https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=nl48eFZGRq8
to set up maybe an archive. All right, that is being recorded. Good. No, I don’t know Brett. I don’t know Brett. So I met Brett a long time ago, like 11, 12 years ago. And at the time he was a self-proclaimed, very marginal professor at Evergreen, which is pretty, I’d say out there, but called Experimental College, who had some good stuff. I spent time with him and his brother Eric. He was also very marginal, some hedge fund trader who was working on physics as a hobby. Right, right. And then of course, as things have happened, as it turns out, the fact that Eric and Brett have good stuff has become more and more obvious, and so more and more people have heard of them. When you mentioned the book you were writing, I had a flash of like, oh, this is actually going to be a very successful book. Oh, thank you. That’s good. That’s good. We’ll start getting you like, you’re the Jordan Peterson couture transformation. And if you’ve noticed, like if you go back and watch his earlier videos, he looks like a professor of psychology. And then when you see him in the more recent shots, he has like a $5,000 suit and a really nice haircut. Wow, I really hope that doesn’t happen. You’ll pick the identity that fits him. He may have elbow patches. So the religion is not a religion. Yeah. So I mean, I’ve put a lot of work into that, as you are no doubt aware, and I’m continuing to do that, especially in connection with the book I just mentioned. I may take physical notes for a second. Let me just grab my notebook. Sure. All right. So the main inspiration for this idea, right, is the symbolic inspiration is Nici’s madman in the marketplace, right? And when he’s arguing with the atheists that they don’t know what they’ve done when they’ve killed God. And the idea behind that, which was I read Nici a long time ago in my undergraduate years, and that really sunk into me very deeply, is that Nici understood the deep functionality of religion for bringing about fundamental transformation, et cetera, all the things that you and I and others are talking about. So the religion that’s not a religion, one of the things it’s gonna require is a very clear, and I mean really clear and scientifically articulated and argued and evidenced explanation of that functionality. So as opposed to political pseudo-religious ideologies that just propose a vision of the promised land and hope that somehow the functionality will accrue as we commit ourselves to that utopia, I wanna do this in reverse, that’s what I’m proposing, that we get the function, no, let’s really, really, really understand the functionality and then reverse engineer the practices that we can that activate it and exact it so as to bring about the transformations we need to achieve individual wisdom and collective coherence. As I put those two now together, as you know in my thinking, I have them in a dialogue with each other all the time, the meta-cyclotectology that realizes coherence and the meta-heuristic that realizes wisdom and they’re together in what I’m calling dialectic. So for me, that’s, I guess, to take a stand there, that’s a non-negotiable for me, that this has gotta be, you know how you said this before, and this is something I like your insistence on this, the rate of complexification is a difference in degree that’s now a difference in kind and we’ve gotta fundamentally do things differently. This is one of my ways of responding to that, Desiderata, that you have articulated so passionately and consistently, it’s like one of the ways in which we can really, really try to do this differently than it’s been done before, right, is no, no, instead of leaping into the narrative, instead of leaping into the vision of the promised land, this is also a bit of the sort of the warmhearted of argument I’m having with Alexander right now, right, about the phallic vision and all that, yes, but you know, what we need to do differently this time is let’s really understand the functionality first. Maybe at some point, yes, we will need the artist, we need to do that, I understand that, I agree with that, but my point, well, is you, you know, to go back to a point I make about problem solving, good problem formulation is most of the heavy work, like get the problem formulated really well and then an essential feature of that, I think, is to really understand the functionality very deeply. Yeah. And then and only then, right, try to engineer the appropriate psychotechnology. Now, of course, like I’m not trying to be imperialistic, I understand because of the way human creativity work and theorizing works and because of the urgency of the situation, we’re sort of doing both of those things on the fly right now, a whole bunch of us, right, we’re trying to get at the functionality, we’re trying to, you know, reverse engineer the needed psychotech, I understand, but in terms of the ideal epistemic framing, like what we’re talking about right now, the design features, that would be, I think, for me, a crucial design feature that would make a qualitative difference from what’s going on before. And so in that way, I’m trying to see it as a way of, you know, playing game B as opposed to game A, we’re trying to change, right, the something fundamental here on how we’re doing this. So it seems like there’s something about there, as part of the design criteria and isometry between the how and the what. Yes, yes, yes, very much. Something along the lines of a, a playing of a collective of individuals committed to embodying wisdom in a collaborative exploration of the metaheuristics. Yes. And using collective coherence in the collaborative exploration of the meta psychotechnologies. Keep going, this is beautiful. To clarify and reify the metaheuristic and the meta psychotechnology and then express the narrative. Yes, yes. So the narrative, we can almost, we can almost use a, it’s like a checksum. To the degree to which the narrative was produced by something other than what I was just describing, we should hold it as being almost certainly, I’m gonna actually say wrong, but we should hold it at a distance as almost a, There’s a higher probability, yeah, there’s