https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iiX7CdFWl9c
And so I think that the way that I, because I’ve been thinking a lot about this egregore and also I’ve been provoked and kind of challenged by my own, the people that follow what I’m doing and are thinking in similar terms as I am. And one of the things that they’ve noticed is that there are certain, let’s say there are collective beings or like hyper agents the way that John talks about that seem to have more logos, that seem to be teleologically structured. Let’s say the navigation of a ship, for example. So the navigation of a ship will have a clear hierarchy and there’ll be a captain who will, let’s say, be the top of the way that the direction that it’s going, he’s going to manage the others, but they’re all working together and paying attention to the same telos. And so they’re able to function as a body, you know? But there are also versions of these beings that seem to be something like headless. And this is what some of my friends have pointed to me, pointed out to me, and that they seem to be more, they seem to pop up and disappear. And so you see that the type of being that Jordan was talking about in his discussion about these weird morality codes that rise up online and then start to manage the way that people act, they seem to be these headless beings, but they do have, they act upon the group. They have causative power. And so they look like, that’s why there’s something of a monstrous effect. And that’s why these people, I’m going to have a conversation with them as well soon, but why they said maybe the term egregore is good for these types of manifestations, which are these, like a mob, for example, that is swerving and then people pop up. Like if you look at Tiananmen Square, it’s a great example of this when it was happening. You’d have, you had this mob of people, and then all of a sudden a leader would pop up and then people kind of start to follow that leader for like an hour. And then someone else would scream somewhere else and then people would just like be moving from head to head and they couldn’t find a clear direction and really is like this. So it does have a kind of agency, but I mean, you would say something like a demonic agency. It’s breaking, it doesn’t have a clear telos, let’s say. That’s where I’d want to challenge it. I think I like the distinction and I now see how I would respond. I’d say if you want to reserve aggregate to those things, those processes that are self-organizing, but are not autopoetic, then that is exactly where the boundary of agency is lost. Tornado is self-organizing and that to me is what’s happening in Tiananmen Square. You’re having a social tornado, but it is not autopoetic in that it does not self-organize in order to seek out the conditions that produce, promote and protect its own existence. Whereas I take it that hyper agencies do. So an example of a hyper agency that clearly does this is a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies in fact, often become totally just self-perpetuating entities that have been self, they self-organize for this telos, but the autopoetic element takes over and sometimes to horrific degrees that’s in Kafka, right? And so, right. So I’m now seeing a continuum, but to me the line where we ascribe agency is precisely the line of where the self-organization has passed properly into being autopoetic. And when there is no evidence for autopoiesis, we should not ascribe agency. And when we can ascribe very sophisticated self-organization. And if that’s what people wanna point to with the term aggregate, then I think it’s a good term for that phenomena. And I’m willing to accept that correction. But for me, I’m interested in the capacity for reality to produce hyper agents because they to me have a significance for our understanding. We have always understood our agency in relationship to some kind of hyper agency. To me, I think that’s part of your point, Jonathan, right? Human beings have always understood ourselves in terms of hyper agents. And so I think the current discovery of hyper agency has a spiritual potential and significance that the discovery of social self-organization does not have. Okay, let me throw something in that just came up and I’m not sure this is a good idea, but it occurs to me that to the degree to which this conversation has a capacity to be an embodiment or a manifestation of one of these kinds of beings, that would be the self referentially proper way to guide its directionality. Yes. What being is endeavoring to express itself to these particular humans. So we can take it as a applied experiment. Excellent. Something that I noticed that this particular one seems to have as a orientation is precision. And as you were talking about the distinction between a tornado and let’s say something else, I wanted to get very, very close because that line is actually a very subtle line. Yes. But if I zoom in at the edge of a tornado, there actually is a shift in the probability of Brownian motion at the event horizon of the causal structures of air molecules that is what produces the auto catalytic characteristic. Yes. The distinction between auto catalytic and auto poetic. Yes. The fine point. And I’d be interested to see if it’s worth spending time trying to get down there, although it is of course a tremendous rabbit hole and it may implicate the whole question. Well, I don’t want to trespass on Jonathan, but since I think the question is directed towards me. For me, the auto catalytic, and this is of course, what Kaufman says, it might be necessary, but it’s not sufficient for life. Because an auto catalytic process is in some sense perpetuating itself, but it is nevertheless not seeking out the conditions that have to obtain. And so my evidence for that is tornadoes will move onto terrain that immediately destroys them. And as Jonathan was saying, the self-organization is starting to coalesce into something that might do something around the same thing. Something that might do something around this leader, and then it shifts to this leader, and then it shifts to this leader. And so there is no, well, to my mind, there is not enough top down, and that’s why I wanted to emphasize in the agregore, I’ll use that term now to refer to these social self-organizations, if that’s okay. There’s not enough top down to attribute cognition. Because I take it that what we’re trying to talk about when we’re talking about things like, when we are invoking terms like spirit, or what I try to invoke like hyper agent, is we have something that has a capacity to not just self-perpetuate, but to self-promote and self-protect. And that in that sense, we want to sort of equally attribute cognition and something like a life to it. Okay, so me, the other thing I’d like to bring into this, what you’re saying, John, is what would be the difference between, let’s say, so we have the notion of a being that is properly organized towards the telos and structures itself hierarchically in a way that seems to give it agency, right? So then we have these momentary beings that kind of shift from one way to the other and don’t seem to be able to do that. And then you have something, what I would call something like parasitic processes. Yes, yes. So