https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dYdosNIsWvE
Welcome everybody to episode seven of Transcendent Naturalism, which is part of the Cognitive Science Show. I’m here, of course, with my continual partner in all of the Cognitive Science shows, Greg Enriquez, and we have Brendan Graham Dempsey here with us today. And what we’re going to do is the following. Greg is going to give us sort of a quick synopsis and synoptic integration of where we’re at in terms of the previous six episodes, and then he’ll turn things over to Brendan. Brendan will lay out his framework, and then we’ll get into dialogue about it. So I’m going to turn everything over to you, Greg. Lovely. Thank you, John. Brendan, super glad that you’re here. I’m really excited about today. So let’s do a quick synopsis. So Transcendent Naturalism is trying to articulate a new worldview that holds science and spirituality, orients us towards a frame of understanding for the 21st century that can enable kind of a collective orientation toward wisdom. What John and I have done in the first four episodes is lay sort of the groundwork for the structure of what such a sort of metaphysical, ontological, epistemological picture looks like that’s grounded in a natural science view that says, hey, what do we need to have natural science be present in the world? And what does it say? In that we lay out the notion that there’s a leveled ontology to the world and that our cognitive structures must be organized in a particular way that grip that. So this is sort of the conforming principle, and this gives us a metaphysics that’s quite different than a reductive mechanical materialism that emerged out of sort of the first wave of the Enlightenment, as it were. And from that, that situates us to think, I think, in a different way, in some ways about sort of a transjective epistemology, one that doesn’t exist inside the subject or object per se, but actually exists in a relational context over time. It’s got some lineage, I think, to pragmatism, but both John and I have proposed large scale theories that really are transjective in nature, most notably recursive relevance realization and the behavioral investment theory, influence matrix and justification theory. And I think that that’s some justification stuff that I did is also really best conceptualized from a transjective epistemological frame because they don’t exist inside the subject or object, but are actually iterative in relation. And ultimately, then from there, we’re looking for what might be an orientation toward collectively toward the sacred and the opportunity for what might be a strong transcendence by which we’re thinking systematically about what is the grip of the knower under the known and what potential does that afford? Not just for us to feel better about our psyches, that’s sort of a weak transcendence is, hey, we can make small and meaning and feel okay before we die. But more collectively, we can waken to the moment that we’re in, sort of a chirodic moment between worlds. And there’s a collective opportunity and a collective danger, I think, existentially, meaning making wise. And so a strong tension that points to the possibility of sort of a collective awakening toward wisdom and what that would mean for society, for our relationships, for our relationships with the planet. And then what we transitioned to was an excellent set of two conversations, two episodes with Rich Blundell and Rita Leduc. And they are emphasizing OIKA, which is philosophically Rich Blundell’s view of sort of an economic ecology that is deeply anchored into sort of a big history naturalism, which argues for an ontological continuity, both with regards to the history of the universe and regards to our own participation in it and how to waken up to that. So it’s really this sort of natural spiritual, natural intelligence awakening that he emphasized. And he has bridged with Rita, who is an artist, and showed ways that she sort of opened up windows to the natural world that called our sort of pre-adapted cognitive structures to connect to that world, to awaken to that world, to feel a part of that world. And so their work is showing sort of how sort of a big history naturalism bridges an embodied experience of the world to the artistic landscape and shows, I think, in my estimation, really a scientific humanistic bridge. And today, sir, we want to continue some of that bridge building with science and spirituality, meaning making and cultivating and understanding of the sacred. And we think you’re the right guy for it, Brendan. So let me go ahead and turn it over to you with that backdrop and welcome you and all the wonderful work you’ve done in metamodern spirituality, emergentism, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So welcome, Brendan. Tell us a little bit about yourself. And then the floor is yours to share your perspective as we begin to sync up here. Cool. Well, yeah, thank you so much. This is really exciting. I’ve been engaging with both of your work for a while, so this is really cool to be able to do some of this in real time. Yeah, I’ve been working under the umbrella of metamodern spirituality, trying to do something very akin to, I think, the project before us, which is trying to engage spirituality within a naturalistic frame and to do so in a way that takes seriously the developments of modern and postmodern thought. Trying to find a kind of what, Greg, you call a integrative, coherent, integrative pluralism, basically, that can bring together these multiple ways of viewing the world and the genuine insights that they have. And trying to do spirituality and engagement with the sacred in a manner that’s not reactionary or regressive or sort of eschews the incredible insights that have been afforded to us by modern and postmodern development. So, yeah, there’s a lot of overlap there. I was so excited watching the previous conversations with both of you. There’s so much overlap in my current explorations of these topics, so I’m really appreciate the opportunity to get into some of that today. And so, yeah, without further ado, I guess let’s kind of just jump into it. I want to basically try to carry forward a lot of the argumentation that’s already been presented, synthesize it a bit and try to extend it into maybe an additional register. I guess I should also probably mention my background is in religious studies. And so there’s a lot I’m coming to in this sort of conversation that’s that’s trying to engage interpretations of the sacred and religion from this perspective. So that is sort of where I want to begin to really move the conversation is into considerations of transcendence and the sacred and meaning making at the human level. And so to do that, I’m really excited to try to ground this first and a lot of the work that you’ve already sort of done. So I’ll reiterate a few things, but I will kind of try to make a thread that we can carry through here. So yeah, let’s start. So I want to start with kind of some philosophical kind of where philosophy, metaphysics, science all kind of seem to meet, which is this issue that came up in episode one around basically sameness and difference in the in the way that this relates to information. So one way of really grounding this that I think is helpful is to think of the entropic universe that we live in as having a sort of tendency towards sameness. That’s what the homogeneity of equilibrium sort of represents is there is homogenous sameness and lack of differentiation. And that is a that’s kind of a first principle of the natural holistic universe that we live in. And now what’s interesting about that is in order to sort of counter that natural tendency towards homogenous sameness, you need energy, you need energy to sort of push back against this entropic force and sort of push back against the pull towards equilibrium. And so in doing that, you create essentially information, right? So if you’re thinking about sameness and difference and John talked about essential difference in the way that differences sort of a core aspect of what we mean by information, I think it was Gregory Bates and who said who defined information is a difference that makes a difference. And we’ll get into the ways that these differences have causal power, which is really important. But basically, there’s this then intricate relationship between energy and information where you need energy to allow information to exist, so to speak, if we understand information to be the differentiation of things in the face of kind of homogeneity and equilibrium. So this already sets us up in this sort of energy information field, where we’re really kind of grounding this thing and again we, or you guys talked about how there’s this, you know, very intimate relationship between energy and information. And we could maybe explore some of that but that’s sort of where I’m coming at this and starting to explore these ideas. So now we can kind of move into what the developments have been in information theory to try to unpack some