a higher probability that it’s gonna be dysfunctional in addressing the problems we wanna address. That’s how I would put it. Yeah, yeah, and there may be useful things there. Of course, of course, of course. We wanna look at it as pastiche. We wanna be able to say, okay, that’s neat, that’s nice. There’s a lot of good stuff there. Oh, it’s funny, I just flashed it flashed in my mind. Have you seen those beautiful works of art? I saw one recently that was an image of Nikola Tesla, but constructed entirely out of perspective. So that if you look at it at a very specific angle, it looks exactly, it is the image. But if you actually move your eye a little bit, you see like, for example, it’s just a collection of trash. No, I haven’t seen those, that’s amazing. I’ll send it to you. So I had that feeling. So this narrative that is constructed in a how, other than what we were describing, will in fact have a bunch, it’s like a toolkit. They have a whole bunch of stuff. But we should be very careful about that. Again, and so then at a heuristic level, trying to actually get these things appropriate aligned, the stack, like the ordering of the stack from relevance realization up, get the stack in the right order, building from the bottom up. Yeah, very much, very much. That would be for me also another, I think design feature as you’ve just articulated it. Although I think it’s implied by the notion of wisdom, at least the one I’ve been trying to argue for, is that there’s going to be, as you put it, the alignment of the stack from relevance realization up through the four kinds of knowing. Both again, individually and collective. I think there’s individually, collectively, and then dialectically between the individual and the collective. And so I think that would be another important feature. So when we’re saying functionality here, we have to be comprehensive. Like you said, it has to be the functionality that goes all the way up and down the stack and can explain and afford its optimization and alignment, something like that. Do you want me to just keep sort of continuing with stuff I’ve already sort of put some thought into, or do you want to make this more back and forth? What would you like? Hold on. Sure. It’s so funny. I almost never take notes. Throughout my entire academic career, I think I have like one page of notes. Well, you’re obviously extremely high in G, so that explains why, right? And I’m wondering, like as I’m doing this, the degree to which this is really more just a way for me to clarify my own thinking. Will I ever flip back to these pages and look at these notes? Okay, please continue. Yeah, it doesn’t matter. I often take notes for exactly the reason you just articulated. So for me, I mean, the reverse engineering is to reverse what we need in order to awaken from the meeting crisis. And then I think that’s a really important point. Awaken from the meeting crisis. And then hopefully that will also provide us with the state from which we can wrestle with the meta crisis. I mean, so I define that, the religion not religion has the T loss, if you want to put it that way, of affording awakening from the meeting crisis. And then, as you know, as I argue in this series, I think there’s two parts to that. One is it has to give us an ecology of psychotechnology that addresses the perennial problems. And then the other is it has to work out that kind of symbolic mythos that religions do that aligns with the scientific worldview. Is aligned with the best cognitive science, the best neuroscience, the best machine learning, the best, the best, right? The very, very best. So that the ecology of practices sits within a worldview that legitimates it and authorizes it in important ways. I would actually push it one level harder, which is that in a line, what I would say is something like, clarifies, so it’s in alignment. Yes, yeah. And therefore clarify. So the work that I’ve seen you do a lot of is actually taking concepts that in many ways have been sort of pulled rough hewn and littered with nonsense into any discipline, cognitive science being the one that you’re focusing on, and then taking a very careful look at them and clarifying them so that the discipline itself is actually disciplined in its own underlying context. Right, right, right, right. That’s very well said. Yeah, that’s very good. I like that. That’s very important. That’s good. I’m glad we’re recording this. I expect there’ll be more insights like that. Okay, so check this out. I’m a German in forest laundry. You’ve mentioned him before. So he’s done a lot of very powerful work. And the interesting thing, the thing that just blew my mind was the way, like the path that he took to his work. He’s a polymath with a deep history actually in, he’s from Maine, so in Yankee wood crafting, like his father was an actual guild master woodworker. That’s cool. But his background fundamentally is computer science. One of the top theoretical computer science in separate men. And his area of practice was, and is, semantic computing. And so one of the things that he did, he was working in really sophisticated semantic computing back, back, back when the internet was just coming online. Back when very little noise and a decently large amount of signal was actually being generated in terms of semantically processed computer readable content. Like saying every scientific journal. And you remember when the first archive of books, digital books was actually put online. I can’t remember where it was. It was like a huge archive of all the non-copyrighted books, which is a huge amount of content. So he began running semantic processing on this treasure trove. And then began tuning his semantic processing using this treasure trove. And then, so doing a lot of this work. So take a concept like transcendence. And actually see, given the use of transcendence in as many disciplines as you can grab, as many locations, what’s the actual semantic location of this concept? What does the word mean in a fundamentally deep sense? Because you just said the best of computer science. And what I would say is that we can really do this from the point of view of participatory knowing. Meaning we should not be