Bridging the Symbolic and Scientific Worldviews (EMP Podcast) (06Osa0EmJVc)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=06Osa0EmJVc

Jonathan, it’s a real pleasure to get the chance to speak to you. I’ve been absorbing a lot of your work over the last week and I’ve gotten a lot out of it. It’s been really interesting. So I wanted to start with this question of what does it mean to say that the world is becoming re-enchanted? Well, first of all, it’s great to meet you. I understand that we haven’t met before slightly, so it’s good to meet you again. I have also been interested in the kind of stuff you’re doing in terms of parkour and everything. My son is really into parkour, so that’s kind of what prompted me to say, oh yeah, I should talk to this guy because I do find, I always find if I’d been younger, I would have definitely been into parkour, like, you know, just a little younger. Anyway, so we can totally get you into it. We’ll talk about that after the concert. Yeah, I’m a little old. I’m getting that permanent little belly. It’s not a big belly. It’s like the little, anyways. All right, so let’s go for it. So what do I mean? The idea is that you could say something like the enlightenment, or not just enlightenment, the whole process, historical process of development created the possibility for what we kind of call materialism or rationalism, rational materialism today. And it’s basically been a desire to see the stability of the world in phenomena or manifestation and things that you can quantify, right? You can calculate, you can quantify, you can count. And my contention is that the reason why it was able to kind of last is because it was trying to remove, let’s say, the mythological aspects of Christianity, but it was still surfing on that. And so there were still remainders of it or things taken for granted, which made it possible for people to pretend as if that wasn’t there and then kind of look at the world just as phenomena and calculate and quantify. But as they were kind of chopping the tree that was holding them up, at some point, things started to break down. And there really started to be like a breakdown in terms of epistemology, which led to something like postmodernism, to this kind of this instability of interpretation. But there’s also another breakdown, which is mirroring it, which is a breakdown in value and a breakdown in society, where we see society fragment and we don’t have things to kind of hold them together. And so what you feel is that this rational materialism is kind of running its course. It’s becoming impossible to hold at every level of reality because society is kind of breaking down. Honestly, because of the type of thinking which led to this approach, now it’s being replaced by other weird mythologies. And so the new atheists, without even realizing it, are being replaced by the woke. And they almost like opened the door for the woke without totally… I don’t think they did it on purpose, but they kind of set the stage for kind of this woke new mythology which is coming in. So what my contention is, but it also has to do with these new… The fact that science is trying to deal with consciousness in a way that they haven’t before because they reached the edge in terms of the problem of the observer in the quantum realm and the problem of understanding what John Vivekid calls combinatorial explosion and the problem of combinatorial explosion. And so now they have to deal with things which until now have just been ignored, taken for granted. It’s like you don’t see the glasses you’re wearing, you don’t notice them until things start to get really weird and really wacky. And then you have to say, wait, wait a minute, why are things so wacky? Then you start looking at the lens through which you’re looking at the world and that’s where we are now. And in that movement, what we’re seeing is that meaning is kind of coming back in and storytelling, image making, all the tropes, ritual. All of these things are going to return because of the crisis, the crisis of understanding that the world actually has to be framed somehow. Even scientists are starting to understand that. And so what is that frame going to be? And so what I’m perceiving is that this is happening in all kinds of ways. It’s not just one. It’s happening in very strange ways in terms of the return of religion and all these kind of weird, fragmented, neo-paganisms, this desire to be all these California Buddhists. There’s just all these ways in which this is pushing itself back into the world for good and for ill, in my opinion. But to me, it’s definitely happening. That’s one of the reasons why I think Jordan Peterson was so effective is because he was scratching at something which was already an itch that had been there for even a few decades now. And now everything’s kind of coming together. So let me restate that. I mean, I think that I’m largely in agreement with you in what you’ve described, but I want to see if my model kind of is the same as yours. But it seems to me, and following Brevecki’s work, that we have this drive towards rationality that maybe starts with the kindness. And we see it playing out into Descartes and Newton and all these people. And it plays back and forth with the Enlightenment, the counter-Enlightenment, you know, empiricism, romanticism. And so these two things are, it’s not a linear trajectory. But in a certain way, like the late 90s and early aughts seem like a period where you had an upwelling of religious sentiment, right, and the moral majority in America, and then you had the counter-reaction to it with the new atheists. And science was delivering, right? We had the tech revolution. We had all of these things that were sort of making the world seem like a rational approach was going to win. And I was part of this. Like I grew up in the counterculture. So I grew up surrounded by people who were into mysticism and astrology. And they were part of this break from the rationalism of the West that happened in the 1960s. And I self-selected into basically being a new atheist type myself. And I remember all the discussions that were happening on the forums. And have you read an essay called The Godlessness That Failed by Scott Alexander? I highly recommend it. I think you’ll get a lot out of it. But I mean, he tracks exactly what you’re saying and how much it happened. Like you can look at people. If you dig below the surface of the new atheists, there’s this whole phenomena of people arguing for atheism from that perspective online. Yeah. And these whole battles with it. And there were all these figures who were major figures, even if they weren’t writing There were New York Times bestsellers, but who were figures in that culture war. And there’s a point at which atheist forums and sub forums and platforms basically start adopting something called Atheism Plus. And Atheism Plus is Atheism Plus Social Justice. There’s this realization that atheism isn’t an ethical platform. It’s a nothing, right? And people needed something. But it’s interesting. You can look at the moment in the late 90s when this happened, and you can actually see how it was going to fail from the very outset. Because the new atheists were in a large part reacting ultimately, not just in the late 90s, but the big thing that made them really react was 9-11. That was their high moment where it’s like, here’s this religious thing that’s coming back and it’s going to destroy us. Right. It’s attacking us. It’s violent. And it’s all these things. And so the new atheists tried to counter that with their kind of rational atheism. But they could never account. They were never able to account to why destroying the two towers was going to destroy America. They could never understand why it would do that. Because the reason why those two towers would become the break, the beginning of the breakdown of American culture was a mythological one. It wasn’t a material one. Like it was the symbol of these two towers, what they were, how high they were, what they represented in terms of the God of America, in terms of business and in terms of money. All of this stuff was being attacked. And what happened was a massive ritual. Like it ended up being a ritual event which led to many things. And so the