https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=HJey6aLkSxs
Welcome everyone to the Cognitive Science Show. This is a new series with my ongoing partner in crime about these Cognitive Science Show series, Greg Enriquez. This is a new series we’re entitled Transcendent Naturalism. We’re trying to bring about the most, I think this is the right word, satisfying consilience between science and spirituality that we think is possible and viable right now. So what we’re gonna do is first of all, sort of talk a bit about why this is problematic. And then I’m going to do a review. I’m not gonna do a complete representation of an argument I made recently at the conference that Greg organized, the Consilience Conference, where this was the core thing we were addressing and give Greg a chance to interact with it a little bit more dialogically. And then that will lead into Greg bringing in work from his Utalk framework that will also, I no doubt, given our past history converge and synthesize with what I present. And then we intend to have on a third person, not the same person each time that will enter into this discussion about transcendent naturalism. So why- Let me, if I can just pop in here. So yeah, this is a super exciting series that we’re about to embark on, I think. I mean, what is the meaning in mental health crisis? What’s the kairos of the moment that we find ourselves in? And it’s been super cool to do the consciousness, the self, the transformation, psychopathology, wellbeing. But what’s the ground of understanding of meaning making and what’s right for this moment? That’s what this series really feels like it’s about. So at that center, it’s a deep epicenter, at least for me in relationship to our journey together and where we are in general. So I just wanted to make the offer of that. So I’m really looking forward to it. Me too, me too. I can’t think of anybody I’d be rather doing it with than you. So these are two topics, of course, that are very significant, at least in people’s background, science, the scientific worldview. And for those of you who sort of might say, well, I sort of reject the scientific worldview. You have to understand the scientific worldview isn’t just rejecting this or that claim from Darwin’s theory of evolution. It’s rejecting the entire framework of science and technology that is pervasive and insinuated its way into everybody’s life and everybody’s way of thinking in a deep way. This is not some criticism or accusation. This is an observation that I hope to make good on. And I’m sure Greg will help me on this. And then the idea is nevertheless spirituality. And of course, we’re gonna have to talk about what does that mean? Because originally it meant relating to spirits. And is that still something we can talk about? And the answer is gonna be sort of yes, but not in the way we used to think of them, perhaps. This is all something that’s in question to begin with. But whatever that term is supposed to broadly mean today, and it means a lot, but vaguely, because many people identify as spiritual, but not religious, there’s something of import to spirituality. And this has to do with issues around connectedness, a sense of being in touch with what really matters, what’s really real, having a capacity to become wiser, overcome foolishness, self-deception, to go through a kind of growth that is not just a growth in one’s acquisition of factual knowledge. There’s a lot of different overlapping things. We don’t need to get clear on that right now. I’m gonna argue that one of the things that binds them together is a notion that when we mean the words, part of what we’ve always pointed to with the word spirit is a capacity for transcendence, at a capacity that we can transcend ourselves in some manner that is very, very significant. Now, this is problematic to have these two right now, and I’ll turn things over to Greg in a minute to bring out his very famous, and deservedly so, discussion about the Enlightenment gap. But we have to understand that for us, these two things are at best orthogonal in our culture, science and spirituality, and frequently they’re regarded as antagonistic to each other. To be spiritual means you don’t just, you sort of reject scientific materialism. It’s not clear what that’s pointing to, and equating science with materialism is part of the problem we’re going to talk about. And if you’re scientific and you’re rigorous, you don’t believe in any of that woo stuff. And by and large, there’s a lot of crap that goes under the name woo, but that doesn’t mean that everything can be easily dismissed away. There are real issues that have to be discussed. And so for us, they have this very tenuous and at-time torture relationship, but if you go back far enough, pretty much before the scientific revolution, reason and spirituality are deeply interwoven together. This is quintessentially the case in the Christian framework, the Christian Platonic framework, et cetera. And there are many people who are making that case and bringing it out again for us today. DC Schindler, Catherine Pickstock, a host of people are just doing amazing work. It is a fascinating book, Aspects of Truth. Just finished it. It’s lovely. Yeah, I’ve reached out to Catherine and hopefully I’ll get a chance to go to Cambridge and talk to her directly. Lovely. She’ll figure in some of the discussions we’re gonna have. Definitely. The idea of conformity and being and knowing in right relation is certainly something that’s gonna pop up a number of different times in our conversation. And the deep connections between rationality and ritual, which I think are also something that we’re gonna discuss. So it’s not necessarily the case that these two things have to have a problematic relationship to each other, but nowadays they do. And there’s some important reasons for that. And I go over to them in some deep detail, maybe excruciatingly so, and awaiting from the meeting crisis and Greg also details them quite well in his, I had your book here. I wonder if I put it in his wonderful new book. Do you have it nearby, Greg, to hold up in a shamelessly self-promotional fashion? I, it is, I can go get it. It’s actually on my kitchen table. Okay, where did I put it? I had it right here the other day. So anyways, we’ll get it and we’ll show it. So Greg in his new book has also detailed these. The main thing that prevents us from bringing the two together is a view of a way in which one is supposed to create one’s worldview. So this is kind of a, this is how you create your worldview. And this is the idea that you build your scientific worldview out of whatever your core, the hard sciences, the core sciences, and I’ll always mean by them physics, chemistry, and biology. And that you should not propose anything in your ontology. That’s your theory of the structure of reality, the kind of entities that really exist. You should not propose anything in them that is not derivable from those sciences. And many people also joined to that a reductionist idea that biology will ultimately be explained, completely explained by chemistry, which will ultimately be completely explained by physics. And then the idea is that the only thing that everything should be derived from in our ontology is the very bottom level of our physics. And that’s the only place that is really real. This is known by various names, but reductionism is the most common name. And so the idea is something like this, all that stuff about meaning and the experience of beauty and all of that, and this comes from the Cartesian divide, Galileo Descartes, all of that is just subjective. That’s not in the objective world. The objective world is the world given to us by the hard scientists, hard sciences. And probably all that’s real about that world is the very bottom level of the sort of quantum mechanics. Although there’s this nasty problem of the irreconcilability of quantum mechanics and relativity, which we keep getting promised is going to be solved and it hasn’t been solved for, I think, what, over 50 years now. And when you get a recurrent pattern of failed problem solutions, this is from the problem-solving literature, you should consider that you have a flawed presupposition that is shared by all your failed problem formulations that is preventing you from solving the problem. Why did I bring that up? Because it’s quite possible that that whole way of framing things that we should only include in our ontology what is derivable from the hard sciences, and ultimately what is most real is what is given to us by our fundamental physics, and everything above that is epiphenomenal or illusory, is part of the problem that we’re facing. So that sort of those, that great divide between the subjective and the objective, and there’s no way they can possibly meet because they are defined completely antithetical to each other, there is no possible mediating term, at least in this view, so there’s no way, and this has all kinds of problems for truth and knowledge and meaning and all kinds of stuff. And then all we have is an ontology is what is derivable from our hard sciences and what is probably most real, given that view, is the bottom level, and everything else is somehow just not real in some very important sense. And that means everything you consider spiritual, the meaning, the beauty, the sense of self-transcendence, that’s probably