participating with the best of the theory of computer science. We should actually be participating with the best of the practice of computer science. If we were asking the question, the religion that is not a religion of computer science, what would computer science say? And computer science would say, oh, well, why don’t we let the computer help? Why don’t we take this notion of a, the problem of getting clarity in the semantic space and automate that. A computer can do that. Right, right. Or at least it can simplify dramatically. Yes, yeah, yeah. So he did that work already. That’s been done. Well, we should definitely think. I’d like to know how to make use of that. That sounds like a very powerful thing. Integrating that with sort of dialogic exploration of concepts like you see in the platonic dialogues would be a very powerful thing to do. Yeah. Where the computer might be one of the participants in the dialogic process itself. That could be, that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And it’s, what we can get there is you can get a, well, you can get a lot. You can get some very interesting stuff. That just popped into my head. So I’ll have to see how to get it. So no, but that’s great. Kind of. The more we can see how to, well, I’ll use this word, exapt the cyber technology so it integrates with the psycho technology, the better. The more we need to do that. I agree. Yeah, yeah. So here’s an example. This is a great one. So one of the things that religions tend to fall into is the semantic complexity. Right. And so you get a lot of, oftentimes unintentional, oftentimes intentional, but a lot of times unintentional equivocation. Yes. As the semantic distance leads people to lose the coherence at the level of argumentative or rational coherence. Right, right. Across the domain that they’re inquiring into. So I might struggle really, really hard to have a high degree of rigor and coherence in the conceptual frameworks that I’m using. But as I’m ingesting more and more conceptual frameworks, the way that my mind is able to hold them begins a process of sort of partitioning them into shards. So I might have a concept like say transcendence, and I might myself be holding it equivocally into like three or four distinct meanings because I’ve got the Nietzschean lineage over here, and I’ve got sort of a Christian theological lineage, and those are connected, but not exactly the same, and you fill in the blank. And of course, as soon as you add more people into the conversation, the level of equivocation and the amount of complexity goes up so high that by definition, that’s kind of the point, no human mind can actually hold the semantic space, but a computer can. And so you can run into a situation where it’s actually able to say, there’s equivocation happening here. Something in the conversational space, there’s a meaning cross, you’re crossing terms, and could help reify the conversation, something like that. That’s brilliant. If we could engineer that, that would be a powerful step up. Yeah, yeah. Are you familiar with the Bonita Roy’s stuff? A little bit, a little. Yeah, she introduced me to very simple, for me, very simple psychological notion of the mapping error, which is so helpful when people are moving up the stack, it’s just basically in many ways, it’s reverse getting people back into the right order on the stack. Yeah, right, right. If you’re saying transcendence and I’m saying transcendence, and what you’re saying confuses and maybe angers me, as a first move, is it a mapping issue? You’re pointing to something down stack, you’re pointing to something at the level of say, yes, yes, yes. Effective, and I need to slow down and actually take that step. All right, sorry, I wandered too far afield there. No, no, no, you didn’t, I think that’s good. No, no, I think that’s good. I think that idea, well, first of all, the idea of inter-level equivocation, I think is important. I think that shows up in cognitive science a lot. Information is a term that’s often used equivocally across the levels, very much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if we could pick up, if we could co-opt some of this existing cyber technology to help us enhance our reflective capacity to avoid things like equivocation in the process, if we can make that happen, I think that’s also, that’s one of those qualitative changes that could make a real difference. Imagine if there was sort of a cyborg rationality in which the human capacity is for relevance realization insight were wedded to this kind of semantic processing that could check, right? And like, you know, and do something, you know, almost like an internet search and say, well, here’s possible equivocations you’re making use of. And then the human being sort of talk about it and, oh yeah, we are equivocating here. No, that’s irrelevant, that’s right. And then, but think about how much time, how much wasted time would be avoided doing that. I think that’s a very good idea. Yeah, yeah, I’m noticing a tension in myself. Part of me wants to continue exploring down this road. Part of me is worried that it’s a bit of a we. But maybe there’s something about the, yeah, okay, if I open the context and say, perhaps the thing that feels like it’s going into the weeds can be held as an example of a more general thing. I was about to say exactly that. I think the more general thing is, and that’s an example, a clear example that gives teeth to the idea. One of the design features of the religion that’s not a religion is exactly this, that it is going to find the best way to not only exact, you know, biological cognitive processing, right? But also cyborg information processing into how it’s trying to exact the functionality. So the functionality that’s being exacted is no longer, and this is another qualitative difference, just our functionality. We’re trying to exact the functionality of these emergent machines. Yep. So we’re broadening. We can ground it, and it was to say as an example. Yes. Are you familiar with the thing that happened, or at least was reported to have happened in Google Translate about a year ago? No. So this is the story that I understand. So what I’m conveying is not