https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=JmOmwLWziAc
Hello everyone. I’m frequently humbled and touched, motivated and encouraged when people contact me by email or texting or commenting or they greet me on the street and tell me that my work has been transformative for them. This has been the case for you and also if you want to share it with other people, please consider supporting my work by joining my Patreon community. All financial support goes to the Vervecki Foundation where my team and I are diligently working to create the science, the practices, the teaching and the communities. If you want to participate in my work and many of you ask me that, how can I participate? How can I get involved? Then this is the way to do it. The Vervecki Foundation is something that I’m creating with other people and I’m trying to create something as virtuously as I possibly can. No grifting, no setting myself up as a guru. I want to try and make something really work so that people can support, participate and find community by joining my Patreon. I hope you consider that this is a way in which you can make a difference and matter. Please consider joining my Patreon community at the link below. Thank you so very much for your time and attention. Welcome everyone to the Cognitive Science Show. This is episode 11 of Transcendent Naturalism. These episodes in this show just keep growing in depth and breadth and I’m loving it and just loving it. We have a special guest. For many of you, there’s no introduction needed. This is Jordan Hall and he’s going to comment on the argument to date. Of course, my partner through all of the Cognitive Science Shows shows. Greg Enriquez is here again. I’ll just say a little bit about what happened last time and then I’ll pass it over to Greg to and then Jordan is going to pick that up and lead into the main joint point at which he wants to make his case for as a response to the proposal of Transcendent Naturalism. The last two episodes were with a co-writer of mine, co-author with me, Brett Anderson. He and Mark Miller and I wrote the paper integrating Predictive Processing and Relevance Realization Theory. He’s been doing a lot building on my suggestion that I did with Leo Ferraro in 2013 about self-organizing criticality and relevance realization, integrating all of that together with Jordan Peterson’s idea about the monomyth as a form of self-organizing criticality relevance realization going on at a more comprehensive level. He’s stitching my work, Greg’s work, and Jordan’s work together plus the work that he and I did with Mark. Very, very powerful framework and he throws in some Nietzsche to spice things up with some nihilistic sauce. He set things up very nicely in resonance to, I believe it was the third or the fourth episode with Greg and I, we were talking more about the sacred dimension of this proposal. Brett really gave some extra depth to that. In some ways, he therefore built upon there was a very interesting work that Brendan had been doing, Brendan Graham Dempsey. The way this is weaving and taking shape is really quite powerful and I’m learning a lot along the way. I’m now going to turn things over to Greg who will extend things even more, shorten up even more, and then we’ll go into it. Hey, this is Brett looking forward today. It’s always a pleasure, but this one is particularly special. You guys, in particular, were talking about the religion. It’s not a religion for a long time. This transcendent naturalism, I think, picks up that ball and looks to extend it. I love the opportunity for the three of us to jam and jazz together around this. In relationship to Brett in particular, I think he really built off very nicely what Brendan Graham Dempsey was doing, both very consistent with the idea of where are we in building a world view that can bridge science and spirituality and orient us going forward. Jordan, you and I talked some about fifth joint point framing. I looked to kind of enrich that today. Some of the things that Brett really spoke to, which I know Jordan, you’ll be very familiar with, was the self-organizing criticality for the development of complexification, very consistent with what we talked about in terms of the ontology of nature and the nature of human epistemology conforming to that. He emphasized self-organizing criticality, both as sort of the evolution of complexification and as in some ways a frame for consciousness itself, where consciousness is then found on the edge of order and chaos in a particular way. Then he connects, as John said, to maps of meaning and so much Jordan Peterson’s work and sort of extracts a myth, the hero myth, and connects that to consciousness. What he does there to me is he’s sort of doing our science into mythos, framing, grounding that in a way that orients us towards meaning. He is also very influenced by Nietzsche and sort of Nietzsche’s call to see how do we situate ourselves in the problem of both fact and value, now so-called that God is dead, or how do we resurrect a conception of God that orients us towards the sacred and the transcendent. His series is Intimations of a New World View, and it speaks also to his own journey and invites us to consider ways we might think about both self-organizing criticality, consciousness, recursive relevance realization, and the hero myth and journey as ways to kind of organize that. That brings us to you in relation to the deep thinking you’ve done in relationship to where we find ourselves. Based on our conversation we had a week or so ago, I’m really looking forward to diving in and getting some of your thoughts and riffing and jamming accordingly. Thank you. So maybe it’s just a bit of a preamble. What I noticed when I was listening to some of the previous episodes is I had a very visceral sensation of, it’s like three moves in a row. The first was, wow, this is great stuff. It really should become, kind of like a famous book. It should become famous. It should become like a movement in science or a movement in spirituality. And then the second thing I had was a very strong feeling of demoralization of like, oh, that’s not going to happen. So I was quite curious, like why? What’s about up with that? And then the last piece was the, I would say the insight that brings me to the topic that I think is going to be the interesting moment for our conversation. And that was that we’re at the end of the moment of the book and the construct that I was working with of how those kinds of things happen was essentially just a model on the arc going from, say, Newton, as one of the earliest examples of somebody riding the rising tide of the book. Someone like Darwin is sitting in some sense of peak book, right? The moment where the book was really clearing the field. And then you sort of think maybe, I don’t know, Dawkins or somebody at the very tail end of the sort of the end of book. And there’s a lot to that. And in fact, I would even go one step deeper and we’re going to move into the fifth joint point in a moment. We may actually be coming to the end of literacy. And there’s an interesting linkage between the Axial Age, the two worlds mythology and the era of literacy, qua literacy. And so we can get our heads around effectively kind of flipping the story upside down from one that is oriented around ideas and thinking about describing the world by means of very rigorous thought and to one that’s orienting around the non-ideal substrates, the material that conditions ideas, of course, both of which have been discussed endlessly in the 19th century. And then of course, the last piece is we’re sitting in a conversation where we have one arc of transcendent naturalism, as you guys discussed it, I think in the first and second episode, you also have the arc of big history as you were describing it. And there’s your joint points. And we’ve also brought in the notion of the meta crisis. And I would dub this practical eschatology. Really used to drop into the religion that’s not a religion, practical eschatology that we are in fact, more or less arguing on the basis of a substantial amount of theoretic and empirical work that the world is coming to an end and the end is not. And in fact, we have a description in the shape of the fifth joint point of something like what that end will look like. And my proposal is today, perhaps we can do the sitting of stride that joint point and in order to participate in some fashion of what’s the other side, like what’s the other side of this thing. That’s actually quite powerful if we think about it, we’re bringing formal cause, we’re bringing a teleological attractor that the arc of literacy and the arc of the work of the relationship between the media structures and the forms of mind that were both conditioned by those media and then making ideas that created further culture have a journey, that they have the journey from the fourth joint point to the fifth joint point and as we’ve accelerated towards this last moment where we’re proximal to that fifth joint point, a lot of narrative arcs are coming to a close. So I feel like that might be a very nice place to spend some time speaking about things that are frankly closer to my area of expertise, like where’s the technology, what is it, where is it going, what’s it doing, things like that. So let’s see. Can I just pause you right there just for a second to, yeah, I deeply embrace and