illusory, it’s definitely subjective, and the only transcendence you’re really ever talking about is a kind of psychological improvement. It’s not saying anything important about epistemology, how you know things, or ontology, the nature or being of things. So that’s the problem we’re in. And the problem is we can’t just sort of … We … I’ll get … Can I give it just a real quick … Yeah, yeah, sorry. No, so just how do we embody this? So I’m with a young man who I know, and we’re at a party, and he’s gone to college, and I said, oh, what did you learn? And he’s like, actually, I learned just a bunch of chemicals. Okay. So he goes, he has a physically reductive neuroscience class, and sort of an analytic philosophy class that is very harsh on love and other kinds of concepts. And so the take-home message that he gets from going to college is that I’m just a bunch of chemicals. And I think that really just sort of captures just meaning, hey, I thought I cared about my job, and I thought I loved my girlfriend, and no, that’s an oxytocin, and we can then … We are just basically an unfolding bumping of molecules or atoms or quarks or I don’t know why, wherever you’re going to stop, but it’s this mechanistic billiard ball at some fundamental level of unfolding that really is determining everything, and you just live in an illusory epiphenomenal world. And if you say that to yourself, I mean, they would talk about meaning in mental health crisis, and you’re like, okay, well, now I’m going to get up and really take care of my kids because that really matters, right? Just a bunch of chemicals. So anyway, I’ll just sort of, at the embodied human level, that is real consequence, but that’s essentially what it’ll manifest. Right, and then what is on offer in popular culture as a response to that is a decade romanticism where just trust your gut. Love is the most real thing, and this is asserted without any defense or argument, and then you have the severing of any of these claims from any attempts to explain them in a rationally defensible manner. And then people careen and vacillate between those two. Right, and that’s because fundamentally what the Cartesian world gives us is an unstable notion of realness. Realness is what is objectively mathematically measurable, or that could all be a simulation. Think about how popular that notion is right now. That could all be a simulation, and all that’s real is my subjective self-awareness because that’s the only thing that I directly, and then we vacillate between a solipsism and a soul-crushing kind of positivism. I frame the shorthand frame for the enlightenment gap, which is the absence of a conciliant model that places mind and matter, science and subjective and intersubjective knowing, right relation, as between being stuck between the ontology of Newton, that’s a mechanical billiard ball all the way down, and the epistemology of Kant, which is basically a potentially, Penny Reed caught, a trapped phenomenological quasi-solipsistic idealism. And how do those things go to you basically, what do you choose one or the other? Well, we certainly don’t have a coherent, synthetic, obvious, shareable frame that appreciates the conformity of our epistemological structures on the ontological structures in which we’re embedded, and I think that’s what we’re after here. Yes, and so I think, that was very well said, Craig, I like that, yeah, Newton and Kant are playing off against each other really profound, and Kant more playing off of Newton than Newton off of Kant, but nevertheless, yeah. But it’s important to understand, of course, what Galileo and Kant did relative to scholasticism and the Christian, you know, the heavens get collapsed, and then all of a sudden there’s all these small laws, and by the way, the Newtonian metaphysics is, hey, we can get an absolute epistemology that simply describes ontology and mathematical formula, and that can be independently observed, of course, this is where you get quantum mechanics, general relativity problems, but there’s an independent, godlike observer that could script the laws of ontology at the very base, and that’s the inevitable deterministic cause of being. Yes, and this model is very prevalent. And like I say, that model and its shadow, the decadent romanticism that fills popular culture, they are, they pretend to be opponents, but they are sharing the same horrible framework that robs human beings of a capacity for genuine meaning and wisdom. Amen. So, Greg pointed out the one kind of example is the person who discovers that they are only chemicals. I, of course, have met many of those people, but the opposite, of course, is the increasing prevalence of narcissism and spiritual bypassing in our society, which people would treat into their subjectivity and to their wonderful experiences at the expense of a rational responsibility. There might be a quantum cosmic consciousness, John, that I’m tapping into, and then can be all as one. Yes, yes. No disrespect, man, but that’s, that’s the simplistic notion of that is also deeply problematic. Right, and so, for many people, if they get to this point, they feel like they’re in a straight jacket. They feel like, you know, neither one of these works, and I’m gonna argue that one can’t work, the first one, the decadent romanticism, I’ve put enough criticism into elsewhere, right? But they’ll say, well, this doesn’t work because I can’t really live as if I don’t exist, and I’m somehow an illusion being generated, and who’s the illusion being generated to, by the way? An illusion being created by a bunch of chemicals, and I can’t really be, I know, in touch with the world and other people if I’m doing this spiritual bypassing and narcissistic craze. But what we wanna say to you is, you’re not in a straight jacket. That’s what this series is going to do. It’s gonna be sort of a philosophical Harry Houdini for you. It’s about how do you get out of this straight jacket in a reliable and intellectually respectable way? So what I wanna do is I wanna start making an argument or reviewing an argument that I’ve been making over the last three or four years, and it’s sort of been building for me, I hope, in clarity, and it’s because it’s been helped by some amazing people, and I wanna go over that argument. I wanna set up a few preliminaries. I’m gonna put one preliminary, Greg, in that I didn’t put in for the Consilience talk. But let’s do the first two preliminaries. Okay. First, I’m gonna propose that if we can make a strong case, a good case for strong transcendence, then we will have given people the beginnings of the way out of that. Now, you, of course, are going to link that strong transcendence to a worldview, but I’m gonna, first, I’m gonna do my part of it by making a proposal for my part in our partnership, making a proposal for strong transcendence. And what I mean by strong transcendence is that those experiences in which we, I’ll try and say this as neutrally as possible. When we have those experiences, and they are experiences that we are transcending, these are not experiences of just psychological improvement. They are experiences that have significant and important epistemological oomph to them, and they have ontological teeth to them, and they are really disclosing important aspects of reality. And therefore, they are not merely subjective, merely subjective improvement. That’s what I mean by strong transcendence. Maybe we should, go ahead. When we talked about this and did our 11th problem of consciousness, the two blogs on that, I think we just allude to, when people are having transcendent experience, one way to think about this is a transformation in their self-world grip, that their model of what, and then there’s an expansion in that mode of being. So the frame in which people are bringing to bear, they gain insight to, there’s a shift, a melting, as it were, and a reconsolidation. At least that’s sort of one way to characterize some of the cognitive schematic elements of a transcendent mode. Yes, I agree with that. What I want, and I think that idea about a mode of being is going to become very important. Yeah, what I want to say is that there are important truths about reality and not just about one’s psyche that are disclosed in strong transcendence. That would be the difference. Now, it’s not clear if this is an accurate reflection of Jung, especially not the latter Jung, but many people read Jung as talking about all these experiences, but they’re ultimately only happening within the psyche. Now, I know, don’t jump on me if you’re a big Jung fan, but what about the psychoid later? I’m already qualifying it. I’m just saying, I’m just trying to give people an easy example that would come to mind of, oh, there’s these, I mean, I remember when I was a kid and I read Fifth Business and Roberts and Davies, and I was introduced to Jung, and it was the notion of the self and all of this, and then I had this, that’s God, and I thought, but wait, that’s just all happening in my brain, and my brain is this little bit of matter on the earth. That’s not God, right? And so, I mean, again, I’m not here to caricature Jung. I’m just saying, it’s a logically possible world that many people do think of these experiences as just psychological experiences. The only truths disclosed are truths about the psyche. It could be the archetypal depth, but nothing about reality per se, and