necessarily real, but it is my understanding of reality and the interpretation of it is what I’m trying to convey. Google Translate moved to using machine learning, meaning that it was engaging in a self-editing, self-authoring process. And what it ended up doing was finding, discovering on its own, that the best way for it to deal with the translation from say French to English was actually to construct a meta-language that only Google Translate had ever perceived. So it created its own meta-language because it was dealing now with hundreds of languages, reifying the grammatic and semantic structures that it was perceiving among all languages into a meta-language. And then if it translated from French to the meta-language and from the meta-language to English, the error rate between French and English went way down. So it’s sort of reverse engineered Chomsky’s universal grammar. Yeah, exactly. So this is an… Let’s use that as… Yeah, but that’s a powerful analogy though. That’s a powerful analogy. Okay, yeah, that’s very good. So, okay, I think that’s very good. So the idea of that these machines can do that kind of thing and help… So they can do one thing… Sorry, they can do two things in an integrated fashion. One thing they can do is they can explicate how the machinery we’re using might be internally self-deceptive, like your example of equivocation. And they can also afford giving us quicker and more comprehensive access to the meta-space we might need to make use of. Exactly, exactly. Quicker and more comprehensive access to the meta-space. Yes, perfect. Okay, so… Okay, that’s interesting. And so kind of sliding to the right and this feels like it’s a bucket that will have to be dealt with at some point and we can kind of name it the… The Pag-Giao bucket? Pagio. Pagio, right, which is the… To the degree to which we’re endeavoring to create a religion that is not a religion, how do we deal with the religions that are religions? And the Pantheon. And I’m wondering, I’m curious about the degree to which we could actually find that there is a meta-structure that would actually allow a conversation to occur. Just think of this as a translation. Now, this is actually quite interesting. If I’m having a Sufi Muslim having a conversation with a Presbyterian in English, we’re under a very significant illusion that we’re actually having a conversation about the same things. Because we’re using a language, English. And I can translate my relevance realization and body sensibilities into English, convey it semantically across you to English, whereupon you can reverse decompose that into something that seems relevant to you and get very fucking confused. Yeah, very much. But if you’re actually able to say, no, no, we can do a Google Translate. We can actually identify is there a meta-structure that is actually meta, not expressed in any given language, or at least reified into a computational construct that has access to the meta, then do the up and sideways, we may actually find that a very large number of doctrinal disagreement is in fact, simple confusion at the level of semantics. That’s, I think that’s very good. That aligns with something I’ve been twang with, which is the alternative to Huxley’s perennialism, right? So, you know how in deep learning you cycle through sort of compression, you compress, you try to extract what’s invariant across, and then you vary and send it back out to the variations that interact with the environment and combat. And I was thinking, well, instead of trying to do what Huxley did, which just find the commonalities, what if we did something like machine learning on the various religions where they cycle through compression, right? Getting, like you say, abstracting this sort of the meta, maybe the core meta language or the grammar, right, cognitive grammar, but then they allow themselves to verify out, sorry, to vary out and then interact with the environment in the particular context and then come back in. And so what it actually cycles, instead of saying either perennialism, all the religions have always said the same thing, or relativism, no, they’re a completely different world. Just no, no, what we can do is we can exact this as a deep learning cycle, which we cycle between compression and particularization so that the whole thing, right, the whole process is getting better. Yeah, that’s really interesting because I think if you did that, and I think we can do that, by the way, I think technically that is available, you might notice, for example, a natural topology in the evolutionary landscape of religion space. Yes, exactly, exactly. There may in fact be like say three saddle nodes and there are three variations on that, like Buddhism might be sitting over here and Islam is sitting over here and Judaism is sitting over here and there’s a real distinction between them we can now actually talk about what those real distinctions are, like what they really are and say, okay, cool. Now that we have that, that’s very powerful and interesting. I’m not sure, well, no, it seems very doable. So as long as we’re just doing the design, there seems to be something that would be, ah, so as a design criteria for the religion, there’s not a religion, it has to in fact actually be used. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s for sure. And ideally it has to actually be used in the way that you described it, meaning it provides us with the basis from which we can collectively address the metacrisis. So, I’m not, I’m, I’ve noticed that trying to articulate my relationship to the existing religions is sort of best explained in what I just said to you. I’m not claiming to have the computational power we would need to do this comprehensively, but I’m saying in terms of my own individual practice, because this is how I sort of try to understand how I was alternative to both, you know, cats and to Huxley. I was like, no, no, what I do is I do things where I do that. I get sort of the compressive stuff. And then I see how the variations go out to apply to more context sensitive stuff. And I cycle that way. And what I was noticing is, I don’t know how accurate this is, but it seemed to me that what was happening is rather than getting, you know, your conviction on any particular religion, my overall capacities for relevance realization were being enhanced. Mm-hmm. Right? Which is part of the meta, both the metachristic and the metapsychotech. Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. So I have another design feature that I think is very relevant and it’s been brought up, I think both by Jonathan and most clearly, I think by Paul, which is the scalability issue. And you and I have also talked about that at times, because part of the functionality of religions as opposed to other things. And an interesting thing historically is you can sort of compare Christianity to stoicism on this and you can see ways in which they succeeded and failed to win the Roman Empire, if we wanna put it that way. So Paul’s idea is, you know, for a religion to bring about the kind of transformation that we seek from it, which is I assume what we are seeking, it has to be scalable both between levels of socioeconomic, sociopolitical organization and it has to be scalable across developmental stages. So from fully, from adult to child, right? Because if you don’t have the societal integration, if you don’t have the developmental integration, you do not have access to the deep functionality that we’re talking about here. I think that’s a very, very good point. I take that criticism that Paul has made of my work very seriously, I think that’s a very good point. I think that. I think we can address that. I feel very strongly we can address that. This is, you’ve met Zach. Yes, yes. And we might say that his life’s work has been really deeply grasping the whole notion of development. Right. And if you think about the essence of what we’re talking about, we can actually re, we can actually invert the challenge and turn it into a lever. So if we say, okay, one of the things we’d like to do, for example, is to actually embody through the use of the medicuristics, increase individual wisdom. Well, if I just sort of flip my head around and say, well, that just sounded like good parenting and education. Now I’m starting with probably 18 months before birth and ending, well, I don’t know where you end exactly because lineage becomes a very challenging thing when it’s just getting out. But let’s just ended it shortly after death. The specifics, the specificity of the instantiation of the medicuristics and the metapsychotechnology is bound to the particularity of the developmental arc and to the singularity of the individual. Right, so this is a second order, but this is nonetheless a very strong is the design criteria, which is that the religion that’s not a religion is bound to the specificity of the developmental arc and to the singularity of the individual. That’s well said, I like that. I like that, that’s very good. Because there’s a, when you do scalability, the third criteria is something along the lines of, it’s funny, I’m actually popping into the computational and even technological domain for the word scalability. I said, to be scalable in the technical sense means that I must be able to add increasing service arbitrarily without decreasing the functionality of the service, to be scalable. Yeah, no, no, that’s good, I like that. That’s an excellent way of defining that. No, I think that’s very useful. Then I can talk about Metcalfe’s law. Which is? Metcalfe’s law is to say, so Metcalfe’s law is a very powerful observation, which appears to actually now be grounded in some fundamental reality, which is that as you add a node to a communications graph, like say a telephone network, the value as measured in the possibility space of the communications network expands and what is the word for it? It’s a mathematical term that I just lost, just flew out of my head, it starts with a P, polynomial. Okay. Many people sort of just call it exponential, it’s not quite exponential, but nonetheless, it’s a nice curve. So what Metcalfe’s law does is it drives the rapid explosion of something like say Facebook. Right, right, right, right. You think about social media, I think about Facebook and Facebook T0 is just Mark Zuckerberg, just him. The value of Facebook is very low. And in fact, if I have Mark Zuckerberg and his roommate, still very low. But as you start getting to three, four, five, six, seven people, the value actually expands at some number larger than the end. Right, right. Well, that’s metascaleable, right? To the degree to which I can craft a technical layer so that people can join, I can scale the number of people who are participating without decreasing the availability of the service. It does not slow down. Every person who gets added, it just continues to have the same sort of response time. And also every person who is added actually increases both the value of the thing and therefore also the attraction. So you get double loop. This is how you do that sort of thing. So if I design a religion that’s not a religion, it’s scalable in that sense, metascaleable, then you would expect to see something on the order of an exponential growth curve, which is how we actually resolve the practicality problem that actually needs to be adopted. It needs to be adopted and adopted in a way that actually helps us resolve the meta crisis. Does that make sense? No, that makes excellent sense. That’s very good. I like that. It’s very, very helpful. I like that. So would that, so there’s an open question, right? Would that mean that the way things, I’m thinking of the scientists working with the rover on Mars and they do not adopt a hierarchical structure when they’re trying to move into this new environment. They socially organize the distributed cognition much more like a dynamically reconfiguring small world network that’s constantly restructuring itself rather than an Iron Age hierarchy. Because what was occurring to me as you said that is I thought, well, how did the religion in the past deal with this? Well, they used Iron Age hierarchy. That was their way of trying to manage what you’re talking about. But it seems to me that if we have the science and the technology and especially the cyber technology, we don’t have to address that problem, manage it with an Iron Age hierarchy. Right. So