of this stuff and John already did a little bit of that Eric holes work, but I want to throw in the work of David crack our the Santa Fe Institute who has an idea called information, some theory of individuality. And basically, it’s a similar sort of idea right so Shannon’s kind of seminal articulation of information theory presented this idea that information is what is sort of accurately conveyed by a signal to a receiver. And we can show that this sort of signal has been received, and it’s the same one that was sent and we can call that information. And, and this is sort of that sort of essentially what you get from Shannon information theory is, is your removing any sense of what things are about. It’s not information about something it’s just information that is conveyed and if it’s conveyed accurately and successfully then it’s it’s information, and of course that also faces entropic breakdown and so you need to build in those redundancies as John was talking about. And that was sort of the core, you know, grounding idea of information theory that’s given us all this incredible information technology etc it’s been incredibly successful theory, but there have been some really fascinating developments to it in recent years, and one of them is this information theory of individuality which crowns some of this stuff so one of the ways of thinking about this now is that if you go back to this idea of differentiation and sameness, you can think about information is kind of creating what cracker recalls the figure ground distinction, right, you’re getting a separation, you’re getting you’re getting well differentiation right and so you’re creating sort of a figure and ground distinction that essentially gives you an entity within a broader context, you have figure you have ground you have entity and you have environment right, and this is a very core dynamic which I’m going to try to argue is really the grounds of transjectivity, and a lot of other important ideas around information processing. So anyway you get this, the theory of the information theory of individuality basically says that once you get this sort of distinction this differentiation, an individual entity can be understood as sort of this communication of the information about that entity over time. And again some of this is already in that work of hold that that john mentioned. But in this theory you can kind of think about this at multiple levels there’s the information about the entity conveyed to itself through time. There’s the information of the environment conveyed over time, and crucially there’s the information linking entity to environment that has a statistical significance in terms of you can understand things about the entity by having information about the environment and vice versa. And this is called mutual information. So there’s an essential, you know link well I dangerous to use words like essential when you’re around philosophers but so I didn’t necessarily mean in that sense but there’s a really profound and important link about the information linking entities and their environments and you can think about understanding the individuality of particular entities as this sort of informational exchange through time and with environments. Okay, so that’s one important development. Now the next thing I want to throw in here is this idea developed by folks like Artemiy Kolchinsky, David Walpert and Carlo Rovelli, and I talked a little bit about this in my reality of meaning presentation that I got into at the conference, but I want to unpack some of those ideas here because they’re really, I think, kind of core and fundamental. So, the idea here is that now that we have this idea of mutual information where entities exist in environments and there’s a kind of statistical link between these things and we have mutual information. We can move past the Shannon issue of information not being about anything, because now we can actually see the entities. Do you have there’s information for entities that has intrinsic meaning to them. Okay, so entities need energy from their environment to persist in order to maintain their informational integrity over time. And so basically, the mutual information that causally links entities to the energy in their environment that allows them to do that has an intrinsic existential sort of meaning to those entities. So because of that mutual information linking entities to environments and the energetic information connection. There’s an intrinsic aboutness to some information that is not just, you know, something we can assess sort of, oh well in a message was conveyed accurately or not. It’s actually about something it actually has meaning to that entity in its context and this is genuine semantic information so not just the syntactic information of Shannon. So now we’ve got information that’s about things. And this is, I think, kind of where I want to begin really grounding all this because basically they call this meaning. This is sort of the the core sense of what meaning might be. Now again, it’s a very kind of very bare sense of meaning it’s very simple sense of meaning but we have this sort of abstract notion that entities exist in environments, based on an entropic universe and needing energy to maintain their informational integrity over time, and that those energy those entities need to then successfully acquire that information to maintain themselves over time and the ability to which they’re able to do that is what enhances or, or delimits or is deleterious to their viability. That is meaning to entities. Now, okay, so that’s sort of the core premise that I want to kind of now build up into this really important idea of where does transcendence and leveled ontology exist in all this. So, I also want to note something that they write in their paper which I think will probably, you know, prick John’s ears up because they say, here’s a little quote I wrote down there’s a connection between paying attention to the right information as measured by semantic efficiency and being thermodynamically efficient, which is basically a form of relevance realization at the level of information energy exchange right so you have to know what’s relevant and what’s meaningful to you and if you don’t, then you’re basically facing potential consequences. So, it’s a potential entropic annihilation. Okay, so now I want to kind of contextualize recursive relevance realization and a particular level of that leveled ontology but it’s based I think on this fundamental notion that we can ground in energy and information. So, what we’ve done I think hopefully so far meaning equals information relevant to enhancing viability of an entity and context and meaning is inherently transjective then it’s not in the subject it’s not in the object it’s in the relationship between the two. So, now I want to synthesize some ideas from Bobby Azarian, who wrote a great book called the romance of reality, and he basically picks up on this notion. He calls it knowledge. Okay, so they call it meaning he calls it knowledge but it’s information processed in this particular way. And the argument he makes is that there’s a learning process involved then in the very nature of complexification and cosmic evolution, because entities are always basically seeking information to maintain and enhance their viability. So, this is the origin of sort of adaptive responses in the face of environmental information. And this leads to more complex structures, which then lead to, you know, more differentiation which needs you know more energy to maintain that informational difference. So, this is a kind of virtuous cycle that builds on itself. So, we’ve got a learning process, a meaning making process, and it’s all grounded in a kind of particular energy information framework. So that’s where I want to now plug in all the work that you’ve both done over this series. John’s incredible helpful philosophical under laboring is Greg put it. And I want to throw in the Utah framework now to bring this into that level because john’s made some incredible kind of philosophical, you know, claims for situating these ideas in kind of a very robust kind of rational structure, and then Greg comes in with the Utah thing and it’s sort of like okay here’s some specificity around what are these levels in this leveled ontology. So, this is now very important because as Greg points out, these levels matter like mine and culture are distinguished by novel information processing systems of increasing complexity. So you can start to see what might emerge from all these things coming together. So, all right, basically, you know, matter we’ve got this frozen energetic memory and then we get to life which is processing genetic information, mine is processing neuronal information and culture is processing symbolic information and they’re stacked over time through this complexification process, which is itself a kind of learning process unfolding over time. Now, on top of that Greg’s framework also gives us the periodic table of behavior which