I think that’s at least fair for at least to middle Jung because Jung is such a Kantian, and he’s so much locked into that framework. Okay, so we’ve got a clarity here, strong transcendence. The reason why I think strong transcendence is central to spirituality, because that strong transcendence gives you a capacity for qualitative self-correction, for real transformative experience, for the cultivation of wisdom, et cetera, deeper experiences of meaning, et cetera. So is the strong, John, for us, and I think so, but let’s be clear when we utilize that term, especially by the way it’s gonna, we’ll have to differentiate from strong emergence, maybe down the line, and have a conciliance council to be clear about that. When we say strong, are we saying then not just in the psyche, we’re really talking about the nature of reality and knowing and being as such that’s going to require us to think about this more expansively than just reorienting the psyche’s grip on the world within itself? Exactly, exactly, and my argument, although I won’t push too much on this part of the argument today, but you can see it in other work I’ve done. You can see it in convergent work, for example, in Aspects of Truth, the book you held up, right? That this is the notion of transcendence in the pre-Cartesian world. There is psychological transformation, there is psychological improvement, but there’s also epistemological and ontological improvement in a very real way. Okay, so I next wanna propose extended naturalism. I’m gonna propose it, and then we’ll defend it along the way. Extended naturalism is the idea that your ontology is not limited to what is just derivable from your fundamental hard sciences, but it is also derivable from what is presupposed by your hard sciences, and that means not just propositionally but performatively so. For example, I am going to take it that some of the presuppositions in the hard sciences are that the hard sciences really exist, they’re not illusory entities, and that they gain real knowledge. Those are the only two presuppositions I actually really need for my argument, and I think a denial of those would be extremely problematic for anybody who wants to invoke a kind of scientific worldview. Now, one thing I wanna talk about that I didn’t do at the conferences, I wanna make an argument about reductionism. It’s not actually my argument, it’s Ned Block’s argument, and you sort of touched on it a minute ago, Greg, which is once you start reductionism, there is no reason in principle where you can stop at any level but the very, very bottom level. This is, right, and he says, look, any move you say, oh, this, right, then if there’s, if there are possible levels below that, then you are compelled to drop and drop and drop and drop and drop to your possible level. That’s the third thing I wanna just put on the table, and I think for those who wanna, you know, if you wanna examine that argument more carefully, just take a look at Block’s work, but I think that’s a fundamental move. Once you open the door of reductionism, see, you get this problem with people very often, they’ll say, oh, well, it’s all just in the brain. Well, you can’t stop there. There is no, right, you have to keep, well, what’s in the brain is just the molecules, and what’s in the molecules are just the atoms, and what’s in the atoms are just the quarks, and what’s in the quarks are just the more fundamental, whatever they are, and what’s in those is just the probability distributions, and what’s in those is just sort of, oh, all right, and you get down, right? And so I’m not gonna allow any reductionists to stop at any level other than the very, very bottom level. Lovely. Okay. Yep, no, and I’m with you, and I’ll throw out a little Utah teaser here to come back to this, okay, which basically says one of our little mantras in Utah is I am an energy information singularity, and it actually allows you to grab all the, it does afford, now think about it this way, remember I said I’m just a bunch of chemicals, I’m an unfolding wave of energy information, okay? And I’m gonna suggest the concept of energy information is one of those ontological concepts that affords, if we’re gonna go to the bottom, okay, those are two pretty good words that get you to the bottom on the one hand. Now of course, you and I are in 100% agreement that you will not explain the world from the bottom without emergence and emanation. Yes. But we certainly don’t wanna stop at chemicals or quarks, but energy information is actually an interesting place to bottom out on, and it can be a fun place to bottom out on as you climb back up. Yeah, and I wanna, a lot of my argument actually runs off the idea of needing information to be real. Exactly. In a very fundamental way in your own time. In a very fundamental way, and energy’s pretty real too. Well, the two are inseparable from each other in an important way. Especially if when you get down to the bottom level and all you’re talking about probability distributions, and then where’s the fire in the equation, where does it actually, where does the actuality come from? And we can talk about that when we get to it. But are we sort of set up? Are we sort of set up? Totally set up, 100%. Yep, I’m there. Okay, so we’ve got these three things. We’ve got a proposal for strong transcendence, proposal of extended naturalism, and a proposal that you can’t stop reductionism except at the very, very bottom level. And maybe there is no such thing, and then that also becomes very, very problematic as well. All right, so what I wanna do is review the arguments. And again, I’ll take a bit of time here to do something I didn’t quite do as well at the conference. I’m glad it was very well received, but I came away thinking I should have done this, or I should have done that, and I should have done that, right? Typical academic, okay. So there’s gonna be two convergence meta arguments. Actually, everyone, so I’m sure people notice, but this is leveling up at the Utah Consilience Conference. But you named it on your channel. What was it, like, neoplatonic science and spirituality or something? Just so we’ll make sure we should put it in the show notes just in case somebody- Yeah, we’ll put it for sure. Okay, sure. Just wanted to make sure. I recommend we, yeah, yeah. I think, do you have it anywhere, or is it just on my channel? If it’s just on my channel, we’ll just put that link in. I mean, you can find it on my Utah Circle. We’ll put you on your channel. That’s the right place to find people. Okay, great. And so I’m gonna do two, and maybe we’ll just get through the first one today, maybe a little bit more. We’ll see. Greg and I wanna be really sort of flexible around this because we wanna go really slowly on this because I think Greg is right. This is the culmination. It doesn’t mean this is the last thing we’re gonna do together, but it’s like, it’s the culmination. This is really the fulcrum point of everything else we’ve been doing, which is why we didn’t do it first, right? There’s a lot of territory to clear and make sure we were syncing up on before we tackled this thing. Yeah, yeah, this is the dragon in the stormy sea. So what’s a convergence meta argument? It’s an argument made up of arguments. So what I mean by that is that there are many independent arguments that converge on a conclusion. So it’s an argument out of arguments, a meta argument, and it does convergence. Why is convergence important? Because if you have many independent things converging on the same conclusion, then that raises the trustworthiness of your conclusion because what it means is it’s very unlikely that your conclusion is produced by the bias of this argument or this argument or this argument or this argument. It’s very important if those arguments come from other people than yourself, which they are because that also increases the trustworthiness and the plausibility. And then I attempt to show what’s the elegance that comes out of that is that these two meta arguments can be put together so that there’s a convergence between the convergent meta arguments. So the first argument will be an argument about reality not being flatland, not being just the, all that’s real is just the very, very bottom, and everything above it is illusory or epiphenomenal. And we’ll talk a little bit more about what that means. And then the other convergence meta argument is towards a conformity theory of knowing as opposed to a representational theory of knowing. And then when you have those two, they fit together as they had in the past to give you strong transcendence within extended naturalism. That’s the big proposal. And in the talk, you know, and I don’t know if we’re gonna frame it exactly this way you then added the third argument of transjectivity. Yes. You know, in terms of whether, and that in some ways emerges out of the two, but it also ties it together very nicely in relation. Oh, I presented, I thought I presented it. Maybe I didn’t do a well enough job. The transjectivity argument, I think was part of the argument. I’ll do it, I’ll do it that way though. I think I like the way you did it. Yeah, I was seeing the transjectivity argument as part of the conformity argument, but that’s… You sort of, in the talk, you actually sort of framed it both ways, but you did then round it out as a third meta-convergent argument at the end. Okay, good