resonate with that framing. I’ll just make a brief note as to how embedded it is in my enactments and that is the book I just published doesn’t mention this coin or garden at all, simply because I do feel in a Marshall McLuhan sort of sense, I do feel we are absolutely on the cusp of a profound transformation of our relationship with each other and with technology and the emergence of the digital globalization. We can think about the terminology perhaps of whatever the next or at least the medium of the next information processing communication network and the implication that that has for our psyche is absolutely front and center and your reflections on technology is exactly, well, a very, very poignant and powerful place to start to think about those interconnections. I just want to grab what’s happened now for me. I’m seeing that we, with Rich and Rita, we laid out sort of ritual and with Brendan, we started to lay out a cosmology and then Brett took that almost like the coiness and now Jordan is supplying us with an eschatology and we’ve already got the philosophy and the psychology. We’re doing pretty well at covering the basis of a religion that’s not a religion or the religion of the future. I can’t use that though, that title has already been grabbed by somebody else. I just wanted to say that it’s interesting how this is sort of unfolding very naturally. We seem to be covering a lot of the dimensions of what is needed for a profound, proper and proportioned ratio to reality, a ratio religio. All right, so let me, I want to propose, it’s actually a little bit like our conversation on governance. I want to propose two concepts and I don’t think it’ll take too long to lay them out, neither of which I’m particularly attached to but I think they’re helpful to begin the process of massaging our minds into thinking about this category in interesting ways. The first is a completely harebrained model of language but I think it’s fun and I’ll throw it out there. In particular in relationship to bringing in the consequences of our relationship with the technology that is coming and that’s kind of the point to say, hey, what does it look like for us to think about the implications of these technologies that are now at our threshold? And then the second is what I’d like to do is maybe do a bit of a deep dive on this question of the digital. Like what really is happening, what are we talking about here and what are the implications of that in its most fundamental sense? Double click on most fundamental. So language. Here’s the argument. The argument is that there are in fact properly three distinct modes of language and the most fundamental mode of language I’ll call family language. So this is the language that an infant learns by being encultured with a group of other people that are speaking the same language and in some sense the essence of family language and here I want to go way back to the actual emergence of language is the coherence or the communion of the group of people. It’s fundamentally about bonding, about relationship and it’s extraordinarily contextual and this is a level of contextuality that we really don’t have a relationship with. It has all the references to all the stories and all the references to all the people are shared by everybody in the group and so tone is 85% of what’s happening because the tone gives you context about the state of the individuals and what’s the conversation we’re having and this is the mother-infant language that has extended to a larger group. The other two modes are almost like inverses of each other. Over here we have what I’ve been calling the trade language. We could also call it the coordination language or the purposeful language meaning that it is precisely defined by the fact that it is decontextualized from that larger very very rich context and is focused on some location where either a narrow functional objective like hunting, hunting together or where in fact you’re bringing into relationship groups that don’t share the same language and so you must reduce the complexity of the language and the complexity of the shared context down to something that can be shared. Say for example trade between two groups that don’t speak the same language. So pigeon would be an example of a classic trade language. Here we have sacred language and this is in the most conserved element we have of that right now is singing or even just music, instrumental music and the point here is that sacred language does not use the modality of propositions or the modality that we have. I have an idea in my head and what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to use some kind of convert to convert that idea into a kind of a token that many many people can receive and then convey it by seems to means of some medium in this case speaking it to you where you grab that token you open up the box you pull out the idea and you load it in your head like copying ideas that sort of simple notion of memetics that’s more like trade language that’s not sacred language. Sacred language is more like attunement and trying to get on the same page in a very deep way to come into group flow and the basic fundamentals of sacred language is something along those lines coming into true communion and by the way oftentimes in a fashion that is deeper than just the human like with our place and with our larger context in which insights can flow. Benita Roy might even maybe the notion of collective insight practice might be an effort to bring back something like sacred language and so historically the argument is that when we begin to move into a space that I’ve sometimes called game may or cosmopolitan imperialism where a political and historical was to grab different kin groups and stick them together into a new political construct a state say in the same city those language modes begin to become problematized most specifically if I actually have three groups that don’t speak the same family language but they have to actually interact with each other a lot suddenly the role of trade language begins to become dominant and what happens over historical time is trade language in fact the language we’re speaking English so dominates that family language evaporates and everybody actually learns what is actually fundamentally a pigeon a trade language a decontextualized language as their family language and by the way as their sacred language and so we now are in a circumstance where we actually think there’s just one language one mode of language and we try to do all the things you know so family and you’re trying to sort of do relational stuff with your spouse you have to go through all this rigmarole of processing and disambiguation and clarification and building psychological and therapeutic constructs to be able to have something like the shared context that is natural to family language because you’re using in fact a trade language to do it and even more so at the level of the sacred and I think a lot of the like notes that I noticed as you guys are going through is the the real challenge of taking words like say faith or eschatology which we we can’t help but intuitively perceive as being meaningful but I want to raise the flag that if we’re listening to them through trade language we’re already in the wrong mode to be interacting with what those things are truly about so the diligence and the carefulness and the effort to go very slowly and try to connect with the let’s say the essence of what is being spoken rather than the the deridian horizontal semantic relationships that are proper in a pigeon language would be that first that that piece right so hold that and we don’t need to go too deeply into because the next part is the part that is the the payload if we imagine lv the role of large language models or of sophisticated ai what I would propose or argue is that that can do the trade language thing qualitatively better than any trade language can in other words an llm can sit in between us and translate between your language and my language understanding let’s say you just speak french and i speak english understanding french understanding english and translating back and forth instantaneously where we can go to do the babblefish thing and i can just hear like the un but even better vastly better and so by hypothesis what this might do is it might break the binding or the domination of trade language because now the best training language is just translation by an ai which at least the level of lms has no domination preference it’s just it’s a pure tool it has currently no self-interest it has no desire to create power the companies that are using it might but at least the technology by itself just does what it does so we can now do the trade language thing in fact we can live in an arbitrarily large cosmopolitan environment let’s say like the internet and not have to learn one dominant language and by the way think about that dominant language to communicate instead we can actually use our own language and have it be translated by a extremely effective and also neutral translator between us now the spaciousness of that what has that has three consequences one is it may actually begin to have an impact downward on the current constructs of imperial language and begin to break apart power and control that is actually just as a consequence of the limitations of having to use trade language as a way