https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=sl1Bta0DsSo
There you go. Thank you. Voice of AI future overlords. Yeah, or well. Yeah, exactly. My words. Shockingly interesting times. Yeah, well, it’s, as usual, a deep pleasure to be here with you both. And on the outside, looking in, stepping into a conversation is a beautiful thing for me. So always feels relaxing and calming for me to presence that in some sense. So if I didn’t share that appreciation, maybe it would be a little bit too much to somehow conduit in some helpful manner. So it’s very good to be here. Now we’ve been speaking for a little while, so I will do a little opening framing here and then open up the space. Part of our conversation today, or in some sense, an angle of its whole. We’ve sort of discussed as perhaps being afforded by an understanding of the meaning crisis from all of our perspectives, I think, in a mutually emergent way. But notably, John, this is obviously a core part of your work and framing of life project in many regards, which has touched many people. And I know it’s of interest for us to understand what the meaning crisis is with as much clarity as possible. And so that’s sort of the opening question here. What is the meaning crisis and I suppose its relevance to you and perhaps for us as things are developing at the moment? Even just a single definition would be fine. You don’t have to go into re-educating me or anyone else. It’s okay. I’m sure there’s lots of material out there. Yeah, I don’t know if I can give a single definition. I’ll try to be as succinct as possible. That’s what I can promise. So the meaning crisis starts from a premise about the nature of agency, that an agent is different from a mere behavior and that an agent can determine the consequences of their behavior and alter their behavior in order to seek to promote. And in that sense, with the emergence of agency, you have the emergence of problem solving about trying to modify behavior to improve conditions for some auto poetic entity. And that’s sort of a core idea. And scaling up very quickly, the idea is that we are doing that as agents. We’re doing it as cognitive agents, but we’re not just very limited domain problem solvers. We’re general problem solvers. We can solve a wide variety of problems in a wide variety of domains. So we’ve developed this capacity for general intelligence. And the basic proposal that I make around that is that that’s a dynamically self organizing process. It’s not in the head, but between the head and the environment. And so I could refer to a lot of argument from 4E cognitive science and evidence, but I’m just going to state that. Okay. And then the idea is that has to do with a process I call relevance realization out of all the information that’s available, zeroing on the relevant, excluding the irrelevant, both within and without in between. Right. And so it’s incredibly complex. And so we have this incredibly dynamic complex system, dynamical system that is doing this. And then here’s the core idea. It is, you know, is in a sense connecting us to ourselves, making us into agents, connecting us to the world as problem solvers, and of course, connecting us to each other because most of our problem solving is done in distributed cognition, not in an individual fashion. So meaning in the sense not of just semantic meaning, but the meaning making the sense making the constitutes agency is that sense of connectedness to ourselves, each other in the world. And then here’s the here’s the next fundamental premise. The very processes that make us intelligent, these dynamically recursively complex processes of coupling to the environment also make us perpetually susceptible to self deceptive, self destructive behavior that erodes at the very connections that are constitutive of our agency in the world. And then across cultures and across historical context, you see people developing ecologies of practices because this is a dynamically recursive interactive thing. You can’t do one shot interventions, right? You have to do a calm, dynamical ecology of practices for trying to ameliorate the self deception and afford and enhance the connectedness. And I think the appropriate term for that is not knowledge, but wisdom, because knowledge is about overcoming ignorance where wisdom is about overcoming foolishness and self destructive, self deceptive behavior is foolishness. And wisdom isn’t just knowledge in general, it’s knowledge about how to flourish. And that’s about reestablishing and enhancing these connectedness. So we have these ecologies of practices and they and they involve interactions with the environment. And these most of this meaning making is taking place below the propositional level. And therefore our access to these other kinds of knowing where most of the meaning making is going is not a theoretical access. It often has to be enacted. It has to be we have to use imaginal practice. We have to use ritual. We have to use transformative processes. We have to acquire skills and virtues, alter a character, et cetera. And then the idea behind this is therefore you have these ecologies of practices and they have a lot of these non propositional elements and then they have to be home. They have to be home in a place that ultimately justifies and helps mediate between the individual and the distributed cognition and between the whole distributed cognitive network and its historical and environmental context. And so you have to have a worldview that attunes people to the ecology of practices and legitimates and modifies and curates that ecology of practices. And for a lot of historical reasons that I go to in detail in Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, that the worldview framework, which was almost always a religious framework, has broken down in the West and continues to break down the increasing rate of the nones, the N-O-N-E-S in all demographics. And then there’s a tremendous number of symptoms of this increased suicide, mental health crisis, loneliness crisis, addiction crisis, the virtual exodus, also positive responses, the mindfulness revolution, the resurrection of ancient philosophical ways of life like Stoicism, the attempt, although often misformed, to import Buddhism and Taoism into the West to somehow supplement. All of these are symptoms of the fact that we are in distress. We need the perennial power of wisdom, but we do not have the place in time and space and tradition to go whereby we can cultivate that wisdom. And therefore we fall into two things. We try to deal with the self-deception by distraction and entertainment. And then we fall into conspirituality of various forms, or we try to address it and we do it in a fragmented, autodidactic form. And we think we’re getting feedback from social media, but it’s largely echo chamber. And so we suffer. It’s not that it’s impossible, but doing things autodidactically creates a great propensity to exacerbate the very self-deceptive processes we’re trying to ameliorate. And that’s as succinctly as I can put it. That’s what I take to be the meaning crisis. That’s where we are right now. Awesome. That was very complete. And I liked the… So first of all, I want to affirm the construction. I think the construction is sound. I think the dynamic that you’re describing is accurate and correct. Thank you. I think the relevance is clear. I think the connection between what you’re calling the whole dynamic. So if we just take that whole dynamic and we call that the meaning crisis, then basically the definition would be the meaning crisis is a reference to the whole dynamic. And you’ve articulated the dynamic particularly well. And insofar as that is clearly relevant to the world state as it is today and our future progression as a species and an evolutionary sort of way of thinking and essentially a basis for understanding what sort of mode of address is needed in order to respond to that. I have a set of tools that I would use to first reify the particular dynamic in a way that might make it seem… I wouldn’t want to seem that I was being reductive because I’m not intending that. I’m just saying that in effect there are ways in which I might clarify the articulation of the underlying dynamics so as to make an essential series of propositions, which results in clarification of the principles and from those principles, a series of actions. That’d be good. So I could add one more… Oh, sorry. I just wanted to add one more thing. As you begin that process of clarification. So it’s an urgency attached to the meaning crisis. It’s not part of the definition of the meaning crisis, but it’s this… So this is sort of the third fundamental thesis, but it’s outside of what the meaning crisis is. It’s how the meaning crisis is interacting with what Thomas Björgman calls the meta crisis. The ecological threat, the political ossification and polarization, the growing wealth disparity, etc. That sort of ball of stuff that seems to be interacting. And the third thesis is… Well, if the meaning crisis is a wisdom famine, the lack of wisdom significantly incapacitates our capacity to address the meta crisis. And so in addition to solving the meaning crisis for its own sake, which you just articulated, there is an urgent existential or extinction threat that we have to address by solving the meeting crisis. So a bold way of putting this is I propose as a hypothesis that we cannot solve the meta crisis independently from solving the meeting crisis. I would agree with all of the stipulations, propositions and amendments. Just as stated, flat out. I mean, I would put it into terms of out of this underlying dynamic, you know, taken collectively, that there are the evolution of existential risk, the evolution of what we would might call the collapse of civilization as a dynamic, collapse of ecosystem as a dynamic and so on. And also, I agree with the proposition that it has basically been moving from a chronic phase into an acute phase and that this is therefore making the issue a timely one. Yeah, I have I don’t know that I would I would go through a lot of effort to add anything to that. I’m basically at this particular point, like I said, my motion would be mostly to from that acceptance to move into reification and from reification to basically say here are the places that there is alignment between the topology of the problem and the topology of the tool set that I’ve been using to address problems of this class. Right, right. So in that particular sense, I can see already that some of the things that you are actually doing and proposing and trying to make happen in the world are aligned with theorems that believe the outcome of using that tool set anyway so I can already know that the thinking that you’re doing is, is, is, is, is good, right, I mean I basically I can use the tool set that I’m using to identify the key points of what it is that you’ve just described to me and therefore be able to affirm the overall geometry of what you’re talking about but also to be able to affirm what I see the behavior that you’re taking actually in the world as a person to try to address this. Well, thank you, that’d be very helpful to hear that back. So, I guess to sort of begin that process and again this is, this is in an effort to be helpful to you. Okay, so if there’s places where it seems like you’re not understanding what I’m saying then please just stop me because then it moves into the space of not being helpful. Yeah. So, so, again, trying to make it more compact and I’m talking so much about the downstream. There is a. One way to sort of look at it as we can say okay there’s an agent. The agent has become capable of modeling its relationship to the environment modeling the dynamics of how it operates in relation to the environment, and has moved into a strategic way of doing that. It is unfortunately incomplete to the reality of its relationship to the world. And that therefore we’re having lots of side effects because, as you said it there’s not enough wisdom in the choice making basis with which it’s creating and using and executing those strategies that are modifying the very dynamic by how it makes sense of the environment and also how it’s capable of acting in the world. In other words, wisdom would be a corrective measure but it isn’t actually operating in this case because it’s become too strategic. Now again, this is a vast simplification. And there could be lots of reasons why wisdom isn’t entering into the system and part of those are the result of system dynamics. And to some extent, they are partially a result of just the position evolutionarily speaking of how our psyche is constructed individually and as a species vis-a-vis the environment we’re currently in. So, and then of course part of the reason that it’s moving from the chronic phase to the acute phase is because of the extreme amplifying effects of technology that are essentially making it so that our strategic choices which are made from too limited a basis are not just disabling our own sense making but are having vast consequences, well beyond our understanding because the consequences wouldn’t have been predicted in advance aren’t included in the strategy and weren’t foreseen in any way at all. So, in a sense, the notion here is, and I agree with you, is that we need to move from just understanding how cognition works, how relationships work, how sense and sensibility, how reason emerges, both individually and collectively, to go from mere understanding the sense of science and technology to as you say, understanding what is the basis of our choice in terms of our values. So one way that I’ve in a sense been clarifying how I think of my own work is to basically say, you know, more collectively than individually, how do we basically think about the relationship between values, knowledge and action. Right. So, so the meaning crisis is essentially a disablement of the right relationship between values, knowledge and action and replacing it with a strategic one, the strategic one being too incomplete too much driven by market forces or prestige or narcissism or any of the other kinds of things that cause people to operate from a point of view which is caring about too little too locally they’re not, there’s not enough altruism in the system to even appreciate wisdom, rather than say short term gains, taken from too small point of view that the strategies being executed have long term consequences and externalization of risk. So I’m saying all of this mostly to try to convey to you that I understand the dynamics of which referring and start to show how I’m constellating these things, so that the next level of abstraction becomes available. That’s that’s very good. So I’ve been talking to other people about that something very similar to the knowledge action value. These terms come up. And one of the things that I’ve been trying to get across is the idea that relevance is actually a nexus between those. Understood and agreed. Yeah, and so, and then it’s fundamental constitutive nature to agency and to intelligibility needs to be better appreciated in both senses of the word. I also I don’t like the fact that you are like you’re trying to orient this in a way that will. I mean, I mean, I mean this importantly, like you’re paying attention to the intelligibility of this in terms of its applicability beyond the scientific domain. I appreciate that, because while I do not want to abandon the rigor that is found within the scientific enterprise. I’m a scientist. I do not think that science as it is constituted, as it is constituted now is the machinery I think you’re agreeing with me on this, the machinery that generate what we need in order to get out of this. That’s part of the reason why. So, so I’m basically