for me. I thought it came together well, Brendan. No, let’s do it that way. Let’s do it that way. Okay, so the first argument is why you need a leveled ontology. This is the idea that actually in the end, what you’re gonna have is a continuum and the levels are just where you happen to slice it for various epistemic projects. But the main point is it’s not a flat ontology. So the main first argument, it comes from Blackowicz in his really excellent book, The Essential Difference Towards a Metaphysics of Emergence, and that’s from 2012. And let me see if I can do this argument a little bit more intuitively. And the basic idea is how reductionism works is reductionism says it’s only the properties that things share that are real. So let me give you an example. Here’s three things, right? And they obviously are different from each other, but what they all share is that they’re all made out of matter. And therefore what’s real about them is how they’re made out of matter. This of course is why people invoke things like materialism as an ontology. Nobody in science believes in materialism. Nobody believes that all that’s real is matter. That’s kind of a crazy claim, but nevertheless, that’s the name that has historically stuck with it for that reason. One of the most obvious things we can do is say, oh, right, what they all share, what they’re identical in is this underlying thing and that’s what’s most real. Why do we do that? We do that because if I know the properties of matter, I don’t need to have to know the individual properties of this and this and this, so I can make general predictions about it. Generalizations, exactly. Generalizations. Now here, notice what’s happening. And please pause to note this. It’s more real because it increases my capacity for explaining, which means my judgments of realness are precisely calibrated to the increase in intelligibility. Realness is tracking intelligibility. And that’s what’s justifying this, that profound intuition, and I’m not gonna try and justify it because if you challenge that intuition, you’re really into skepticism. That realness is tracking intelligibility. Now what does Blackowitz do with this? Well, he says, there’s a problem with that, which is, couldn’t it be the case that the differences between things are also essential to their intelligibility? Right, and you go, what? Well, why might that be the case? Well, first of all, think about the problem with generalization. This is one of the trade-offs that we’ve discovered that generalization is always in a trade-off with discrimination. I generalize and I lose too many important differences, I actually lose a grasp on the causal grip of reality. And that’s also part of what we mean by real. So let me give an example. Here’s two predictions I can make. There’s stuff near me, right, or there are people near me. Now notice the one is almost always true. Like maybe in pure vacuum, right, it’s false. You’d probably be in trouble if there’s no stuff by you, John. And the second one can be false quite often, right? Actually, other than this virtual, there’s no people that near to me. But knowing when there’s people near to me is really, really important. It really makes, and this is the point, it really makes a causal difference, right? So this is, discrimination is like acuity. Acuity is being out, so I take my glasses off, my visual acuity goes down, things blur together because I’m losing all the important differences. See? Yep. All right, so there’s a trade-off. We’re losing all the important differences. So there’s a trade-off, which means it’s not the case. We can use an example right behind you. Is that Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle behind you? Yeah, they’re right there. Okay, so those guys, they’re men, right? Yeah. And we’re gonna just say, hey, men, and then you just generalize, well, what is men-ness? And yet, okay, then how do we place them as men and then how do we differentiate them? And then that’s gonna give us a much more complexified form of understanding as we create the general and the specific. So that’s where you wanna understand how people are all alike, how they’re somewhat alike others and how they’re fundamentally unique. So it’s gonna create a generalizable differentiation dialectic. Excellent. Oh, that’s very well said. I like that. All right, so that’s my attempt to supplement Blackowitz, and I’m gonna do a little bit more. And this is the idea, well, because intelligibility ultimately depends on information. Now I’m gonna use information even in the technical, Chanon information theoretic sense, which information is a probabilistic relationship, a statistical relationship that allows you to rule out alternatives. So classic example, I toss a coin and it comes up head. That’s not very much information because it was only one of two alternatives, right? If I roll the dice, if there’s a little bit more information that it comes up a three because it’s one of the six possibilities, et cetera. And so when you have that relationship between events, that this event predicts that event and that prediction rules out alternatives, then you have information in the technical sense. Now you go, okay, so what? Well, here’s the basic proposal, without information, there’s no intelligibility. That seems, I think, uncontroversial. And then let’s use Blackowitz’s language here. Information is an essential difference. On the differences between events and on the ruling out of alternatives, which are also differences from important, counterfactually important differences. Difference is essential to information, which means if you try to get below all the differences, you progressively lose more and more information. Now that’s to be expected. So there’s, right, because we have this trade-off relationship. We can’t just maximize intelligibility by maximizing generalizability. What’s the lesson that comes out of this? The lesson that comes out of this is the following, that intelligibility actually depends on this play between identity and difference. Both are essential. And any argument you made for the identity being essential, you have to make for the difference being essential. And if there’s essential differences, that means there’s something real about this frog from this stone, even though they’re both identical being made out of matter, they’re different in ways that are essential in terms of how they are real, how they are intelligible, and how they can show up causally in the world. Lovely, lovely. So quick, if we take that analysis, we can watch, so take a standard cosmological view, Big Bang is a collapse into, and we can debate about one of the specific, but collapse into this singularity where all the laws of physics break down. Yes. Okay, why? Because there is, whatever that collapse is, you can argue certainly it’s a collapse somewhat into sameness, I’m gonna say ultimate sameness, but the fact of it is our laws of physics are actually tracking differentiation. And if you collapse differentiation, there’s no intelligibility. That’s right. And so you can totally then see the laws of things are trying to track pattern differentiation in many regards, and of which its absence means you have, all you could say, well, there’s the dot, and I’m now done in relationship to what I can say. Yeah, that’s a great, I hadn’t thought about that one, although that reminds me about a repeat here, how current cosmology is wrestling with a problem that the Neoplatonists wrestled with, which is how do you get from absolute simplicity, where does all the difference come from, right? And of course, a reductionist is really hard pressed. If all of the difference is so illusory, then the massive production of difference must have been the most illusory event of all time. And so the Big Bang is probably not- It’s just nothing. Yeah. Yeah, so you get arguments around that. So, I mean, there’s a lot more detail in the talk about that argument, but that’s the gist of it. So that’s the first of these. The second is Hohl’s argument, H-O-E-L. And he’s got some papers, 2017, 2018. He’s got formal mathematical proof. I’ve asked one of my gifted students go through the math and make sure the math is tight. It is. I’m not a great mathematician. I don’t claim to be, but I know when I can- Me neither. When I can trust people who are. But the argument is basically, again, building on information. And notice, keep reminding how Greg was prophesying how energy information would turn out to be a really valuable place. Okay, so Shannon’s information theory is also ultimately a communication theory. It’s how do you pass a signal, which is how do you get events from the sender to be replicated by events at the receiver? And the main thing that, one of the main great insights of Shannon’s theory is you’re not maximizing to the information channel. You’re not trying to get as much signal in the channel as you possibly can. Why? Because you are inevitably going to lose signal because of noise, because of other kinds of degradation. All kinds of stuff. I won’t go into detail. So what you do is you have to build in redundancy. You have to build in patterns that take up how much signal you can send by giving you multiple ways to reconstruct the signal. So if seven of the eight ways are lost, you still have the eighth way, and that allows you to reconstruct the signal. So you have to build in