you showed in Episode two. And what’s really cool about this is that this gives you the entity environment pairings that give you the transjective context of meaning making right. So these are going to be the context in which meaning is registered and knowledge is acquired basically. And so with that framework, you basically bring all this together. And what I’m trying to argue is that what we have is essentially a tiered structure of increasingly complex learning processes stacked on top of each other over the course of cosmic evolution. So matter. I call it kind of structural learning and you can get into dissipative structures and adaptation and that sort of thing to see people like Terrence Deacon have even recognized that there’s a sort of a teleological or a, yeah, teleonomical sort of aspect to to these sorts of things right and intentional quality, even at the level of pre prebiotic material. But certainly this becomes a lot clearer once you get into the life register where you’re getting genetic learning and Bobby Azarian makes a great case for seeing evolution is basically a learning process using genetic coding, then you get into the cognitive learning layer of all this and then john this is where I really plug in your work very much because your whole framing of recursive relevance realization is I think basically where this framework fits in the tiered sort of, you know, leveling ontology right because you’re specifically focused on neuronal entities processing information about their environment for relevance and meaning. But that’s occurring at the level you need, you know, a complex nervous system to be able to process that kind of information. But just to be able to connect that to this really grand process that sort of goes up the entire, you know, cosmic evolutionary complexification chain is very cool. And then the last one at the culture plane, you’re talking about symbolic information I call it symbolic learning and that’s really what I kind of want to focus on here to try to bring this a little bit into the religious register and to focus on the sacred and the spiritual. And actually, can I just pause you and just yeah I feel just I want to make a comment about the congruence of what you just laid out there. I mean, one of the things that I really like the entity field. I really like the energy information mapping. I like the stacking. I think that basically, you know, I’m feeling you feel your way into information into meaning and connecting the dots in a particular way that feels very synergistic, adding some richest in detail and also very congruent. So I just wanted to make that comment. Thank you. Also, let me know if I’m going too fast or, you know, just I can slow down and or whatever. Also, I wanted to say to I want to say this upfront. I want to be challenged and critiqued and I want all these things to be broken apart too. So, you know, I’m working with this. I’m about 350 pages deep into a book trying to explore these topics. And so, yeah, I’d love this to be a really, you know, something that can allow me to deepen this and correct for any, you know, failures of thought here. So by all means do that. Okay, so yeah, so basically what I want to kind of where this sets us up for is if it’s not kind of clear by now is that we’re getting a picture in which meaning itself evolves meaning complexifies and so do values, because if you’re talking about the if you’re talking about structures and their learning environments and the positions in which they’re processing information for viability, those things have intrinsic value to the existence of entities and context, right? So whenever you’re talking about meaning, there is an implicit sense of normativity in the sense of and I think Deacon mentions this at one point where basically if there is an implicit sort of goal state, then and that can be successfully or not successfully, you know, moved closer to, then you have normativity in the mix. And so once you kind of have some basis of normativity, you have a sense of value already in the mix as well. And I think that’s really important too when we’re talking about conversations of meaning and meaning complexifying through time and over the stack, because normativity and value is part of that idea that’s evolving. Did you did you Yeah, I did. I’ll do this if I want your attention. First of all, I want to emphasize what, what Greg say, I’m kind of humbled by this. What you’re doing. It’s really impressive. It resonates. Yeah, you know the way I’ve tried to connect using Evans, Evan Thompson’s idea deep continuity relevance realization to auto poesis and then auto poesis goes down into self organization, and that’s at least a your era who has whose new book is out by the way. And, but the thing I wanted to ask, so I’m just, I’m sort of silenced by, by this I just want to go like, yeah, just keep going. But I have a question emerges and it goes towards. Well, some of the stuff I was talking about, especially when I moved when we move into the religious register. So you, you made the argument that I agree with that meaning is complexifying, and it itself is evolving. And that, and, you know, and evolution is a kind of learning and relevance realization is like evolution and there’s all that deep continuity. So, that means that its capacity to disclose aspects of reality is also evolving. Right, it’s getting a more and more optimal grip on reality. So, what I mean by that is that as the meeting goes up the disclosure of being also goes up in a completely correlational manner this is one of the tiniest his main arguments and claims and I think we’ve circled I think we can give a scientific framework for that. So, first of all, you’re nodding you agree with that. 100% Yeah, I think that that is what what’s very powerful about understanding this as a learning process. I mean if we take learning seriously that’s what we hope we are doing when we are learning is learning more about reality more reality is becoming disclosed to us, we gain a more and more, etc. It increases our causal power etc. So, yes, 100% and, and that more is just to make sure that make that more is not just a quantitative more it’s a qualitative more given Greg’s argument about novelty in forms of information processing. Moreness not just a quantitative moreness it. Yeah. And so that that means that, you know, human beings have an ontological significance because right, they may not be causally significant in the universe because they’re infinitesimal specs against the, you know, billions and billions of galaxies as Carl Sagan would say, right, but they’re the, the, the aspects of being that are disclosed by them. And that is, you know, you know, I want to say something like at the summit. Yeah. Right. I like to say earth burns like a quasar of complexification in the night sky. So if our, if our measure is mass, then yes, but if our measure is complexification, especially a ontic epistemic conformity that affords awareness experience potentiality growth oriented towards a potential future, etc. Yeah, that is a, that is an area in which we, you know, find ourselves quite uniquely situated I believe in the universe at least in terms of the everyday knowledge that we have of things in the world. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean I would throw into that. Right. We have some metrics around these sorts of things in terms of like there’s a wonderful book cosmic evolution. I was gonna say pretty famous but I guess it’s famous in these circles I think by Eric Shazam about the basically using energy rate density to map complexification through time. And, and when you do when you use a metric like that, you’re looking at well informational richness and energetic, you know, and the energy needed to maintain that informational richness, basically exponentially increasing, and the summit on that on that chart is the human brain and human cultural production basically. So yeah, if you look at sort of the more reductionistic scientific, scientific framing of things, we’re just you know on the pale blue dot and not really have any significance at all but when you frame this in complexity terms we don’t know of anything more complex than us. So, yeah, so two more points on that sorry there was, I had to answer a call. No worries. One is that means that human beings not only possess symbols or make use of symbols they are themselves in symbols. Right, they have they themselves are disclosers of reality. So there’s a kind of participatory knowing in that symbolic sense. So, I’m doing a review of Tillich right now for a course I’m teaching and so that’s sort of Tillichian idea. So we’re not just possessors of symbols. We are, we are symbolic of being at fist and says something analogous that we, you know, we don’t have a model. The self doesn’t have the model of the world the self is a model of the world kind of thing. So, I think that there’s consonant there. And then I wanted to say there is perhaps something more complex, which is of course the distributed cognition of