agreeing with you and saying that science and tech can tell us what we can do, but they do not tell us what we should do. So we’re distinguishing between knowledge and value here and the value is not utilitarian value because that just points to what we can do. It’s actual value in the sense of what do we care about and how do we bring about that manifestation, but also it’s a point or two and this is part of what you’re getting to when you’re saying the meaning crisis in general, is that our scope of care is too small. And then we’ve effectively replaced culture and vision with strategy and as a result, we’re having disablement of culture and vision and effectively we’re replacing life with death. Now, I’m going a little beyond. Let me actually first of all, before you respond to that. Understand that part of what I’m doing here is actually very specifically structured so as a software engineer basically what I’m used to doing is, you know, I come into a project there’s a whole bunch of code in place is deployed and they’re using it right, but they need some systematic So they want to add a feature but that feature doesn’t exist within the capacity of the existing system. So sometimes if there’s a whole constellation of such features and all of them are out of scope, then what I’ll need to do is essentially refactor the system to make it possible for the new refactored system that still performs the same functions, the old one, but has new points of articulation that allow for new features and new functions to be introduced. So at this particular level, given the nature of the dynamic of how the problem is described. I’m noticing as a kind of consultant because I’m operating in that way at this moment with you that will need to refactor the dynamic of how we understand the problem a little bit in order to make it possible for us to understand what the nature of the principles are that would allow us to essentially emerge practices that would be an address. So I first doing a lot of refactoring. That that’s fantastic. And I just want to, I just want to add something as an addendum to that, which is a reason for optimism, which is the current work on cognitive development, especially the work of Michael Anderson, and the circuit reuse and the cognitive And the cognitive expectation model is that strategy that you just you just proposed looks to be very much like the actual strategy of how the brain operates. So rather than how we have been taught to think of the brain as right, basically a logical program unfolding it. I think what the brain is actually doing is very much similar. It’s constantly redesigning itself and exacting and reusing circuits like or doing something equivalent to biological. I’m all the way. Yeah, yeah, not, not many people are not many people are. And so, one of the things, one of the arguments that can be made is in a very deep sense we’re not proposing something that is fallen to the guts of people’s cognitive agency, we’re actually getting them to wake up to what’s And I think that’s a very powerful way of framing this for people, because people are, while you’re proposing all these new ways of thinking is like, not really in it. I mean, in some ways, yes. Right. But in other ways, we’re trying to get you to tap into what we now have what the best science tends to indicate how the brain best actually operates. So, what there’s a possibility of proposing to people that this significant challenge can plausibly met by the optimal kind of processing the brain engages in. And I think that’s an important point to make. I am certainly fine and agreeing with that. In the sense of what would be helpful to you now I mean as I said I can I can create refactorings that might make some descriptions of the problem more compact. So, so in effect I was, I was refactoring first to do that, because that becomes, as you’ve mentioned the kind of educational thing. I think that showing that the refactoring process itself is the same sort of dynamics as cognitive structuring is a point that can be made it’s a fairly elaborate one. But it does, as you said, give hope to people. But on the other hand I think that there are lower hanging fruit that might make a lot of this a lot easier. Please. So, in a sense, what we’re really looking at, and, and again this is going to sound like a tremendous simplification but it’s not. That’s what you have my very positive regard and respect. Like, feel free to, as you wish, you’ve made it clear that you’re not trying to, like, be dismissive or reductive, I accept that I accepted wholeheartedly. Well, one of the tools that I that I that I work with essentially is this triple of meaning value and purpose. So in a sense one way that we can characterize the meaning crisis is that purpose has become so paramount in terms of how we as individuals and as a species operates that it has more or less fully displaced value and meaning. Right, it first resulted in the displacement value. And because of the loss of value we now no longer have the infrastructure of meaning, because the relationship between meaning value and purpose in a theoretic sense under Axiom one would basically say that purpose and value are conjugate and they together create meaning, or that meaning emerges in both purpose and value. So in that sense meaning is more fundamental, but it shows up in the conjugate relationship between value and purpose. So it’s like clip value completely and leave only purpose, meaning itself cannot not also suffer. Can I just interrupt there to say that that I think that is brilliant. So you’ve made very succinctly an argument I’ve been fashioning very recently because the, the obsession with purpose is being undermined by the empirical data. You know, like the reduction of all these other things to purpose. It was even showing up in the literature the experimental literature but when we actually started doing experimental studies, we were finding that purpose was one of, you know, four factors or three factors, and it wasn’t the most important factor, understood and agreed. And believe me not only did I predict that but I also knew that already. It’s going to be a little challenging for me in this particular case because it will be literally impossible for me to surface my background. Yeah, there’s just not enough time and it wouldn’t necessarily help you to just know all that but what I can do is I can say okay so this triple of meaning value and purpose, although it does very succinctly describe the dynamics at least the level of understanding why the notion of meaningfulness is entangled and why the notion of strategy is entangled, and why the notion of value is entangled. It doesn’t get to the structure meta structure level that you’re talking about when you’re saying, we’ve become aware of our own cognitive processes and are now shaping ourselves. So we’ve entered into a kind of transcendental destabilization because effectively it’s like the robot working on itself. It doesn’t know itself well enough. So the changes that it’s making are less healthy than the thing that it was previously. Now obviously technology amplifies that even more but in one sense the issue is one of transcendental stabilization, which by the way, to put it bluntly as a motherfucker of an issue. Right. And so talking about how to actually work with that requires yet another set of tools that is essentially an adjacent triple that allows us to get a little bit closer to the structure and metastructural aspects, because it allows for a cleaner motion from axiom one to axiom two. So, in regards to that, the second triple that I would introduce in correspondence with the first one is the relationship between vision, culture and strategy. So, in this particular sense strategy would refer to purpose. Vision could potentially refer to either meaningfulness or to value, I would prefer to have it connect to value, and to have culture connect to meaningfulness. Now I’m setting that particular conjunction up in that specific way, although there are cases in which arguing for the ultimate construction might be valid. But for the cases in which we’re concerned, under the refactorings that we’re currently in the alignment that I’m describing as preferable is specific. To sort of cement this a little bit, connecting back to say, micro economic theory when we’re talking about theory of the firm part of the reason why the CEO is a specific function is because in order for the organization to have unity you need to have transparency in all three of those notions specifically because without that, say you have two strategies you actually have two separate companies. Say you have two visions you have two separate companies, you have two cultures, you have two separate companies. So therefore, in order for it to be one company doing one thing well, it needs to basically be able to have one vision one culture and one strategy. Now while I’m describing it in that sense so as to make it very clear as to why there would be direct correlations between the of some of the concepts that I’m rendering for you and the particular dynamics of what’s actually happening at a macro economic level and also system wide in terms of the relationship between man machine and nature. It is therefore important for us to actually understand that these concepts are fundamental, so that we can essentially see how they translate project. Let me make that. Let me back off for that a second and try to bring this down to a level that’s more relatable to what you’re talking about. If I were to describe the meaning crisis in terms of the relationship between vision culture and strategy. It’s basically that strategy cynically uses vision to manipulate culture. Yeah, yeah. And I want to be very specific about this look at how Silicon Valley operates, like pretty much every business that’s emerged from that in the last 20 years probably even longer. Let’s go all the way back to say 90s. Maybe even 80s fact. I think pretty much ever since Glass-Steagall was repealed that there’s a, that there’s this tremendous bias to essentially have a founder or CEO or some person that basically wants to change the world has a strategy to do so. And so Silicon Valley uses the vision of changing the world as a way of collecting together community that are believers. That community being the employees, right, the executive team, but mostly the employees. They use the vision of, you know, say connecting the world as basically being the vision that first gathers the staff, right, and then acts as a kind of way for coordinating and manipulating what the staff does. Gathering the customers and coordinating manipulating what the customers do. And so in effect we’re, we’re using the vision and the mission statement as a kind of cohering force for the culture, both of the staff, the customers, and then eventually the shareholders, right, but that’s part of the strategy the strategy is essentially to use the vision to first create the culture and then to essentially have that be the organizing basis through which the culture itself is evaluated and metricated and the buyers and the stockholders are all more or less thinking about the situation, not thinking about the larger dynamics of the situation at all. Because they’re looking at culture, vision and strategy from a very myopic point of view rather than from a general one ie with respect to the relationship between man as a species, machinery as a technology and life systems as nature. So the ecology ends up suffering, man ends up suffering because machine ie the thing which is analog of strategy becomes dominant. By the way, let me correspond that. I know this is a lot to take in. If I use the key structure of, again, the triple of man, machine and nature, machine corresponds to strategy, nature obviously corresponds to culture and vision, you know, basically being the last one, right. So in that respect, what we’re basically doing is we’re saying that the notion of the meaning crisis can, in all three of these cases show up as an imbalance in the relationship between these triples, a subordination of one element in the triple, which is not fundamental as if it was fundamental, displacing the other two. And so for instance, in the way Habermas would talk about this, it would basically be that the life world is being dominated by the system. Yes, right. The system being machine, the life world being nature and humanity taken together, obviously he’s not doing triples, he’s doing pairs. But the idea here is is that if we were to look at it in the sense of how we would reify the notion of the In terms of the triple of man, machine and nature, machine has become dominant and is extracting from both man and nature. And that is essentially roughly the equivalent of strategy. So if I’m going to use strategy to try to overcome the man, machine and nature triple or to, you know, try to address the man, machine and nature triple, I’m already going to be in a failure mode, because it’s essentially the same failure mode as the one that was driving the system dynamics in the first place. Okay. And so in effect, we can use axiom one to understand which of these things is more fundamental actually to, first of all, and then under axiom three to have the distinct and separability and non interchangeable in this of the concepts themselves, reify so that the connectives between these domains are actually well structured and we can see this problem using any one of them particularly. But then we can basically say that as far as solution space is concerned, having constructed in this particular way, we can see that it depends upon the flow and sequence in axiom two sense to know whether we’re moving in the right direction or the wrong direction. So in this particular case, if we’re looking at the vision strategy and culture thing. So if I’m using strategy as the primary entry point I start with strategy, then I select a vision that is optimal for manipulating a culture. Then I basically at that point I have a fixed system and little by little over time, it will die. Right, because it’s not structured properly in terms of axiom two because it began with strategy. Instead, let’s take an alternate vision. Okay, or an alternate world system. Let’s say we started with culture first. And the culture went through some process that surfaced what its vision was. And through the awareness of what do we want as a species. Right. What does the ecosystem one as an ecosystem. You know that we come up with we, what do we as a community actually need for conscious sustainable evolution to be realized, and that value system then becomes the basis by which that community coordinates to first develop strategy of action for that community to act. Right. So essentially you have a distributed process of value discovery, a distributed process of knowledge, working right to create choices, and a distributed process of, of action. A community coherent action that will result in real changes in the world. And that of course because the strategy has come out of the community vision matrix is actually going to be a substantive strategy that’s actually going to be responsive to the needs of the community as a whole, the ecosystem as a whole, the environment as a whole because it was starting from that process, when the values discovery was actually happening, because we weren’t presupposing strategy and we weren’t presupposing vision, the vision, and the strategy, the strategy was actually that dominates from some sort of top down sense, it comes out last as a sense of it emerges from the dynamics of the system, and is therefore responsive to the whole ism of the system as a result. So then as the strategy executes, and the community learns and develops a new set of knowledge about what it is