answer, which is what the atheists gave, they could never answer that because it happened. Like what the terrorists wanted is happening. This is what they wanted. They wanted the world to realize, they wanted to watch the story of America break down. And they knew that by attacking their highest symbol, basically by an act of desacralization for the God of America, that they would succeed. And they’re succeeding because now back and forth between totalitarian security and desire for freedom has now, it’s just moving back and forth. And there’s no way to stop it anymore because there’s nothing to answer. And also because that God, the God of economy is not a sufficient God. It can’t hold a society together. That’s one of the things we’re realizing. Trade is not enough to hold a society together. So anyways, go ahead with the atheism plus. But I just wanted to kind of interject that and to see why it was, they never understood what they were dealing with. And I don’t agree with the terrorists, obviously, I don’t agree with them, but I can understand what they were doing. Yeah, I mean, I’m reminded of listening to Dan Carlin talk about the history of the Syrian empire and how when they conquered a new people, like one of the first things they did was take down all the statues of their gods and basically take them back to their their own city and put them in subservience to their overarching God. There’s a there’s a symbolic power to this act. And I think the idea of of capitalism as a god is actually a really profound one. But let’s let’s dig into that a little bit more as we go through. So to finish the thought that I was on is basically. Atheism as a sort of cultural trend was gobbled from within by social justice and the people who were supporting this kind of militant atheism ended up almost en masse going over. And really kind of particular figure you can look at is PZ Myers. PZ Myers spent all of his time arguing against creationists up until, I think, 2011, 2012. And then all of a sudden it switches over. And now it’s about the racists and the misogynists and the the homophobes and the transphobes. Right. And all of his writing is now there. And and so I share the sense that. That religion keeps popping up. Right. Like I remember I was I was involved in CrossFit in the early days of CrossFit. And there was the sense all of a sudden that like CrossFit is a cult. Right. Like it’s many things. Right. And it can be a great form of exercise. I’m not I’m not sort of smashing down on all the all the crossfitters. But but like people start treating it as their place to have an experience of the sacred. Right. And I remember identify with it. Yeah. Like they make it their part of their. A large part of their identity. And you can see it when you see someone does CrossFit. You can usually recognize them pretty fast. Not so much anymore. But when it was like at its high point, you could just like, oh, yeah, that guy. Yeah. I mean, you know, the joke was like, you know, how do you know someone’s a CrossFitter? Like, don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Right. The joke also works with vegans. Right. And yeah, that’s the other job. The other experience that I had of like. Of like, OK, wait, like religions popping up all over. Because I remember sitting down with this guy and talking about veganism. And he was trying to sort of like he he was a new zealot of veganism and he was moving through the parkour community in in in England. And and he he’s like, OK, I’m I’m a sustainability vegan. Right. I choose veganism because it’s better for the planet. And I was like, well, here’s why that’s not probably the case. Right. And then he’s like, well, I’m I’m a health vegan. And I was like, here’s why that’s probably not the healthiest for you. And then he was like, well, I’m an ethical vegan. They laid out I laid out why why it’s possible. And maybe I’m wrong. Like, I’m not claiming I’m wrong, but I made an argument why why, you know, there are more animals that are destroyed through farming, you know, for soybean and corn than would otherwise be. And you have to utilize more land if you’re not utilizing mixed farming system. And. You just hit a wall. And then it was like, well, I’m just a vegan because right. Yeah. And I was like, oh, there’s there’s no rational argument that will convince you out of this, because this is your sacred value. This is what you you worship. Right. Yeah. But the ethical vegan is the greatest vegan because the ethical vegan is reinstating the human sacred without even realizing is saying that we do not participate. We are above natural processes and we kind of stand above them. And then we look at them from above, kind of like from this this high mountain. And then we we choose not to participate in the in the violence, because obviously animals eat each other like animals. You know, the the fate of an animal in the in the wild is is is pretty bleak, like in terms of how it’s going to end its life. And so the idea that the idea that someone would think that it’s ethical to not kill animals means that they stand above like angels above the world. And they kind of look at it from a spiritual place. So it’s just interesting because veganism exists in religious traditions. But it’s specifically like monks are are not vegan, but they’re definitely vegetarian in the Christian tradition. And I think in Buddhism and in many other, you know, and the the Janes are like they’re basically he should have just said, I’m a Jane. Like, that’s what he said. Like, I’m really what I really am is a is a kind of religious person. But anyways, all right. Keep going. Sorry. Yeah. So. This one’s a touchy one, but you already mentioned wokeism, but I mean, I like it was really striking to see this come up after George Floyd, right? And the washing of the feet and the like I was walking through Seattle and I saw this altar that someone had created in their front yard with like Martin Luther King’s name and George Floyd’s. His name and Tawana Bradley and and and Trayvon Martin. And all of these all of these slogans and all of this artwork. Right. Like like like pieces of glass and mirrors and feathers. And like I said, I actually sent a picture of it to John and said, like, this is an altar, right? Like, is there any other way to interpret this? But as an altar. Yeah, it’s an altar. It’s clearly an altar. And so it was like, I had the sense that, you know, I described this to. So I’ll tell you a little story. A friend of mine who’s a who’s a gay black man, he, you know, after the George Floyd protests, you know, he had all of these people calling him and asking him about, you know, is he OK? Is he OK? Is he OK? Right. And he’s like, this has been my experience of America. Like I’ve I’ve had this expectation of the police. The whole time, right? Like nothing’s changed for me, but all of a sudden, this one thing happens and everyone’s concerned about me. And then. And then he had this sense that, like, well, he felt at first, like all these people loved him and were his friends. And then he had this disillusionment where his sense was, actually, they were just calling him to basically be shriven of their sins. Hmm. Right. And I told him that I think that basically, this movement, the BLM movement is a kind of it’s a it’s a kind of reflection of Christianity, where the suffering of Christ on the cross has been replaced by the suffering of the African-American. Right. And and and the thing about that that’s really terrifying to me is that African-Americans are actually then forced into a priestly class, right, where their role is instrumental for white Americans to be able to release their self-doubt. That’s what it is. That’s exactly what it is. And it’s and it’s different from Christianity because Christianity has a universal form where there there is an absolution. And also the priest himself, like if you watch, if you listen, if you look at a Christian liturgy, there’s a moment in the liturgy where the priest will turn to the people and will say, forgive me, brothers and sisters. And there’s an understanding that the priest is not going to be able to do that. And that’s what it is. And so there’s a moment in the liturgy where the priest will say, forgive me, brothers and sisters. And