that’s a reasonable implication to draw. That is a very reasonable implication. But I would say you probably go two more steps and discover that it is actually going to be… How do I say this right? There’s a series of steps that lead you to conclude that it is almost certainly a necessity. Yeah, well that’s… A necessity in terms of network design. It’s almost like a network design necessity. If you want to do the thing that we’re talking about in terms of the design criteria, you begin to prune all the different network designs that you might use. Yeah. And you begin to realize that this network design is the only network design that actually satisfies the design criteria. Right, right, right. And I’m really interested right now. I’m actually holding this flip back and forth into MetaSpace. What’s happening there? Okay, so let me see if I can just narrate the story that’s playing out in my head and see if there’s something about it that is real. Please, please, please. Yeah, I guess I was synthesizing a couple of different conversations that we had. So I had a population of humans partitioned into at least two distinct kinds of groups. One kind of group was partitioned around language, so French speakers and English speakers. And the other kind of group was partitioned around existing credo, I suppose. Yeah, okay. Semantic commitments. Right, right, right. Existing religion. Yeah, yeah. And then what I was… And then I guess the third variable was a differential allocation of meta-processing capacity. Oh, okay. Say more about that, please. There were some people who were naturally skillful in operating in MetaSpace. The capacity to perceive meta-structures and then to be able to move from the meta to the concrete was at a higher level, higher competition. Right, right. And what I was noticing is that the ability to engage, there was a distinct, there was a network of topology that seemed to be emerging out of this construct, these three distinct characteristics, which was something like a collaboration happening between and among the more meta individuals, which I guess we might even flag a shaman, just to kind of wonder if that’s what’s really being talked about. And very importantly, there was that conversation and collaboration between and among the meta individuals, the shaman, and then there was a conversation and collaboration between and among the distinct populations in which the shaman are embedded. So there’s like a meta religion or a work happening at the meta level, and then there’s work happening at the embodied level. Right, right. There’s a network topology that actually has the… What’s the word for this? It’s like a, what’s that word called? Oh, geez. Not a space filling algorithm. It’s like you… It’s an option, it’s an evolutionary optimization function. Right, right, right, right. Shape of the network conforms to the actual optimal flow in the reality that defines itself. That’s right. With the bones evolve, like they’re an evolutionary search algorithm looking for a bunch of different criteria, like how to get strong and flexible and healable, you know, all these carrier characteristics, and it finds it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s good. That’s good learning that, yeah. That’s interesting, because when you said that, it triggered in me the two of the dimensions of dialectic, because you did the horizontal thing, like where the shamans are embedded, and there’s that horizontal, and then you did the vertical. They moved to the meta, which is again, that ontological shifting that’s going on in dialectic. So there’s a connection there, too. Yeah. Yeah, I was just wondering, like, what would have become of us if Socrates and Lao Tzu had been able to hang out? Yeah, that would have been really cool. That would have been really cool. It would have been really cool if Plotinus had made it to India and studied with what was going on there. That was his actual intent, but of course… Man. The emperor lost in battle, and that all fell into nothing. That was the end of that. Well, now those sorts of things can happen with the click of a button. Yeah, which is why, again, we’re in a different place. So what you all said was very helpful, and like I said, I feel there’s resonance with the dimensions of the dialectic, which we’ll need to explore. I also like, well, I like it, but I think there’s also a point separate of my preferences, because I think this is another way in which the religion that’s not a religion differs from a religion, because it’s trying to get out of Iron Age hierarchy as its fundamental grammar for its mythos. So in addition to having to break… There’s a deep relationship between these two, which Jonathan has continually argued for. The axial age two-world mythology, which I’ve argued is breaking down, and Iron Age bureaucracy mutually reinforce each other, because the hierarchy, right, for dealing with the problems we were talking about, also seems to be like the ladder that goes between the two worlds. And so this idea of a hierarchy that bridges between the worlds is also sort of a fundamental thing that is sown through a lot of the existing, at least, axial age religions. And what’s interesting, I mean, there’s important exceptions to it. Taoism tries to subvert the hierarchy in some important ways that you just alluded to. But nevertheless, I think that one of the things I think needs to be undermined is that complicit mutual support between hierarchical social organization, Iron Age bureaucracies, and the two-worlds mythology. And if what we’re describing is correct, then we have something that simultaneously takes the two apart and then reconfigures something new in its place. And I think that’s very important. Yeah, so I don’t know, let’s try this on, see if this lands. The thing that just popped into my head is the distinction between a photograph and a holograph. Does that land? I think so, keep going. Yeah, so by the way, under the impression that perhaps at some point this may be watched by people other than us, the distinction that I’m making is, in principle, superficially, I may have an image of a particular object and I can take a photograph of it and I can make a holograph