actually happening in the world. It can become clearer about its visions, become clearer about how to develop a new set of knowledge about what is actually happening in the world. And so the process continues and you end up with a healthy system, because we have the right relationship between vision strategy and culture which is the exact opposite of what we’re doing literally everywhere in the world today. And this is the essence of the meaning crisis. That was brilliant. Like I really liked that a lot. Let me try and pick up a couple threads of response. I’ll start from the more concrete example and work up to the more abstract framework that you because you mentioned earlier, the I’ll start from the more concrete example and work up to the more abstract framework that you because you moved in that direction. When I think about what you point out about you know the CEO starting things up. And so, and I think this is convergent what you’re talking about whether you know the way they’re doing this and they’re the way they’re marked and they march. And so, and I think this is convergent what you’re talking about whether you know the way they’re doing this and they march. It’s kind of an inversion of and other people have noted this this isn’t particular to me. I mean it’s a it’s very much a parallel religious and pseudo religious organization that’s going on because you’re not just, you’re not just sort of getting people together to work. Right. You’re actually getting people, you know to your, you’re also co-opting their sociability, you’re co-opting their identity making processes, you’re making them assume roles. And so, it’s anti life to every level of it basically it’s assuming that a centralized initiation place is essentially going to result in some sort of new market the new markets going to have extractionary dynamics you know some percentage charge but because it’s a market and it’s growing and that percentage is charged on every transaction in the market, that the more we can create fungibility and efficiency and market dynamic velocity, that the larger there’s going to be a flow in an exponential sense towards the market system and so as a result, there’s this huge incentive to take advantage of ambient forces to create parasitic process that will result in huge outsized gains for the investors and the shareholders potentially. Right. I totally agree with that. And what I was pointing out was that it’s pseudo religious and parareligious. And this adds to the cynicism that’s what I’m trying to say, the pseudo religious and parareligious aspect of it actually masks does not solve more like symptom suppression, the hunger, or the legitimate religious kinds of and cultural kinds of behavior that people undergo when they’re transforming their identity, transforming their sociability, coordinating their efforts, committing to a vision. It’s taken the natural impulses towards life and it’s turning them into some sort of extractionary tactic which is effectively a death impulse. Right. And so in a sense here what we’re, we’re looking at is essentially a co option of the natural processes towards an artificial one that itself isn’t furthering. I mean in the fundamental sense of that which does not further, it doesn’t further it only basically moves it, you know, for that individual or for the initial team and founders and that’s it for everything else after that. It’s all cost. I agree. And then the, and then the second point the more the larger point, which is a normative response like you’re basically saying we shouldn’t be doing this, and then a powerful way. And the basis of the argument is well, right there with the fundamental the ontology as long as they can convince you that there’s no alternative the market system is the way that is, we’re powerless to do anything about it learned helplessness is the best answer. You know, those are all part of the cynicism of the strategy to basically maintain the hold right. So in effect, you know to the more that people are basically saying this can’t be solved now to be honest about this. When I was first brought into this particular dynamic of thinking about this somewhere down in 2014 now, by the way, I’ve been working on these issues since the 80s but the main thing is is that I haven’t necessarily like like after about my first process was and understanding the relationship between the subjective and the objective, and really getting the tool set which by the way, that’s where all these tools come from. From understanding that dynamic fundamentally and well that it essentially was something okay here’s how I can enable individuals to make better choices. So my initial presentation was the fundamental theory of the of the of the dynamic, and then finally, and then and then finally like around 2002 or whatever. How that dynamic could be applied to help individual choices so that’s the foundations book and the effective choice book, respectively, but then you know after about 10 years I got asked this question. And I said, well, there’s a way to basically solve this this this meta crisis problem and it was presented in a number of different ways and that’s at a certain point you know I spent a long time diagnosing what precisely is going on what happened here right so I’m now using these tools to essentially analyze the fundamental of the meta crisis, and obviously with that I get an understanding of the meaning crisis, the way you’re describing it. But one way to sort of describe succinctly why there’s a sense of learned helplessness is actually, you know, my first hand experience was okay so you’re asking me to come up with an architecture for social choice making that is in the field of action where the participants are basically predators, right. And again I’m saying that from a biological level not from some sort of evaluative thing but you know our eyeballs are forward facing rather than side to side. We have the kind of teeth, the omnivores are our physical construction construction is designed for endurance but also for speed. And so in effect, you know we’re not pure predators but we’re more oriented towards predators ship than not right we’re higher on the food chain in that sense. So, on one hand, you take that and you say okay. So we’re, because we need to do good system design we have to basically design it as if people were perfectly predators. Okay, so that’s the ingredients, those are the tools you have. And then on the other end of it that the other spectrum it’s technology is toxic. And this was a point that was made a long while ago and it took me probably two solid years to convince Daniel that of the truth of that assertion, but it’s at this point now something that’s been established in this and conveyed really well so if the ingredients you’re working with is, we want to solve the meta crisis but the, but the things you have to start with our perfected predators and perfected toxicity. And that’s what you essentially working with them saying, wow, you know you want me to get something through that goalpost. Right, you know, to get a ball through that space what the fuck you talking about right. But after a few years of analyzing the problem I figured out that there was a way to apply axiom to to essentially change the dynamic of the situation at a fundamental level by converting the question. But essentially there was a point that was above it and below it. And then on that third axis I was able to construct something that does actually go through the middle. But it took me three solid years to construct, even a proof of the capacity for there to be a solution. At that point I had proof of existence is still no idea what the solution was. So, you know, thinking of the tool set that I’m working with and the kinds of things that I’m talking about. It’s not hard for me to believe that 99.99% of the observers in this field are basically looking at this and saying, there’s no other solution there’s what we’ve got, and we’ve got to figure out some way to model along with this and try to compensate for the worst successes, and so on and so forth. Whereas at this particular point I’m coming before you and I’m saying, no, we can do way better than that. In fact, there’s a way of thinking about this problem that not only is a solution but is necessary to be understood as a solution in so far as it doesn’t necessarily lead us into that learn helplessness and it allows us to look at this whole problem in a completely different way, which is why when I was describing it in terms of vision, culture and strategy and the ways in which those are currently lined up. So that refactoring allows us to say what if we re sequence and instead of starting with strategy we start with community. And then when we look at the architecture of civilization we basically say okay, what does civilization consist of well, on one hand it consists of civility. On the other hand it consists of cities, right by the way that’s a third triple cities cities, cities, civility, and civilization is a bound triple. So we’re basically looking at okay what is the structure of the, of the kinds of things so I have, you know, ecology and out of ecology and Miller’s emerges some sort of humanity, out of humanity and the value systems that that has, you know, the cultural elements emerges infrastructure and out of the infrastructure emerges finance and finance effectively starts displacing the ecology and of course that’s the problem, right, that’s your meta crisis all over again. And now we have people that are optimizing what’s happening at the financial level, and it’s starting to drive what’s happening at the infrastructure level and therefore to drive what’s happening at the cultural level. And when we start to see things happening at the cultural level that are unstable. The, the tower the, you know, Jenga tower of blocks starts to look a little, little, little less stable, right. So in effect what happens is we’re saying wow that thing that Jenga pile isn’t looking so good we’re piling higher and higher, but the blocks are coming from down below, and they’re starting to drive which of these blocks are coming out and this isn’t any good at all. So in effect we have to actually recognize the culture is primary. We’re in the stack, then infrastructure which in this sense would correspond to machinery, and the value systems in the sense which would correspond to what is used to be human values but has now become financial values. And that because we have a mistaken notion of what value means. We’re not making very good choices as far as what our strategies are and therefore we’re degrading the infrastructure and the culture. So that, that, that was that was excellent amplification. The point you ended on was the point I was I was actually moving towards expressing appreciation for the idea is that the primacy of culture, and a proper understanding of that and then, you know, and then the vision without a vision will perish. And then on top of that your particular strategies, and you can even see this that work, you know, in analogs with them. It’s even simpler than that without the people the people perish. Yeah, well, vision wants to emerge before the strategy for sure, but there’s a result we now have to have the culture of people because the wrong dynamic it’s like this big wheel. And at this point there’s so much momentum behind that wheel, and everybody who’s been steeped in the lives of the world of the particular progression of strategy first have effectively become so inured with that strategy because look at how successful it’s made us all right. And now in effect, we’re basically saying okay that that particular thing got us here but it won’t get us there. And to get there. It’s going to make things worse. Of course it is. Can we take a pause here, real quick. And that’s just because there’s a couple things. One thing is I’d like to hear john sort of offer a kind of a full response in terms of what’s been what’s been present so far so we get the entirety of that other angle. And then the intention behind my presentation was to see whether or not there was coherence so in other words, I’m refactoring. So it’s not so much that I’m looking for a response is as it as it changed so much as does this map. Yeah, and I, that’s what I wanted to try and articulate a one reason which I think it maps on to both propositions and projects that I’m currently engaged in. I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I mean one of the projects that lines up. But I will say it doesn’t have the, the same clarity and depth of articulation that you just provided is a project that I call stealing the culture, which is the idea of not trying to change this at the level of policy or strategy the political level, or are trying to change it technologically or or economically, but we have to go down and and the model I use is the way that Christianity changed the Roman Empire didn’t change it to political revolution, economic revival technological innovation. It basically created subcultures that work from the bottom up to fundamentally change the Roman Empire that’s the model. And it doesn’t right. Yeah, yes. So, we’re working, you’re putting into action. Precisely what I’m describing needs to be done. But I would want to make some amendments at this point. Right, because essentially we’ve handled the first order effects. But now we need to start compensating for second order effects. So in difference to the way that communities of culture in the Roman Empire would operate, we’ve now at this particular point emerged at a level of strategy awareness, such that people knowing that this is the basis would therefore seek to create cultures and religions with a secret strategy running on the inside. Yes, right. Yes, you end up with escape valves written on the inside or possession of high territory in domains of action which nobody else noticed until obviously it becomes an issue. Right. Yeah. So, you know, the whole surveillance capitalism thing for example emerged out of the system dynamics associated with technology, nobody predicted that. But on the other hand, it was definitely emerging and when it did emerge it became the new capture territory, which is part of the reason why some systems emerged as being dominant and others didn’t because some people noticed the strategy of, hey, we can capture value systems, and by capturing social value systems we can create more capacity within our strategies within an economic system. So now all of a sudden, although it started from a religious impulse. And it ended up being co opted by strategic one although people didn’t notice that that was happening, because they weren’t sufficiently aware in the population, the same way that the, the movers and shakers the social leaders were aware as a subset of the So essentially because the future didn’t arrive evenly. The people that had more access to the knowledge of how to basically be savvy about how to think about social dynamics ended up getting ahead of the curve and therefore dominating the system, even though it didn’t look like that was going on because the strategy was covert. And there’s, there’s been some very good historical work about how techniques from Renaissance magic were taken into advertising and very much this kind of sort of crypto religious move that was made. So part of the way I’ve tried to respond to that is to try to get to the fundamental interactions, both intra psychically and intra psychically cognitively, in which the fundamental reverence for emerging logos happening online. As free from surveillance, as you put it surveillance capitalism as possible, getting totally free is almost impossible right now. But that’s that’s very much what the whole the logos project is about. It’s about trying to get