there’s an understanding that this is not one just a one way thing where we all participate in this in this desire to forgive each other and to kind of cover each other’s sins so that we can come together and be one. That’s the point. The point of like the point of asking forgiveness for your sins is to then be in communion with people. It’s not just a moral finger wagging or some kind of getting rid of a person who doesn’t. Then, like you said, it becomes a very, very dangerous situation where you have one group of people that has ultimate authority and then another group of people that just need to get that, get their forgiveness from those. And that’s it. And so and it doesn’t even seem to be a way to fully be absolved in that movement, like a perpetual guilt. Yeah, there’s no redemption, right? No. It’s a dark enlightenment, right? And there’s another great book that I like called Oh, professing, professing feminism or no? I’m sorry, I forgot it’s by Daphne Court, G and Daphne Patel and Court G. But they basically talk about the rise of gender critical theory in women’s studies. And they talk about it as like there’s eventually this this realization that that the young women mostly who are entering this are having a conversion experience like a Christian conversion experience, except there’s no hope. Right. What they’re being told is that patriarchy is is in every every ounce of every moment of everything that is done and that it’s always going to be there. And it means that everything is everything is essentially dependent on the creation of their suffering. Yeah. And that’s that’s actually extraordinarily psychologically destructive way to view the world. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why you see like the image of the critical this this kind of radical feminist is a sad one, like in just in terms of, you know, how they they how they present themselves, like their mimicry, their faces, you can feel like this deep anger and despair, which rules over them, you know, like they just live in a world of anger and despair. Yeah. So. So if if so, what should we do? Yeah. Well, so so if we if we identify that that religion is popping up everywhere, right? What is what is the symbolic world? Why why is it necessary to understand at this point in order to to move forward through the breakdown? Well, so the idea what. So when we look at this, what we see is something which is is a kind of disease version of religion or a kind of completely whack whack version of religion. But what we could help us understand is that it’s manifesting something which is inherent to the human person and cannot be gotten rid of. That is, the desire to participate in in common purposes those. That’s what being a human is. And in order for that to happen, like in order for us to be able to participate together, to recognize each other as being part of a group, there has to be a totem which appears above it. There has to be something which is beyond the group, which will bind it together. You know, and so I often use the image of a of a of a sports team like a sports team is a religious venture. Yeah. You know, and everything about it is is is is religious. And there are certain sacred things you have to be careful. Even it becomes superstitious. Like, you know, so many sports people are engaged in actions which for a rational materialist would be considered superstitious. But it’s really just all these token behaviors which are there to manifest the unity of the group. And there’s a sense in which the unity even of the fans, for example, will participate in the winning of the team. And this is true. Like, it’s true. It will actually work, which is why teams live in the same way. Why teams lose? You know, we’ll lose at in another city, but we’ll win on in their own city because the coherence of the fans and their participation will participate in the winning of the team. And so all of it is really this kind of coming together. But I mostly want to point to is that this is actually completely inevitable. We this is what makes us human. And so now that we realize this, we have to be able to deal with it appropriately. So if we pretend if we try to ignore or suppress this reality of either will be doing it without realizing it, will participate in it unconsciously, or it’ll actually come back almost like like Hydra. It’ll come back in a very dark, dark and dangerous way because these desires, they also they also have a very dangerous and dark undertone if we’re not careful, you know, because this desire to join together, it means you exclude necessarily. That’s what it is. And so inclusion and exclusion is a is a dangerous. It’s a dangerous thing, and it can lead to violence and war and all of this. And so if we need to. So the idea is this is inevitable. And the kind of the weird, like the weird globalist desire to to create this like one world thing or whatever to avoid it is not going to avoid it. It’s going to fragment at lower levels. That’s what the story of Babel is. The story of Babel is this desire to to say, oh, like if we just create one thing, if we just like have one massive group and then we’re all in the group, then it’ll then it’ll work. But that’s not how it works. You don’t have intermediary groups. If it doesn’t manifest itself fractally is what I tried to talk about is like you need you need layers of unity. So it’s like you, your family, your city, your group, and then your religious unity. And, you know, you have all these layers of unity. If you try to remove those so that we’re all in just one thing, we’re going to we’re going to rip each other apart. We’re going to rip each other’s eyes out at some point. We’re going to start to fear the your neighbor. You’re going to start to to create weird groups of unity. And then there’s going to be a civil, basically civil war. What’s going to happen? It’s sort of happening. Right. I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s why I can say it without flinching, because it’s already happening and it can get a lot worse. It gets we’re not even it’s not even started. It’s it’s going to get worse. Yeah, there’s a, you know, there’s I think there’s a survey data that shows that like, you know, the sense of how good race relationships in this country are is is is going down very fast. And and then obviously the polarization between left and right has reached a level that’s that’s really absurd. And and it’s interesting because let’s say when people talk like, let’s say you think of the Civil War, the U.S. Civil War, or you think of other civil wars in history. Usually what it is, it’s like there are competing groups within a unity. Right. So there are two tribes that are that are together in two families, two big families that are together in one one unity. And then the tension between these two tribes, you know, becomes so strong that the unity can’t hold anymore. And then one has to defeat the other or they have to split or they have to do something like that. But now it’s it’s all across the system. So it’s not like the north and the south. Yeah. Right. It’s it’s everywhere. And it’s it’s your neighbor. And it’s in the cities and it’s in the it’s in the it’s the cities versus the the outside. It’s the it’s the it’s it’s not even even just parts of the country. It’s like within the country. It’s happening at every level. It’s happening at every level. So that kind of civil war is is my goodness. You have no idea what could come. We’ve got. White versus people of color, we’ve got Asian versus black, we’ve got, you know, the whole thing that’s going on with the Jews right now is really scary. And and then you have rural urban, you have low income, high income, you’ve got men versus women, you’ve got unmarried women versus married women. Totally different perception of things right now. So there’s lots of there’s lots of fragmentation. There’s a one thing that’s ironic and I just wanted to bring this up quickly. Another essay by Slate Star Codex worth worth reading is called I can tolerate everything but the out group. And it’s about this idea that that the the seculization of tolerance is actually allowing a sense of intolerance of anyone who doesn’t hold that value as most sacred that is paradoxically extremely intolerant. Yeah, I mean, it’s it’s it’s so funny when you encounter it. It’s like you just want to laugh it just so you don’t cry. Like I remember meeting a really kind of woke person at an event where I was talking about Jordan Peterson and he came to me and he was he was kind because we were talking about Jack Dayda and the idea of hospitality of like radical hospitality, which did not talk about this, like absolute openness. And I was trying to argue with him how impossible that is. But he was saying, like, this is the way we need to go. Then he then he said this little thing, he says, well, obviously, we’re not going to be radically hospitable to fascists. But then he keeps going. I’m like, OK, which has happened? Great. Which has happened? Yes, everyone. But the the person that I’ve decided is Miami. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is where Christianity is brilliant. Well, that’s the idea. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s like it’s it turns gets turned inwards and then it becomes about self-sacrifice. That becomes the mode of of let’s say the mode of of and the person that was killed and brought out of the city is is God himself. And then that plays itself in your own self where it’s like, OK, I need to I need to sacrifice myself instead of sacrificing the neighbor or the other. Yeah. The scapegoat. That’s right. The self. So I want to go back to the religion as a team sport idea or team sport as a religion idea, because another another resource that I really am getting a lot from is a book called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Hyte. Have you have you read that? Yeah. Well, I haven’t read the whole thing, but I have. I’ve read parts and listened to many of his lectures. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, it’s really rather interesting. I mean, it’s really resonant with what we’re talking about because, you know, he has a chapter in there. I mean, basically, it’s about understanding the out group. Right. And it’s about understanding what what the telos of different groups actually is. Like one of the things I told you before the call that I wanted to have this call with you really in particular once I heard you with rationality rules and and I’m friendly because I felt like I was able to operate the conceptual framework that they were playing in. But I was more open to the conceptual framework that you’re playing in and I want to be able to produce that bridge. Right. But I think from a rational materialist mindset like this chat, the chapter, you’re right. It’s called religion as a team sport really helps understand because he’s essentially saying that biologically and culturally, we’ve evolved, we’ve evolved this capacity to act in groups. And the research shows that that having a religious system improves that. And religions are probably selected over time for their ability to help people act in groups. Right. And there’s always the thing about a group is that it has an out group. And this is part of your, you know, I think what you talk about a lot, which is really brilliant, is in order to define a group, you have to have an out group. And the default human tendency towards the treatment of the group is complete alienation. This is something I think it would be really useful for people to read the anthropological literature a lot more closely and not with a sort of noble savage gloss on it. Because I feel like sometimes people will read an anthropological thing and they’ll be like, oh man, their lives are so amazing. I’m like, I read the same book as you. And I don’t know if you read the part where the man just kills a child for no reason or the woman is beaten by multiple husbands because that’s part of this tribe that you’ve just told me is like the perfect example of egalitarianism. But one of the things that you find is that very often in tribal cultures the name for people outside the tribe is just not people. Yeah, they’re not human. They’re not human and they don’t have any, there’s no sense of moral obligation to them. Yeah. And I think… Yeah, which is why the type of torture that they can inflict on someone which is from outside the group is like, no, there’s no limits. You saw that in native culture here in Canada where it’s like if they caught someone from the other tribe they could do anything to them. Yeah, absolutely. And it wasn’t like, it actually wasn’t, it was interesting because it wasn’t a racial thing. It was a ritual reality. And so they could ultimately adopt someone from another tribe. And once they were adopted, then they were like, oh, then they’re in the in-group. But unless that happened, then they were inhuman and they were just basically something to be acted upon. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s definitely a truce to the idea that the way that we perceive race or the way that race was perceived say in the late 19th century, early 20th century has this massive social construction and it’s using this underlying group competition psychology and it’s mapping it to certain physiological differences in order to, you know, for a variety of reasons, right, historically. But it’s not a default setting to automatically treat those physical characteristics as the most important aspect of someone’s identity. Yeah. Yeah, and also, I mean, the racism itself is a modern concept. It is a scientific, it’s a scientific take on the ancient perception of difference, but now we’ve made it into these scientific defendable categories. So scientific racism is most… The Nazis were more like scientific racists than they were like the ancient people and how they understood difference or understood stranger and that kind of stuff. Yeah. So I wanted to get into your idea of the cosmological frame. Like, I think the conversation we’ve had so far… Maybe I can just… into what you’re talking about, about Jonathan Haidt and let’s say the difference between what Jonathan Haidt is saying and let’s say a proper religious understanding is that Jonathan Haidt perceives that there are these axes, you know, that people will elevate something, a virtue or someone or something and then they will process around that reality, right? They’ll circumambulate around a common point and then that will create cohesion in the group. But Jonathan Haidt seems to treat that as almost like arbitrary, as if like whatever it is you decide is going to be up there, then that’s going to be the thing that’s going to join together and it’s going to play out. But this is in terms of a religious understanding. You could understand that it is perceiving this which led to something like what we call the monotheistic religions, which is actually that if you follow… Like, I was actually just reading… I was reading Phaedrus recently, Plato’s Phaedrus and in it Socrates talks about how the followers of certain gods will seduce their lover in a way that resembles the god. And so it’s like if you follow Zeus, then the way you will approach your lover will be like Zeus. If you follow this god, then you will kind of approach your lover in that way. Your Dionysus, you’re going to use wine. Exactly. Zeus, aggression. If you’re Pan, let’s go to the woods. So they were different. But it’s mostly the idea to understand that like whatever it is that you follow, you subject yourself to that. So like you said when we talked about the idea of Crossfitters, it’s like people who follow Crossfit or worship Crossfit, they become Crossfitters. It’s not arbitrary. They actually embody the thing that they’re worshiping. So they become the body of the thing they’re worshiping. And so this is the movement, let’s say, towards monotheism, which is that, okay, we realize that there are aspects of reality that are fragmented. And if we worship those as the highest thing, then we embody something, but it ends up being in conflict with something else because it’s a fragmented aspect of reality, which is why like so the Greek cities would just fight all the time. And even though they went to the Olympics or whatever, they would fight every year. There would always be wars between the Greek cities because they were subject to different principalities. And those principalities didn’t necessarily elevate above. There was like a competition between them. Whereas