of it. In the context of a photograph, what I have, the photograph has a characteristic where if I cut the photograph in half and I throw away the right half and keep the left half, then I have 100% of the left half and 0% of the right half. Right, right. I’ll get to the point in a second, I think. No, keep going, I think I know where this is going. Yeah, keep going. With the holograph, if I take the holograph and cut it in half, I have 100% and I throw away the right half. In the left half, I have 100% of the whole, but at lower resolution. Right, right, right. That’s a completely different, it’s almost like a Fourier, effectively, in fact, be a Fourier transform between different approaches to how you’re encoding reality. Now, the photograph to me topologically feels very similar to what you were just describing. It has a certain Iron Age perspectivism to it. Yes, yes, yes. There’s a very distinct mapping of location and information. Each pixel is a, is only what it is. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes. Whereas the holograph has something different. So for example, let me tell this in a human story. Please. It’s coming to me and see if it can use to go. No, this feels like it’s going in a good direction. Keep going. So in the context of a religion that’s not a religion, it is held holographically. The proposition would in fact be that every member, every human or every sentient that is a participant would be holding the whole story intrinsically. And it is in the relationships between and among them that the fidelity of the story becomes more clear. That’s excellent. That is a very, very different analogy for meaning than in the context where there is for sure a perfect copy that is somewhere. And the question is, are you putting it in the right order? Right, right. That’s wonderful. That makes me think of Michael Anderson’s point about the brain’s exaptation, right? That the brain isn’t organized with a stable topography hierarchically like we always tried to think it was, right? Instead, each area gets multiply exacted into different functionalities, right? The constant circuit reuse. And so this area, if it’s connected with these things, gives me speech, but if it’s connected with this thing, it controls my right hand. If it’s connected in other ways, it makes possible other new emergent functionality. And so there isn’t a hierarchical organization because they’re, like you said, a thing doesn’t have, like you said that, you said information is tied to its location, which is exactly how people still make these frigging pictures of the brain and the cartography, right? The here is where this happens, here is where this happens, here is where this happens. Well, now knowing that’s not how the brain works and the brain is neither completely holistic and neither completely localized, it’s doing this constant dynamic circuit reuse and re-exaptation of itself continually. And when you were just describing the holding the story holographically, that was saying, well, that seems to comport really well with how the brain wants to actually function. Yeah, yeah. And so we can make a small, like a very small concrete scaling move and say, okay, we have good reason to believe this is how the brain inside this body functions. So if we’re gonna be doing distributed cognition, maybe we should do that that way as well. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And as continuity up and down levels of scale. Exactly, exactly. That’s exactly what I would, that’s what exactly I would propose and given what you just said a few minutes ago, exactly. And the implications are actually really powerful in terms of the kinds of things that we may like to see in terms of what Paul was saying in scalability. Yes. Because, so I’m doing something with brain and when I’m doing something with brain, so I’m trying to move from speaking to say I’m having my hand move, there’s something like the constellation or the configuration of the sub components and their relationality that gives rise to the transformation of capacity. Yes, very much, very much. Well, this just happened in terms of mythos space. I’m sitting there trying to get a handle on a particular inquiry in mythos space. And the answer is, well, I actually have to get the right constellation. And it may be that it’s actually a seven year old kid in Bangkok right now. That needs to find the conversation because she’s the one who’s resonant frequency in the overall hologram is actually enables the spontaneous transformation of this particular thing to create clarity in the location of mythos if they were in inquiry. That’s really wonderful. That’s very good, I like that. Perfect symmetry across all possible participants in the conversation. So instead of doing the scale in terms of power, you’re doing it in terms of capacity to participate, which I think is a, which is a fundamental difference. And I’m wondering if there’s actually, as you’re saying that, yeah, it almost felt like there’s a, constantly moving back to this notion of scalability in the technological sense, which is said the anti-rival of scalability. There’s something very, very close right there. There’s something about the degree to which you make that movement from power to capacity to participate. There is an intrinsic motivation on the part of all participants to support the up gradient of the capacity to participate. Yes, yes, yes, yes, excellent, excellent. Yeah, yeah, if you think about it, there’s like a, there’s a shared map. There’s a shared map, there’s a shared orienting basis that everybody who increases their capacity to participate increases the richness and fidelity, therefore the value of the orienting basis, which is this thing that’s being held at the meta level. Like it’s something held at the level of the possibility or at the level of the holograph that we’re talking about, not yet actualized, but in its possibility. The actualization comes afterwards. You get the clarity, then you get the reality, the actuality. And so it’s in my best interest at all times, under every possible circumstance, to support everyone in becoming more capable because the thing that they’re contributing to is an