fractal of criticality, meaning like, okay, in my everyday world, I’m going to a grocery store. There’s some criticality dynamics that are happening in the everyday world. Then there’s these massive transformations, just like you have on the graph down there. So there was some context of sort of everyday life where we’re on some sort of edge of criticality, but we’re also can create a zoom back and say, well, actually major transitions happen through exactly the criticality kind of process that Coombe would be talking about. I don’t know if I’m being clear about that, but just the dynamics between, well, criticality in an everyday situation that’s fairly routine still has criticality element. And then there’s major transformation elements too, if that makes sense. Could I add to that? And then I’ll let Brett pick it up. I mean, so some of the work I’ve been doing around the proposal of the cognitive continuum, which is at a low level, largely unconscious, you see fluency, right? And we have all the evidence about fluency and fluency is that if you just merely repeat something, you don’t get fluency effects. And if it’s just chaotic, fluency has to have enough order and novelty in it in order for it to catch. That’s why the brain likes it, right? It’s a good heuristic because this is often indicating that it’s optimal processing. And then there’s lots of arguments, not just by me, Tobolinsky and Rehberg, that insight is a fluency spike in which fluency just goes up. And then we’ve got the argument that I’ve made that Brett and Anna Herobat Bennett and Leo and I made that flow is an insight cascade, right? And then you’ve got the growing evidence, right? That you can get collective flow states between people and you can see the same things going on. And so I think that’s not the complete argument because I think Brett has more to say about how that extends into the ontology. But I think the thesis of the cognitive continuum goes a long way and it’s supported by some of the criticality evidence that it shows up in a scale and variant manner in the brain. And so the cognitive continuum and the fractal nature of this, I think they form a strong argument for exactly what you’re talking about. That makes good sense. I thought that was the case, John, but I wanted to highlight that. That’s wonderful. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. And these, you know, this in everyday life, let’s say, you know, criticality is associated with power law distributions of avalanches. And so what you would see at criticality is a huge number of very small transformations like this, and then occasionally a very large transformation, right? And so if you zoom in on the changes as they occur, you’ll still see this structure even when it’s apparent gradual. It’s just apparent that you’re not close enough. It’s apparently gradual because you’re not looking close enough. But when you, of course, when you have the large transformations, they’re very obviously non-gradual. I think that’s basically how it is. One of the things maybe we can come back to when we sort of sum this up is sort of the macro macroscopic, sort of chirotic criticality and see maybe if we can think about this frame in relationship to that as well. And I’ll say more about that. But when you were talking earlier, and I saw some of those slides, that was a point I want to break up, but I’ll let you continue and then we can move into that perhaps. Sounds good. Okay, so, okay, so I think that all I think that criticality and the general idea of complexity also has cosmological implications. I think that Terrence McKenna, so Terrence McKenna is one of these people who, in my opinion, it’s great to listen to Terrence and never to take him too seriously, but occasionally he says really brilliant things. And I think that he was picking up on this understanding of complexity a long time really before a lot of other people were. He was really on the frontier of a lot of things. And what he pointed out is that, well, this newfound understanding of complexity, if it’s the case that the universe is this complexity generating engine in some sense, right? And maybe that’s not how we want to conceptualize it, but it is the case that we’ve gone from the very simple to the very complex. And we are easily the most complex entities in the known universe. And so we are manifestations of this process of complexity, and we are also participating in it when we are behaving optimally. So when we are at that border between order and chaos, not only is that the optimal pattern of behavior, but it also represents our meaningful participation in the ongoing creation and complexification of everything. And as far as I’m concerned, that gives it a kind of sacredness in some sense. Yes, yes. It affords sort of profound participatory knowing, not just representational knowing. Yes. This is another really interesting line of discussion that I would like to maybe, John, at some point tease out maybe here, maybe later. And that is sort of like, how do we think about our complexification in relationship to the cosmos writ large? And what I mean by that is like, is this a unique historical line? Like, I’ll take the flip side and say, well, actually, the universe at the matter level is still 99% hydrogen and helium and not very complex, and it’s kind of dead and spaced out. Okay. So one thing that’s interesting to think about in terms of a cosmological view is, hey, and this is really the romance or reality point, is like, we want to think about this complexification as the story of the universe, okay, versus the story of us, I guess I would say. And should we make that distinction? What does that mean? I think that’s an interesting sort of, at least mythos or broad axiological reflection. Well, but I think part of what an argument I’ve been forming around that question is about this notion of alethetic truth disclosure. In terms of how things are spaced out, as you put it