people into an experiential remembering of what the fundamental meaning making relevance realization and reverence for that process is like such that they can remember and taste what it is like to experience it authentically or as authentically as possible, removed from market forces market ideology, technological of subsumption, things like that. That’s what so very much. This is where we’re going to see the first divergence so everything that’s happened up until this particular point was essentially first alignment. In this particular case I’m saying yes to what you’re saying but I’m saying there’s a piece missing. So, at this point I would say that if it were to just be the case that people were to to be moving into just an experiential sense, they would, while gaining something in the sense of the wisdom that could emerge out of the experiential sense, don’t the degree to which other people noticing that this is happening with therefore use their increased differential understanding because they happen to be smarter or more enabled or more empowered in one fashion or another to effectively, you know, it’s like, if I say to you, hey, rather than thinking about this I want you to feel it and then why you’re feeling it I use the tool of thinking to manipulate you because you’re not looking at it from a cognitive point of view you’re looking at it from an embodied one. So it’s like the new age movement being anti intellectual means that the intellectuals the true intellectuals have just figured out another way to create value extraction because everyone else wasn’t paying attention. They’re busy, basically having a firsthand meditative experience, or if I have an emphasis in a system where people are focusing on Buddhist values of deconstructing the self, then the handful of narcissists which are basically saying, Oh, that’s cool. So if you’re all deconstructing yourself, I’m going to reify my construction and then be in place when you’re reconstructing yourself to make you in my image. Now that of course would mean that we’ve just disadvantaged them because we’ve been a sense by emphasizing one thing made it easier for the pendulum to swing the other way, but not freely, but in a constrained way because the constraints were observed. I think I can say for this there’s, there’s a couple of specific things that I would recommend. One is is that we need to educate people to become sensitive to these kinds of dynamics right so our social phenomena for example needs to be noticed, not collectively, you in the sense of, you know, some sort of shaming act, but, but, but in the sense of discernment to basically saying, Yes, I want to have the full hand religious experience but I don’t want to be dominated by some guru who’s basically going to tell me what I should think and how I should act when I’m in my especially most vulnerable space and my cognitive things have been a sense temporarily displaced in terms of firsthand experience. That is part of the educational framework. Like we don’t, we like part of you take people through this process of increased self awareness you get them to become aware of this, you get them to understand that they’re, if they’re seeking dominance or victory, that’s going to be called out, like, there’s a lot of stuff you do to try and make people understand exactly that that that that propensity and that discernment show up in the process so that one person can notice when they have basically been in a context, which has been set up to disadvantage them. So what happens is a very, I mean there’s a discernment process you have to educate people in because there’s a phenomenological marker of when the we space, the guys get shattered, and things focus on a particular are being focused on a particular individual in sort of an ongoing fashion, and you can train people to notice that. So the we space doesn’t belong to anybody in particular. And that’s in fact it’s important normative aspect. And when that gets broken people can sense that somebody’s trying to do that and so you and you give people some. It’s not an exhaustive definition but you give people things like if somebody’s trying to get you to do therapy on them, or somebody’s trying to recommend or somebody’s trying to correct like then, then, you know, you give them the criteria they’re not definitions but the criteria by which you get people to look for. Well what’s what’s helping everybody to enrich the we space, and what are people doing that is breaking it. And the advantage of that is it’s not just something that you apply conceptually you can get a very felt sense of phenomenological marker of, Whoa, that’s that’s shifted in a way. And we’re with the, you know, we’ve lost the spirit of the situation. And because it is so dynamically emergent, you can’t come into it with I’m going to have these techniques of manipulation, because it’s not a finite game it’s an infinite game, people are changing right. And you’re not going to be able to do that with the parameters as they’re engaging in the practice. So it’s very much in that very good. I mean, first of all, I stand corrected you’ve had you’ve added the correction I would have required the next piece that I would, I would, I would ask to see if you’re if you’re implementing, knowing that there is now a causative relationship between behavioral dynamics that could result in a breaking of the field as you describe it. Yeah, the process of manipulating the field strength could itself become some sort of vector by which strategy could emerge. So for example, say I have. Okay, I’ll make a contrived example or obviously rape is bad. Right. Okay, so you set up some sort of legal system that basically says that if somebody makes an accusation of rape that it’s going to be taken seriously, and lots of stuff will happen. But then a second order effect emerges, sometimes, not very often but sometimes people will claim rape, even though there wasn’t actually a rape. And therefore, the defendant now has to go through a lot of effort to defend themselves and of course it’s hard to prove that something didn’t happen versus something did. And so now they’re on the defensive and they have to spend all sorts of time and effort and reputational loss, because of the accusations so then you say well, how do we correct the second order effect well let’s put a third order effect in. So you’re going to find out that you’ve made an accusation of rape, but it was a false rape. It’s a, it’s a false accusation it was designed to disadvantage the thing, and you get caught, then there’s going to be, you know sanctions applied to the person making the false accusation. Now you can basically say well, if I was a good strategist I would figure out a way to make it seem that someone was making a false accusation, so that they would then be subject to the punishment. Right, and the third order so now there’s a fourth order. Right. So what so in effect one of the things that’s happening here is is that the notion of how to detect when things are entering into these sorts of arms races, because that’s what it is it’s a it’s a symbol of an arms race. Right. You have essentially strategy now in some sort of contest, or at least some subgroup or maybe a particularly in our social individual you know some psychopath or something, who’s, who’s basically trying to figure out how to take possession of the group, using causal processes and so if you train the group to become aware of anything that breaks the field and now all of a sudden any individual can make the threat. You know, if you do that you’ll break the field and so therefore what you would be tending to do is therefore bad, and now we can label you, and you’ll lose social credit with respect to the group because of this, right, one way or another I’m always going to be able to construct a second and a third order effect and build an arms race. Right. So, now the question becomes, how do we prevent arms races. What is the fundamental dynamic here. So, again, I’m going to shift gears and I’m going to make another another correspondence because that’s again tool set we’re working with right in order to solve these problems we have to refactor a little bit. So a triple that shows up in this space is simplicity complexity and clarity. That’s again it’s a bound triple. You may be wondering why I’m emphasizing bound triple so much. Once something is established as a bound triple it means that it’s subject to the actions. We can assure proofs of closure. So friends, if we’re trying to solve a problem. The first thing we have to do is to identify what are the necessary characteristics of the solution. But in some way along the way the proof that makes a demonstration that something’s necessary to solution isn’t itself a proof that you have a solution because you might not have all necessary things. What is sufficient to solution. Have I included all the necessary ingredients. So in effect in that particular case of proof of sufficiency, by the way, has a completely different proof geometry uses totally different methodologies and techniques than a proof of sufficiency of a necessity of a specific thing. And oh by the way somewhere along the way sufficient to solve the problem isn’t enough either because we actually need to solve something called comprehensiveness. Not that it solves a problem that we know about but it solves all the problems of that class including the ones we don’t know about. So in other words, does it have closure like if I was to take and do exception where I take the ingredients of the existing governance system and I try to make them into some sort of hybrid new government system. But the exception itself wasn’t complete like there was some things that I threw the baby out with the bath water because I thought that something that was bad, you know, was contangled with other stuff that was good but I didn’t know that so I threw away the good parts do. In order for us to show comprehensiveness we need yet a third proof structure that basically says we can know for certain that the things that we’re trying to address that the questions that we’re asking were actually the right questions IE did we characterize the problem correctly. So identifying the structure of the ways in which we can establish the system sorry necessity sufficiency and comprehensiveness. The tool set that is needed for those things is three separate tools, but they themselves are about triple so we end up with the kind of closure over the methodologies by which we come up with solutions to big hairy audacious problems, which brings us back to the triple of simplicity, complexity and clarity. One of the things we notice immediately under action one is that simplicity and complexity. And well, that these three things are distinct and separable non and changeable that therefore the notion of simplicity and clarity are distinct, they are not the same. Most people confuse those two, it becomes relevant because when we’re looking at an arms race situation, which you end up with is a situation where people try to address complicated situations using higher levels of complexity. They’re going to try to obviating the difference between complex and complicated at the moment, although I know that’s a distinction that as per Dave Snowden which by the way, I like his work, but the main thing is is that if we’re getting to a place where we’re saying, okay, a person’s created a complicated way to manipulate a social group. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to add another rule or another law or another thing we’re going to create a more complicated scenario that effectively is going to try to address the previous thing, but then we notice that the causal structure of that thing the very fact that it’s a rule and therefore it has inputs and outputs and logical construction or causative one basically means that someone else is going to be able to use their choices to manipulate the causation therefore weaponize that so as to essentially shift the agency and the capacities of some group versus some other group or some person relative to a collective. And so in effect in order to address that we have to actually notice when we’re using complexity to try to address complexity because expanding the complexity field continuously which is what we mostly do with technology means that the machine is going to win, and we’re just exasperating the situation which is the fundamental dynamic of the meaningful problem, or the meta problem in the first place right so in a sense what I’m describing here is that in order for us to move forward into a meta solution for the meta solution. We have to in effect address that an arms race is always going to be turned in complexity. How do we clear that the solution for complexity is clarity, not simplicity. Most people think that when we’re looking at a complicated problem that we need to move to a simpler state. Let’s go back to tribal things. Let’s try to do things the way they were before in history that clearly worked. Surely we can do that again except that they don’t notice that because we have technology and everybody has become so much more savvy with respect to social system design, how cognition works, how the mind works we’re creating machines that are intelligent, we’re starting to affect the dynamics and the system dynamics of the ecosystem itself, and we don’t necessarily have the value systems that go with the holism of that right began becomes a problem of wisdom. What is the nature that makes wisdom distinct from intelligence. Right. So in effect what I’m saying here is that wisdom has the quality of creating clarity, whereas intelligence would have only the quality of creating more complexity. So it’s not so much that I’m trying to, to say, hey, this is a necessary thing. I’m saying, here are the kinds of things that allow us to merge past necessity into sufficiency and set up for comprehensiveness. So in effect when I’m when I’m working and engaging with your particular work I see that you characterize the problem well, and now I’m trying to use some of the tools that I have in order to help you move through what I think are downstream dynamics from where you currently are. So, I, again, I think that’s, I don’t know if there’s divergence there or not. Like you said, because I mean I did work on this way back on my thesis on trying to distinguish intelligence rationality and wisdom. And I think that’s the infinite regressive rule problem, right, whenever, which you did with your court case. Right. And the problem is, I mean, I have a different sort of argument the problem is no rule can specify its, its, its conditions of application, because then you have to make a rule for when you’re going to apply the rule and how you’re going to apply. I use the example of what it is, what does it mean, I give you the rule be kind. And then I’m going to have to have the same thing to my feet how I behave to my son, I behave to my romantic partner how I behaved with stanger. Right. And so then they’re going to have to have rules upon rules upon rules right. Where did you go with that. So the way I went with that was was, which was way back to Brown’s book on rationality was, and this is Wittgenstein argument. And I think Brown is right it’s actually Aristotle’s argument but I would go stronger I think it’s actually Socrates is argument is you can’t you can’t capture wisdom and rules, right and so you can’t ultimately legislate. So the whole point about the deal logos, is that it is always Socratic in that the deal logos is always about virtue, right and not as something that we’re going to define or make rules about, but it’s about trying to get people into the act of cultivating wisdom within the very practice itself, so that the practice is putting into itself, the