let’s say I see that more easily within, oh, let’s say the mob. So the mob is a good example, like at a social level. And addiction would be a good example at a personal level, where you have a process that is self-perpetuating that has all the mechanisms to preserve itself, can ultimately be the demise of the structure that holds it together. Can ultimately kind of break, can kill you. So you can have an addictive pattern within you that is doing all these things, but then it ultimately could act against the body that’s holding it together. It’s funny, as you were saying that, I immediately thought of parasitic processing. So I think I’m right. I’m really catching your perspective, I hope. Yeah, I think the idea of something like a self-organizing process that is parasitic, but is nevertheless self-destructive of what we might call it substrate. I’m trying to use terms very neutrally here. Yeah, I think that’s right. But I mean, since I coined the term with Leo, I guess I could speak to its provenance. The intent of parasitic processing is it’s actually something that is destroying agency. That’s one of its defining features. It insinuates itself into the agency of, well, in the case we were originally talking about, of an individual cognizer, takes on a life of its own, but at the expense of the agency that it is dependent upon. And so for me, I think what that calls for then, I mean, I feel what’s happening is we’re being called to like a continuum in the taxonomy. We’ve got aggregars and then we have hyperagents and now there’s this in-between thing. Yeah, to me, it doesn’t cross the line, the threshold into hyperagency because it’s like an addiction. It’s ultimately, it’s a twist in the potential for agency that is being actualized as the self-destruction of agency, if that makes any sense. Yeah, well, one of the reasons why I’m using, I’m trying to bring that up is just because I’m also trying to account for the iconography, let’s say. That is one of the reasons why demons are represented the way they are. Like if you look at the way demons are represented, they’re always represented as hybrid monsters. That is they’re represented in a way that they have no definite identity, but they can nonetheless act on you. And they act on you in a manner that wants to, like you said, John, to destroy your agency, to destroy your being basically. They want, the demons ultimately want to feed off of you until you die. And so they’re actually represented visually if you look at the way they’re represented in medieval art in a way that seems to represent this problem that we’re talking about. So they’re like, they’re egregores in a way because they’re like this mismatch of beings. They’re like a fish mixed with the human, mixed with the tail and all these weird things. But then it also is able to act upon you and in a way that’s violent, right? They’re sticking for you. They’re basically torturing you ultimately. I like where this is going. I like how we’re getting this articulation of the continuum that is trying to be birthed in the taxonomy. I like this a lot. So let me throw some more parameters or what you call that sort of like edges, shape. One is something like closure, thermodynamics, closed system, disconnection, separation. And in particular, something like the metaphor of death. So if I consider, for example, an animate body, let’s just go with a rabbit that’s hopping about as a being, and then it’s a dead rabbit, right? Something has happened, a discontinuity has occurred. The physical body and the components that made up that physical body are now subject to a completely different regime of dynamics, right? They’ve now become thermodynamic and characteristic. In fact, a more fundamental notion, I think of parasitic process, which is there’s a gradient of possibility or stored capacity that has been built up by the organic being, which is now a feedstock for a completely different set of regimes that are in fact, in relationship with the rabbit, are in fact bottoms up, right? There are bacteria and predators and parasites and whatnot that are going to decompose that stored energy, which is living precisely in the gap between what was at one point, a autopoetic process and is now transitioned. Okay, that’s one. Two. Uh-huh, yeah. How would we say the confusion that arises when something of that sort, let’s just go with the bunny that died for a moment, happens to be made up of human beings. Uh-huh. The difference between a tornado and the mob is the tornado was made up of air molecules and the affordance of air molecules for engaging in cognition in any meaningful way is quite small, whereas the mob is made up of human beings. And so the affordance of human beings for engaging in cognition is relatively quite high. And so we may ascribe to the mob a level of cognition that is in fact not properly happening at the mob, but is what happens when something that was alive is now in this parasitic process dynamic, but its subcomponents are in fact fully functioning cognitive agents. And that creates a little bit of a confusion about what’s actually going on. I see, that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting. Yes, so you’re saying there’s a great temptation for we have to be very careful of a category, in a classical sense, a category mistake. Yes. It’s applying between the species and the genus, yes. And if you take the notion of short-term and long-term or what’s it called, global optimum and local optimum, and apply that against the choice-making landscape of a cognitive agent, so let’s go with a mobster, effectively what’s happening when we refer to the notion of disconnection or separation is we’re reducing the scope of self that is actually in the context of making choices. What had been a larger self, a greater being, is now made up of a very field of smaller selves that are making choices on the basis of a much smaller scope of capacity, which is their orient towards local optima. Because they’re orienting towards local optima, they’re in fact degrading the landscape that had included a global optima. Right. It’s the wholeness of the autopoetic beingness. But because these are in fact functional cognitive agents, there’s a substantial amount of activity that’s going on that looks in fact, and in fact is cognition, right? So they’re shaping the landscape in a potent way. So really looking closely at what’s going on inside that gap gives us a lot of insight. In fact, by the way, it may be like a 10,000 year long thermodynamic process that is constantly eating up the feedstock that emerges in the context of ordinary human, how humans come together into wholeness and what is possible in the context of humanness as a source for parasitic process. And every time that source comes together and endeavors to reach a more whole basis, it actually provides a niche for this parasitic process. This goes back to your demons, I think. That’s brilliant. So if I hear you right, you’re proposing that the demonic is actually a case where there’s a degradation of the hyper agency into parasitic processing and we can understand parasitic processing in terms of how it’s undermining the cognition of the individual agents. Did I understand you correctly? Certainly a piece of it, yes. Yeah.