collective and right that supports collective intelligence. And that would also if this argument follows that would also not only possess symbolic rep on the world, it would itself be a more profound symbolic disclosure of being. I think that’s getting us deeply into the religious registers, as soon as we, we move from, because it’s very, you know, you can, the enlightenment and you know the romantic response we know yes we have symbols and we manipulate them. And I think that’s leaving out this participatory relation know that the way we actually are symbols. Yes, both at the individual and at the collective level, and that religion is the attempt, and not, you know, not without significantly, you know, significant fails of significant failures of significant moral consequence or anything like that, but religion is the attempt to enter into, like, a, a proper participation in that symbolic disclosure to be a symbol, either individually and collectively, and I just wanted to throw that into the mix and see how that landed for you. Yes, so there’s a couple things that come up from that. I’ll address the main part after this little first little aspect which is just that the causal power is an interesting thing to consider because on the one hand yes from the scope of the universe, human beings and the planet, you know, yeah, what have you. But if you just look at sort of the framework of what we see that we are able to accomplish with symbolic learning, and how much causal power that unleashes for human beings. I guess I just wanted to point that out at least at the level of scope, and also to note that we don’t know where that’s going at history is evolving and time is unfolding and so you know folks like Bobby is area and see us eventually having and others to see us having a much grander causal impact on the broader universe, but certainly within our local level we can see that. But as for the symbolic aspect this is really crucial and this is a big I take up a lot of time and this thing I’m working on to really unpack this because I can I can I can get at this actually through Greg’s framework I think pretty well because he talks about justification systems. And basically, you can think about what we are doing with symbolic information as coming up with justification symbols across different scales. Now, that’s a nonlinear process as well because we get in culture rated using symbolic justification systems. So, we are both updating the symbolic justification systems through our learning processes, and then we are in cultivating the next members of society using those updated mental models and so on and so forth so there’s a way in which we really need to understand individuals as being networked into symbolic processing systems however you want to think about that it’s very important because we’re not atomized individuals. We are my individuality, my self consciousness is formed by means of symbolic information that I get you know so there’s this really important relationship between what are called collective representations and sociology and the kinds of like egoic identity structures that we form, and I’ll talk about that in a little bit, but that’s really that’s really crucial. So, we are all that and, and those things exist in a kind of transpersonal way and then the last thing I want to say to is Greg to your whole model as well. I think you can. If you look at the periodic table you’re kind of seeing that each of those kind of columns becomes a way of networking, you know comes together right and so what definitely yet with symbolic information is essentially the networking of neural nets or minds together right so symbolic information is a way of bringing together minds in a way that we’re able to speak with each other, and where we’re headed of course is now with the distributed cognition of you know AI and whatnot we’ve networked symbolic information into a way that we’re now engaging with and so that process you know again kind of iterates and continues but anyway. Yeah, well let me let me just speak to that because that’s 100% agree not to, you know, we can certainly disagree but I do agree. The way what for me emerge with justification systems theory is the human psychological level. So we’ll get together and all of my own justifications egoically a family will develop a justification system. And at the same time that’s then nested in what I call the large scale systems of justification provide the superstructure that legitimize sort of magistrates to regulate institutionalized technological structures. And so there’s this iterative nested element of a human psychology situated in a socio anthropological political large scale system, and there’s this constant iterative forces, you know you get somebody like Hitler. At a particular point and you get an individual that then is creating a broadcast function that can create a collective. This is so central to me in the center of the tree of life is this mean flower, and it’s got a big metaphysical empirical or the empiricals the data through the metaphysicals the concepts and categories that represents the large scale and around it is each of the small smalls each individual and it’s this iterative process between self and society. And you’re absolutely right that we get socialized into become conventional and then set individuals become post conventional press the edges and we see that nested iterative process. And ultimately when John and I think are talking about strong transcendence is what is the ingredients in relationship these large scale systems and how do they embed participation collectively to create sort of the collect epistemic that opens up potentialities in the world. Yeah, so on the on this front and I think this will kind of tie these things together. Okay, so there’s great work, Brett Anderson is doing it and, you know, I’m trying to do some of this stuff as well is bringing into some of this conversation ideas around worldviews chaos and order and the kind of process that undergoes with, you know, in the kind of archetypal what we think of the great stories and what they’re doing. And the hero’s journey and that sort of a thing basically going into the unknown the chaotic the entropic and then coming coming back into the world with something that sort of well enhances viability right for the collective again you’re sort of saving the world from entropic breakdown by reaching into chaos and coming back into order but then you’ve extended that front of order and chaos and that sort of critical edge and you get that’s you know the complexity advanced so John to your point about the disclosure of more reality. That’s it I mean right if we live if you kind of want to use the metaphor image of there’s this void of chaos and sort of chaotic, you know, entropic, you can even think of it as you know homogenous equilibrium, and the kind of, you know, penetration of that into the unknown. And then, and then where that becomes restructured in a way that can basically become intelligible right at a higher level of complexity. You’ve made a transcendent leap and that’s what we’re doing when we’re leveling up in our worldviews which is where I was going to kind of get to next in this basic idea but it’s a really lovely way of thinking about it. And so yeah, I’ll put one more thing on that because I think I’m actually talking about them later this week Michael Levin in his really interesting work on sort of exploration of morphological bio physiological space uses the term I call it a bio cognitive light cone for that level but basically what he’s saying is there’s a there’s an attractor state that this thing can move toward and then we can think about the radius of that light cone across number of different levels and I would say we’re looking at the radius of a bio psychosocial or living mental cultural and then maybe more kind of light cone in relation and the radius of that is some of what we’re talking about and a collective intelligence of a capacity would be sort of the highest radiance you know we can imagine God or as really holding the, you know, the, the imagination of God. The original radius of that that we’re aspiring to so that that is just another kind of angle that I think corresponds and aligns very closely with what we’re talking about here. Yeah. Well, so yeah, this, this kind of brings me into the next slash, I think maybe more or less last part of this whole thing that I was going to lay out but I’m also this is good. This is really good to have this back and forth. So I could just jump into that or we could keep it. Yeah, go ahead. So, so yeah so this is, I think maybe more of the novel stuff that I want to throw into the mix here, because what I’m trying to do a lot is zero in on the symbolic complexification front, which is going to mean looking at culture, and how, yeah, essentially the learning process has unfolded through culture and and disclosed more of reality in the way that we’re talking about kind of creating iterative transcendent moves. And we, and actually I wasn’t even