tutoring of people in wisdom, so that they can start to, as you said I think quite accurately, bring good judgment and discernment, I would say enhance relevance realization to bear on somebody who’s using, you know, manipulative strategies of intelligence, this is basically Plato’s drama of the conflict between Socrates and the sophists who try to use sophisticated intelligence and technical definition to manipulate people and that’s the act. So I saw that drama as the place in which Plato is trying to recommend, not in any theory, because you can’t, but in like, and I don’t mean like, I mean like in some kind of set of rules, but he’s trying to dramatize the practice that will be the solution to that problem. And of course he presents it as itself a practice that is continually self correcting because as the members become wiser in the practice, they deploy the practice more wisely so that is how I’ve tried to configure it. That sounds good. I’m glad to hear that that that brings some relief to my, that that’s that’s extremely encouraging and I’m very glad to hear that. Let me clarify the question a little bit and just go horizontally to just make sure that there’s there’s strength in that. So you mentioned practice and the practice being a practice of wisdom and I see this as being a good thing, like just just flat out let’s just leave that as a good thing. There is a triple here that applies in the relationship you mentioned rules and you mentioned practices and I mentioned principles. So, principles, practices and rules are themselves guess what about triple. And so in effect what we’re. This is this is part of, I’ve been hearing intonations of the difference between tantra and sutra, for example, in this particular case, although most of my actual action happens to be in the form of writing so you know there’s your sutra part. But my, my actual preferences for the tantra side of things right so. And so in effect I’m going to characterize tantra in a very specific way I’m going to basically say that the people who are the shamans and the sort of outcasts of society, who are the talkers so to speak who kind of see between the worlds and so on and so forth. They are the ones that notice over time that the rules which are unchanging right because they’re based upon some sort of sutra. The world changes but the rules don’t. And so the complicated series of rules plus the arms race that makes them more so right and all the strategy manipulative tactics that would encourage people to make even more rules, so that they can create more causal structures with which they can manipulate the world and so on. But the dynamic here is that over time the rules become less and less useful and adaptive to the context in which the people live. And if the function of government is to actually protect the land and the people at some point the rules aren’t helping. So, at that point you have to fall back to something. What do you fall back to. You fall back to principles. Where did the rules come from what were the reasons in the sense of values that that we even did this in the first place. Like what the hell did all this come from. What do we really care about what really matters. Okay so meaningfulness and care and and some sort of, you know, review of what the social contract is is up right. And so in effect what we find ourselves doing is coming into. Okay shit is fucked up. Shit is fucked up. Look see and tell the truth because this is the sense making we need to do and the process by which we need to do it I mean I’m talking classically here before you know the sense making process itself got messed up but we’ll treat that as a separate thing in a moment. The idea here is is that I come back to the principles. And from those principles, I create new practices, and I do the practices, and I do the practices to help identify the principles and the principles to help identify the practices and I go back and forth principles and practices, by the way, that’s the triple we’re interested in. And when we get to the stabilization of practices that work that mirror our values that actually implement an underlying meaningfulness in life people feel comfortable again. Then, what ends up happening is is that over time simplifications happen. Remember the triple of simplicity complexity clarity. Well under action to the next thing after clarity would be simplicity, and after simplicity comes complexity, and oh by the way round and round and round we go, but it needs to be in that sequence in order because And that’s the way in which we’re getting to here is that if we’re looking at the dynamic of practices as being the way in which you’re essentially bringing this out into the world. And that’s the one architecture of principles that allows you to clarify and articulate the essential ingredients of this such that wisdom lives in the clarity. And that in that particular process we can now have a kind of self governance principle that allows us to implement more practices at a collective level that essentially evade the retreat into rules which is essentially what most people are going to want to do. And that gets very well said. And it aligns with. But I think you have articulated it perhaps more clearly than I have. And that aligns with the idea again that I get from the platonic drama, which is right. The movement to principles is is is, you know, the platonic, you know, a sent to the to the good, because the good is right, the good is properly understood as this as the, as the source the existence or such a true and beautiful. Yes, exactly. Good, true and beautiful as a principle right they go together. And so, you know, the ideal actually stands for the good, the true and the beautiful. It’s just he chose that term because it was the most sort of normatively apparent. Right. And so, in trying to get. Right. And so for me I talked about virtue is the beauty of wisdom, I see every. This is again a Socratic idea that each virtue is just a way of trying to be wise in a situation, but it’s a way of trying to do this movement, right between, you know, the return to the to the good, the principle, and the Sophia, right, that’s one word for wisdom and then the from Isis, the application into practice, and that wisdom is properly understood as facilitating and helping people to do these movements in a coordinated way within themselves and and with others. And so that’s part of what the nature of the practice is about. So we talk, we talk about, like the two dimensions of the logos, the horizontal dimension between people, and the vertical dimension that you and I are just talking about right now and properly becoming aware of them, and of the relationship between them in practice and awareness, and in their own attempts to discuss and reflect upon it. That’s good to hear when we’re talking about the vertical we’re talking two kinds of vertical vertical to self and vertical to world. Yes, yes. So, in interior connection to essentially become clear about one’s values and exterior connection to world not to other people, but to world in the sense of, you know, the physical chair you’re sitting in or your capacity to do pottery or woodworking or blacksmithing or, you know, your ability to drive a car or all the kinds of things or a bicycle or whatever that that So first, you’ll be happy to know that I, I introduce people to that by you doing the Neil platonic contemplative practice where you take people through the scales of intelligibility. So they start to get aware of fuses into suitcase into noesis into, you know, And so they get, they don’t just get a bunch of ideas, they actually feel themselves moving, and they can feel the correspondence change between their sense of the world and their sense of themselves when they’re doing that they have to learn that before they can even engage in the the dialogical practice. Okay, we’re moving quickly then so in this particular sense leaving all that as good. I’m just going to call that and just basically say at this point we’ve have a point of arrival. And I see two more steps that I that I would at least think might be relevant in in in in fielding some of this. One of them is is that somewhere along the way we need to account for momentum calculations. And then the other one, we’re basically looking at the transition from individual process to community process. Yeah, so those are the two next steps that I would like to make I can do them in sequence. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, given that we have articulated, both a common understanding of the nature of the problem and both kind of referred to and you in practice actually how a response to the problem which is at this point, I would say is a good and solid response has the right ingredients looks good to me. So, in that sense, Or, I just want to say thank you for saying that. Yeah, that’s meaningful to me. Thank you. You’re welcome. Well, I just ran you through the wringer to get there so very least do is say, cool. And, and, and, and, and by the way I mean you know part of the reason that I’m, I’m going kind of hard and fast here is because it’s not often I get to, to, to basically do these kinds of validations and because this is impactful. And it’s now at this particular sense I’m, I’m kind of saying hey this is a real thing that you’re doing. I’m not only supportive of it but now I’m actually invested in it right so I’m basically saying hey, by the way, I really want to make sure this works because it’s got all the right ingredients and therefore you know it’s now becoming a test of work, not just for yourself but also of mine. So, in this sense, the momentum calculation piece so add individual level like, like it sounds like in one sense I could characterize it as you’ve put together a really well thought out and comprehensive educational program for individuals to participate in, and essentially just actually live better lives right whatever that means. Now, leaving that as as as a process, obviously people go back into their lives, after having had this experience, and having had this education. In what ways are you currently able to help people to notice when they’re slipping back into strategy first habits. Yeah, yeah. You know, given that they’re living in an insane world. They’ve experienced sanity for a brief time, or practice that would for at least some of them, most of the time probably help to move them to at least an awareness of what sanity looks like but then they drop back into the pool of, well I should say cesspool of, you know, what is, quote unquote. I’m going to say very cynically, real trademark life. Right. So, look, what is this, is there a thing that you’ve been able to do in this space and if the answer is no that’s okay, I just want to know that. Yeah, so, I mean, not very much. So I’ve been trying to get, you know, so I’m doing. And I don’t, and I don’t mean this to sound manipulative, but you know I’m trying to do something with a discord server that has arisen around the ecology of practice and try to see what is it like to build. So the model I was taking was, you know, a religious model that what people typically do is they, they have a place where they go to renew. They step outside of the world, the utilitarian political world that’s the sacred space of the temple or the church, and then they do the imaginal play is serious play, so that they can reboot the developmental, the developmental enhancement, or at least preservation, right, of the, the, the altered virtues and traits, and so forth. Somewhere along the way it sounds like you’re wanting to move from a temporary event to a community of practice. Yes, and and I’m, it’s very much a participant experimental thing that I’m doing, not only a community of practice because I’m also doing stuff at the higher level. And so that’s what it looks like to to network these communities together, so they can mutually support and afford each other without that becoming an iron age hierarchy of some form. That’s also something I’ve been talking with that’s where my work is going to start to become very relevant to your work because I spent a lot of time thinking about the intra community dynamics long term, and the inter community dynamics long term and how to stabilize that. So that’s, that’s a, that that’s a place where we make the transition pretty fully from probably what is the focus of your work towards the focus of mine. That’s a nice place to transfer because that’s, I mean, My cup is more empty there so it is more open to to being filled if I can put it that way, because I’m really curious about. I meant that as a compliment for us is I want to, I want to, I want to get a clear formulation of this problem, because I don’t have a very clear. I don’t have a very clear formulation I mean part of the problem is I don’t see that Mary other people wrestling with it. I mean, what they do what they do is they, I mean some of the people make good criticisms about sort of scalability issues they don’t mean that in the economic sense. Paul Vanderklaay means that like in the religious sense how are you going to make this, you know percolate through a community and permeate across generations, which is. And I take that I have taken that criticism from him and Jonathan Pedro very seriously and I’ve been trying to affect a response but I’m not clear about the problem. Let me put it this way. Yeah, the nature of that particular problem is at least as difficult as the problem you’ve already done. And I don’t, I don’t, I would I would literally treat it as essentially a. It’s it’s it’s getting back into the meta crisis thing but it’s characterized in a more specific way and that’s part of why I was doing some of the refactorings I was doing earlier. But I, but I would, I would first of all try to set the expectation with you, or the expectation that you’re having with yourself. That to be the person that solves that specific problem may just be asking more than is humanly possible for any one of us anywhere in the world right so just, you know, if somebody says well you haven’t solved this problem to treat it as a kind of. Yeah, well that’s not mine to do you figure it out. And when you get an answer come talk to me but don’t don’t ask me to do it for you right. So, I’m saying that in this particular case that’s something that I have been working on I consider that to be an area where I can be contributive right. One of the things that I think that, and this leads into the to some of the other parts of it is is that when we’re thinking about the community part. Okay, so remember I said there were two sections I’m not transitioning into the second one. Yeah. The piece there is, is again there’s, guess what, another bound triple which is having to do with agreement structures or networks of agreement. Jordan may have introduced this language to but you know you know where that came from right so in this specific case there’s networks of agreement which themselves are upheld by and instantiated within networks of relationships. Yes. Right, because agreements are only as strong as the relationship that underpins them fundamentally right. And then finally, the network of relationships is upheld by the network of communicative acts. Are you using that the way Habermas uses that term, the idea of communicative act. I am although, again, not, I won’t claim that I understand Habermas so well that I would presume that I mean the same thing. But what I mean communicative acts, I believe that what I, what I’m intending by that and I believe that he means the same thing is that not just what we say to one another but everything we are that we do with one another just a complete presence if I’m standing next to you that’s a communicative act. Right. Yeah, yeah. The communication and