very well, we are insignificant ontologically. But in terms of the capacities of the universe to produce properties, we are apex, and we are really, really, in that sense, ontologically privileged. What we basically prove is that the universe can make moral agents, which is like, you wouldn’t have known that, five billion years ago or something like that. So if you shift from a quantitative ontological analysis into a qualitative, you say, but wait, and that gives us an important symbolic role where I don’t mean symbol as just a mental ornament. I mean, we are icons, we disclose properties of the universe and disclose depths of it that are not disclosable anywhere else. And therefore, there is an onto, sons piled on top of sons don’t introduce the same difference as one mind does to the universe, qualitatively. Yeah, probably. And I think that’s essentially the same thing. I mean, that’s what complexity is. It’s novelty. We are at the pinnacle of novelty in the universe. It’s intelligible novelty, though. Yeah, that’s what’s important. Agreed. OK, so and then in my opinion, because we have this capacity for cultural evolution, and the capacity for cultural evolution means that tradition in the past has a kind of epistemological authority for us, and it should. And that means that there is something that’s always missing, in my opinion, from a worldview that doesn’t connect us meaningfully to the past and that doesn’t connect us meaningfully to our traditions. And I think that Jordan Peterson did a beautiful job in Maps of Meaning of connecting these ideas to mythology. And of course, he didn’t use criticality. He wasn’t talking about criticality. He didn’t know anything about that. But what he showed in Maps of Meaning is that the mythological hero figure or the pattern that’s represented by the mythological hero figure emerges at the border between order and chaos, or that the hero stands at the border between order and chaos, and that that process that occurs at that border is essentially the same as the process that occurs at the border between order and chaos and nature. It’s this descent into chaos and reemergence into a higher level of complexity. And he shows how this manifests in different mythological narratives, whether that’s Horus in Egypt or the Buddha or Marduk in Babylon or Jesus Christ in our own culture. And the metamethology, as described by Jordan Peterson, has characteristics indicating, to my mind, that it is essentially the same as the process that characterizes relevance realization. It occurs at the border between order and chaos. It has the same basic structure as an insight. And it’s described by Peterson explicitly as the process by which we think he said determine the motivational relevance of novel stimuli. Well, that’s just relevance realization, right? When we’re presented with some anomaly, we have to categorize that anomaly in terms of its implications for how we should act in the world. That’s what the metamethology is for, essentially, that process of dissolution and reintegration. And so this, for me, this is really important because it means that what we’re discovering in this worldview is not something that radically disconnects us from our past or disconnects us from our traditions. We are participating in the same process that our ancestors were. Our ancestors were trying to, at least implicitly, trying to describe in a variety of ways through a narrative or ritual or whatever it may be, something like the optimal pattern of behavior, what you might call interesting or admirable behaviors. We’ve been trying to distill the general pattern underlying what makes somebody admirable. It’s something like that. And we’ve gotten to this general pattern of the metamethology. And so there’s that. And I won’t go through this in detail. This is something I go through in some detail in part two of my series of videos. But Jordan, this also connects us to our phenomenology as well because Jordan Peterson argues that our phenomenology is characterized by experiences where we know what we’re doing, essentially order punctuated by anomalies that disrupted order and that occurs. He implied somewhere in Maps of Meaning that it occurs in a parallel distribution. He didn’t call it a parallel distribution, but many small disruptions and occasionally a large disruption. He uses nested language. He uses the language of nesting quite a bit, or he used to. Yes. He does in Maps of Meaning. It’s a nested hierarchy. The stuff at the bottom of the hierarchy is constantly changing while the stuff at the top is a lot more stable. But when the stuff at the top does change, it requires everything that’s nested inside of that, of whatever’s at the top. It requires everything that’s nested inside of that to change as well. And so that’s a huge amount of entropy that’s generated by that. Okay. And then one more thing I want to just mention here is that criticality has been an important concept within the scientific study of consciousness. So research within global workspace theory, integrated information theory, the cognitive science of insight, the cognitive science underlying psilocybin have all converged on this idea that there is some relationship between self-organized criticality and conscious experience, that experience emerges at the border between order and chaos in the brain. If you move people away from that border through sedatives, they lose consciousness. And so what I would suggest, just given that we have this convergence within different theories of consciousness, is that there’s very likely something very real and important about that pattern, given that we see it within integrated information theory, global workspace theory. I know that you’ve talked about this in your work, John. And so we have multiple frameworks indicating that consciousness emerges at the border between order and chaos. And yeah, so I think that this idea of criticality, for me at least, it has