redundancy. Now you have to think about causation and things hanging together as communication, not as the way we are communicating like language, because information at this level is not like what we normally mean by information, which is making ideas happen in great- Semantic information. Semantic information. So we’re talking about technical information. So we’re talking about technical communication, the ability to replicate a signal. That means you can think about one part of an amoeba communicating with another part of an amoeba as the amoeba tries causally to stick together, to hang together as an organism, which as you can imagine is very important to the amoeba. Right. The point is, if you were to try to send a signal purely at the quantum level, it can’t get there, because the channel is getting overwhelmed by noise. You have to have multiple signals that are identical to each other, and you have to build in the redundancy. And the way you do that is you have to have a higher level of organization in order to do that. Exactly. So that higher level of organization allows you to build in redundancy, and then that is actually needed for the signal, which is also the way of saying that is needed for the causal pathway to form between one end of the amoeba and the other. So what you can show is that upper levels have causal powers that are not reducible to the lower levels. Yep, absolutely. And so what’s actually, so with the point here, folks, at least one way to think about it as far as I’m concerned, is there’s essentially an abstracting pattern. You think about like data compression, you basically compress the data and say, oh, here’s this and here’s how it will unfold. And then the receiver takes that and affords the unfolding, and that creates a causal connection. Now notice the data compression is not by very definition taking all the quantum states of all possibilities in the current state, it is abstracting them and then delivering that message to then be decoded, which means that at some level of causation, there’s a fundamental break when we’re doing this kind of communication between the underlying quantum states in the original and what can be received as the message and decoded. And that’s a very important point in relationship to this opens up a whole nother kind of causal connection than just standard, oh, it has to be the least action principle at this particular place is gonna cause an unfolding. Well, actually, not if this thing’s being abstracted, sent over here and decoded here. Exactly, exactly. So for those of you who want more on that, you can take a look at the talk, you can take a look at Michael Levin’s work and how he makes use of those works. Unbelievable stuff he’s got. Yeah, just fantastic. And Michael and I have had a chance to talk and he’s very happy with me calling him a neoplatonist and he has a neoplatonic ontology. So, and that’ll become relevant as we go on. Why I said that. The next argument is one many of you have heard us make together before and this comes from one of the great books in cognitive science in the last 25 years, which is Alicia Urrero’s Dynamics in Action. And where she says, look, if we’re really gonna explain things, we need to make a distinction between causal relations between events and constraints, which are conditions that affect the possibility of things that give us probability and not just homogeneous possibility. And then of course, once you talk about that, you can talk about bottom up causes like the micro events of a tree, within a tree, the micro chemical events cause a particular structure, macrochemical structure, but that structure of the tree changes the probability that a chlorophyll molecule will be hit by a photon thereby powering the tree. So the structure changes the possibilities, which alters the power and energy going into the micro events which then support the structure. And you have to talk about emergence up from causes and emanation down from constraints. And then you, and that’s the basically the only way you can talk about self-organization without falling into circular explanation. And so whenever you have a feedback loop, like you do in living things, if you were to try to trace them out in just a billiard ball manner, you will get a circular explanation. But by making this difference between bottom up causes and top down constraints, your arrow breaks out of that circular kind of explanation and shows how feedback can be a real pattern that really explains, causally explains things. And you then need a layered ontology for doing that. Her new book is coming out soon, by the way. What’s it on? Do you know? More of this stuff. More of the scope. Yeah, something about context really matters or something like that. I can’t remember. Here’s another example that I would say is an example of this. So as our society grew, okay, and we merged from the oral indigenous into civilization, it explodes in relationship to the technological structures and what are the kind of regulatory structures that then are necessary to manage what I call the culture of person plane of existence? I would consider laws like the literal laws that emerge as essentially emergent constraints on justification that then channel the relationship between institutional power, government authority and the complex dynamic and active actions of actors in relation. And so you get this create, we need to build the structure to create the constraints that enable complex dynamic justification. But when it gets activated, then you have to channel the power and you bring the law to that to maintain a particular level of constraint. So you can see laws then exploding and then constraining the justificatory dynamics, say, at the culture of person plane of existence. That’s a great example. And that’ll be relevant as well when we talk about spirit. The third argument comes from Wolfgang Smith. Notice that none of these arguments are mine yet. And that’s important. I’ve also had the great pleasure of talking with Wolfgang. I was on Karen Wong’s The Meeting Code. And he also has no problem with the description of being a Neil Platonist. He loves that. So he is very clear for him. So he makes an argument about the measurement problem in physics, which is the problem that you need the measuring device to have a constancy and an integrity that is greater than the things you’re measuring. If it is as ephemeral as the things you’re measuring, you can’t measure with it. And so the thing is, he says, that’s like, yes. And you can see how this lines up with all these arguments. You can see how they all belong together. But his basic point is like, if you’re gonna measure the quantum level, you need something that has a stability, like a meter. A meter has to have a kind of stability and integrity that is not possessed by the entities that it’s measuring. And so he introduces this other level. He calls it the corporeal that is above the material. And I think that’s fine. And the idea is, the only way you get out of the measurement problem is to have a real essential ontological difference between the layer that is being measured and the layer that is doing the measuring. I wonder if that, so in you talk, you have a foundational, essentially implicate order layer of the energy information. And then there’s the material object, matter object body layer. I’d be interested to talk with him is to see whether that the matter object layer is, which is an emergent dimension of complexification residing above the energy information. I wanted to bring this up with you because I thought, I don’t know if you have explicated it somewhere, but I thought it was always implicit in your work that there was the measuring capacity of the upper level on the lower level. Totally. Yes, yeah, that’s what I thought. Absolutely. So the argument essentially is that really, you could think about it, if you want to put it in information terms, the matter object is sort of like, in sort of a time dilation, it’s sort of like a memory. It like freezes aspect of what’s going on in the energy. Yes, very much. So it’s pulling that data in a space-time continuum stripe of structure. And then life, mind and culture are pulling off of that, measuring and then processing off of that in a way. So you can then pull memory and then use memory for predictive processing. And then you build some panic systems to engage in predictive processing, mediated through cells, mediated through brains, mediated through language. Excellent, I think that’s good. Okay, so that’s again, more detail in the talk. You can see the extended discussions with Smith and I, but I think that’s good for what we’re doing here. All right, so all of these, I think converge with an argument that I’ve been making, which is in order to do science, you need real information, real causal signaling, real structures and real measurement. Science presupposes the reality of all of these things. And as you’ve just seen, all of these things, in order to be real, presuppose a layered ontology. They presuppose a non-reductive ontology. So if we take science to be real and to give us real knowledge, then everything that is presupposed, not derived, but everything that is presupposed by the act of science also has to be real. And again, these things that are presupposed commit you to a leveled ontology, an ontology of multiple levels. Another way of