the communing. I talked about it as communication and communing, where communing is, and the community is not just passive presence, we’re actively shaping each other in profound ways at a non propositional level. That’s right participation in being there. That, that’s correct. Correct. Absolutely. So if Habermas is meaning that then I am as well, and I’m, that’s what I, that’s what I’m taking from Habermas at least. So, we won’t make an exegetical point here. We’ll just say, let’s take that that’s what we’re talking about. So, in so far as the totality of the relationship is defined by the, the summation of all of the communicative act. Then in effect, when we’re characterized the notion of goodness across this triple we would say something along the lines of clear communication supports real relationships and real relationship support authentic agreements. And so if, if, well it’s, I’m appreciating that you’re liking it, it’s an axiomatic result, right, it’s because of the nature of the triples that we’re seeing these derivations. And to some extent we’re looking at action to relationships as characterizing the dynamics of how communication process emerges in the relational process. But again how relational process emerges into agreement process how agreement process upholds communicative act process, right, because somewhere along the way we made the agreement that the word dog refers to a furry animal with four legs that occasionally barks. Right, somewhere along the way we see this meta structure of axiom to holding the triple together. And so when we’re looking at refactoring in the sense of qualities fielded across the triple we’re basically saying, you know, what is it that characterizes the notion of communication, such that relationship emerges. What is it that characterizes the nature of such that agreements emerge. And what characterizes the nature of agreements that support the communication emerges. Right, not just axiom to, in the sense of identifying the sequence in the flow, but axiom to as identifying, what is it that it characterizes the nature of how goodness can actually emerge at each of these levels, and must actually do so in order for the thing to have integrity integrals, as one working together such that the process actually coheres in the service of life. I like what you just did there. That was very good. I like those questions, and I like the linkage of the questions. Well, I should hope so. I know it to be good. No, I get that. Not just an opinion it’s it’s a it’s a theory right it’s a theory that basically it’s a theory of ethics. It’s a theory of goodness actually applied to underpin relationship between meaning value and purpose fundamentally see these things aren’t just words that I’m using their, their terms of typology of a kind of hyper mathematics, right, it’s a conceptual mathematics. You’re trying to get, you know, a grounding relationship between ethics and ontology I appreciate that. And I think that in and of itself is a fundamental. Can I say something that might sound incredibly egotistic. Yes. I’m not looking for it. I found it. I know for a fact, it’s done. It’s, it’s, it’s like, it’s intense, it’s really intense. But it urges a lot of really beautiful stuff. So, I appreciate that I mean, I at least think what you’re saying is, I mean I’m just hearing it so I can’t have the degree of conviction that you have, but right. What I can say in my response to it when I said it was good I didn’t just mean oh that’s a white or that’s a wonderful idea. I meant that strikes me as rationally plausible, and that and when I mean plausible I mean it should be taken seriously. And that’s the kind of normativity I bring in when I’m encountering ideas for the first time. I’m trying to go beyond that. I’m basically, you made the reason why I was even able to point this to this and to make this specific claim was because you talked about it as a relationship between ethics and ontology. I’m basically saying, it’s not just a relationship between ethics ontology. How would you characterize it then that goes beyond that. It’s a relationship between ethics ontology and epistemology. In other words, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a structure that is at once, all of these things, and none of them in the sense that it is the deeper basis from which all three emerge. When I say, I know something, and I’m not making an opinion I’m basically saying, because the nature of epistemology itself is wrapped into the nature of ethics and ontology directly. In fact, the notion of knowing here isn’t just empirical or analytic, but it is something that is other than empirical and analytic, and including and transcending both. And it is from that basis from which I’m actually speaking. Yeah, and I think you might have misunderstood me that’s what I was trying to get at I was, I was about to say that I see you going back beyond the contian thing to the work, the kind of framework that Geerson’s talking about when he said what ancient epistemology, it’s like you’re the way you’re talking about it now, in which knowledge is not some function of belief. It’s about, you know, it’s about coming into the metaphor that replaces it as a conformity of contact with the good that which lies before beneath beyond and affords right the connection between the true the good and the beautiful the epistemological the ethical, and perhaps the ontological that’s what I was, I was about to say. And that’s what I was, because I’ve already heard that earlier on when you when I said, you know the good and you said that true the good and the beautiful what’s beyond them and what makes the their interference possible. I get that what what what what I get I guess what, for me, and this, I think you agree with this but let me ask it. For me, the one of the fundamental differences before, if you compare after Descartes before Descartes is after Descartes, I don’t have to go through any fundamental transformation to get at the deeper truths, I just have to have a method before Descartes, and this is clear in the Platonic tradition, I have to undergo fundamental transformations in order to come into right relationship conformity with the good I can’t get at it. And right. And so, for me, it’s both actually I think to some extent that it’s the beingness of it already holds it. And to come into cognition of it. And become it. Yes, very much in tuning the note. So, for me, the reason why I like it. I started with this started from a compliment it wasn’t a criticism, but what I was like, what do you mean and then by, because two places you’ve been both clarity as an essential as the clarity of understanding and now here’s the clarity of the communicative act which is not acknowledge not just clarity of communication, but clarity of communing and I get that and I really appreciate that. And that would be something I want to hear more about what does that, like, could you could you explicate that a little bit more that’s where I, that’s where I wanted to zero in. Well, I’m glad you did because you’re actually anticipating the direction I would go anyways. Right. So in other words of the triple of authentic agreement relationship and communication. Most people try to figure shit out at the agreement level they try to come up with the rules. Right. And then you have people who will try to manipulate things at the social level by, you know, falsifying what’s happening at the communicative level so the first thing about the the communicative level is, by the way, if we’re going to do anything we need to start at the communicative level so I’m looking at community and communion. Right. To be in community to be in communion to some extent I’ve, I have to think about the principles and the practices of communication. Right, so that would be the emphasis that I would be leading to get to. You’re asking the question you just asked me, which, by the way, is awesome you anticipated that. When we basically are looking at what does it mean for clarity to be applied to communication. Now, this is a junction point and there’s a whole lot of stuff that comes out of this. I can imagine I can. Right. So first of all the way in which we think about ethics itself is partly modeled in terms of the dynamics of the communication channel so what does it mean to have integrity in the communication channel I don’t mean that in the sense of tell the truth I mean in the sense of the communication channel works. Right. And so now we’re looking at symmetry and continuity dynamics as being ways in which we characterize the communication channel the symmetry dynamics were characterized by Shannon’s information theory, pretty well, the continuity stuff is, is, is a lot more abstract that hasn’t been described mathematically by anybody I know yet but maybe I’ve overlooked it, who knows, but the point here is this that if we’re looking at what increases the integrity of the communication channel, and therefore as a side effect increases the integrity of the source and the destination the subject of and the objective, then the notion of ethics would be the summation or the conjunction of those three kinds of integrity increase. So the notion of clarity here isn’t just that the signal that goes in and the signal that comes out as the same I either I have an underlying symmetry. It is to say that the channel itself has continuity in time and that the energy exchange. You mean that channel is self protecting and self propagating in some ways that what you mean, yes, there’s an auto poetic aspect to the channel right right good. That basically has a number of practical implications or principles to translate in the practices. So that’s one branch that comes out of it. Okay. Another branch that sort of comes out of this is, is the notion that clarity isn’t just you and I understand one another. It’s the ability to move through so clarity isn’t just that I can see through something it’s that I can move through it. So in this particular case, I’m saying that the channel itself or the dynamic of the protocol, which constitutes the communication channel because I can’t think about channels without thinking about protocol that the dynamics of the protocol itself have a certain necessary form. So, for example, in this context, it would be something like I grant to you three rights. The right to speak. The right to be understood. And the right to know that you have been understood. I can’t take these rights, but I can give them to you, I can’t take these rights from you, but you can give them to me. And when it is the case that each of us gives to the other, these three rights and the conjunction of the six together is the necessary and the sufficient basis for communication to happen such that we can move through points of understanding and transformative points of articulation. And anything less than that is not transparency. That’s really interesting because I’m not claiming this is identical what you’re talking about but there’s a precursor in the practice that I call it actually dialectic into your logos, where people have to actually move through, like, like, they propose something they have to be up, they basically they enact those principles, like, they can’t, they can’t say anything of their own until they first say back have I have I have I heard you have I understood you, and not only, not only that superficial agreement, but it’s active they have to try and draw the person out. They not not trying to impose their own ideas but they have to, like, can you tell me more about this can you tell me more. And is this what you’re like, and so they have to enact those. And so, what I’m saying is, that’s interesting because there might be that I’m the practice I’m talking about and I’ve been trying to develop with Chris and others is actually introducing people to precursors of the thing you’re talking about and let’s take it into the next level right because now I’m able to bring explicit principle to this that now can we find the technique. So, say I’m in the position where I’m attempting to assess as one of the speakers I’ve just said something to the other person, and they’re now trying to demonstrate to me that they understood me because they’re trying to, to meet the condition of that I know that I have been understood. Right. So how do I know that I’ve been understood well if the person across from me says back to me verbatim I’ll know that they’ve heard me, but I don’t know that I’ve been understood right. So, then, then you might say well, and this is the point you were making. They try to draw out they come out with. Well, you know, I hear it like this, and I hear that like that is that what you mean. Is this the deeper thing you’re trying to get to and so on and so forth and that didactic process can over time eventually converge to my belief that you understand what I was trying to get at, but that’s not the strongest. There’s one more, which is by the questions you ask, I will know definitively what you do and do not understand. So in other words, what I basically do is I say something to you and then I watch what you ask I watch what you do next. And what happens is is that from the response you have, particularly if you’re asking questions I know where the limits of your knowledge are, because if you. So, so say it’s a board right, and I put a dot in the middle of the board this is what I say, right. And then, if you say something back to me it might be another dot here and there and so on so forth, and I’m trying to see whether there’s an adjacency, but I could skip all that all together and say, ask me three questions. And if they ask three questions and those questions are other places on the boards. It defines the limits of your knowledge, such that the area of the space included in the middle is for sure understood. Now I can know that for sure because you wouldn’t know what question to ask. Unless you had understood specifically what it was that was relevant in the sense that you mean relevance. Yeah, that’s good. That’s very good. And by, by doing all of this so again, what I’m doing by by essentially constructing all these things away is I’m fast forwarding you through the questions that I’ve asked. And I’m noticing which questions you’ve and sent answered. So then I can leapfrog again to the next level so we’ve just, we’ve transitioned at this point I think we’re about eight levels away from where we started. So, by the way. So, actually, this is as far and as fast as anybody in this domain has come yet. Just, by the way, that’s a compliment that’s a high order compliment. Okay, yet, like literally anybody I’ve talked to yet hasn’t come to the level of coherency in the space that you have. I’m talking seriously here. So, in effect, when we’re getting to this specific thing I’m saying something along the lines of, if the people in communication are trying to go for maximum clarity. It’s going to focus on what questions they ask, not what statements they make or what directives they issue. So now we’re basically saying that clarity comes to clarity of good questions. So what creates clarity of good questions. So then we start to look at, again, Habermas and what are the dynamics in which reason, and insight emerges, the process itself, how does that happen. Well, I have two points of view, my two eyeballs, and they each see a two dimensional field. And through this process which I have called phase parallax and other people have a different name for but there’s a, there’s a sort of interference pattern that is created that allows me to construct a third dimension. Yes. So visually I basically can get parallax to see how far away something is because of the triangle relationship that emerges and the angles and such. So essentially what happens is that we say