going to get into this but I’m glad we did because it’s really important, there’s a really important mechanism for understanding that process which I’m calling the individual collective feedback cycle which is what we were just getting at which is that symbolic ideas get generated, they enculturate but then people kind of push the boundaries of that, and then you wind up sort of getting a gradual distributional shift in symbolic complexification over time and that’s a way of understanding kind of cultural evolution. Yeah, so I mean, Dan champion I’ve been going through Brandon, and especially reason and philosophy and spirit of trust. And I mean, this is basically his take on Hagel. This is what he, this is what he says Hagel was actually proposing. And when you get out of sort of the, you know, the first appraisal of Hagel put it in this very pseudo religious, you know, deep. And you take it out and you put it into this language of intelligibility and rationality and we are responsible to prop, you know, to, to how things have been prioritized in the past we’re responsible to the future, like, so, our, our, our, our acts of justification to use Greg’s language are precedent respecting and they try to be precedent setting, and then we’re doing this very thing. And it caught me and then of course, that and how reality is disclosed through that is geist for Hagel in a powerful way. Yes. Yeah, yeah. And, and so, so, reading Habermas has been really influential. So, right, so, so basically right you get you get Hagel talking about dialectics and then you get marks doing dialectical materialism which in some ways is a really important move right because we’ve got to naturalize this thing right. But of course, Hagel, I’m sorry to Marx is too simplistic and basically makes all of culture to sort of a superstructure to economic means of production. So then Habermas comes around and does a reconstruction of dialectical materialism, and he grounds it on the kinds of learning processes that I’m talking about and communicative action and this sort of thing. Exactly, exactly. That’s very consonant with what Brandon is doing right that’s exactly what randoms project, and it’s very constant with justification systems theory in fact Brandon talks about justification and the Habermas structure which I didn’t know about when I came because I was ignorant. But when I learned about Habermas frame I was like oh my gosh I should have been more aware of this but enormous amounts of concepts. Yeah, so so then what I’m really interested by is trying to get into this with some specificity right it’s one thing to kind of recognize some broad patterns and trends but then it’s like, is there a way to measure this or something like that right and we talked about you know energy or free energy and that sort of thing and there are other metrics or, you know, attempted metrics for complexification at different, you know, levels of the stack but what would that look like in the sympa symbolic information processing. So here I’ve been very influenced by Daniel Gortz’s work or Hansi Freinach and bringing in and I also mentioned, Habermas and others who are basically using learning models to think about this process and you know one of the great educational pedagogical thinkers of the 20th century and epistemologists was Piaget. And, and when you look at so Habermas is using Piaget’s models essentially and what comes from that and Kohlberg and that sort of moral development that sort of thing, but a lot of work’s been done on those fronts over the past 3040 years right so you get this Neo-Piagetian or post-Piagetian consensus. Yes, yes. Exactly. And actually Greg intuited this when you were talking about level ontology he at one point was like oh MHC and this sort of thing. And so this is a very interesting way so what I what I’m looking at is this if you look at these models of the 20th century and the 20th century complexity and the two I’m particularly drawing from our commons as model of hierarchical complexity. And then there’s another one called dynamic skill theory which basically, you know, they’re basically mapping the same levels of hierarchical complexity. Now part of the Piagetian epistemological program is that our knowledge kind of comes out of the body in some ways. But what I kind of focus on so there are a number of those stages of hierarchical complexity that are basically just purely sensory motor right and Piaget identified that in the early process. Once you get language in the mix though then you’re dealing with purely kind of symbolic hierarchical complexity. So in my work I’m sort of synthesizing those two models of hierarchical complexity, lopping off the sensory motor bit and just looking at the linguistic complexification of basically symbolic information. So that gives us sort of 10 or so what I call symbolic complexity grades of just thinking about how this works. And then we have an actual pattern that’s in many ways empirically grounded and also theoretically and mathematically even very robust to think about how symbolic information complexification unfolds and what that looks like. I mentioned Gortz and Freinock’s work because they are doing some really interesting things around looking at cultural history in the way Habermas and others were doing through this kind of learning process. And when you do that you see a learning the the the learning patterns that we see in these hierarchical models of complexity become manifested in the collective representations of cultures over time. And so this gets us into the main thrust I want to argue which is that at this point now we’re dealing with ideas of religion, spirituality, you know institutional frameworks, God, etc. And my whole thing that I’m very fascinated in and trying to bring my biblical studies background to as well is looking at the very ways that God and religion complexify and evolve. And of course with all the value normative frameworks that go along with that. So I can actually just do one thing real quick and then I’ll kind of wrap up my little spiel is that what we’re doing right now can be situated in this sort of learning process a cultural symbolic process right. If you want to think about the two worlds mythologies that we get from the axial age, the move into modern reductionism but John really you know well summarized at the beginning of the series. And then this attempt to try to bridge into some kind of transcendent naturalism, etc. Right, you can see this process unfolding culturally in terms of the symbolic complexification thing. So basically you know, you know, the actual age is this cultural movement into MHC abstract stage thinking where you get the abstraction from the stories and this sort of thing and then you get the universal one you know you get the, the abstract conceptual stuff the immaterial other world right. So in many ways you can read the entire axial edge shift through this learning process development that goes on in this sort of leveling up of collective representations according to a new level of symbolic complexity. Now, that is sacred right that was sacred for that world and that was the, that was the locus of the engaging with transcendence and if you look at where the world had come from it was you know dominated by, yeah, basically, empires and you know kind of master slave dialectic sort of stuff. So then to jump from that into deep moral interior landscape and a world of the abstract and the, the other transcendent. This is a, this is a leveling up process that is rightly deemed sacred because it is disclosing something more about reality is part of this learning process, and it is perceived as an experience of transcendence. And now when you get into sort of the dawn of modernity, and the advent of modern science you’re dealing with the next stage of hierarchical complexity or full formal operational thought, which is all about linking basically abstract variables and defining sets of relationships and doing that and studying the world that way, and you start to get this mechanistic universe. And of course that does go in in in many kind of almost pathological directions or at least maybe potentially destructive ones for for all sorts of meaning making but at the same time, there’s a sense in which what what sacred becomes the truth, and the quest for knowledge and the you know the sort of notions of progress, etc. Anyway, if I had more time I could go into looking at more cultural history this way but I think what we’re really doing us right now in this broader kind of metamodern scene I think is trying to do that next step now I missed most modernism in there but you know you go from modernity to post modernity, and now we’re entering this new thing. And we are in the sort of meta systematic vantage where we’re taking into account all these different systems of knowledge, we’re trying to see the meta systematic through line that unites them all. And we’re also trying to integrate the insights of all those so that we’ve got, you know, the best of, I think you call it the