the idea of like a monotheistic thing is like, how do all these things come together higher up? Can we have something which unites them in a higher way? And then you have the kind of neoplatonic idea being itself and then love, right? Because love is the manner in which multiplicity exists as one. So you can have both multiple and one. And so then you kind of you keep going. And then you have this idea like, let’s say, in Christianity, the revelation of the Trinity, which is the notion that there’s a thing that’s both infinitely multiple and infinitely one at the same time. It seems like a total contradiction, but you realize actually, no, if we worship that, then we can both have multiple and one. Because if you’re too much in unity, you have a problem, which is that difference starts to get sucked into the unity. People become like carbon copies of each other, like in communist countries. But if you just worship multiplicity, then all of a sudden things start to break down like we’re seeing now. And then fault lines start to appear. People start to fight amongst each other. So what’s the highest thing we can worship? It’s something which is both at the same time. I want to try to ground this in a biology, right? Like my frame often is going to go back to evolutionary biology. But I think like when you talk about multiplicity and unity, that’s the right words, right? Yeah. Like that ends up having a very sort of mythological frame sounding to it. And I think it’s hard for a rational materialist to grasp it. Like I literally feel like I didn’t get what you were actually saying until last night. OK. And then I was like, oh, this is exactly what Vervecky is saying. Right? Vervecky describes that as the process of diversification and integration. Yes. So every process that complexifies has to both diversify functions while uniting them under some overarching tailors, right? Yeah. Simultaneously. Like it has to be constantly happening at the same time. Yeah. And this is what what Hite talks about in The Righteous Mind is the idea that that cooperation always suffers a a free rider problem, right? But we’ve we’ve actually been able to move up through these levels of cooperation, right? The single cells. First, you have like mitochondria that go into cells, right? And they are there are two different things. And then all of a sudden they learn to cooperate and not default off of each other. And then single cells become multiple cells and then those become organs. And so like that’s that’s your developmental process. You started as a single cell. And then then what can happen? There’s two things that can happen. One, one sort of cell can just start start replicating itself and trying to turn everything into itself. That’s cancer and you die. The other thing that can happen is your your systems can go to war with each other. That’s autoimmune disease. Now it can also kill you. Yeah. And so we have these these two directions that you’re talking about the direction of of of of sort of collapse into a single thing, which destroys the overarching thing, which is what they tried to do in the matrix with Agent Smith. Like that’s what Agent Smith was supposed to be. He’s supposed to be like this, this like the tyranny of a specific thing that tries to to make everything into itself. Yeah. Cancer, basically cancer. Yes. It takes everything over. So so I think it’s really helpful to be able to look at that from these two different frames. Right now, I think that part of what makes your world view, you your world view and not say Jordan Peterson, like I think a lot of people just map the way that you think about it. Yeah. Like that was something that came up in those two conversations. It was like, wait, you’re actually a religious person who believes in God. Yeah. Yeah. I’m not Jordan Peterson. That’s for sure. Is is that you think that there’s a reason why framing it as in that mythological realm rather than in the biological analogy actually works better. But it’s not just that. It’s it’s that. You can one of the difficulties people seem to what you can see it top down and bottom up. You’re seeing it top bottom bottom up, let’s say. And that’s fine with me. Like I’m fine with bottom up. But the thing is that you have to keep going. That’s the that’s the point is like, can you keep going? That is, is there a way to start bottom up from like, let’s say quantum possibility, field of possibility, and then move all the way to the bottom up? That is, how all this multiplicity joins together towards unity, but then it also continues in the human person, but it continues across human persons. That’s what a city is. The city is the same as a cell. It’s a transpersonal being that that is is is engaging in those rules of complexity that you mentioned constantly. It’s a transpersonal being that is is engaging in those rules constantly diversifying, constantly unifying. And it’s a it’s a it’s a messy process. It’s not always totally clean, but it’s happening or else cities wouldn’t exist and then countries, etc, etc. And so the idea is that there there has to be a way for it to continue to scale up. And then if you scale that up, it’s a limit. That’s what you get to you. And you inevitably get to something like love or infinite love or or the divine Trinity. That’s what you will get to, because one of the problems that I see is that people see it in biologically, but then they stop at some level, some reasons like keep going, man. It keeps going like keep going up. And at some point it also becomes true in the world of intelligence. So it’s like it’s not it doesn’t it’s not only biological. You’ll notice that ideas also have that same pattern or ideas have have places where they unify and places where they they complexify. So if you think just any any concept or any any let’s say abstract notion will also have that in it. It’ll have it’ll have an aspect of complexification and unification, then you can keep going in that world. Sure. So like just to throw an example for people, right, you could look at parkour and you could you could divide it into a series of of sub disciplines, the different people practice. So there’s like rail flow and there’s bar swinging and then there’s like all the tree jumping in the wood. And you can see those things as essentially separate and they could they could even like separate like someone might decide they’re just going to go be a rail flow guy and they’re not going to mess with the rest of parkour. And then you can be like, well, OK, well, parkour is a movement art. And now you see that it’s unified with other movement arts. Right. So now you see that it’s in some overlapping category that contains also martial arts and dance. Yeah. Yeah. Like all these kind of movement arts and then it moves like you said, it moves into something which is even higher. And then you could then that could keep going like it could keep going up if you were if you were capable of perceiving how everything moves into being, let’s say. So you were that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah. Yeah. So. So I had this. So growing up in the community that I did, I the word spirituality makes the hairs on the back of my neck. Right. Like. When someone says spirituality, I feel like they’re about to try to sell me bullshit. Yeah. Right. Like they’re going to understand. No, I see what you mean. They’re going to tell me like spirituality to me is like, spirituality to me is telling me that it’s really important to I’ll give you a really precise example. When I was growing up, there was a certain people within my community who would say you create your own reality. Yeah. There was this idea that that like and those people would then turn around and do heinous shit. Yeah. Say that the reason that you felt their shit was heinous was because you were creating your own reality. Yeah, it’s horrible. Right. That that that just drove me crazy. Right. And so I’ve always like at a certain point, the stuff that I was teaching started being like, well, Parkour has some kind of profound transformational impact on you. Well, how do I understand that? How do I help people get that? How do we get more of that? And someone’s like, well, you’re a spiritual teacher. It’s like, well, no, because those fuckers