okay, if I’m talking to somebody and I have a point of view, and they have a point of view, right, because we’re each different people. And I find a way to see through their eyes, through the communicative process. So in one sense, I’m holding my perspective and I can genuinely know that I’ve hold their perspective because of the questions that they ask and I’ll know where they stand right. So in effect, from there I can now overlay these two things and gain insight into the world in a way that I would not have been able to do by myself. This is what you were meaning earlier I believe when you said auto diet dactycal only get you so far. And this also goes to one of my defining criteria, one of the defining criteria I use for genuine D logos. Both people admit that they get to a place that they could not have gotten to on their own. And they don’t admit it. They recognize and appreciate that I got to a place where I couldn’t get, and you got to, and we did that together. For me that’s one of the ways in which that’s a marker I give people of, how do you know if you’re moving into the kind of thing Understood. So the point you made about the question I really I want to save it up for me because I want to remember but this is recorded so I’ll be able to go back to it. Yeah, because I mean, I’ve been trying to figure out about how to better get this that’s the Socratic dimension in, in that you’re looking at ETP technique. What technique. Socratic process. Right. So, that’s kind of where that has because that’s basically one of the directions in which we get to values discovery for governance process, intra and inter community wise right so you know, back to the question earlier we’re talking about governance, but in the sense that we were looking at what is it that creates clarity and communication. Yes, why clarity would be important. So, part of what I’m getting at here is the degree to which clarity itself allows me as a process through this insight process to move from a two dimensional perspective to a three dimensional or an n dimensional perspective to an n squared one right that to some extent what I’m looking for is a dynamic that effectively, not only characterizes what clarity would mean as far as practice and principles concern, but what it means in the sense of what outcome is what outcomes it has. So, in this specific sense I’m basically trying to answer the question of what does clarity mean in the context of communication I’ve outlined at this particular point. Three separate branches as to what that means in this context. Yeah, no I see this. This is very good. I like this a lot. Again, in the sense I was about earlier. So, so, like, in. Well, maybe I’m just interrupting because I’m interested in how does that address sort of this, the scalability, because that goes back to governance, let me finish this part. If we’re looking at the degree of insight as being the characterization that we’re looking for in the sense of what emerges. The kinds of questions that are the right questions. Right, because we’re asking earlier, how do we know what the questions are why do we focus on the question so we talked about that a little bit, but now I’m basically saying what is the method by which those questions are emerged. So, in this particular sense, what I’m basically concerned with is the same way that we would might use a way of identifying the key characteristics of the process. So, in this particular sense, what I’m basically concerned with is the same way that we would might use a way of identifying the key characteristics of the process. So, in this particular sense, what I’m basically concerned with is the same way that we would might use a way of identifying the key characteristics of the process. So, in this particular sense, what I’m basically concerned with is the same way that we would might use a metaphor for example, I’m looking at two things that are the farther apart, the better. So, in this particular sense, what I’m basically concerned with is the same way that we would might use a metaphor for example, I’m looking at two things that are the farther apart, the better. The more brought together they are, the better. And the quicker that happens, the better, because if I’m looking at reification power as a process, rather than as a static metric. I’m looking at what is the rate at which diversity and unity combined. Yeah, the rate of I have too little diversity, I might make it easier to have unity. But if I have too little diversity, even though I have a lot of unity I don’t have a lot of insight whereas if I have a lot of diversity but not a lot of unity, I don’t get insight because I don’t have enough coherence to essentially emerge clarity as to what it is that I’ve actually perceived in the insight way. So in this particular good yeah the idea of the affordance of complexification. Yes, that’s the language I would use for that. So what is the basis by which this sort of process can happen it depends upon the strength of the participants. Yeah, because the strength is going to be the characteristic by which they can hold substantial diversity and be able to still implement the kind of perspective seeking and holding that would allow for the emergence of the kinds of insights that matter and then if, if it’s if it’s by synchronous. In the sense that, you know, I might have skill that I could basically see through your eyes. At the same time I see through my eyes, but you might not have the skill to do the reverse. But if you did. If you were able to play so I, I can see from my eyes and from your eyes, you can see through your eyes and through my eyes. So you have insight and I have insight but then we do the meta process of seeing through the insights of the other. Yes, so now in a sense I can construct a kind of hyperbolic geometry that would allow for a reification basis that is substantially stronger than that which would occur if just one of the individuals had the necessary capacities. Yeah, I’ve been talking about this in the dynamics. Some of the work I published on flow as an insight cascade. And how do I get an insight cascade not between an individual and an environment between people. And what are some of the features of communication that are reliably predict flow and allow you to afford the flow with other people. So now we’re talking about strength as the individual which has to do with the degree to which the inward connection to self self in the greater sense what most people would call solar spirit. And connection of self to world. And again, world in the sense as the objective totality not in the sense of other other being other people so if I’m looking at what creates clarity in the relationship to other it’s going to be on the basis of this triangle of connection to self and connection to world. So what is the depth that creates connections in those spaces. So you’re using a strength metaphor and I wonder I just want to the metaphor I’ve been using is a flexibility metaphor meta perspective of flexibility. I use the word strength in a very specific way it’s and it’s a like so when we think about power for example we’re talking about a force overcoming a distance inverse and time. Right. And so when we’re talking about the power of a metaphor it’s the degree of diversity of the things connected the degree of completion, by which they have been connected, and the inverse of how long it took to do that. In this particular case a lot of very powerful metaphors have been deployed. So, in the metaphor literature that I published and that’s actually called appness. That’s, I’m sure they have names for it, I would prefer to use the word power because in this particular case it connects back to the actual definition and the equations, as seen in physics. You mean, In physics it’s tall the capacity to do work and the appness would be a measure of work in that sense. Yes, but if I’m going to get to a definition of strength what I’m basically going to do is I’m going to say, in the same way that work talks about actuality, strength potentiality so I can fold the equation of power through the actuality potentiality mirror to get what would be the equation of strength. So I think we’re using the same way because I’m using, I’m using flexibility drawn from my Tai Chi expertise, where it means the way I’m flexible it doesn’t mean sort of just this, it means, how many moves are all, how many options do I have available to me. So what are the real possibilities for me in this situation, the potentiality optimizing for potentiality becomes. That’s what she is. That’s what she is, basically, the Zen practices, emphasize and awareness of potentiality in ways that are balancing for people that have lived in the world of actuality for so long that they’ve unbalanced because they don’t notice how to optimize potentiality. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so if we’re looking at goodness again coming back to that from an ethical point of view what makes a good choice in the sense of effectiveness, we’re therefore characterizing it in the sense of explicitly the summation of all that is actual, and the summation of all that is potential in product relationship with one another. So now I’m basically saying to live well and fully, or to optimize both the consequence of choices that I’ve had and the capacity to make future choices. Yeah, I talked about this in the fundamentals of the relevance realization about the notion of self as basically being the product of all of your past choices as the product of all of your possible choices all the things you could do. And all the things you have done. Right. So, in this sense, if we’re looking at clarity, again trying to identify what are the things that are effectively going to create the most clarity. I’m looking at, again, as you said, if I’m going to look for maximum of power. In the sense of resolving power resolution power in the sense of insight, reification power. I’m going to basically be basing that on the strength of the participants, i.e. as cells that have in the sense that you’re describing the capacity for flow and for flexibility and so on and so forth. Yeah. So what is the nature of strength in this sense. It’s a capacity to remain the same, despite overwhelming forces over long periods of time. It’s proportional to time, proportional to force but inversely proportional to change. Right, a person that’s strong can be strong without doing anything at all they just standing there, and they have the capacity to move if they need to but aren’t obligated. So, so power in order to be known as power must be demonstrated, but strength to be known as strength has to be felt from within. So I’m looking at what are the capacities that create this sort of strength and looking at what are the capacities that create inward connection, integrity, safety in the sense of response to the world ability to respond to the world i.e. they’re very facile, they’re very skilled, they’re polymath, right. They know how to work with their hands and they know how to work with people. So what happens is is that it’s this spiritual characteristic this, you know, inner inner knowing enlightenment sort of thing plus the chop would carry water factor that allows for coherent negotiation of complicated social spaces in the sense making process, such as the one that we’re describing, as in, how did we solve the meaning crisis or how do we solve the meta crisis and what are the skills and capabilities needed to actually do that. Question, then. Yes, I want. So, why, why are you like, why is the why is that like, why is that being defined as a capacity to resist change. It seems like it’s a capacity to accommodate change. I mean, it’s fine. The comedy it’s good. I mean it’s, it’s essentially, you know, the stick metaphor right I have one stick, I break it right, I have a bundle of sticks, I can’t break it. So in other words, it affords the force. Right, they bend a little, you know they move, but you let the force go, and they go back to their original shapes so now you can start talking about things like Young’s modulus, right, the stress versus strain ratio. So, the imposed force the strain would be the permanent change the results. So I get I’m getting that but what I what I’m wondering about is, you know, the idea of, you know how evolveable a system is. So, very. The things I’m talking about a pure principles. These are clarification questions are not challenge question so I’m trying to get the what’s the ontological level at which you’re saying, we understand the strength of the self in its capacity to not change, because I know that you’re not meaning we don’t acquire virtues we don’t acquire skills we don’t acquire. We don’t become wiser than we are. So what is it that you mean is it changing, what is it changing the notion of integrity, being to act as one together. So in other words, there’s a there’s a spiritual quality that’s being referred to here. So my integrity as an auto poetic cognitive agents psych is not is not disintegrating and some. That’s it. Okay, that’s all I wanted to get. I don’t have any, I don’t have any challenge I just wanted to understand. Well, let’s just take it the rest of the way right the thing that makes Jesus a spiritual figure is they nailed into a cross, he endured enormous and through all of that he basically says Father they know not what they do he didn’t lose integrity. Right. He’s still himself throughout all of this he didn’t give up anything right, or, you know, the laughing Buddha right has these transcendent states of joy, and like He’s still a human being at the end of it all. Those are qualities that’s that’s the essence of what makes those spiritual qualities. I mean, I’m doing it right now and I’m reading it deeply, because I come back to this another person I come back to repeatedly, my son’s doing it with me. So it reminds me very much of spinosas notion of Canada’s in a profound way, and that that that. So, and the way he similarly tries to drive blessedness from that. I like, I’m very attracted to that because it fits into. It’s a way of talking about the spirituality of the self that does not make it antithetical or non biological and allows you to see a continuity into the biological domain, because one of the problems I think we have with our spiritual traditions is they have tended to elevate and incorporate spirituality from biology. Right, so now we’re basically looking at the, the next piece which is, how do we move from individual process to collective process because even if I have a truly enlightened individual. Well they went through, you know, 20 or 30 years of life becoming enlightened. They enjoy it for a little while and they die and the rest of the community is basically saying what the fuck it doesn’t help us a bit. So in effect there’s a there’s a sense here in which individual enlightenment is not enough we have to go beyond that right so so so now we’re looking at what does it mean for community be enlightened, what is the dynamics that are involved in the communicative process. And again we’re going back to clarity here but what are the kinds of things that in the communicative process would move it beyond just the individual process of insight, and how that emerges to maybe be values discovery or good choice discovery or creation of new vision for the community, or creation of new strategy or so on. We’re now looking at is, what are the dynamics on the process of communication that would basically have both literal elements and symbolic elements right we mentioned spirituality as an integrity but you notice I use it in a very literal way, but then I was able to incorporate directly by reference, the connotative elements and to say why it was the case that all of the connotative elements and