of interacting and i believe that’s the case and we may even begin to be noticing that geopolitically second and more interesting for me is to then create space for the re-establishment of family language because at the end of the day humans are still going to learn language from the human beings that they’re their parents but the families that they’re with and i can imagine over a long arc let’s say over hundreds or thousands of years a renaissance in tribal language right we had the kind of the narrowing of the diversity of languages in the human cultural portfolio to what i would propose maybe the low point now but if what i’m arguing is correct we’d actually see an opening because people can rediscover the value of highly nuanced local languages that are very bound to their actual lived context and their lived relationships and get the enormous advantage of using something like that to communicate with each other because it’s no longer dominated by the necessities of trade language and by the way i would also say the same thing about sacred language we may be able to rediscover that mode and reconnect with that mode and that will open up if the argument is even vaguely true will open up a whole new set of possibilities for doing the spirituality thing and doing the religion thing and doing the sacred thing than trying to cludge our way through it using trade language and you know very careful argumentation and thought do we want to spend any time there or do you want me to put the second concept in the middle and then we can go through the larger story i’d like to unpack that what you the argument you’ve made so far i’ve got some questions so by the way thank you for that that was very clear so the first question i have is so when i think about family language i think about something i talk about built on lead montague’s idea of mutual modeling that you get like my aunt and my uncle who uh you know it looks like they have telepathy because they have they’ve built and so and what this and and why and the argument for this it’s not quite an a priori argument but it’s almost is that you face this sort of you face this bind about any kind of communication you’re trying to right uh you’re trying at one hand to communicate as much as you can to reduce cross-purpose interference but you’re trying to reduce communication because that eats up resources and time that you could be using to solve the problems that the communication is affording and and so montague argues well what you have in a in an older couple right that they stay together because they love each other not because they hate each other um and uh i’ll just it’s easier just for imagery to use a straight couple i’m not stating any moral or even aesthetic preference it’s just easier to talk that way so here’s the husband and the wife and the husband has an internalized model of the wife the wife has an internalized model of the husband they can go off and not be communicating with each other they just check in with the model and that’s how they get the benefits of not acting at cross-purpose but not spending a lot of time and energy just communicating now the thing and that’s where montague leaves it he says the brain is basically doing that it’s doing that sort of mutual modeling and there’s evidence for that so um it seems like a plausible account uh of uh of how that problem is solved and and that problem is sort of endemic now the what i added in is and this goes in with sort of the cycling you get in predicted processing and deep learning and other things is yeah but what has to happen is periodically they got to come back together right and unplug from the world and just talk to each other so that their models don’t get out of sync and you have to actually cycle between these and you see the brain actually cycling between these it’s task focused and then it goes into default mode where all the modules talk to each other and make sure they’re all in touch and then back into the world and it’s just oscillating and we do the same thing the groups go out uh with their model the map and model from the day then they come back to the home base and you can see this dynamic at multiple places um and so when when i was when i’ve been thinking about family language i was thinking about oh the way it can work right is right you’ve got a very complex mutual modeling network going on but that’s very limited like you said you only do this with a relatively like i i expect it has to be it hovers around a dunbar level uh limitation because you get too many people and you just have to move to a generalized other the way me talked about you can’t just have like what does peter think and what does susan think and so um so i i think one i’m making a proposal and then on the basis of the proposal question i’m proposing that i think the fundamental machinery of family language that makes it so tone sensitive and tone based because it is so pragmatic and contextually sensitive it’s almost telepathic that’s its power is that mutual modeling and that’s my that’s my proposal i’m trying to here’s the underlying mechanism what you’re talking about and then and then then that leads to the question and i think you might have an answer to this in the civium proposal but it’s see i think that family uh sorry that family language i’ll pun here a little bit requires a profound kind of familiarity um in the way i’m talking about so well i think the llm’s may be a necessary condition for the reemergence or the reprioritization of family language i don’t think they could be sufficient people would have to go back to living together in more socially intimate fashion in order for that mutual modeling to be practiced because it takes time and be rich and sophisticated enough to bring back what family language was so that’s my proposal and the question do you what do you what do you think of that i agree with both um i would expand on the first point a little bit and if you use the metaphor if you move if you actually do the exact opposite point of life from the old married couple to the mother with the newborn baby yeah um the the diversity of mediations of expression and relationality we again in trade language we tend to have this this this notion that language has to do with words issued by lips and heard by ears but as we know of course a baby doesn’t have those and a mother understands quite well what the baby is different to express and oftentimes vice versa um so that’s like so when the when the when the husband and wife are kind of coming back into relationship they’re also activating this extraordinarily large folio yeah yeah and different modes of expression are different ways of they hold different things differently it’s very difficult to sort of express your love using you know words when you can express with touch for example it’s a different yeah yeah and they can be a lot you have all of that yeah they convey a lot with the gesture or a look or or even you know an arrays of an eyebrow there’s all that kind of thing going on yeah i agree with that i think i think it’s a recovery of something profound uh about about the dialogue of the inherently dialogical nature of of cognition and the and the formation of self and how those get linked together so given that that’s the case doesn’t doesn’t the proposal require something like your civium proposal that we now have the llms and the trade language running in the network on the internet but we drop into psychological physiological and ecologically healthy small-scale communities where we live together in this uh family language orientation it seems to me that’s almost required something like that now that you mentioned i think it’s probably worthwhile um flushing that out a little bit yeah yes please and i think just to kind of make sure that we’re in this shared context we are in fact talking about a practical eschatology yes we have we have a a theoretical model that proposes that changes like the ones we’re talking about are actually happening right so this is not a theoretical exercise for saying no this is we’re racing towards this thing perhaps we should come to terms with it as best as we can so we can make the best choices we can in relationship was just coming so we should keep that in mind like for those who are listening no this is not a conversation about neato ideas it’s actually you know a diagnosis of maybe what’s really happening so the argument in the larger context of civium you said it just right things of that sort so it’s it’s okay so the argument the larger context of civium is that um the city was fundamentally a consequence of what we now know as metcalfe’s law that there is a exponential generativity that occurs when minds come into communications networks and that way back in the old days the only way to get minds and communications networks in any density was to give bodies into physical proximity and that there was a problematic of the tension between things like dunbar family and the ability for those things to be very coherent and the desire to scale more bodies into the same location and the resolution to that a 10 000 year temporary resolution to that was the invention of what i call game a which is also the city civilization and cosmopolitan imperialism those are all different ways of looking at the same thing and trade language i would add now to that argument and well and trade language as used as