sweet juiciness of the two worlds mythology. We want to bring that in right but we also want the modern skepticism or the modern rationalism and we want the postmodern pluralism, and we want to be able to see a meta narrative that unfolds through all of this so anyway, yeah, that’s my basic just is that this has been a successive layering of kind of further disclosures of reality and higher levels of symbolic complexification. And of course then this starts to tap into issues of you know the fifth joint point and whatnot but we can understand the sacred and transcendence as being that we’re trying to complexify that call to level up into new disclosures of reality new levels of learning and understanding about reality that give us a more optimal grip and enhance our viability in the universe so that’s kind of my, my time was great. I want to I want to draw you out on one point you sort of, you did a updated and improved version of the Durkheim in thesis that you know this gets taken up into collective representations God etc. And there’s Vygotsky counterpointing Piaget there’s the top down of culture right with the bottom up of sensory motor. And so all of that was was what you you you capped on it. And then what I what I was expecting after you just made that sentence as I was expecting something like, and this call should be a call to exactly an evolution of the sacred. And again I’m in the midst of redoing till it for a course so this is the God above the God of theism right that call that if this argument is correct, and we are in this particular moment, then this is not just, you know, a revision of how we understand ourselves or even reality, it is a fundamental way in which we are trying to afford and be receptive to a new disclosure of the sacred a new way in which God can be, which sounds of course ridiculous, but, but that’s exactly what he’s at the end of the courage to be right he’s proposing right and in the God above the God of theism or as I sometimes say the God beyond God. Yeah. And so, is that fair to to to lob that back at you and see what I see. Yeah, I mean, of course I mean my way into this whole project was through that lens basically. So, I’m now I’m kind of coming back to, to the whole theoretical foundations of a project like that but that is where this comes to in many different ways I mean, so till it right I mean he, the idea of ultimate concern is itself a version of doing a move like that right it’s yeah yeah so you’re moving actually in Fowler I didn’t mention but Fowler who’s doing something similar talking about stages of faith. Yeah, he uses a phrase ultimate environment. And so I like that as well because entities environments are looking in some ways for that ultimate environment that will be maximally viability enhancing and so, but but more to your point. Yes, one of the. I mean we could really, there’s a lot to this whole thing but I guess briefly I would say this, I think, sets up a participatory aspect to to the religious life in a way that’s not, you know, an inheritance of traditional practice and belief but an actual generative co creative process. Because collectively I mean and john this is our earlier conversations right with layman and whatnot getting us exactly this is, is where this really leads to is that once you realize that okay we’re working with inherited world models basically which are these worldviews of shared representations for navigating the world, and they’re no longer adequate to meet the needs of the moment, we need to level up there’s an existential chaotic element to that. And so, and we need to do that together. But we also need to do it at a personal level and basically be networking or shared personal representations of this sort of thing so that’s like when I think talk about building the cathedral. That’s the whole idea right. And developing a personal mythology, engaging in the myth of poetic activity that we see our symbols right but we’re able to sort of network together, and to then make possible new forms of thought, which are we’re going to need if we’re going to more optimally navigate our environment towards viability. And that’s sort of what you’re talking about and what you’ve been talking about in other conversations I’ve seen and I participated in at dovetails with what Rita was talking about last time very much, very much, very much so. And it also it also gets to the dangers to that, yes, that were mentioned at the outset right because, because anytime you enter the chaotic to look for that next level of transcendence you’re in the realm of chaos you’re in the underworld you’re in the. You’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the underworld, you’re in the this whole narrative in some ways that we’re telling as optimally and coherently as possible so it becomes a kind of intuitive groundwork for people to engage this, while also with a built in epistemic humility because you realize that there’s this transcendent process that sort of narrative and you’re not getting the absolute final necessarily you’re getting you’re getting the next step and so there’s all sorts of really important sort of checks and balances that need to be part of a project like that, but it is the urgent I think kind of religious innovation project and that we’re engaged in and it’s the religion of no religion it’s emergent ism, you know people trying to engage this but also trying to be wary and responsible to the inherent dangers as well so there be dragons. So, seems to me that there’s no two things then that also are going to need some sort of reciprocal re symbolization. One is reason. And we have to get it outside of the Cartesian framework. And we’ve already bumped up against that in important ways, and return reason to, you know, that that that that note or that notion of right overcoming self deception and affording reality disclosure in an interlocking fashion as the primary thing. And then of course, and then that that’s going to relate ultimately to wisdom but I’m thinking also particularly of courage. Again, right, because it seems to me that courage properly understood, and we have, of course, in the courage to be a huge attempt to rethink that and re symbolize it properly see it as a profound symbol, because courage seems to me to be the virtue that describes exactly what you’re talking about the courageous person is the one that goes into the chaos, but has the wisdom and the wherewithal to not give, not to go down. You know, the, the rabbit holes the self deceptive self destructive rabbit holes and then there’s something about the two of them being, you know, reason, or maybe the three reason, courage, and wisdom. I mean, we are still part of part of what I struggle against is so much of the language by which we understand reason, courage and wisdom is either the actual age formulation, or the Cartesian modern formulation postmodernism basically tries to sort of tear them both down, but it doesn’t give it doesn’t really provide an alternative. It just asserts justice social justice and really annoying. Annoying manner, precisely because mere assertion is no protection against exploitation manipulation deception, etc. It’s, it’s no defense against corruption. Right, right, we’ll just be just okay. So that’s that’s why I’m not dismissive of the whole project I think there’s a lot of argument but that part. So, it seems to me to get back after that sort of brushing aside and I’m just perhaps an irrelevant at this moment, digression is like, it seems to me that we are, it’s not. I, I, I, you know, Berto echo talked about semantic drift I feel something like epistemic drift. So we you know we have to re symbolize God, but then also reason, and then also wisdom and courage, and the self. And, one thing about that that’s positive is we have a model for that from the past, which is religion religion does exactly that job and nothing else does that the things that have tried to do that have been disaster. But the problem then is that all the religions we have are mired in, they are the actual age that has been refracted through the enlightenment, and then been corroded, or in some sense, or eroded or practice the right word by the encounter with modernism. So, it’s like, I find that I’m sorry, I there’s a there’s a, like, I think everything you said was beautiful and then we get to this, what, there’s a Kairos but I find that there’s an aporia in the Kairos. Right. A profound aporia. I keep sort of feel that I’m at times I’m, you know, I think I do not think that all the work I’ve done or Greg has done or you’ve done is a waste of time I’m not saying that at all. Right. I’m not being Socrates and oh by the way all the definitions have now collapsed. That’s not what I’m doing. Since the end of the program, John. No, I, this was great guys. That’s the end of you know but I want to, you know, precisely because you have done such an astonishingly good job Brendan. I want to, I want to probe you about your sense, do you have such a sense of encountering this aporia, and what is coming up, what