flipping this around is, if the upper level at which the scientists exist and in which they’re taking their measurements and doing their computation, if all of that is an illusory, then that provides no justification for any claims that scientists might make about the fundamental level. In order for those claims about the bottom level to be real, the knowledge up here has to be real, which means the signals have to be real, the information has to be real, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Science is in a performative contradiction if it proposes that all that’s real is just the very bottom level. Science doesn’t exist. Science doesn’t and can’t exist there. Now, if you say, like I say, well, science is just an illusion, then if science is just an illusion, I’m not going to listen to you making your scientific pronouncements about what the bottom level is. Like, you can’t have it both ways. That’s a performative contradiction. And performative contradictions, to say it for the 19,000th time, are just as important as propositional contradictions. Okay, so I take it that that argument for emergence is well-placed. The argument for emanation, the top-down is already there because the measurement is top-down, the constraining is top-down, so it’s already those arguments have been made. An independent argument, another converging argument, right, is if the upper level has no causal powers, it is merely epiphenomenal. It is an effect but not a cause, and I take it that epiphenomena don’t exist because, give me an actual case of one, the analogies are not actually epiphenomenal. Everybody who says, well, think about an epiphenomena as the noise that the engine makes, but it’s not really an epiphenomena because the noise reflects, right, the energy, the heat, and the heat actually degrades the metal, so it’s not an epiphenomena, but pretend it was, right? It’s not an epiphenomena, but pretend it is. But the thing is, well, give me one where I don’t have to pretend. So, you’ve got an empty category. You’re talking about it as if you’ve got a category, but it’s otherwise empty. Secondly, if it has no effects, how can it, it can’t be an actual thing because it can’t act, and if it has no effects, it can’t be known because knowledge is an effect of something. So, something that’s unknowable, not actual, and does not have any other category members belonging to. This sounds to me like, you know, all the purely illusory entities that we’ve ever talked about. So, I don’t think epiphenomena are real things. So, if you buy the arguments for emergence, you buy it, and you already buy the measurement issue, the constraint issue, and you realize that epiphenomena makes no sense, you have to also have an emanation. So, bottom up, top down, completely interpenetrating each other. That’s the first. Yep. That argument. And I would say, so I’m in this, as we talked about the consilience led by Corey David Barker, this arc disciplinary research group, whereby what that group is doing is it’s trying to look across all the different, it’s trying to organize and look across all the different meta perspectives that have been developed historically and concurrently. And one of the things that are immediately apparent that we saw as a group is the integrative levels and the argument across all big picture systems over and over again, virtually all of them. Even Augusta Compday in various ways, I mean, they’re just, at various levels, that aspect of reality, it’s cut in different ways, but that aspect of reality just shows itself over and over and over to all sort of big picture coherent mapping structures. So at that level, there’s a whole other sort of convergent argument of like, well, we take the species of arguments that are trying to get a big picture view, this integrative levels thing manifests itself over and over and over again thinker after thinker. That’s a great supplement. Thank you for that. That’s a very great supplement. So we’ve got half of what we need for strong transcendence. So the other half is to bring back an argument for conformity. So let’s just be clear that that’s the standard theory of knowledge until the scientific revolution, when the conformity theory gets replaced by a representational theory. Representational theory is the idea, right? That I have something in my head that is a representation for the world. And most people think, well, that’s what knowledge is, right? Map territory kind of thing. Yeah, the older model was, no, no, for you to know something is for you in it to share the same form. Form doesn’t mean shape. Form means sort of its dynamic, structural functional organization, the fundamental grammar that makes it be what it is. The grammar within you and the grammar without you are when they come to be identical to each other, when they conform to each other, then you know things. You are in touch with reality to use a metaphor that still survives in our language. Absolutely. Is that clear? Do you think, Greg, for people in general, the difference? Yeah, again, let’s go to modern, empirical natural science with these formulas they started. And these formulas could be like, okay, this just represents the world. And so now I split my analytic representation from the world and develop a correspondent theory of truth which basically says, okay, these abstract representations are corresponding to reality, and it is that looping function, which is a very important kind of epistemology. But when you bite into an apple, okay, what you’re actually doing is you’re bringing all your senses across a multimodal distribution across time to interact with that structure. And it is not the same, just to say, I have some representation of my apple in my head, and that’s the thing, it’s actually, it’s a much more dynamic interface where the interface between the form of the apple and its pattern recognitions and the form that you bring to bear in the interfacing structures is, well, conforming. That’s what it is to grip and to have knowledge in relation. So just to foreshadow, and this is where this argument will end up. Think about what we were saying. We’ve made an argument for reality is layered in this bottom-up emergence, top-down emanation. And then what you’ll see is, right, the increasing convergence, well, this is how cognition is organized, bottom-up emergence, top-down emanation. And it looks like there’s a reason for that, that the grammar of cognition is conforming to the grammar of reality in a fundamental way. So that’s to foreshadow. Now, what are the convergent arguments? The one comes from Pickstock’s astonishing book, Aspects of Truth, where what she does very carefully, and very rigorously too, in a way I think which is very convergent with your work, Greg, which is why I recommended the book to you. All the great distinctions that were used to keep mind and world separate, to say, no, no, mind has these patterns and these properties and they’re nothing like the patterns and properties of the world, right? All of those great distinctions have basically collapsed under the weight of strong philosophical and scientific argumentation. I’ll just list some of them, and that were used to try and say, well, the patterns in the mind aren’t the patterns of the world. And this is Kant’s major, major argument, right? All those patterns, those are ones that the mind imposes on the world, on the representations, but how the world is in itself, you can’t possibly know. This is his famous thing about the thing in itself. The problem with, the problem for Kant is, he says, in order to be that consistent, he has to say that causation is just also a relationship, a pattern we impose. And then he famously uses that to say, that’s why we can’t do metaphysics, we can’t make arguments about God causing, right? All of this intelligible structure, because cause only makes sense within the intelligible structure. And everybody often, and I did it too, an undergrad, oh, and then, but Fichte comes along, and they never gave us Fichte to read. And Fichte says, but wait, you claim the thing in itself causes all of this. We can’t know what it is, but we can know that it is. But that’s exactly the same position that God is in. That’s something outside of the phenomenological experience. And so how can you possibly talk about a cause outside of that when you’ve argued that we can only talk about causes within our phenomenological experience? So there can’t be a thing in itself any more than there can be a God. And then Hegel comes along and he says, yeah, and if I can’t possibly know something, if it has no intelligibility, how can it possibly be real? Real is judged by intelligible. And how can you know that there’s a limit unless you can transcend it to some degree? But this is a limit that we can, and so the whole Kantian thing falls apart, right, as I’ve argued, right? And Clark says, you know, Kant has a problem with that, like that he claims that there must be other minds, but I don’t, no, no, all I can legitimately say is I have imposed a pattern on what appears to be another mind, but not that there’s another. So how could I possibly have moral obligations, which is all going on and on? There’s all these problems. And then to make matters worse, the famous distinction that he based this all on, the analytic distinction, which is the relations between ideas and synthetic relation, the relationship