served as this kind of linchpin. It connects our ontology through statistical physics and consciousness research to our phenomenology, to our experience in the world through the study of insight, the flow state, psilocybin, to our epistemology through Piaget and Kuhn and insight, and our cosmology as well. And so the experiences associated with criticality, insight, flow, the peak experience, I would argue that these do not only indicate psychological improvement, although they often do that, but they also, they really do have significant epistemological and ontological implications. And these experiences indicate, properly understood, they are indications that we are participating in a process that is scientifically understood as biologically and psychologically optimal. But that process is equally our participation in the process that then underlies the ongoing creation and complexification of everything. So it’s ontologically grounded as well. And because this, because it winds up very nicely with the metamethology, it links us to our past as well. And so that’s kind of how I would connect criticality to this idea of transcendent naturalism. I think that’s pretty much all I had to say about it, but I’m curious about how that sort of fits into your guys’ worldview and how you would make sense of that given what you’ve talked about so far. So I have a couple of questions off the bat. The first is going back to the metameth. I’ve had talks with Jonathan Pagiot and other people, published three papers with Dan Schiappi on the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And I cite the work of Hull and others in the talk I gave at Greg’s conciliance conference, proving that higher levels can have causal powers not reducible to the summation of the causal powers of the lower level and a lot sort of thing. And basically the idea is there’s a we agency that has a collective intelligence that’s instantiated in distributed cognition, and it can solve problems, largely problems dealing with hyper objects that individual can’t solve, like running an airline, doing science, tracking global warming. And so what it does is you have these ways of coordinating distributed labor and coordinating distributed cognition so that you can grok and solve problems that individual cognition can’t solve. And then there’s been discussions around, and I do practice with other people have helped to create design practices that try to get people to realize this. And independently, this has been happening. There’s lots of discussion about the we space and practices that bring out the we space. So again, I’m just very quickly, a lot of convergence arguments onto this idea. The fact that, and it maps onto older ideas by Durkheim, but when we were talking about spirits, we were talking about the intelligence of the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. So would you say that when we’re looking at the meta meaning, sorry, the meta myth taking place at the meta meaning level, that we’re basically seeing, we’re getting a window into the relevance realization that is the collective intelligence of distributed cognition. And if so, what what hyper problems, hyper object based problems is it wrestling with? Do you think is that a fit? First of all, is that a fair question? Yes, I think it’s a fair question. I’m not sure if I’m going to answer it directly. I think I might indirectly answer it because there is something I want to point out about the meta mythology in relation to collective intelligence. And then I guess I’d be curious to know how this is relevant to thinking about. Okay, I just wanted to point this out. So the meta mythology is largely describing, in some sense, part of what it’s doing is describing the relationship between the individual and the group in relation to solving collective problems. Because Jordan would make the case, and I think I would make the case too, that there’s something that groups of people cannot do, which is that they can’t really respond to anomalies. And the reason why is that groups are fundamentally conservative in some sense, that the group is defined as a group by the boundaries of the group. And those boundaries can take many different forms. So they might take the form of a worldview that is involved, religion essentially is a boundary that defines a group. But within science, we have groups that define boundaries that define groups of scientists as well. And those boundaries, when they are violated in some sense, it’s not clear to me that groups can respond to those violations as a group. And so what the meta mythology is doing in some sense is describing this tension between the fact that individuals experience anomalies, and then they have to update the group in the face of those anomalies. But there’s a problem with that, because there’s a tension between the need for the group to be conservative, because built into the logic of cultural evolution is this conservative impulse. We blindly follow tradition. And there’s a good reason that we blindly follow tradition, because the traditions that have evolved over many thousands of years are often extremely functional. And they work for reasons that we cannot consciously understand. So there’s multiple examples of this in the literature, right? So one of the simple examples is just maniac processing. So there’s this plant that lots of lots of groups eat in South America that requires a complex processing procedure to detoxify the plant. And the groups that engage in this complex detoxifying procedure, if you ask them why they do it, they don’t really know that they’re detoxifying the plant. They just say basically something along the lines of, well, this is the way we’ve always done it. This is how a group does it. Something similar occurs. Another common example in the literature are these water temples in Bali that are used in agriculture to direct the flow of irrigation. They’ve been used for hundreds of years. And