is being evoked and provoked in you by encountering this aporia. That’s not a fair question you can just say no but great. No, it’s wonderful. Okay, a couple things and given my own history with kind of deconstructing a lot of my evangelical faith I’m not usually want to fall on a word like this but I think it actually is relevant which is faith, which is that one of the things that I think something like this, this framework helps me with facing that is, there’s a sense of faith that this is, this is going to emerge. It’s, it’s, we can do our best and we are, I think, we’re doing what we can as individuals in this very complex system. We’re trying to develop new symbols and move the symbolic, you know, complexity forward. But yeah, it’s incredibly paralyzing sometimes to appreciate how, how much of just a small little node you are in this very complex network. And so I think to meet that kind of crushing feeling, there needs to be a kind of requisite meeting of that with the courage, the courage of faith or I’m mixing a bunch of till it together here now but that’s that’s fine that’s perfect. But but you know you have to sense that okay if there is this fascinating beautiful pattern of increasing learning and deepening consciousness and I didn’t even get into this but I, there’s a, we need to talk about how this is moving towards the good as well. Of course, of course, yes. That you have to also own your own, you know, kind of like the Schleier Machian sense of being in the face of the divine. You’re just a creature, you know, the creaturely sense of how big everything is. And that but the faith that this sort of DNA, this code will do what the code does, and we’ll keep moving the process along so I feel like we just need to do our part in that. You know, we’re little organelles in the cell and without us the cell would fall apart, but we’re not, you know, that’s the whole beauty in some ways of complexity it’s like it’s all about the parts but then it’s also all about the whole and the parts are just playing their part for the whole and if there’s a beautiful dance that needs to go on so yeah I think you’re getting at something really crucial which is all right what now what next what do we do about this and how do we rise to whatever this means. I think that’s what kind of you’re getting at. Yeah, I’m getting at that definitely but I’m also getting at this beautiful formulation can with a couple of moves be the ground for just profound despair. Oh, interesting. So yeah, I’d like to hear about that. Well, like I just said, I mean you can you can do all this and you can get you can get well you can get basically sort of the existentialist response to Kago which is, yes, you have this grand machinery, right, and but we really don’t understand it it is always overwhelming. And so, you know, you’re overwhelmed by the ambiguities of human life the uncertainty, the irremovable uncertainties. You know, this is the Kirk of guardian classic Kirk of guardian response, and then, and then given what I just said you know what this, like, are we, is there a reason to believe we’re capable of this, and then you throw into it, you know, the human conception the inherent combinatorial explosive nature of reality. The fact that with radical emergence there’s radical uncertainty, and I think this is a really important idea for any conception of reason, or I think we’ve come to the end of the project of understanding uncertainty as probable risk. And that of course is a thing, but it does not grasp that kind of uncertainty that is introduced with radical emergence and amination I would say but you know what I mean, we have reality is like this if it’s a self complexifying reality there it you know this is a white novelty that is there that introduces, like, you know, a radical uncertainty within, you know the combinatorial explosive ambiguous tempting to self deception thing. And then that’s what I say you get this sort of aporetic sense and that that what I just did, I think, can cause despair. Right. Yeah, I tried to evoke it as best I could there. Yeah, no, I think that that’s, I’ll speak to that from my own perspective. So for me, yeah, I think I agree with everything there. I will say that I, for me, if you think about the knowledge as well, you know, as an island and as you expand you actually expand the uncertainty, and inevitably. I’m, I feel like I’m situated in an agnostic space ultimately I don’t have foundational truth in relation and therefore I am inevitably situated at a backdrop of a poria that I’ll always have to deal with. That’s what I that is what I expect. I will say that within my own experience of the evolution of this frame, the cumulative knowledge that it grounds me in does situate it homes me in a particular sort of way that that that is sort of the opposite of a poria, at least within the ground of what I would say my soul spirit feels so I feel networked into a bubble of ambiguity that actually has a bubble of clarity within it that holds my soul to the ground. So, speaking for myself, what I find is in the aporia and is is what I’m okay, but I don’t know what to do. I guess. I’m like, where how do you interface? You talked about I’m an entity and membrane over course time and then you get the enormous uncertainty of the current institutional structure inertia embodied knowledge systems what people actually need across a wide variety due to cut and I get overwhelmed myself with the engineering problem or the, the, the, and I like some of the things that Jonathan said in his perspective is like, okay, what can we ask of ourselves in terms of action was an attitudinal shift. I think that’s a dynamic. There’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what we should do. I don’t know if John how that lands in terms of what when I hear aporia that’s certainly where I find myself repeatedly landing. Yeah, there’s definitely it’s definitely that. But I’m also. Yes, so resonating deeply with that. But I, but I also, I’m also resonating with what Brendan said when I want to draw him out a bit but I’ll try and. So, I mean, you have faith, and I take it you don’t mean assertion without evidence I take it you don’t mean the pretense of certainty. I don’t take it you mean the attempt to silence opposition or all the other meanings of faith that we’ve had you’ve had this ultimate concern, and then you have this sense of being called by something beyond you, you know, record talks about, you know, that weird way we’re tempted by evil and we’re tempted by the good. And you alluded to the good and then there’s something like the momentum gives you a sense that you’re being called by the good, which is beyond any final formulation but it keeps the promise that the through line of complexifying right disclosure, enhanced intelligibility will never be broken. That’s the kind of faith, I have, and that I have that sense of being called like magnetically drawn towards the good and that that promise that promise moment by moment, century by century, eon by eon is maintained and this big history gives me right the trust that’s at the core of the promise. So, that would be my response. I’m interested in what I want to hear if possible what both of you think about that as a sort of a post Higillian right neoplatonic kind of faith. Yeah, I think that that’s really that was very beautifully said when I mean faith. That’s been such a distorted word but even if you go back to the original Greek like pistis it meant something like trust. Yes, when I when I think faith I think there’s a trust in in in the way things will unfold, and that’s not ungrounded it’s grounded on 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, moving in a particular direction. So, and I think, you know, you can look back and get the precedence and see the pattern unfolding, which is the grounds for that but then you can look forward, and whether that’s to in Greg Smith of poetic expression and elephant sun god or a kaleidoscopic I or whatever symbolization we want to render for this sort of or Bobby is Arians omega and you know day shirt and and all that. There’s something that we are moving to. And that is the promise of, of, of the history the there’s a kind of reimagining of sacred history you could say going on in a project like this, where it but not in a naive way and appreciating all of the, the endless sort of right it’s not it’s also not just that everything becomes more and more better. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no activate the potential and we need something like that through line that that that calling figure or image or symbol that Orients us in that direction because when you get enough parts oriented in that direction towards that attractor you’re gonna get You’re gonna get movement in that direction. And so Yeah, I think in many ways these are perennial issues. There’s nothing necessarily unique about talking about the religious Aspirational project and all that it entails and the struggles of living in a world in which there’s a lot of incoherence and chaos and disconnection and whatnot But um, but there’s also like yeah, there’s something that we aspire to that’s that’s in that that um, That I think is sort of the guide and and that also complexifies too. So that that’s a that’s part of the process I think the last thing maybe i’ll say about that too is that when you identify the pattern, right? There’s something There’s a deep uh, there’s a deep logic to it in some ways that is is is also maybe reassuring in some in some way, uh, that We can also celebrate and when we see that unfolding and when we see that manifested in the world Um, and I think yeah again just to bring back the perennial aspect This is what the religious life has sort of always been about is like you do your work you you you add your part to the Cathedral and you you hope that it continues, right? And there may be times when there are earthquakes or when people give up the project or whatever But all we can do as sort of agents in this arena is uh is Is is our work? I don’t know if that’s a if a satisfying answer, but yeah, it is but I wanted to hear what greg had to say too Yeah, no, obviously the you know The way to my work took me into this sort of big history Complexification formulation and I now situate myself in that story. I I have faith in that story I see myself as carrying a little baton of energy information across the stack that is trying to build frequencies and nodes and networks and and it is the case that I See the unfolding of that in a way that both gives me sort of a pori. I mentioned the attractor You know the third attractor. I like that formulation daniel schmoktenberger You know alexander bard others have certainly given this idea that as the chaos of our current situation emerges And the uncertainty emerges we have a lot of danger for the response to either be a breakdown or then Totalitarian control we are as you go through flux the dialectic of chaos and order becomes intense and we’re definitely dangerous I think we’re in a dangerous point in our lives To find ourselves either into a chaotic breakdown and global civilization collapse kind of dynamic or retaliation against that that’s going to Centralize control in a very dangerous way with the digital You know ai scenario being something that now could get control of a network Of a new medium of information processing that creates a control variable that that enslaves us all But I think both of those are very plausible and dangerous realities and a protopian reality is also possible meaning an awareness of what a much better awareness of our human natures and much better awareness of our need for Relationship a much better understanding of what I call the wisdom stack from energy to matter of life mind culture And its relationship our relationship with each other and the planet and then the digital that would afford Collective well-being and in a different way So for me the issue is the orientation or the good is how can I be a good ancestor? What would be the ripple effects of my activity across the arc of time as long as I could imagine it? And I can only imagine it to the back half of the 21st century Maybe a little further and then my little cognitive light gum the elephant sun god can see further But my little light con is gonna it’s gonna fade out and do that and that that feels orienting and and part of the story and my Small role in that story that that gives what my soul spirit orients to Yeah, and I I want to just Add one further aspect to that which is that I think it’s important to appreciate the the needs of the moment, especially because that really is The the locus of of meaning making right and I mean your work especially tends to focus on that Well, I do think that there’s a need for the ultimate environment and the the biggest map possible. It is when you start Exploring into those reaches that the despair and the uncertainty and maybe even the nihilism starts to come hard and fast so if you want to just frame it in this sense, right of like uh What does this get us if you want to put it in those terms, right? Like Well, I think it gets us a shift from a world view that as you said at the beginning of from a materialist reductionistic meaningless nihilistic destructive you know, uh mentality that is Leading us further from viability and and heading causing us to head towards a cliff Um, we need to meet the needs of that moment in our environment wisely and successfully and so maybe the broad Scale scope of the entire story is a bit You know daunting either in the sublime or a terrifying way But at the very least I feel very called and driven and passionate about Trying to respond to the needs of the moment and that at the time of a meaning crisis is like the most meaningful thing That I think people can feel called to do so. I mean literally where this project leads as we were just talking to is becoming participatory uh Artists of the new divine, right? And if that’s not a meaningful project, I don’t know what is so Um, yeah, just another frame for that Slowly that’s an excellent place to draw things to a close because we are uh, you come to the end of our a lot of time but um Uh, I just wanted to take this moment to thank you. Uh brendan that was uh, Amazing work and I really look forward to your book Uh, and if you want somebody to read it and write a blurb for it. I’m happy to do so. I’m like, um, uh, Really excellent But i’d like to give you and greg Um the final word perhaps we’ll start with greg and then we’ll end with you brendan Yeah, no, i’ll just echo john’s thought I thought that the setup That we got from the sort of network of the entities in the field and then the Coalesce of that and dissipative structures and the emergence of information and then symbolic and then ultimately we’re really a symbolic Semantic stack and this is what meaning is and its meaning is what’s relevant for the entity um, it was very of course congruent and But the issue the orientation then towards our collective Structures and the meaning making that that affords us in in a different fundamental grammar than we’ve been given at least from the modern natural physical science worldview is I think very exciting and inspiring and then to To bring the angle that you have brought to it is really I look forward to uh expanding on this next time Uh when we sort of you know, we can I’d be invite you to share some a little bit perhaps What we would do next time and bridge that but you know, thank you absolutely brendan You know how much I admire your work and it’s been lovely to hear your articulation of it here Thank you. Uh, thank you both so much. This is fantastic. I mean, uh, yeah in some ways It’s a bit of a firehose But this context to be able to get into this stuff is so rewarding for me and I really do think very important Um, there’s something and you know john when you’re laying out some of your philosophical arguments You talked about the importance of convergence And I just see so much convergence happening in very fascinating ways not just amongst us but amongst you know Many of the people we named and many we didn’t that there’s something happening, right? There’s something going on there and there’s a lot of sense in which there is some some kind of attractor. That’s uh that that we’re oriented towards and um So I appreciate that and that is a deeply meaningful thing to be a small part of that Uh conversation which you know in its most aspirational way is is really trying to forge a new World view and a new potential way of being in the world that is oriented towards wisdom integrity Uh, etc. So, um, yeah, I look forward to continuing the conversation next time and uh, and maybe Developing the thoughts or challenging them or going in whatever direction, uh seems to emerge but thank you all very much is great Yeah, so one of the things that i’ll uh, just I think encourage us to it’s like, okay There’s an emerging architecture. What are we seeing doing? Hopeful for challenging with in terms of like if this is where we are now and it’s the situation we find ourselves in Uh, what affordances should we be seeking? How should we orient our attitude? What is the way in which we can? Uh, yeah challenge this to make it more refined and effective Incorporated amongst within a group and then you know, is there are the things that we should be doing or trying to do? Uh as it unfolds Yeah, I want to do all of that Um, and first of all, uh, just to say it wasn’t a water hose you were laying out a framework we can in the second Episode we can together we can go into this right and what I would like my request is everything that greg said and then I want more explication elucidation on this reciprocal reconstruction of religion and god that we’ve been banging up against and how does that you have like interact with everything greg was talking about about what we do and what the practice like that’s what I would like to try and um probe and uh Draw out from you if possible That sounds great. Yeah Okay. Thank you so much gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you