between facts, that analytic synthetic distinction has been totally broken down. And these are famous arguments by Quine. The distinction between a conceptual schema and its content has been undermined by arguments by Davidson. The value distinction has been undermined by Hayes-Spear, by Putnam, and by this guy called John Ravecki, who talks about relevance, right? Amen. So all of these things that have been used as a standard way of cleaving subjectivity off from objectivity and supporting that whole framework, that the things that did the cleaving have all disappeared in a very significant way. So that’s the first argument that she makes. The second related argument, this is why the book is really important. She shows, and this is converging with other people, that the attempt in the analytic tradition to bridge between these two worlds by saying, well, there’s subjectivity and there’s objectivity, and then there’s the logical realm of propositions. Goes through the history about, right, that third realm, the proposal of that third realm has collapsed because of all kinds of arguments, and many of you are familiar with them. There’s arguments around incompleteness from Gödel. There’s all the paradox arguments, you know, Russell made many of them famous, right? There’s multiple logics, which is the right one. There’s paralogics. There’s the non-logical relations between logics. Like you can’t inferentially get from one logic to another logic. If I’m in predicate calculus, I can unfold all possible permutation of the predicate calculus, and I won’t get to modal logic, right? So there’s all of this, right? And then there was all the epistemological problems. It’s, well, why can we have direct knowledge of those, but we can’t have direct knowledge of the… And so this whole project is largely now regarded as completely collapsed. So notice that the two components of this view, right, which is, oh, right, the things that cleave it, all these hard analytic distinctions, literally the analytic synthetic distinct, all of those distinctions have collapsed, and the thing that was supposed to bridge between the subjective and the objective world without getting us back into that horrible, horrible conformity theory, namely the third realm of propositions and logical space, that has collapsed too. And so she says, well, what you’re left with, right, is you’re left with an interpenetration of knowing in the world. And the way to make sense of that is conformity theory in which there’s mutual participation in the same governing principles. The principles governing the mind and the principles governing the world, as I like to use the metaphor, there’s a grammar to grammar relation. My favorite example, completely biased example, though, of course, is the principles that govern the evolution of life are the same principles that govern the evolution of relevance realization. And so how the mind is unfolding and how life is unfolding and biology unfold, et cetera. I made those arguments elsewhere in more detail, so I’m just making- No, it’s the same, I mean, you talk lens on the same thing. Inside of physics, the principle of least action is unbelievably profound. The core fundamental principle of behavioral investment theory, the principle of energy economics, the principle of least effort. Yes, yes, yes. I mean, these are the kinds of embedded correspondences that are gonna afford us the capacity to see object, subject to object, object to subject in a conforming identity. Yes, yes, I think that’s well said. And of course, this is lines up with other arguments that I could put easily into convergence here. Evan Thompson’s deep continuity hypothesis, many people making arguments about- I think Friston’s predictive processing. Yeah, fractal relationships, et cetera, et cetera. So again, a lot of convergence around this. I have an argument that I’ve already made, I already foreshadowed, which is, look, cognition, overwhelming consensus now has this dynamically self-organizing, multiply recursive, bottom up, top down. Why does it have that structure? One is it has that and reality is not like that at all, which means like, and we’re trapped in some sort of Kantian hell of an absolute solipsism or skepticism, or cognition reliably takes on that structure across evolution and within the acquisition of knowledge because that is how reality is organized. And then you have the basis for the conformity theory. That, so you can take a look at my talk at Consilience or the talk I gave at Ralston where I developed that argument at much greater length. So you got that. And then there is another argument, which Greg says I said was the third, so I’m happy to do it that way. This is a convergence between Gibson, Heidegger, and Vervecky, sorry, I’m putting myself in company with these giants, but this is an argument. I got no problem with it, John. That’s kind of you. This is as the point, if there’s no deeper, if there’s no relation that is deeper than subjectivity and objectivity, then there’s no way they can come into relationship to each other. There’s no way that knowledge is possible. There’s no way truth is possible. I propose the term projectivity for that more primordial relation that has to exist such that subjectivity and objectivity come into relationship with each other such that the world is intelligibly knowable to us. You can reject that. You can reject that, but like the reductionist argument, as soon as you step back, you have to keep stepping back and stepping back into an absolute solipsistic skepticism, which gets you into endless performative contradictions. Heidegger, of course, famously made this argument about his aliphatic notion of truth, that any truth of correspondence depends on a deeper projectivity, connectedness between the subjective and the objective. Gibson famously made that argument with his proposal of affordances. Affordances are co-created by the environment and by the organism. Now with notions of niche construction, that has become even more plausible as a proposal. The floor is walkable to me. This is graspable to me, but the graspability is not in my hand or in this object. You’ve got all of these arguments for transjectivity, which is also a relationship of profound conformity that’s co-creation, mutual shaping, sharing the same principles, etc., etc. Okay, argument for leveled ontology, argument for conformity, argument for transjectivity. You put them all together and you get this. There are real levels into which I can enter into a transjective conformity. And when I move in my knowing to another level, that requires me being at another level. Turning it around, when I transcend, I’m not just psychologically improving, I’m now taking on the form, the structural functional organization, that gives me epistemological and ontological access to the world that I could not have at this lower level, because reality is really leveled and knowledge is really fundamentally about a kind of conformity. And when you put this together, what you get is, oh, self-transcendence is not just psychological improvement, it’s allowing for real epistemological truths about reality to be really disclosed. So there is disclosure of being that is exactly paired. And it can go the other way, the disclosures of being can draw me up. And this, of course, is the classic Platonic, the classic neoplatonic model of strong transcendence that underwrites the spirituality of the Abrahamic West in a profound way. That’s the core of that spirituality. It’s this spirituality within Christian mysticism. It is the spirituality within Sufism. It is the spirituality within Kabbalah. And I could go on and on, and you can take a look at the work of Arthur versus Lewis and others making this argument. This is a strong transcendence that gives you a historically significant spirituality. And yet it has been produced in a way that is completely consistent with extended naturalism. And then that would give us conciliance. We would have strong transcendence supporting a profound spirituality that is consistent with naturalism. We would have transcendent naturalism. That is the proposal. Damn! All right, so yeah, let’s, and when we put this in a dialect into dialogos at the level of meaning crisis in a chirotic moment, folks, that word strong transcendence, clearly we’re not talking, although as much spiritual transcendence as an individual can have, right? What are we talking about at a collective cultural level? Yeah. Right? And then what would it be when there is a collective awakening of sorts that you find resonance with, that all of a sudden there’s a new picking up for capacity for an epistemic conformity on the antik that then is collectively shared and opened up to a new emerging emanation. That to me is what we’re pointing to here at the level of a really, a collectively strong transcendent naturalism. Yes, and there’s very well said, and there’s also the possibility, I mean, I think the, first of all, I think the LLM machines have shown us the power of collective intelligence from distributed cognition because that’s where they get it from. And if you wanna know more about that, see my- Great piece, by the way, Masiya said it was a great piece. I thought it was a great piece. Checked out John’s just released video essay with commentary on AI and what that, how to reflect on that with wisdom and good forethought and