a dominant language yes yes yes and those are all part of a a complex of solutions to move minds to move minds more minds into uh a net communications networks to take advantage of that exponential that exponential is very powerful and it shows up at least in the category of wealth and innovation so as you put more minds in those networks you increase wealth every time you double the size of a group you increase the wealth per capita by 15 which is a lot compounding as you keep doubling and you increase innovation per capita by about 15 so that’s a lot and that’s a very powerful centripetal force pulling population into centers and then dealing with the centrifugal force of how you’re going to feed all these people how you’re going to bring water how you’re going to move waste out how you’re going to give them housing right so the the arc and the movement of city and civilization was that set of tensions and by the way i i propose that the reason why i collapse city and civilization is that all roads really do lead to rome that the entire roman empire is a single body and the entire territory giant territorialized the torus is to move resources ultimately necessary to support rome while rome at the at the top of that pyramid um and we’re now reaching the end of that too at the ability for minds to enter into communications and in fashion which is almost entirely ephemeralizing the necessity for us our bodies performatively this moment right here we’re in completely different geological locations geographic locations and we’re communicating it’s not as rich we can’t do family language right we can’t do that rich rich high bandwidth but it’s pretty good and the argument is it’s good enough or soon will be good enough that again that binding that generator that has produced history is it’s about to become broken which then produces a different energy on where history goes right so now we get to the civium proposal and i don’t think it’s obligatory by the way there may be a fork it may be two basic different approaches of shooting through that fifth joint point and i’m very much arguing in favor of this one this will be known as strong transhumanism so this would be we come cyborgs and then we upload into the into the computer and sort of become pure information i think that’s a terrible idea but so i’ll just argue this is a at least one possibility and the one that i’d like to propose as you move over here those more fundamental needs of humanness needs of relationality needs of connection to space needs of mythos as embodied mythos those are still there right we’re still as for as long as we’re bodies those those needs come up which are grounding meaningfulness right that’s that the fraction underneath here and those become attractors to start pulling people like huh and as the minds is the ideas are like well if those are things you yearn for maybe have been yearning for your whole life go here right if somebody properly designed something says here’s a way to get those needs met if you go there and you discover a that those yearnings are satisfied and b that you’re not losing anything by virtue of leaving the city for example that you may be afraid of losing that begins to propagate and so the argument is that because those are so fundamental and by the way because they are catastrophic and disrupted by the urbanization construct people will once released from that that pulling force would begin to drift back down into something that looks like let’s say dunbar right so those two forces then cross family language will begin to become supported because trade language no longer is necessary or dominant and because people will be spending more and more embodied time with familiarity with each other and with the land and the context that they live in so that’s a prediction about what things look like either on the other side of the fifth joint point or as part of our movement through it i’ll make a strong argument for that last part in a moment that there’s a minimum viable capacity to do the things we need to do to make it through the fifth joint point is actually geometrically associated with a new network topology like family language familiarity whole humans and wholesome relationships with each other and earth but also connected via properly designed networks so that’s a that’s a big sort of box i just described we may or may not get to it today maybe we’ll do it in another conversation so let me do the other the other the other concept this has to do is try to do a deep dive into the digital i think it’s proper to say that something fundamental is going on in the movement across the threshold in the fifth joint point but i think we need to come to terms with what we’re we’re really dealing with like the digital quad digital and i think greg you and i had a conversation here i’ll use some of the ideas that came out of that i want to put over here the basic function of the human mind in relationship with complex reality i.e modeling i want to put over here the notion of the digital as what it is and my proposal is that these are like the alpha and the omega that they fundamentally are doing the same thing and by virtue of finally making our way to digital we’ve essentially closed the arc of the relationship between the mind with complex reality and that’s so the arc of that fourth joint point of minded bodies moving into this new space it begins with the ability to create a simulation or a model of complex reality which by its very nature is a map not the territory meaning by its very nature it foregrounds certain aspects backgrounds other aspects and critically elides effectively everything else like if i can’t include the infinity of reality if i’m trying to model i have to actually create a quantized or reduced or complicated construct that captures the parts that i care about now of course as we all know there’s a lot of power in that the ability of foreground allows you to optimize allows you to extract characteristics to be able to find principles that allows you that’s the whole thing and we talked about the role of books and the role of different kinds of mediating technologies and we can notice that mediating technologies figure or embody certain aspects of model the book is governed by say linearity and if it’s in english or in a western language is alphabetic linearity if it’s in chinese or eastern language it’s a different kind of linearity and the media structure the analog media structures the form of the media structure imposes itself on the shape or nature of the model or simulation or the kind of mental relationship with complex reality that’s possible when we finally get into digital we actually do two moves simultaneously one in some sense the most obvious is that digital is pure simulation in other words it can be a book it can be a video it can be a song it can be a combination of things right it can be ai it actually has no particular binding to a media form it is polymorphic it can be all and any and new ones we’ve never even experienced before which means we’re now able to explore by virtue of the digital the whole portfolio of all possible ways of mediating which means therefore all the different variations on how media configures our models and mental capacities that’s one one aspect of what’s happening we move to the digital field and we’re by the way we’re seeing this now with lms as we’re beginning to discover that the notion of language is diverse and that lms become more powerful as you as you connect different media forms to each other through the medium of language language right so lms that no longer just do text can also speak and hear and can see and can create images and can create video right there they’re naturally going to expand to cover possibly the entire portfolio of what can be mediated by sense and expressed by sense then the other side the orthogonal is if i get dropped down to the very essence of the notion of digital what i’m actually talking about is discontinuity quad discontinuity i’m talking about sampling i’m talking about quantization i’m talking about the extraction of some finite component from the infinite context of the whole so digitization literally just is which is at the bottom the the base or the fundamental characteristic of mind and modeling in relationship with complex reality so the argument is that we’re actually reaching something that is the the most pure the most basic most abstract or reified element of what we’ve been exploring for this entire period of time in the context of mind that’s we have three elements we’ve got the entire portfolio of modes of expression which we can now play with with no particular imitation we have the notion of the essence of quantization or decontextualization and then we have the algorithmic relationship of some construct of these kinds of things that produce models of and represent complex reality so that’s the the argument if we’ve now reached that point and that is again at the very essence of the joint point when we say the joint point has something to do with the digital what i would say is that it has something to do with us at long last finally and fully coming to terms with the consequences and the potency of this thing in relationship with complex reality and are able to finally bring it back into a stable and a wholesome relationship with complex reality and maybe just to loop that last part we say