in the 1970s, the government came along and said, you know, we’re going to implement a scientific way of doing agriculture. And it actually turned out to be terrible. And it turns out that the old traditional way of doing the irrigation worked for reasons that nobody could really understand. My point here is just to say that sometimes blind adherence to tradition is useful and necessary, but that creates a tension between the problem that occurs when an anomaly disrupts, when an anomaly occurs that makes the tradition no longer functional. Then you have this clash between those people on the one side who are adherents of the tradition and the clash between the person or the maybe a group of people who perceive the anomaly and perceive that update is necessary. And so when we’re talking about collective intelligence, it’s not clear to me how to conceptualize it because I’m not sure that collectives have the same kind of intelligence as individuals do. It’s not clear to me. So an insight, let’s say, looks very different at the collective level than it does at the individual level, I think. Because at the individual level, right, it’s a disintegration of your, let’s say, hierarchy of beliefs and values, whatever that may be. It’s a disintegration of your own individual hierarchy of beliefs and values. And at the collective level, it manifests, I would argue, as an individual pointing out some anomaly to the group, whether that’s the revolutionary scientist or the, you know, whatever, the religious leader, the shaman or whatever it may be. And that manifests as a kind of group dissolution. I guess I’m just curious, like, can you? Well, I can apply to that if you’d like. So I worry here a little bit about Jordan’s emphasis on individualism. So I think what happens is analogous to what we’ve already talked about. We have two groups, and this is very much like the left and the right hemisphere. And one group usually at the level of collective insight represents the wider attention. And they represent a reorientation, a reproblem formulation, and they’re in conflict. And it can just break down. But if it’s creative tension, if it’s opponent processing, if it was democracy genuinely working, then, right, they’re in relationship to another group that represents, like you say, order, the tradition. And they can do opponent processing, just and again, you know, the left and right hemisphere are collections, collections of neurons, right, that are because a lot of individual anomaly is wasteful, predictive processing, a lot of it shouldn’t be paid attention to. I think it has to get to a certain critical mass before, and I use that deliberately, a critical mass before it can introduce criticality into the system. And so the reason why I say this is because I think you can make a very good case that you see this kind of move in science and democracy. I’ve been arguing that democracy, when it properly functions as opponent processing, between the left that emphasizes that we’re subject to fate and we’re finite animals and we need compassion, and the right saying, yes, but we’re not just animals and we’re called to virtue and responsibility. When democracy works right, those two groups seeing each other is the best way to self-correct, then you get what democracies have been capable of doing, which is, you know, very rapidly reorganizing society and culture when it’s needed, but also stabilizing culture when things are running fairly smoothly. So that would be my pushback. Now, where I agree with you, I think, but you see this also within all of this, is we shouldn’t be talking about collective intelligence just as if it’s a top-down process, like predictive processing, like everything else. There, of course, you’re right, there has to be stuff bottom-up coming from the individuals. And so I guess I could agree with there’s opponent processing between, like, the gestalt and the future level, between the collective level and the individuals, but I’m not quite, for the reasons I’ve articulated, happy with talking about that as sort of the individual versus the collective. I don’t, yeah, well, I’ve given you the reasons why I’m suspicious of that and how I think I would propose how we could negotiate between us, how we could land that. Well, let me ask you this in relation to that. So you talked about neurons being integrated. I would argue that people are not integrated in the same way that neurons are, and that’s why individuals are conscious, but groups are not, right? And so, and I’m curious, I mean, I assume you would agree, but I don’t want to assume any. So would you agree that groups of people are not conscious, right? I do agree. I do agree that they have zombie agency. This is what it’s called in the literature. And I think that has to do, I think you’re alluding to this, most people argue that has to do with sort of the density and the speed of connection, things like that. Sure. I mean, my intention is that consciousness has a role to play, that consciousness has real causal power, and that it has something to do with our capacity to. Okay. This is a good argument. Cause I agree. I think most of the evidence about the link between consciousness and relevance realization that says consciousness is basically about dealing with situations that are ill-defined, complex novel. And then you’re saying what individuals possess consciousness. So they have specific access to that, that the collective doesn’t have. Do I understand your argument? That’s essentially, yes. Okay. I think that part of the argument I can agree with very much. So I think the degree to which individuals possess consciousness in the group doesn’t, individuals have a functionality as individuals. I don’t know if they shift the collective as individuals. That’s what I’m arguing back. I think they have to, I think what you see happening is you generally see, right. And this is the problematic within collective intelligence. You