are are are are full of shit. Yeah. And I’m trying not to be. Yeah. And but then I had this I was reading two books. One is a book called The Spell of the Sentuous by David Abram. And that’s about phenomenology. It’s very much inspired by Merleau-Ponty. And the other one is a book called What the Robin Knows. And it’s about it’s about bird languages. And I had the sense of exactly what you’re describing, I believe, which is that when you walk through the woods, you hear birds singing and you can tune into a bird or you can turn into the birds and all of the birds together actually contain an intelligence that’s more than the single bird. So if all the birds go quiet, you know there’s a predator in the area. Yeah. Right. And so there’s a neural net and you can you can pay attention to where the quiet is and where the noise is. And you can pay attention to where the alarm calls are. And all of these birds are like they’re little neural nets that are communicating to other neural nets through sound that are that are giving you information about the environment. Yeah. And hundred foragers are extraordinarily attuned to this and they will be like, OK, I know where these animals are because I’m listening to the signals from the forest. And I was like, well, that the easiest way to conceptualize that is that’s the spirit of the bird, the spirit of the birds. And then you could understand that the spirit of the birds is is a subsegment of the spirit of the forest. There’s all this other information between the trees and the other animals and all of that kind of rises up to something above that. Yeah. And I believe that that’s what you are referring to when you talk to something about something like powers and principalities. And then we could we can understand Facebook and Google and social media as as all of these things. Right. Yeah. Especially now, it seems like we’re building something like we’re building some kind of of a body of a god. That’s for sure. It seems pretty obvious by now. So interesting. We’re building we’re building new gods. Right. It’s really hard. But this is not new. This is what pagans did all the time. Like this is what they that’s what making they would make statues of a god and then they would they would open its nostrils so that it could become the center of a community. And then people would embody the gods. Like they would they would become worshippers. And like I told you about in the house, Socrates describes the followers of certain gods as embodying. But the statue would be like the would be like the place where our attention would go. Like all our attention kind of move towards that that embodiment. And and that’s would be part of the how we would how we would manifest the god. And so it’s like the Google is is definitely acting that way. And what’s interesting about Google and Facebook to what’s interesting about them is that they they’re pretend they’re they’re all there are there’s like a priestly cast that’s whispering. There’s like a priestly class whispering the will of God. And we and we can’t they don’t want to know that it’s there, but it’s there. And so it’s like the Google searches are obviously tainted towards whatever that priestly cast wants us to to believe. So all the actually all the really negative stuff about about religion that people caricature like this. This idea of this like crazy cast that wants to control everybody. Like this is what’s happening right now. If you want to know like this is that and and they don’t have they don’t have something above them which is supposed to be their judge. If there’s nothing above them, which is there isn’t a tradition or something before them or above them, which is telling them like so like let’s say a priest abuses his power. He can do it in the Catholic Church, let’s say. But everybody knows that he’s wrong. Even if he can do it, it’s going to happen all the time. But everybody recognizes that it’s wrong. Whereas now there is no there is no ultimate there is nothing above to kind of judge. Well, there is, I believe. But like at least in their perception, like they’re the arbiters of reality, really. So that’s scary stuff. And we you know, we could say that there’s a telos to social media. Oh, yeah. There’s a there’s a there’s a goal which it is serving. And at a first approximation, maybe that is is capturing of attention. But that yeah, that’s but that’s it’s also understanding how reality works. It’s really in a way, we’re in a good place because what because social media and and Google is showing us that the world is in many ways function through attention, that it’s actually made of attention. And now once you realize that the world is made of attention to a certain extent, then again, it’s a very, very And then again, ancient religious rituals will become less arbitrary to you. The idea that to attend to something which is beyond you, to do it together, right, to stand together and then to attend to something which is beyond you is actually has actually has a causative function, like a causative role. It actually causes unity in that group. It’s a different kind of causality. It’s hard because materialists understand that there are causalities of like billiard balls hitting each other. But there’s a type of causality, which is a causality of of unity. Right. This is the formal cause that that that Aristotle talked about. Like there’s a something which brings you together. Yeah. So in my context, I think it’s a very, very important point So in my conversations with with Verbeke and Manna Clay, we’ve talked about your perspective and in particular talked about your perspective also in relationship with with David Abrams perspective. And the place where I get hung up is I find what you have to say extremely insightful. Right. But there’s a point at which you assert that a pattern of being exists. Right. This is just the pattern. The pattern is heaven and earth. The pattern is there’s the unstructured potential outside of heaven and earth. Masculine is this feminine is associated with this. And that’s annoying. Huh? That’s annoying. And my question is always. How do you what’s the epistemology that allows you to assert that? Right. Like I think that in your conversation with with with Steven Winford, you you basically I think make it I wish I could replay what you said exactly. But you made a case that essentially that he has no way of establishing the good that his frame doesn’t allow him to establish the good and that he’s not fully conscious of that. Right. That I think was a key part of your argument. So it’s like you’re telling me that my thing doesn’t doesn’t serve the good, but you don’t you don’t know how to describe your own good. And like based on on on Heights book, I would say that harm reduction is actually the good that he’s talking about. Right. It’s the closest to to the God that he’s worshiping, but he couldn’t actually tell you that. But I would say that reciprocally, I still don’t understand how you establish the true. Sorry, you broke down. Could you repeat that? I said, reciprocally, I would say I don’t know how you establish the true. Like I sort of like you asked him, where do you stand? Right. And I would say that I don’t have the same certainty about where I stand that you do. Like, I feel like I stand within scientific epistemology as a rational materialist and that I recognize that that frame, that set of axioms doesn’t give me everything that I need. And I suspect based on what that frame tells me that a lot of what I’m relying on is actually Christian, that it’s this ghost of Christianity or the bones of Christianity that I’m standing on. Yeah, I don’t know that I can that I can say that with 100% clarity. Right. I don’t know. I think that’s a quite difficult question to answer really well. But that’s where I would say that I’m standing. But I would say that I believe that we have a good way of asserting a truth claim within scientific epistemology and that we have to be able to understand and utilize that system because it’s what allows this technology that we’re speaking on to work. And if we if we allow. If we allow sort of participatory, mystical, phenomenological thing to colonize all the way down into the propositional level, that runs a risk of collapsing