unassailable commons, which is this, Yes, yes. This method. That’s, that is a very, that’s very powerful. I mean, in a sense of a very powerful vision. The way you just articulated that, I think was beautiful. Like really beautiful. I mean, there’s an aesthetic, not only is there intelligibility to it, there’s an aesthetic to it that I find attractive. Yeah, it feels like we’re definitely, yeah, we’re jamming. Like it definitely, there’s a song that is wanting to be played here that is starting to come together. Whoo. Aha. Whoa. Okay. That’s killer. Yeah, I’m gonna have to send you this document this woman sent me yesterday. Hannah, I think her name is, or Heather. Starts with an H. It’s actually astounding. To be perfectly frank, I’d be, are we actually running out of time? Holy smokes. Yeah. It’s an hour. Yeah, yeah. Tell you what, I will send this to you and I will be amazed and intrigued to see what you say about it. Because I just realized that I’m largely saying what I think she was actually saying. And let me actually see if I could just call up and just read to you like one paragraph. Please. She’s somebody who I’ve encountered in the context of the Game Beat Facebook group. All right, so this is what she says, this is my good. So she calls it accidental Game Beat shamanism. That sounds great. Ah, there we go. To the extent that the theories put forth in the first half of this document are found to be meaningful, they might be taken as early proof of concept for themselves. This document is not the result of conscious propositional inquiry by its writer. To say that its contents have surprised this writer is an understatement. With a background in the arts and humanities, this document’s writer possesses only a rudimentary propositional understanding of systems thinking, complexity science, participatory knowing, and shamanism. She didn’t even propositionally understand the term meta-psycho-technology until halfway through the writing of the document when she realized she might be describing one. All right, so two weeks ago, with the loose idea of creating a post for the Game Beat Facebook group, the writer set out to type up some nascent thoughts around the trans-contextual application of artistic capacity, she’s an artist, and the possibility of arts funding as a capital source for Game Beat projects. To a disorienting flux of writing, editing, intuitive feeling, default-mode network thinking, interactions in online Game Beat space, and uncharacteristic but manageable levels of sleeplessness, the writer has instead witnessed this document’s improbable birth. The unfolding has for the writer been, in one sense, profoundly confusing, but in another, and in the context of the theory so far presented, it may in fact be easily explainable. That’s quite wonderful. Yeah, please send that to me. Yeah, that’s very good, that’s very good. That’s very good. So yeah, because I wanted to create the context, I specifically wanted to create the context so that the perspective that you have when you go into the beginning of it is landing on the notion of you’re dealing with somebody for whom almost all of the words that you will see so artfully assembled from a propositional perspective are in many ways even unknown. Like if you were to actually double-click on something and say, could you now give me a dictionary definition what this thing is? She may not be able to, but the thing hangs together. That’s interesting, I very much wanna see that done. It’s super neat, yeah. That’s cool. All right, great, so I get the feeling, bizarrely enough, almost using a little bit of the methodology that she was just describing, I’ve been waiting for the working group on the new religion to need to happen. Pregnancy moving into the, into the, what do you call it, Braxton-Hicks contractions moving beyond Braxton-Hicks. Right, right. And I can feel the Braxton-Hicks contractions. I mean, even just this conversation, like wow, I feel like you do a lot really quickly. Yes, I do too, I do too. I know that you, and Zach mentioned that you are part of a thing that he’s putting together around, and he calls meta-psychology. And there’s something there that I think is quite good and useful. This weekend, I’m actually engaging in a collaboration that I think will help inform my perspective on the new religion project. But I get the feeling that in the order of, at the current pace, that’s what I’m reminded of, Nietzsche’s commentary about elephants. Which? He said that I’ve discovered that I’m an elephant. It takes 18 months for an idea to gestate inside me. I think it was 18 months, but anyway, you get the idea. That we’ll be moving into a more sort of embodied or more concrete phase involving like neat gatherings at fun places with people. Probably just as winter, like in the dead of winter, like January, February is my set. Right, right, right, right. Of course, we can choose places that aren’t necessarily negatively impacted by the dead of winter. Or how we live right now. Just FYI, like in terms of my own process, I’m feeling that happening. It’s getting more and more obviously alive. So what, because I’m back, I’m off sabbatical, the reading week in February would be the best time for me to travel. The reading week in February, that’s kind of like spring break or something? Yes, exactly. Okay, great. Well, that might work perfectly because I’m reasonably sure that in fact, my ex-wife has my older kids for that period of time. So that would actually create space that I would have as well, assuming they align, which they may not, but it’s a zone of possibility. All right, man, well. So do we want to keep this private for now? Do we wanna share it? I mean, do we wanna make it public or do we wanna share it with some select others? It feels to me like sharing it is actually what it wants. It wants to be shared. Okay, so how do you wanna be the- I have no slightest idea who at all. I’m actually like, I feel almost like confused by the question, but maybe there’s some people that we could identify that we could share it with who made themselves somehow have some ideas on the sharing of it. Sure, sure, sure, sure. In any event, let me stop. Yeah, because I gotta go soon. Yeah.