see, right, a polarity form and that can either go become opponent processing or it can degenerate into polarization, like what’s happening in the United States. And then the system breaks down in a powerful way. So here’s one of the things that I was thinking about. And you can think about this, like, well, are these a collection of individuals or is this an emerging collective intelligence and what would be sort of the difference between them? So one thought where I’m going in relationship with this at the macro macro level, to bring it back to a point I was making earlier was, Hey, can we frame where we are? I like to frame where we are at the sort of the fifth joint point. Okay. So in terms of criticality of our macro level scenario as the emergence of the digital global landscape, okay. And AI and our interface with that, that’s creating a lot of criticality and we need to use the order chaos framework for that. And indeed we see that in relationship to say the third attractor idea. So the third attractor idea is that we need to sail through this time period, managing the chaos that may emerge on one level and the totalitarian order control on the other and develop an adaptive way of living between order and chaos and organize now. Now, as we become conscious of that and engage in dialogue and engage in collective intelligence along those lines, like where is the individual learning? Where is the culture learning? What’s the collective intelligence and how do we frame that? I just throw that out there and see where you guys land in terms of like, what is collective? What’s individual in relationship to that moment of criticality? Does that make sense? Yeah, I was going to lean on that. I was conceding, respectfully, I think Brett made a good point about consciousness having a role, but I think I would counter and I acknowledge that, but I would say language has a big role in that and there is no private language, Wittgenstein. Language is inherently shared, right? And no one person runs the language, no one person modifies the language, it evolves collectively. And so I see like each the collective and the individual have powerful functions that do amazing things. And I would put it to you that I do think like rituals, right? So I’m doing work now on ritual knowing when you, yeah, we’ve always done it this way. No, you haven’t actually, right? If you actually study rituals at each generation, they’ll say, we’ve always done it this way, but across time, that’s false. The rituals evolve, the language, this is how we’ve always spoken. No, it’s not. That’s why you can’t read Shakespeare, right? So there is evolution, there is innovation, there is something like insight. But I think you’re right. I’m trying to give both here, right? I think you’re right. I think there’s a special function and I think you’re right to point that out that consciousness has for the way it can detect things in the environment that collective intelligence can’t because it lacks consciousness. But I think the reverse is also the case. I think that the collective intelligence using language and using other things can detect things, hyper objects. I can’t see evolution, I can’t see global warming, right? But science can, right? And so that’s how I would respond. Sure. Yeah, so it’s really hard to, I think, get the right language down when we’re talking about these things. Because I, you know, what I would say is that it’s something like, you know, when an accountant notices an accounting error, right? Well, that’s them playing that role of noticing the anomaly and reporting it to the group and all that, okay? And that’s at a relatively small level of analysis. When Darwin noticed the variation in selection, right? When he picked up on that pattern, well, he was also picking up on an anomaly. It just so happens that that anomaly was way more fundamental to our culture. It violated the most, you know, very fundamental assumptions of our culture. Now, Darwin couldn’t have done what he did without Malthus and other people, right? And language, by the way, because he had to keep track as he was on the voyage of the Beagle. So he’s also linking various instances of Darwin together into a collective intelligence across time through language. Right. So, but of course, Darwin, you know, even though I think we can now look back on it and say that evolution seems relatively, at least, you know, I would say, you know, evolution seems relatively obvious. Of course, that was an anomaly that it took our culture. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yes. Yeah. Well, so maybe we can move on. I think we’ve got to a point where there’s important things to be said on both sides of this contention. We’re both acknowledging that each other’s points are legitimate. So this sounds more like a work in progress. And so to answer you, Greg, I think we need to do this kind of work that’s coming up in this. And one of the valuable things that Brett’s formulation has done is call this question or problem in a positive sense to the fore. And addressing what you’re talking about, I think, requires further explication, elucidation about just this bottom-up, top-down thing we’re talking about here. Because in the end, Greg, and also Brett, I mean, I think this goes to the broader argument where I’m making use of other people, that it’s not just emergence up, it’s also emanation down. It’s not just causation up, it’s constraint down. And I think we’re both sort of converging on that when we’re talking about this in the meta-myths right now. I know that’s not completely satisfactory, Greg, but is that at least pro tem? Yes, I agree. So, Brett, can I ask you another question? Are you okay with leaving it at that state between us right now? Yeah, I think that’s good. I think we’ve made our cases and I think we’re basically, I think we’re pretty much on the same page, but maybe we’re coming at it with a different emphasis. That’s fine. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, this one is a little bit more technical, and it’s something I’ve been reflecting on. So, earlier on, RR was integrated with self-organizing criticality, also small world network, because those two loop on each other, right? If you fire as self-organizing criticality, you wire as a small world network and vice versa, right? And so, it’s that bigger, and by the way, small world networks do not only form between neurons, they form between many things in the environment as well. So, the correspondence doesn’t break down. And tying in relevance realization to that, right? And then, of course, we’ve been, right? And you were the initiator of this, for which I’m forever grateful, and I’ve been putting more and more thought into explicating the integration between relevance realization, predictive processing. I won’t go into that right now, but I do want to talk to you about that, by the way, because I’ve been talking to Mark about it, and he thinks this is a really good way of getting clearer about how the two are so interdependent. But how do you see the self-organizing criticality and the small world network and the RRPP integrations coming together? Do you have any thoughts about that? And if you haven’t turned your mind to it, that’s fine. I’m just wondering if you’ve turned your mind to it. And if you… Like, do you think that if we were actually looking at the dynamics of a predictive processing network, we would start to see fractal self-organizing criticality between the layers of the predictive processing network? Like, what do you think? Oh, that is what I think. But I mean, I have no real way of convincing anybody of that at the moment, I guess. The problem for me in some sense is that I don’t understand the math of the free energy principle, and I really wish I did. Because apparently, that idea is essentially built into the math of the free energy principle. Optimality occurs at criticality, and at criticality, you get what they call these self-organized instabilities, which occur… I don’t think they call it a fractal. There was a paper by Friston and a bunch of other people, I think, in maybe 2011 or something, where they talk about self-organized instabilities as being… And Kelso has been talking about metastability along the same lines. Well, apparently, at the very lowest levels of perception, at the fundamental levels of perception, we have a process that’s going on that they call self-organized instability. But as best I can tell, you have little increases in entropy and re-emergences, even at very basic levels. We see this fractal of what emerges as an insight at a higher level, what we might call higher levels of cognition. Well, that same process is going on at very low levels, very fundamental level of perception as well, is what it looks like. And that idea is essentially built into the free energy principle, which I don’t understand, so I can’t comment on that, or I can’t pass judgment on that. But yeah, I do think it does, and all this stuff manifests… Well, it would help to explain why we’re getting converging evidence for why the brain seems to be organized as nested small world networks. Why that? And you want a theoretical connection between that and the predictive processing framework, right? And none of their models typically look like small world networks, but the brain clearly is. And so I think you’ve got at least the beginnings of an argument like, well, here’s a plausible reason why the brain architecture is this way, its functionality is this way, and then you get that by integrating the self-organizing criticality into the predictive processing framework. At least you can make a case for making the hypothesis plausible because it carries explanatory power. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense in light of the autism schizotyping continuum stuff, as the people on the autistic side are essentially specialization for order. It’s all those trade-offs that are associated with relevance realization. They’re tilted towards the side of efficiency and specializing for predictable situations and the opposite on the schizotyping side. And I suspect we would see that play out in collective relevance realization as well in terms of the dynamics of the group and the interactions between these different perceptual styles. So yeah, all of that stuff, it fits very nicely together, I think. Excellent. I think that’s very encouraging. I’m hoping we can do some more work towards that. So I wanted to ask you one more thing and then I’ll let Greg ask some questions. I’m sorry, this work is so, I find your work just so wonderful, right? Just like it’s, you had the slide there and you made one sentence about it, about, and I think this is, right, the sacred or this accounts for our experience of the sacred. You said something along those lines. I hope I’m not misquoting you. And I want you to come back because I’ve been advancing the argument that this is basically, this is very, very analogous, similar to mappable onto late neoplatonic ontology, right? And emergence emanation, you know, another myth is, you know, the Republic Socrates goes down to Piraeus and then he comes up and out. We go in the cave and then we go out and then we come back down into the cave. Like all of this is, you know, the myth is there and the thinking is there and you’ve got this massive philosophical framework all built around intelligibility. So there’s two questions I have. One is Brendan did a lot of work integrating RR and some of the work that Kolchinsky and Wilpere, you know, the no free lunch guy, no free lunch theorem guy, you know, how we can get technical information to be meaningful using sort of RR understanding and it maps very well onto their proposals, you know, about causal relevance to an auto, basically an autopoetic system and things like that. And so it seems to me that there should be some connection between theoretical