it. And it’s already happening. Right. Science is already like all of these all of these little religions that are popping up. They’re trying to colonize and crush science. Yeah. Social justice does not want science to operate as science. It wants it to operate fully in service. It’s like sync with. Right. So. But then you’ll realize that science, at least the kind of the image of science that people think has never really manifested, right, that it has always been serving goals like other goals and what social and what the social justice people want is only that science serves their goals. And and and by doing that, it appears to us like a clash because we’re like not in the same world. And so it’s like it’s a different world. And they’re saying we want these technical, physical descriptions to serve our our goals, let’s say. But that, I think, has pretty much always been the case. Like, it’s always kind of been there. So I’ve made the argument to Verbeke that. That I think that if we’re going to kind of survive the Western that if Western civilization and what it’s given rise to, the world system that it’s given rise to is going to survive. Probably the best thing that we can do is in some sense, recover Christianity, because it’s the only religious system that has a history of allowing science to fully develop within its under its ease. Right. And his counter argument is that the Islamic Golden Age. And, you know, I don’t think I have an answer to that. But. But but I do think there’s something there. And I think, you know, there’s a claim that that science is sort of necessarily nested within a religious frame. Yeah, that’s definitely what I what I what I believe. But maybe I can maybe I can. How can I say this? So maybe I can help you with the problem of when I say heaven and earth and all these things. Yeah. The first thing that the first thing that we need to notice is that the terms that are used when I talk about it are always analogical. They’re always. And so you can even hear it often in my voice. Well, say I say I could say something like and then I’ll say something because the pattern is a is a pure intuition. And and I don’t know what to say besides that. And that’s going to be annoying for a lot of kind of materialist. But there is a sense and it’s a something to universal sense. It’s not just in Christianity. It’s an almost in every religious system that humans have a capacity to intuit the the reality, to intuit the real pattern. And that intuition is not reason. It reason flows from that intuition. And so so it’s it’s a direct grasping of of the of the pattern. But then you can’t you can’t when you when you bring it back down into the world of manifestation, you have to translate that or you have to you have to embody it, you have to give it form. And then you can talk about different patterns. And the only way to help people see or to intuit the the actual pattern is to I mean, there are different ways. Like Zen Collins or like the different ways to kind of provoke that in people. The way that I try to do it is to give you a bunch of analogies that you don’t think that you don’t think fit together. But all these examples of things you don’t think actually have something in common. And then all of a sudden you see that they have something in common and it gives you a little glimpse and it appears to you like an insight, like a spark. You have this like scent that it’s coming together. And often you can’t hold on to that. It’ll it’ll kind of get it. And then it’ll go away. But that but that insight is described in every single religious system that ever existed. It’s like this kind of this glimpse of reality. And then then this kind of fade away. And so it’s going to be annoying what I’m going to say. But it’s like, that’s what my truth claim is grounded in. I don’t know what to tell you. Your truth claim is grounded in a in a personal intuition. It’s grounded in an intuition which then becomes verified. As you can see, the intuition embodied in different levels of reality. But so that’s how you that’s how you verify. Right. So you you so you have the intuition and then you have to then you have to see if it finds a body. So if it works at the personal level, at this at the civilizational level, at the family level, if if it works in stories, if you find it in stories, you can find it in ritual. If you find if you’re able to see how this intuition embodies itself, then you’re close, like you’re closer to a real pattern than if it’s just this weird, like freak thing that you that you kind of you get. People can have intuitions, but often they don’t they’re not right. Like they don’t actually verify when you try to embody them. And so so there is a there’s almost like there is a kind of scientific. It’s close to actually how science work, because people don’t realize that scientists often don’t find things by digging in the dirt. They have intuitions. Yes, absolutely. And then they verify whether or not by digging in the dirt it’ll it’ll pan out. And that’s exactly the way that I that I work. It’s like I have an intuition and then I try to verify it at different levels. So but it’s a little different than it’s a little different than the scientific way, but it’s nonetheless trying to find the pattern embodied, let’s say. Yeah. So. I heard two things there. One was kind of an appeal to pragmatism. Right. Sorry, you have to repeat that. Keep breaking down. You said you heard two things. Yeah, one is an appeal to pragmatism. Right. And basically, this very it really sounds a lot like Peterson’s argument. And there’s two aspects to Peterson’s argument. One is is is you kind of know that a pattern is true when it works for you and it works well enough. But the the corollary to that claim would be that he would say that that we only ever get there. We only ever get to true enough. We never have the full truth. And then the second claim is basically like in Maps of Meaning, Peterson, you know, basically makes a claim that that his his his cosmological view that he’s putting forth there. Is verified through multifactor, you know, multi-method verification, right? That’s that’s the term. That’s the scientific term for it. So he’s he’s saying, OK, if this pattern shows up in the neurobiology and in the cognitive science and in the anthropology and in the evolutionary biology, then then I’m going to take that as as true. Right. In the same sense that, you know, if I see something and it’s surprising to me, if I can then smell it and hear it and touch it, then I’ll accept that it’s real in a way that that my eyes alone won’t tell me that something’s real. Yeah. So those are the two things that I that that I hear as sort of your system starts with intuition and then moves into into multifactor, multi-method, and then is grounded, grounds out in pragmatism. It’s something like that. The difference maybe between me, Jordan and I, is that I grounded above and he seems to grounded below. It’s like I think that so. So it’s like, what is it that the word of Christ who says, Blessed are those who did not see and and and believe like that is that if you have the pure intuition, that’s where reality lays, not in the embodied pragmatism, pragmatic thing, because the embodied pragmatic thing is messy and it’s kind of it’s it has variability and it’s sometimes it’s a little off. But then the pattern is pure, like it has it’s it’s almost mathematical. And so you need both. And I agree. And you totally need both. But I ground. I let’s say you could say something like you just it is going to be annoying to the secular to the secular people. But I think I ground my life in in my faith in Christ rather than in the multiplicity and in the in the like the variability of existence. And so it’s it’s it’s so that maybe that’s the difference between Jordan and I. So I think solidity comes from above doesn’t come from below. I. I’d like to dig into that. I mean, I’m I that one I struggle with, right? I understand that you struggle with. I because. So to go back to the beginning of the conversation, we’re talking about how sort of modernity. Reaches a point, it’s like you you break all the molecules down into atoms and then you break the atoms down into subatomic particles, and then you reach this point at