the literal elements happened to correspond with one another, because guess what, in language we’re basically looking at the symbolic and the literal as being one of those things that have an actually one relationship with the conjugation between them. Right. So in effect, we’re not just concerned in the communicative process with just the logic of argument. No, we’re also concerned with the dimension of care. What is the empathy. What is the compassion. What is the degree to which the tonality of the process. And oh by the way I know I have been hard on you in this conversation but nonetheless, that the tonality of the process emerges, a new capacity for forward motion. So that’s part of the reason why I’ve been pushing because to some extent, without that I wouldn’t have been able to know how to help you the most. Right. So, in a sense, it’s the question of not just how do I help you to solve a problem you’re trying to solve which would be just an analytic information logical construct right. And that’s also the dimension of that I care what you care about, I recognize your caring. I see what you see. And I also see this as being meaningful to me in my life, and to the larger world right, not just to other people, but to the sense of self, and the sense of environment right back to back to the self world another again. So if I’m basically taking that and I’m saying to myself, okay. Not only is it that I’m going to be concerned with the compassion. In the sense of how you’re expressing it, I’m concerned with the compassion of how I’m expressing it. So not just, how do I show you compassion and empathy, right, but also, am I being compassionate in the way that I’m being compassionate. Right. And am I for sure knowing that the way in which I’m being compassionate is itself actually good. Doesn’t just look good or feel good, because compassion would feel good. And maybe the argument would look good. But I have to know somehow, what is the reification basis by which I can trust that the particular exercise that I’m leading you into here isn’t some form of addiction, for example, right, because that can look good and feel good, maybe right mostly feel good not always look good but you know you can have the good sales thing you know the product that you can buy that, you know, everybody sees that you’re high status because you’re wearing the right kind of shoes are carrying the right kind of pocketbook. But if you basically saying you know what feels good and we’re talking about addiction right then somewhere along the way I’m going to basically say, how do I So, there’s a difference between the compassion, the compassion for how that process of compassion is itself expressed as a process, and the underlying ontological ethical and epistemic basis by which I can literally know those things to be the case as themselves. So, in this specific sense what I’m basically saying when we’re talking about the communicative process. I’m saying, yes, it involves literal elements, and it involves symbolic elements. And here’s what some of the symbolic elements look like, and why they are important, because they are just as much a manifestation of the underlying ethics, axiality, so to speak, ontology and epistemology that are the ground of the system itself, and literally the very basis by which we come to understand theory of ethics at all as the principles of effective choice. Does that symbolic dimension. I don’t know I’m struggling for a verb here. But does it, does it exact it, does it exact a lot, does it exact meaning into the domain that people talk about when they’re talking about the sacred. Of course it does. Right, can’t not do that. I’m one of the essays that I put up on mflb.com recently, which by the way you might want to pay attention to is essentially an argument, the worth of the world basically this was in a TEDx I did years ago, basically saying you know if you actually think about this on a sort of cosmological level. The value of this planet is enormous right I mean we tend to, as a species think that we should make choices on the basis of economic realities right if you talk to an economist they say well, you know economy sort of like how we do trade offs and finite limits and so on and so forth, and basically say all right, let’s take that at face value. We’re going to have, you know, a notion of value and, and so on and economic exchange what is the total economic transition. The total economic transit of everything that happens on the entire planet on an annual basis. Well spitballing we come out to something on the order of around 1,000 for consulting session with with with with as high up in the expertise of this particular field of particle physics as I could get and ask straight out. Here’s the scenario. Have I made some huge mistake. And they basically at the end of it said no, you’re thinking, you know about about these particular issues is actually coherent there’s nothing wrong when you’re using an enthalpy calculation in the place where it actually belongs. Then I basically says is anybody thinking about this and they say, No, that is a horrifying. Right, because it’s a horrifying sequence of affairs because it puts to this specific thing okay so some people some group is essentially going to get, you know, academic prestige and they’re going to have their name on the paper they might get a Nobel Prize, a whole bunch of governments get to say they’re investing in something which they think is going to be maybe great for humanity because we learned something but all of them are secretly hoping for some new new weapon maybe right, or the capacity to build, I don’t know starships or something. And then they basically are taking risks that could potentially without anybody really knowing for sure because the math only allows us to get maybe eight digits of certainty. And so we’re going to have to do something against the value of the value of the earth. We really ought to have something like 33 digits worth of certainty, but no we’re going to do we’re going to roll the dice on eight, eight digits worth of certainty against the value this 30 digits of certainty, because some ignorant people couldn’t do philosophy. That’s a very good argument for reverence, the virtue of reverence. Yes. I have to go soon. We’re understood. I’ve actually reached kind of a point of completion I have maybe just a handful of wrapping up things. The transition from individual awareness of sacredness to community awareness of sacred is important. And that has to do with the kind of clarity and the communication process, taken all the way up to the level it basically requires greater strength and skillfulness on the part of the participants to actually incorporate the compassion pieces, I feel like I’m reinventing Buddhism. Right. But the notion here is is that without that clarity of communication to include both the literal and the symbolic and not have the symbolic, or the literal be used as vectors of power but actually become embodiments of strength. So the particular conjunctions that are associated on their axiom one between power and strength actually solve as a kind of address of the NAR social issues I was mentioning earlier. Right way back three levels of conversation ago, right, we basically saying yep I’m aware of this issue and we’re trying to deal with it this way and I said, here’s some of the dimensions downstream of that. So in this particular case what I’m basically suggesting is is that the future course. As far as our education process is largely going to be focused on, not just increasing awareness of the ways in which things go wrong, and the value of what it means to have it go right and therefore the value lost if it goes wrong, but to have that live at the community And I recognize that the process of creating good community is it much going to be on the basis of the degree to which we have higher levels of strength in our care and compassion first for one another, and for our communicative process to be clear and to emerge that. And also for that particular process to become the basis of principle and practice for the action of the community as a community, and that this is the way forward. And I think that the level of governance to some extent, depends upon this level one reification even happening in order for level two such as things like EGP to really manifest. And I’m not even talking about the stuff downstream of that yet. But at this point, I think you can get the sense that the trajectory that I’m working on a directory you’re working on are not only closely aligned, but to some extent, maybe not just symbiotic but necessarily so. I would agree with that record. I would, I share that recognition. Yes, very much. I hope that this has been helpful to you. I’ve enjoyed this thoroughly you said you were pushing me but I didn’t feel it that way I felt it, I felt that his fellowship I didn’t feel it as anything other than that. Good, I’m glad that I’m glad for that reflection I, I knew that I was moving things more quick, I felt that I was moving things more quickly. Otherwise, would, Tim was cut off at least twice and I’m apologizing for that also. Yeah, a lot of good stuff. Seems like we’re getting to the point where we’re recognizing alignment, which, you know, like I told you so I think that’s a good beginning as far as I’m concerned. So I do have a request then Tim, I would like, if I have both of your permission. I would like to put this out on my channel. I think this was exemplary in many dimensions. And I would like the people, I would like to put it out as an episode of voices with for Vicky. If you think that would be that that that’s fine but I would, I mean you’re going to put it on your channel that’s fine. I think that would be best actually for it to. I think it would be best to for it to go on yours, and if I publish it, you know, one day on voice crafts. I think it resonates with a kind of profound integrity of what I’m trying to do and voices with for Vicky. It’s exemplary in many dimensions and I would very much. I’d say request I would very much like it to be there. Can I ask a calibration question. Sure. Since you are pretty uniquely position this was something I asked in a group yesterday. Given that you have wide experience of a lot of different thinkers in the field both historically and presently. What’s the degree of unicity that you experience in a particular content method that I’m presenting to you as comparative to all of the other stuff that you’ve experienced. Um, I think, and I hope this is the right adjective. I find a kind of metaphysical clarity, and the way you mean it and coherence. I see other people, and I’m trying to complement both you and them, and I’m not trying to set myself up as some God adjudicating right I’m just asking about your opinion, your experience the opinion. Okay, fair enough then given, given that qualification. I find that you’re the metaphysical clarity of what you’re doing is is quite is profound in a way that I find rare. I find many people that I’m talking to on this trajectory, I think, and different ways but I think it’s clear to me that in many ways you have thought about this more deeply than almost everybody I’ve talked to. That doesn’t mean that’s not a criticism of people back. A lot of the people I talked to have thought about this deeply, but there’s. This isn’t the right word for us, and you’ll know why it’s not the right word but it’s the closest word I had. There’s a formalism that you have that I write that I find very rare. That brings a kind of rigor that I deeply appreciate. You know the formalism isn’t the right word but that’s the word I’m using to as a placeholder right here. I actually think it’s okay. I’m fine with that word. Okay, yeah, I could have a higher level of rigor, if the need was required for it. Sure, I think that part of the thing that I’m trying to evaluate a little bit as far as unicity is concerned is that not very many people would even know that that was needed. Even fewer or know that that was hard. Even fewer would know that that was especially hard in this topic space. Yeah. And even fewer would understand the degree to which the self descriptive capacity, not only creates reification of the first order but if the second and the third which so far as I’m aware, historically has never before occurred. So, in that sense, yes, and more so, but it’s hard for me to tell the degree to which the awareness of that is evidence in any other person. Well I could, I was, I was cautious to say all I can give you is my educated. Fair enough. But I do. I do think that. I think there’s fertile ground in the community that has gathered around my work for this for this conversation. I think I can also say that with a significant degree of confidence. Well, we’ll see how, whether there’s enough interest for that to happen. Well, I mean, I mean, there is there’s also confounding variables, right there’s right interest is also driven by, you know, familiarity biases and availability as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Understood. All right. Back to planning. I know you have to go. Were there any other wrapping thoughts on that you have anybody else’s part. I don’t have any I’m very, very happy and appreciative for this conversation. And that’s all I want to say thank you. Thank you to both of you. Thank you, Tim for putting this together. Thank you, john for willingness to take the risk of spending the time to do it. I mean, you’d already earned my trust. So when you have trust in a person’s character, the risk is tolerable. This good. Clearly, obviously yes good that. All right. All right. So, Tim, if you can, like I said, it’s to me, and I’ll make it available probably next week, actually. Yeah. All right. And both of you, if whatever you wanted the description notes linkage, make sure to take time reflect. This is an opportunity a doorway, potentially, you know, let’s try and use it as wisely as possible. I’m just curious to know whether anybody’s interested in the contents of mflb.com and whether I should put more content up, or how quickly I should focus on doing that and so on. That would probably be the only thing that I would hope would be in the description other than that I trust your description to be whatever’s right. Okay. Whatever recommendations you have to please them. Just send me a link when it is posted so I can link to it. Of course, if I can, if I can make a request for another conversation. I, I would feel to send links, or to put something into the description, and in that sense to make the invitation that I would possibly want to make would be probably be more appropriate for me to be more of a part of the conversation and to do so. I’m so sorry for that. I had a lot that I was trying to do and I realized that was my error. I, you know, we’ve spoken about this before I see these conversations as 1012 I mean there are hundreds of hour long conversations in context that aren’t yet present. So for me this participation is not just one of this conversation but in the meta conversation and in the emergence of the context enabling further seeing and knowing of each other, you know, I have deep appreciation for both of your works. And for those parts where I would feel there is music to add that might initially sound discordant, but nevertheless I would hold to as my own, in some sense sacred form of necessary contribution. I would ask for the trust that the resolution of that and the integration of that is something we can undergo together. In fact, I believe that the next steps I see on the horizon to take actually necessitate that Okay. Beautiful. I’ll do that john. Thank you both. Yeah, really awesome to spend the time. I’ll end the conversation for all of us now. Blessings. Okay, bye bye.