connection between the space of self-organizing criticality and how technical information becomes semantic information. And if you put those two together, you’d get a naturalistic account of the emergence of intelligibility as a thing. So that’s the first proposal. And then the second is given what you’ve got, especially when you have this ongoing complexification up and down, right, you get the idea that there’s that that intelligibility itself is almost like a living thing and it’s inexhaustible, like the combinatorial explosive nature of a complexifying world. You have an inexhaustible source of intelligibility and that’s sort of the proposal for what the sacred is in that neoplatonic framework. And it sounds to me like if you put the self-organizing criticality together and the work that Brendan’s doing with some RR PP glue, you get an account of what intelligibility is, right, and then you can then give an account in terms of what you’re doing. Then give an account in terms of intelligibility, which is inherently transjective phenomena, right, what sacredness is because sacredness also seems to be an inherently transject, it goes in, it’s me, but it’s not, it’s participatory, like you said. So what do you think of that proposal? I mean, that’s a very long argument compressed, but. I don’t know, I don’t know what to think about it, but I’m going to say something that might be related to it. So there, you know, this is this idea of intelligibility. And there is some important connection between the intelligibility and the sacred. You know, when somebody, when a scientist, for example, discovers something new about the world, there is this sense of sacredness about that, right? There is some sense. For me, much of this is about integration. So I have a paper that I’m working on, but it’s also the seventh part of my YouTube series where I talk about the psychology of meaning and I think this is, a lot of this is implicit in your work, John, but I’m not sure if you’ve ever said it explicitly, correct me if I’m wrong, but a lot of the work on meaning in psychology sort of points to this idea that what the sense of meaning is, or the subjective sense of meaning as a mood that we feel over the long run is the extent to which we are psychologically integrated, right? So we see this with the coherence as being an aspect of meaning in life, significance being an aspect of meaning in life, the extent to which we’re integrated with the external world, purpose being the third one that’s usually talked about in the literature, and then you would say mattering as well, right? And mattering, there’s evidence that mattering is actually prominent among the four. It does a lot of the heavy lifting. This is why if you want to know, if you can ask people, what do you want to exist, even if you don’t, and how much of a difference do you make to it now? And if they have good answers to both of those, that’ll generally predict how meaningful they find their lives. It’s like, well, my kids, I want my kid. Well, and do you make a difference to your kids? Yes, I do. And that’s why my kids make my life so meaningful. Okay, so what I would suggest is that a lot of that is pointing to this idea of psychological and the extent to which, so there’s a really nice paper by Jacob Hirsch and Jordan Peterson was an author on that paper from 2012 called the Psychological Entropy Framework. And what they argue is that what anxiety is, what psychological, you know, anxiety is psychological entropy, psychological entropy is the extent to which there is conflict between our behavioral affordances. So the world presents us with affordances, you know, and to the extent that we have conflict between our psychological and psychological experiences, we’re not going to be able to know. And to the extent that we have conflict between those options that we have, we experience anxiety, we experience psychological entropy. Well, the opposite of that would be the subjective sense of meaning over the long run when you are psychologically integrated. But I mean, it’s not just a psychological sense. If it’s actually involving affordances, affordances aren’t subjective phenomena. That’s one of their defining feature. They’re inherently transjective. So wouldn’t it be more like something like, the right whatever whatever complexification is happening here is actually coupled well to the complexification of the world? Because, you know, you have you have all the things about nobody wants internal peace at the expense of being in contact with reality. You know, you can run the simple experiment of asking people, I do this with my students, how many of you are in really satisfying romantic relationships? How many would want you would want to know, even if it destroys the relationship that your partner is cheating, they almost all put up their hand, because they don’t want that well being at the expense of it being fraudulent or a lie, or not real. And so, isn’t it more about the affordance coupling than just the inner state of the person? So let me just say why I would say it’s subjective, subjective in some sense that you have a subjective sense of meaning in life simply because you can be wrong about it. So for example, your meaning in life may be tied up with your to use your example with your intimate relationship. And you may find out 20 years down the road that actually your spouse betrayed you and your two kids aren’t really yours. Right? Okay, something like that. Well, then all of that meaning in life that you had, it was an illusion in some sense, right? So that’s why I would say that that sense is subjective in some sense. But right, right. So but then there’s the distinction looming here. Because if you can be wrong, you can be right, which means there has to be something non subjective that gives you the normative standard by which you judge that. So the meaning can’t be equated to the subjective sense, because there has to be something