foresight anyway. Thank you, Greg. So the evidence for a collective intelligence of distributed cognition and the real possibility that that collective intelligence can be educated and induced into collective wisdom, that’s a, and I’ve been exploring this with Jonathan Paget and other people, right? That’s a good way of thinking about at least what spirits might be, which is really interesting because it brings back an old idea from Durkheim that the gods and the spirits were, right, that, but it puts it into a much more plausible perspective. As you know, Dan Chiappi and I published three papers about the NASA scientists moving the rovers around on Mars. Yeah, and the power of collective intelligence to solve problems and to be able to grok sort of hyper objects that individual cognition can’t get a hold of. And so, you know, the idea that that relationship to higher levels and our ability, and I like this word now, to interface, think about that, right? That’s a perfect word for you too, right? To interface. That’s what I emphasize, yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah, to interface with that, that upper level intelligence probably has, you know, at least part of the provenance of what people were talking about when they were talking about spirits. It plugs into a lot of information. I know when we run the workshops, the Circling into Dialogos workshops, and people start to get into the flow state and feel phenomenologically the experience, the self-organization of that collective intelligence in the we space, in the geist, they start talking about it as a spiritual entity and the religious language, even from people who are declared secularists or atheists, is just, it’s just, it’s prevalent. So I’m really trying to get, I’m really trying to add to what Greg just said, like, don’t just think about this individually, yeah, strong transcendence, but there’s also, right, this, well, yeah, but we also have access to interfacing with this, and that also carries significant spiritual, has carried significant spiritual significance for us. That’s why we do many of our spiritual things, ecclesia, gathered together. Gathered together. Right, I mean, religio, bind together and collectively determine what’s sacred relative to the profane, that is the essence of the religious act, etymologically in many ways. Yeah, yeah. So we have a proposal here for how we can get out of the straitjacket without giving into the two bindings, without giving into a reductionism or giving into a decadent romanticism. I notice I always say decadent romanticism now because I’ve been corrected by some people about romanticism in general. I’m happy to keep going on that dialogue. So what I, I’m gonna turn, next time I’m gonna turn things over to Greg, and Greg, as we’ve often done, I’ll build it, we’ll problematize it, I’ll build up that, and then Greg will, right, in response, build up from his side, and then we get a massive convergence argument, which, I mean, that’s the thing that’s been astonishing for both of us, the degree to which independently we have converged on this, and it’s just afforded so much resonance. Greg, do you wanna foreshadow what you’re gonna do? Yeah, absolutely. So the big picture thinker Roy Bashkar talked a lot about the job of the philosophers who philosophical underlaboring to afford us clarity about our scientific understanding and our just embodied understanding of the world. And John, what I think you did with the leveling up thing is just a brilliant articulation of philosophical underlaboring, both to critique the mistaken, misformed grammar of the enlightenment gap and its fundamental split and attempt to then stitch the subject objective, whatever, and its failure, its fundamental failure, and that we need to reform our leveled ontology, a conformist model and a transjective epistemology that gives rise to stitching the ontology together. And that grammar is what we wanna really then bring alive. And we wanna infuse that grammar into the culture and allow for a spiritual awakening because when you script the world that way, the issue of meaning in life becomes totally different. I mean, meaning in life becomes contact with the real across the leveled ontologies in a knowing, being, sworn in way, right? And then we’re like, you and I, I think find ourselves like, we’re in a kairos of a moment across a wide, really big stack. And then you wake up in the, I certainly wake up in a Jesus, Jesus, right? And if we collectively feel the Jesus of the moment, I think that’s great. In my own world, a long time ago, the whole chat GPT thing was on the horizon. And then I’ll talk about this next time. So here, I’ll just foreshadow this. So in new talk, one of the core statements of you talk is marry the coin to the tree of knowledge in the garden under God, okay? And what that means, the coin is your subjective, it represents your human identity function from the inside your psyche, okay? So that’s the embodied phenomenological perspectival position in the world. And then you realize, of course, well, wait a minute, I can interact with the world, so that’s kind of weird. I can talk and hear myself and you can hear me. So there’s obviously a transjective, but we have our coin position, subjective, unique, the tree of knowledge, and we’ll come back to this. I believe in natural science, John. I believe that it gives us truths about the world. And I believe it gives us this sort of quasi objective, and I’ll explain more what I mean about that, behavioral position of the world from the bottom up. It allows us to understand big bang and quantum and gives us a grounded reductionism, not just that, but a grounded reductionism that affords us clarity about a monistic worldview that starts with energy information in a material object, living organisms, minded animals, and cultured persons, which I can then say, hey, I can see that from the inside too. I can see that aspect of myself from the inside and the outside. So marry the coin to the tree is the embodied conformity. Right, right, right. It is the embodied formality of knowing and being, knowing from the subject perspective, affording an understanding of what we’ve discovered about the real world through, say, scientific epistemology and placing those in right relationship inside out, outside in. And then ultimately then doing that in a way that, well, what is collectively valued and what is the ultimate good, what’s the ultimate, and that’s represented by our ultimate concern, whatever elephant, sun god, whatever your icon is of what would call you then forth to be in the world in a way and say you wanna be a good ancestor at this time, right? So I will then basically say, hey, the emergence of the philosophical underlining that John does is completely consistent with, and I’m not a philosopher by training. I’ve now educated myself some, but I’m not a philosopher by training, but this is what emerged in relationship to the psychological and psychotherapeutic world that I found myself in. And the kind of modeling for me as a psychological doctor or scientifically grounded psychological doctor who helped people define meaning in life in relation. So the last thing I’ll say is I’ll start with taking your leveling up and I’ll just look at it through the lens of the tree of knowledge. And I’ll suggest that, hey, tree of knowledge is like there’s leveling up, there’s actually aggregate leveling up, there’s a development of levels within a dimension and then jumps into dimensions. And that will give us a little bit of a taxonomy on the leveling up structure that I think will give some riches to that. Then we’ll talk a little bit about the emergence of what I see as the power of the conformity model. Basically, I’ll just take your recursive relevance realization and say, well, that stitched together so many of my ideas and now I can actually see the architecture of my sort of mind one, two, three, my neurocognitive subjective experience justifying state of being. And then the super interesting thing if we come to transactivity, I realized, so the core concepts that I use after the tree of knowledge to sort of theoretically frame human psychology, investment, influence, justification. These are clearly transjective concepts that you really have. Totally, totally, totally. They’re totally transjective. So now you’re like, oh, these aren’t subjective objective, they’re transjective. So I will then suggest that we can put jai dynamics, justification, influence and investment as transjective concepts. And it’s just like, holy good Lord, your philosophical rich grammar underlaboring sets up from what I’m sort of developing over here on this side and that’s a pretty tight correspondence. That’s really, oh, that’s exciting. I’m looking forward to it. So me too. Okay, we did our first episode. We’ll put the name and link of Greg’s book, which neither one of us could retrieve. Right, I’ll have it all framed out here next time, John. So when I’m talking. As I said, it’s gonna be Greg and I initially for a couple of episodes, but it will move into a trial log and our third person will change. I think there are a lot of folks out there, look at the Concilions Conference and beyond that are brilliant, important things to say will compliment this argument and enrich it and expand it into the collective. Absolutely, I look forward to that. Me too. Thank you.