meta crisis one might well argue that a major through line of meta crisis is precisely the destabilizing elements of this triangle in relationship with complex what is the tainter the entire tainter argument is ultimately boils down to this the inexorable self-termination of game theoretic arms versus escalating technology curves it’s this right this is the key thing and if we can resolve if we can’t resolve this then the meta crisis is quite likely terminal through op and hymer effects you guys watch op and hammer yet i haven’t we spoke about it i haven’t yet yeah darn well remember we actually went to some depth about that if you if you happen to be watching this you’ve seen the last scene the argument i’m making is that whether or not op and hymer himself frankly ever said it or whether nolan intended this the meaning i’m putting on top of it is he was seeing the notion of filling the space where we don’t kill ourselves as we race down the just the basic logic of game theory arms race and the way that technology becomes exponential because it builds on itself so he he had at the manhattan project los alamos they passed through the first point where ordinary arms races in the kind of pre 20th century sense which led to conflict but didn’t lead to the end of everything could suddenly for the first time lead to the end of everything but if he’s looking at it and he’s thinking about the implications of oh well if i’ve got an a bomb then they’ve got to get an a bomb therefore i’ve got to get an h bomb and now the risk of things getting worse just went up if i’ve got an h bomb they’ve got to get an h bomb and if we if we lock in around not nuking each other all that means is that everybody’s now looking for other ways to compete in the same basic field and so yeah drones aren’t necessarily as dangerous as h bomb but there’s a point at which drone technology is sophisticated enough and powerful enough that it actually can be extinguished there’s a point in which ai became extinguished the point which genetic engineering becomes extinguishing and so if you see that box the box fills the box represents the volume of the space where we’re filling more powerful technologies in an arms race but don’t kill ourselves as it fills our pin ourselves into a corner so that’s like having the openheimer effect i’m putting all that into say the way to resolve that is to resolve this triangle it was at the birth of humanity into complex nature and these three characteristics and practically speaking we don’t make it to the fifth joint point if we don’t solve it but equally practically speaking therefore the essence of moving through this joint point must include whatever that resolution looks like all right there i’m done spewing words to that you i apologize um well i think there are a couple things that i’d just like to draw some attention to i mentioned this briefly in our conversation um one thing that i was struck by just at a parallel level then i’ll come back to what i see in terms of the architecture that you’ve laid out and how it speaks to me in relationship to kind of resolving or at least the problem before us that if we get successfully through the fifth joint point it will indeed involve resolving very much the kind of dynamics that you lay out so one of the things that i’m reminded of john i’ll be curious if you pick this up too but when we did the conversation with zack stein and he gave his meta psychology identified three sort of vectors of the psyche didn’t do it strongly but he thought it was very useful one is essentially the doing cognitive skill vector of sort of control and then that’s going to generalize the capacity of things sort of have logical impacts inevitable practical logical impacts on the environment and to me that’s kind of where trade language then would find its grip in relationship to what are the practical implications of doing in the world and then there was insolvent which then connected very much to the felt sense of your image-based relations in particular self and other in the world and managing that and then ultimately transcendence which is sort of you know an essence essential connection to the spiritual and and ultimate sacred transcending our human condition at whatever level into beyond forms into essential forms etc so anyway the sacred trade and family languages seem to be perhaps sort of the ways in which systems of justification or human attunement might be parallel to some of what zack was saying so i’ll just throw that out there to see some parallels of resonance for me when i think about the fifth joint plan i think you’ve really captured it very nicely the nature of this sort of absolute medium and its potential in power and its tremendous threat is well stated in the architecture that you’ve laid out i think you’ve cut to the core of some of these dynamics and then spell out okay what are the challenges and what are the dynamics that we need to resolve one of the things that i’m wondering about what you’re thinking when you say okay as trade language gets regulated and instantiated in this process it gives the opportunity for more family language do you see that as something that’s sort of an inevitable tractor a tractor state or do you say that’s something that has to be sort of engineered like we have to figure out how to create the eddies of connection like like like systematic civium projects or ways that afford us the capacity to be engaged in the relations with others or do you think that the nature of or depending on how it evolves it will afford an opportunity as it takes over in sort of a trade language a natural space will open up for us to be drawn into family language as like is this going to be a really hard push thing up the hill kind of deal to get happening or is this do you envision this more as an unfolding that we may be able to slide into comfortably without a lot of hard engineering okay so that last last little bit first order i would say that it i would propose that it is an attractor okay but attractors aren’t um certain if i have a little i have a divot in the floor and i push your marble towards it there’s an attractor but if the marbles off or fast it’ll pop in and out right so in fact we dialoged about this exactly with brett anderson we had exactly that model and metaphor so we were building off of that for sure okay so it’s a powerful attractor and you know we’re sitting in an environment that has a lot of energy and has a lot of energy both in terms of kinetics lots of stuff going on that people are connected to and in terms of cognition psychology of paragmatic people have a lot of preconceived notions about what the good life looks like or how to accomplish different needs and so i would sort of sort of aesthetically and ethically propose that there will be a design characteristic where human beings may see this as a possibility maybe they themselves are yearning for it and to even just satisfy their own needs they engage in an effort work of design and construction but by actually it’s art ultimately but by virtue of doing that that both becomes more energetically available it’s a real thing that people can participate in and it becomes more an idea that becomes clearer and you get a reciprocal movement and so the attractor attracts the attraction manifests and deepens the attractor and there’s a series of co-creating forces that bring it into reality the last bit that made me laugh was in some sense obviously if we actually try to apply a strong design methodology we’ll simply reify the complicated structures of trade language on top of this thing and it can’t be that kind of thing we have to actually relearn how to dance with these things and how to actually sort of midwife or co-create things that are part of the ambient environment let me say gently and not design down on top of them otherwise we’ll just repeat the same circumstances lovely i’ll say one more thing and then i’ll pass it over to john and rio and i have talked a little bit about this in the past so it’s not new to you but it’s um so embedded in the unified theories frame for our human relationship system is the core barometer of both social influence which is this pragmatic capacity to influence others in accordance with our interests and the felt sense of relational value so this is the you know when two people are together it’s because the wife knows the husband and she doesn’t leave the husband when he gets dementia because he has particular value and the argument that i have is the human heart needs to be seen known and valued and have social influence yet the trade language structure especially capital labor structure basically turned us into you know influencers and there are aspects of the digital world that are doing that of course also but there is i believe the human soul is craving to use a sort of an exact science sense or the insolment side is craving the need to be seen known and valued and at some level if we can at least wake that up that consciousness and then find some opportunity for that to coalesce and then manifest itself in the lived experiences of real relation um that is the way i would at least point to it without top down trading it as it were nice thank you greg that last point was very helpful to me it clarified some things so jordan i’m wondering i i want to i first of all i want to get make sure i get sort of the incisive point of the second the