that corrects it. When that sense is when that sense is false, and presumably it’s a normativity that is trying to get you to track, you know, real meaning, for example. Yes. Well, what I would suggest is that, you know, the meaning is not where the value is, the value is where is in the process by which you update your meaning when it’s lost, essentially, right? So yes, yes, that goes well with the problems around coherence and Heinzelman’s work. So there’s been a failure to replicate a few times. And I’ve been arguing that it’s not found meaning that like in pictures and the linguistic stems, but it’s more like if people have an insight, or they get a realization of meaning that’s predictive of meaning in life, that’s an experiment I actually want to run. So I think we’re agreeing now. I think we’re agreeing. I think you’re right. When we did the experiment on the relationship between mystical experience and meaning in life, it wasn’t the phenomenological content. It was the insight factor, how much of an insight factor was there that was actually carrying that load of changing the meaning in life. And so my relate this back to what to what started this, that process, right? So it’s not that the meaning itself is the sacred, right? Because that meaning can be false. You can be wrong about it. But what I would suggest is that the process by which we update to that meaning in the face of anomalies, it’s something like that. That process is sacred. Yeah, we’re in agreement. We’re in agreement. Now. Okay. Yeah, that’s exactly right. That’s why I try not to use the, I was trying to use this sort of sense of the fount of intelligibility, where that’s meaning that makes sense to us and affords our agency and problem solving in some important fashion. Yeah, I think that’s right. I think we’re in complete agreement now. And so that process, the reason why that’s related to criticality is because that process, when it’s being done optimally, that’s what takes place at the border between order and chaos, right? That’s criticality. And so that process by which we update ourselves in the face of anomalies, which we can induce, we can induce that phenomenology, at least through the flow state, through psilocybin, and presumably there are other methods as well. But the reason why we get that sense of the sacred under the influence of psilocybin, often people get that sense of the sacred is because that is what’s happening under that state, right? You were being dissolved in some sense and reformulated, right? That’s the Rebus model, essentially. The Rebus model of the action of psychedelics, relaxed beliefs under psychedelics says that psychedelics essentially flatten out the hierarchy, allow prediction errors to travel to the top and knock out that stuff at the top. And that process is felt by us as being deeply meaningful and sacred. And it’s, I think that is what intelligibility is in some sense. I’m not sure exactly how you’re using that word. No, I think that’s right. And I think that process you’re talking about is when we experience it individually and consciously, that’s the insight experience, and then the flow experience is an insight cascade. And I think mystical experiences are not an insight into this problem or that problem, but into the meta problem of having an optimal grip on the world. And optimal gripping is exactly what you’re talking about. And so it’s going to be more than the flow state kind of thing. The thing that we still have to get back to is, and I want to propose that we leave it for next time because we’ve already gone quite a while, is I want to go back to the Trinitarian model you had there because I know there’s a lot of my viewers that are going to go, oh, there’s the Trinity, there’s the Trinity, and I’m not making fun of them. I think I’m representing them fairly, and I’m very sympathetic. Because I’ve been sort of advancing the argument, I’m not a Christian, but I tend to like Christian neoplatonism over pagan neoplatonism because of these kinds of moves. And so I propose that we could at least start there. We don’t seem to have any problem getting into very rich and wonderful discussion. You’re so juicy to talk to you. But I propose we bring this one to a close, and we can start next time with, you know, what does that, like, start with that? Because it’s clearly, it’s explicitly in your diagram, it’s a Trinitarian model in some ways. It’s the father, son, and the mother, right? And then what does that do with the Christian Trinity, and what does that do with the neoplatonic Trinity? Because they’re all over the place, right? And so how’s that for, we pick it up there. I think we should definitely talk about that. So I’m going to let you, I’ll do it in this order, Greg, and then you, final word, and then we’ll bring it to a close. Just basically bridging off of what John said, I really love the way the concept of criticality speaks about the levels of our ontology and the way in which our cognitive grips it, and then sets us the stage for the sort of view of the kairos of the moment, if I come back to that. So one of the things I’d like to talk more about is the kind of worldview implications. We’re talking about transcendent naturalism, a lot of beautiful stuff about the kind of mechanisms of cognition and what does it mean about intelligibility, but also we want to sort of be also, hey, what is the worldview? And I think you did a beautiful job laying out some intimations of that. For speaking for myself, and maybe this picks up on the Trinity, I’d like us to bridge into that maybe next time. Yeah, yeah. Excellent, excellent. Sounds good to me. So Brett, final word from you. I mean, that was great. I think I learned a lot in the sense of how to communicate these things properly, and of course, I’ve learned a huge amount from both of y’all. So yeah, I look forward to the next discussion. Thank you everyone for your time and attention. We’ll pick this up next time.