digital and then i want to i want to get clear about what the connection of the first and the second point are because i i feel those two things are are belated if i get a good answer to the first i’ll get a good answer to the second and vice versa so it was the main claim that the digital is moving to something that you know is multi-dimensional polymorphous i believe you said and that it’s that’s a complete arc it i mean you’re not saying of course it will have infinite capacities or anything like that or it still won’t face the bios various problem or anything like that but you’re saying like there there won’t be any dimension of our experience that won’t be digitized in some important way when we’re trying in communication i’m trying to get like what what’s what’s the you’ve said the quantitative difference you laid it out very clearly i want to know the qualitative difference what’s the move here like because we’re talking about a joint point right we’re talking about it’s not just it’s it’s a more that becomes an other that’s in greg’s model whenever we pass when we pass from inorganic to life it’s not just more it’s other we pass from life right it’s it’s not just more it’s other more it’s different to you yeah yeah yeah exactly okay and and i got the more but i didn’t quite catch the the different the other than the novelty and how that relates to the first point about the demise of trade language imperialism was that a question was that clear sure of course it was important because it um i guess the the the key point that i want to make about the notion of the digital was that um and by the way this has been going on since the birth of the internet for the most part i’ve noticed that most people perceive the digital as being called yet another medium yes yes you know the internet is kind of like the yellow pages we’ve got books we did print and the argument is that no it’s actually the final perfectly purified reified essence of what all media have always been ah so it’s like it’s the platonic form of of media it’s the it’s the embodied right the actual yeah which is a very interesting thing right um but you can’t go any further down that road because you’ve hit the limit in both directions you’ve hit the limit of the essence of what it means to mediate what it means to draft a simulation and convey and you’ve hit the limit of what it means to play with different ways of forming media we used to get very excited that we could take a we could convert language into text we can make that transition it was such a huge deal we and we really thought of it being its own kind of object what i’m saying is that digital reveals that things just two moves and there’s both moves are critical but they’re fundamentally the same basic uh conserved every time that one is the essence of foregrounding and backgrounding of modeling of a map and the second is the the the particularities of some given transformation of mediation across form right and so we know that the forms matter and we know that the fundamental movement of mapping matters and when we reach digital we actually reach the platonic form of that and we’re done right that’s it so that that the quality that becomes more is a little bit like the the story of of from rhythm to tone well i see something i don’t know if it maps onto that metaphor um you and i’ve talked about this is unlike other things in that all the old boundaries get crossed this is neither like speaking nor writing it has right what we’re doing right now is like speaking together but it’s also got the permanence of writing and then it’s got something beyond of the hyper conversation that emerges right and so and the private and the public are now uh broken but i’m hearing something i hadn’t heard before what and is that the distinction between the intelligence and the medium is now breaking down because if it’s doing what you’re saying this medium or this meta medium right um it has to be intelligent it has to be like right we’ve we’ve also had this other there’s the speaker you know shannon there’s the there’s the sender there’s the channel and there’s the receiver but if what you’re saying is correct that’s gone right because it is like it’s doing all uh like if if we get to this point and we’re both just you know it’s doing the relevance realization it’s it’s doing you know and it’s it’s it’s it’s exploring on its own like it has to be doing all of this to have that capacity you’re talking about and it sounds like even that distinction the distinction we used to have between the intelligent sender and um the the signal is also breaking down where i saw this quite a while ago by was it was it 2013 2014 people were trying to get data security and the move that was being made and that’s why they invited me to the conference was people were realizing you can’t protect information unless you make it intelligent and self-protective we’re we’re the period in which we could sort of lock information by putting like locks around it and protective structures is breaking down because the stuff that comes at it is going to be like wickedly intelligent which is we’re now in that time we’re in that time and so what you the information has to be integrated with and a counter intelligence that is basically like an immune system that and see so i’m hearing i’m hearing that in addition to the ones we’ve already explored you’re proposing that what this what this platonic it’s aristotelian because it’s embodied what this aristotelian completion of the medium is it’s it’s breaking down right the difference between writing and speaking that up so upset play-doh it’s breaking down the public and the private uh you know that the enlightenment was predicated on um it and now it’s breaking down the distinction uh between the intelligence and the medium in a profound way and then what i hear you saying is we’ve got we’ve built up a grammar of understanding ourselves based on these distinctions they’re kind of like dimensions and that’s all collapsing and that’s what’s radically qualitatively new is that landing am i getting it yeah let’s just keep hammering on that so we have things like um this notion of the aristotelian form which i’m quite liking um we have a velocity so in the past whenever a big disruption would come let’s just go and say the book with thousands of years would have would take place as that new possibility is integrated but of course as we move into this new form that goes vertical and so the rate of the exploration of the possibility continues to radically outstrips any notion that that old model of adaption is going to happen this is a right we’re going to make if we’re going to make it we have to actually come to a do a new thing than something like a limping along adaptation that we’ve used so far and as you’re saying there’s like the dimension of um um yeah we can we can migrate in the the concern of what happens as you begin to see what actually is the area under the curve and this is the characteristic of something like intelligence that is contained there right the the space of all modeling is contained there all mechanisms whereby a simulation of complex reality can be produced and can be used to predict future states right the thing that we so proud ourselves and being able to do as intelligent beings it’s all contained in there right all of that that whole thing and in many ways it will outstrip our facility with that to an you know to a qualitative level and so and we’ll admit of course that that part of the conversation has come in from a different direction but the point is we’re bringing it into this conversation saying why yeah we’re actually talking about something like the ultima what we’re there let me if you don’t mind i’d actually like to remind us of the of the the thematic of this uh what do you call it series that you’re in which is the notion of transcendent naturalism yes and to some extent the bringing of spirituality and i’m going to propose by the way religio into relation with all the other human faculties and things like ultima things like ultimate are of that category you know you can’t you can’t deal with the infinite in even in science like science actually can’t deal with infinities this is why the renormalization thing had to happen in physics you can’t deal with ultimates ultimate is actually a different kind of thing yes yes so now if we’re actually dealing with the ultimate with regard to this kind of uh a moment in reality it will actually require a different toolkit and we’re actually dealing you know i think i’ve said this in a previous set of conversations that from my point of view theology and the mode of the sacred are actually the proper approach to this thing called a like yeah that’s how i’ve made that argument too yeah i’ve made that argument at all yeah yeah so the the last bit there which had a technical difficulty is that the we’re moving very much into this field where we’re actually going to have to start wrestling with things that we can’t renormalize and we’re dealing with things like the infinite we’re dealing with things like ultimates and the proper toolkit for that lives over in the category known as theology and the proper way of being in relationship with that lives in the disposition that i’ll call the sacred and i’ve i’ve often thought of the sacred in terms of a relationship or disposition more than a noun in fact i would even argue to use some of the previous language the thinking of the sacred in terms of a noun is a trade language profanity that we’re actually operating in the mode of the sacred language we know that the sacred is actually a way of being in relationship with the world first and then how you behave and act second and that there are places and things and ideas that so fully call forth that way of being in relationship and so fully remind us and so fully a consequence of it that it embodies us it brings us into sort of resonates with us and brings us into that place but it’s both but it’s more about relationship by far than it is about a given thing is quote unquote sacred so i want to pick up on this because this touches on a lot as i was mentioning is and so it might have got garbled for you in the video essay i did on a i also propose that theology is going to become important because we’re going to have to place more and more emphasis on what i call the spiritual somatic dimension of our existence because as you rightly argued in what you’ve already said the areas we thought we could place our identity in the the effable areas the propositionalizable areas are we’re going to fall behind on them very rapidly but those that put us into that ineffable religio orientation binding to what is ultimate till x ultimate concern for ultimate reality which is his definition of faith i think they come to prominence i wonder if the argument could be tightened a little and i’m not i’m not i’m not saying this because i think your argument is not rigorous i just mean explicated in the sense that it seems to me that as this as this aristotelian form of media comes into full existence and as it breaks down a lot of the grammatical the cognitive grammatical uh boundaries and structures that we’ve created especially post-enlightenment and as it makes us confront things that i’ll use your word because i like it are ultimate and therefore call for our sacred capacity is there not the fact that we will have i think so for example i’m thinking that as the boundaries break down the human capacity for the realization in both senses of the word of non-duality and the kind of work that nicholas akusa did with the you know the coincidence of opposites the infinite circle is also a straight line and that multi-dimensional and the point is not closure he says if you if you’re if you try to close it you’re you’re still behind the wall you break through to learned ignorance you break through to that right uh right relationship rather than being right and i’m just i’m just saying um i i see that it will open us up to ultimates again but it also seems to me that by breaking the grammar right it like it’s it’s it’s going to break the subject predicate grammar really really powerful it’s going to so although it may be the aristotelian form right uh of media it’s going to break the subject predicate grammar that’s behind substance ontology that’s aristotle you know the world is divided up into subjects and predicates right it’s like oh wow look at this look at what we now have and it doesn’t work that way and i’m wondering that i’m not claiming that the the aristotelian form of the media uh uh instantiate sacredness although i think there’s going to be a terrific temptation for people to relate to it that way and i’ve already articulated that i think what it does right is it it can become something like the spiritual exercises that nicolas of kusa talked about about like because now non-duality and paradoxical infinities and the breakdown of the subject predicate and stuff going from the infinitesimal to the infinite all of this is no longer something that some crazy monk was doing over there it is the world now and that seems to me like i’m like i say i’m trying to strengthen your argument by saying the confrontation the existential confrontation with the kind of being that the aristotelian form of the you know of media is will itself like trigger spiritual exercises and we and and there’s another bifurcation point we can either be tempted to worshiping the multimedia machine or we can be sopherson we could be tempted to the good we could be tempted to no no no this just gives me better better ways of unlocking my capacity to come into relationship to what is ultimate and that’s that’s the proposal i wanted to put down that that if if if we explicate what you’ve proposed in the way i’ve done i think we get to a chirodic decision point where we are tempted i mean this is almost mythological we’re tempted to heaven and we’re tempted to hell if hell is what happens when you get into profound idolatry at least that’s what dante thought right i was going to say it’s and the the language of idolatry is goes was coming to my mind we are we are absolutely going to be tempted with the most potent form of idolatry imaginable we will literally have concrete objects of vastly more power than us that will actually be able to seduce us into giving us the things that we think we want if only we right it’s going to be a very uh very sort of hyper pagan because it’s not the least bit symbolic um maybe anti-symbolic and then i think about it so so there you go now what i also noticed was something like uh the transcendent quad transcendent um or the notion of the ultimate qua ultima so we have the notion of to self transcend to be in a in a box that the three the nine dot problem and then to transcend that box into some new location but if i contemplate one level above that which is what affords that possibility at all the transcendent quad transcendent um now we’re in that category which is the ineffable by the way i can’t believe you didn’t say it like the john set it up is the effable is getting is going to be effed the realm where mystery is like the place from whence we have the notion of the mysterious in its in its essence right that that category over that we can call the transcendent not transcend not to transcend but the place from which the notions of transcendence in general come um is the thing right if we move towards the only thing that’s the answer from idolatry is the answer of moving into the mystery where we haven’t even the capability of grabbing a hold of something to which we can enslave ourselves now i actually notice myself moving all the way back downstream to some of the stories like the integration of the meta myth meta myth or monomyth which one is it uh i’ve heard both use uh monomyth because because it it’s cross-cultural and meta myth because it’s sort of above all particular mythical stories so let’s just do the same thing like let’s just take that story of saying okay and just the same way we’ve now had this historical arc of a search across media space and we’re reaching the end of that um in that same arc we’ve also been having search across mythology space and we’re now reaching the point where we have to do the same kind of work that greg was proposing that we would have to do around something like civium where there’s clearly an attractor that has been pulling these narratives in a particular direction there’s something happening at the level of the ontoc that provides us with a transcendent or invariant across all transformations in space and time umometry of say for example the good or proper behavior or virtue and we’ve been sort of discovering them haptically as we’ve been moving through culture space and now we’re actually at a moment where we can look at that and go you probably did in your last two calls whoa this is what’s happening and so what we can now do is just a very powerful medium let’s take that and just bring it all the way to its ultimate what does it look like for us to design or identify or project or follow the path of this of this dimensionality and again that’s the content of a proper religion coming out of the realm of the transcendent grounded in the ineffable and in the mystery and yet nonetheless giving us an ontic ground that is actually invariant across all transformations in space and time that will guide us in our choices that will allow us to make effective choices under any possible context and just to make a fine point on it under the power of exponential technology the only way to actually do make any kind of choice is you have to have things that are grounded in say the infinite maybe quite specifically the infinite right if i can if something’s going like this i’m exploring the leibnizian explosion where i have an asymptote of the finite getting closer and closer and closer to the infinite and if i put a race with that by getting smarter and smarter on this curve the formal term for that is unfucked but the infinite qua infinite that this is in fact always infinitely far away from it and i’m actually perfectly good to go but this parallel is a move that happened in the history of neo-platinism right and and and so i’m not i’m i’m suggesting we take a look there uh for maybe some help um because i mean for if you look in playdo and the early neo-platinus including platinus infinity is bad infinity is the lack of definition it is the lack of intelligibility it is the lack it is privation it is it is chaos it is what evil is and what happens right is as you as you you move into christian neo-platinism and you get to it starts to open up with proclus who’s a pagan but you see it full-blown in the christian neo-platinus and it comes to fruition and people like erigina and especially nicholas of kusa you got no no if you get the good infinite and you get the idea now of god as what jordan was just proposing that god is right the affordance of infinite self-transcendence like god is that field affordance pure relationality that makes all transcendence by any finite being wherever whatever for however long possible and that he in kusa’s getting us to try and orient towards the positive infinitive as the inexhaustible source of intelligibility that can continually fuel all possible forms of transcendence that’s actually happened in the history of neo-platinism i’m reading a book right now on how there was this there was this sort of choice point where we went down era we could go we came out of playdo we had aerostal on the neo-platinus and with aerostal we had the subject predicate logic ontology and that became dominant but the neo-platinus were arguing for a fundamental all the way down relational ontology which is what you’ve been talking about and so there’s a lot there and why that matters why that matters is for me that means that we like what we’re proposing like there there were which there there are again cross-culturally philosophical silk road there are patterns of enacting this ontically rituals and ways of discourse and ways of communication which is really interesting because it’s different than the trade language than you were talking about what’s going on in the silk road is what i call something like the the lingua philosophica which was this neo-platinism that allowed people to move into a joint appreciation of the ineffable of right and so um i think there’s something there that we could pay attention to um because if we can if i’m not saying that you know i’m not being nostalgic no neither nostalgia nor utopia but there’s there’s a lot of thought into exact sorry jordan i don’t mean to be taking anything from you i’m trying to actually okay good there’s a lot of there’s a lot there’s a tradition cross-historically cross religion cross geographical territory of reflection on exactly the proposal you’re making there’s a rich legacy and heritage for us there that’s what i’m i’m saying just so we complete clear um i have no notion that i’m making it i’m thinking anything that hasn’t been thought before it’s quite likely everything i’m saying has been said much better by other people i don’t particularly make any claim to being rigorous actually was at a asked to give a keynote at the santa fe institute and the the preamble was guys i’m not rigorous that’s your gig i’m here to be provocative i’m here to shake things that bring new ideas in so that the fecundity of your rigor has something to work with to bring it apart um and by the way but jordan just intervene you’re not going to insult me shock me so run yeah but yeah i get what you mean by not rigorous you’re not bound to sort of strict logicality but you’re still careful right and that’s something that’s important i’m sorry i want to put a pin in this because you exemplify that and i think this is actually relevant to what we’re talking about here there is a way to be very careful like socratic care it would it isn’t bound to subject predicate notions of rigor i i think it’s important to to note that right and you’re you’re so yes i get what you’re saying and i’m not trying to backhand it away but i want to say that but there’s a positive framing on what you just said it’s like yeah yeah but look we like there’s a way of being relationally very very careful and i’m demonstrating it so i just wanted to i’m sorry for interrupting you but i thought that was a point worth worth making so what was coming through my mind when you were when you were describing just a moment ago was something along the lines of events that have different durations to play themselves out let’s say we have this long arc that includes things like the playing out of the implications of mind and media and we have the long arc of the playing out of the implications of of how that shows up in terms of cities and and the energy of cities and by the way the the the socio-anthropological consequences of what happens that creates conflicts and you know arms races and things like that so there’s a whole arc now let’s say for example that’s playing out and let’s go with 2000 years ago 1500 years ago something new dropped in that was beginning to send out its own ripples yes those ripples were happening in the context of this larger arc right so it’s not necessarily nostalgia as much as it is just remembering and almost like sorry this is exactly right how funny is this once upon a time i was trying to paddle out into some very big surf and i couldn’t figure out how to get the right angle to get it and then this dude came out and he looked at it and he noticed that there was a cliff and the waves were hitting the cliff and as they would they were reflecting back out so he actually timed the reflection wave jumped on right past the cliff on the reflection wave which pulled him right back out through the water and then he just popped into the into the into the lineup this is something like that right we have waves that are heading this way towards the fifth joint point with a huge potent logic we have this other sort of wave that dropped in here that are happening in the more in the sacred domain and like i’m delighted to hear that the christian neo-platin has dropped dialed into this back in that time frame that sounds extremely right and our in some sense our job is to find those waves and find the waves that are in the like moving in the right direction and then just ride them noticing that took 2000 years to work out the implications of all this other stuff fair enough yeah and it’s not just the christian neo-platinists it’s the the islamic it’s sufism and there’s interactions yeah right the the silk road was very properly in your sense the commons in a profound way nobody owns the silk road people try to hold pieces but if they try and hold the pieces separate from each other it breaks down everybody has to agree that it’s like what’s happening here is held in common and see that’s what’s so exciting about this because it has the capacity to it’s got the proven track record it in zen and that’s why i want to try and bring zen and neo-platinism together they both have this proven track record of being able to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with almost anything they come into contact with and we not so much for zen but we have clear evidence that neo-platinism can do this readily with science too and you know and and and that brings us sort of back to this argument like that we can wed like there’s an opportunity at the fifth joint point to see a profound new possibility you’ve added a powerful dimension you’ve really explicated unpack the fifth joint point and why why it both affords and demands a conciliance between science and spirituality that’s what i’ve heard coming out of all of this very much so yeah i propose that we end it there i don’t want i’ll like greg give any final comments and then you’ll i’ll just say i i basically will have named you know as i attended to the fifth joint point i named it the digital identity problem where the digital is the techno environment and then ultimate digital medium problem and the identity is our knowing mental facility and we need to get the right rotation on that to generate a digital identity solution it’s a transfer we need to rotate our identities in right relation and jordan when you were talking about catching those waves and finding the right between a trade language and between the sacred language and holding that identity that grounds us in a particular way but also recognizes that potential the rotation of that is very the felt embodied enactment of that rotation on our identity is essentially i would say a wonderful depiction of what i was intuiting so that resonated so jordan we always give our guests you’re going to come back for another episode and we can continue to unpack this and some of its consequences but we we always give our guests the the last word it can be summative it can be provocative it could be it could be an expletive it could be stay tuned for the neat thing that’s coming but we give you the chance to have the final word but before you do that on behalf of myself and greg i want to really thank you this was incredibly rich like i’m i’m like really fired and i’m seeing a deep convergence about what you’re talking about and the all the this work i’ve been trying to do about the walking the philosophical silk road and i find it very exciting so i just wanted to also thank you you’re welcome um i’m sure that your memory or understanding of greek grammar is better than mine what is the uh the category of grammar i think it’s called the vocative like whole fails there’s the middle voice yeah i think when we’re actually calling forth yeah so i’ll be vocative okay okay i’ll request of that which is being called forth on the other side of the fifth joint point that which calls us forth in the in the infinite that allows and affords our continual transcendence to guide us in the contemplation and the metabolism what’s happened today so that our next conversation can continue to move us along that way right move us in that direction we can build and build and build yes i share your i share your invocation your prophetic prayer i i share that very much thank you my friends this has been really wonderful