which it’s just uncertainty. Yeah. And that’s not what you expected at all. Yeah. Aristotle’s potential is waiting for you. Yeah. So you end up you you expect clockwork at the bottom of reality and you end up with quantum fields. And then and then you spend the last like 60 years basically unable to get anything that creates new technological opportunities out of trying to figure out what’s at the bottom of reality. And, you know, I don’t understand quantum physics. I don’t think anyone understands quantum physics. So if I butchered it and what I say makes no sense because of it, you know, forgive me. But but so we so we end up there. Right. And essentially so much of science is is powered by reductionism. And then there’s a point at which that doesn’t work anymore. And now we have complexity. Right. We have combinatorial explosion. We have complexity, science, systems thinking. And all of this gives us a way to understand emergence. Right. So we know that things emerge, right. That that, you know, the way I understand it, we notice it. I don’t think people understand it. OK. David Bentley Hart had a great term. He said he said he said rationalist use the word emergence like you would use the word magic. It’s like your magic happens. They just found another word for it. So so a lot of people people talk about complexity. That’s exactly what it sounds like to me. And what really helped me was understanding that you can understand a dynamical system as a system with two cost functions. Right. And that when you put these two cost functions in opposition to each other across an equation that they generate a random walk. Right. So the classic one, the one that that’s, you know, really important all of science is evolution. Right. You have mutation and sexual reproduction, which produces variation. And then you have selection, which selects from among that. And then all these crazy things emerge from it. Right. So. So I get that right. That makes sense to me. And I feel like I have really, really epistemologically sound ways of getting there. Right. So. But then, like when I listen to you or JP Marceau or someone else, you talk about this idea of emanation. Right. So I want to I want to look at an example. Right. One of the things that that the problem is going to be easier to see emanation at a human scale because it’s it has to do with intelligence. It’s going to be harder to see it at a biological, like low level. It’s there, but it’s harder to see. It’s easier to see at a human level. Like if you deal with human. OK, so let’s say I, I, I found a city. I talked about this on my channel recently. It’s like I’m Constantine and I’m the king. I’m the emperor. And then I found a city. And so I come and I do a sacred ritual. I will take a lance and I will like walk behind an angel to like mark the limit of the city. And and and so so I actually give it a name. I found it. I give it a name. And then it from that will a city will will appear. Like people will start to congregate around that center and will start to to to to do the things people in cities do around that sacred gesture that I did. Like so in the in the let’s say there’s there is right nearby where I live, there’s a town that the first thing in the town that was built was a church. And so they built a church, which is a common place, a place of unity where everybody congregates and worships the same thing. And then, you know, a few decades later, there was an entire town built around the church. So that’s a form you could say, like, that’s a form of understanding causality from above, which is you found you name, you, you know, you create a coherence. And then the world kind of comes in and manifests, manifests from from, so founding a company, founding anything that is almost human needs to have an aspect of eminence that you can easily perceive for it to for it to exist, like for a group to exist, it has to have a name. It has to have a name. You have to name it. Right. And so it’s like you have a band, you get a bunch of guys together. But it’s like, OK, so if we’re going to exist, we need a name. And so then you name the band and the name of the band. Like if you name the band, the name, a name that sounds like like a pop band or if you name the band, a name that sounds like like a death metal band, because those actually can be recognized in the name. It will affect. So you couldn’t have like a death metal name. And then make pop songs because it’ll be so incoherent that it’s going to break apart. So you need to have you in the name and in the image and in this kind of founding. You need a you need a type of coherence. So that’s a form of that’s a form of a form of eminence. I mean, there are so many, but there are a lot easier to see it for sure. And human in the human sphere. But I mean, can’t you see that that that emination itself is derived from an emergence? It’s a it’s a it’s both happening at the same time. But you can’t only see it as as as emergence. Like you can’t it doesn’t like at least to me, like the founding of especially the idea of like the the idea of the founding of something, because there is a whole idea that we remember the founding. It’s like, why do we remember the founding if it’s just emergence? Like we we we tell ourselves the story of the founding of the United States. We tell ourselves the story of these these sacred moments that are the origin of of of a community because it actually binds the community together. That’s why we remembered it and retell the stories. And so like companies that have like companies that have good founding stories will it’ll actually affect like how how much it how much it last. Like, you know, yeah. So it’s but the thing is that you can’t only see it as a word, as as as top down, it has to be both at the same time. That’s the that’s the bond of love, you could say. Like that’s the communion of love. There’s a great quote by St. Maximus, the confessor that I always like to to quote. But people have heard it a thousand times. But it’s he says that as the as a person, let’s say a mystic kind of raises above phenomena and then starts to see the spiritual essences kind of rise up from the multiplicity. He’ll he notices that there’s no contradiction. If there’s no contradiction between those essences and the way they exist embodied below those, that’s actually that’s actually how it works. So it’s like it’s that’s why reality is often described as the meeting of lovers. Right. As a as a sexual union, which is that you need you need the desire of both. Like you need the man to you need the man to give. I need the woman to be to to to give herself as well in the different way that she does. Like she has to be able to receive what the man is giving. And so that is that that is the union of heaven and earth, which is both eminence and emergence happening at the same time. And that’s how you have a child. That’s how you have the fruit of the, you know, the next another. And that’s how an identity is formed, you could say. Mm hmm. But I understand that it’s harder for you to see. For me, it’s very easy to see. It’s actually a lot easier to think that way than to think the other way. Yeah, I mean, I’m very much grounded in a sort of a rational materialist epistemology. And and I’m. I’m I feel like I’m going to need to watch this part back and mull on it to try to understand it, because. You know, we’re sort of obviously this is this is tapping into the idea of the forms and this this idea that like. I give me let me give you one little more example. Like, this is actually a pretty good example. So so like imagine you have you have something like you have something like punk music, right? So punk music appears, right? And so actually, punk music is just rock music, right? Yeah. So why is it that why is it why is there punk? And so then we name punk. But that keeps going. Right. So you all of a sudden, because there’s always variability. It’s obviously no punk band is the same. But at some point, you name that you name the variability. And so you’re like that emo. But then once you name the variability, it has a causal function. You’re going to have way more emo bands once you’ve named emo than before. For sure. I mean, it was just this variable thing that was kind of. And then people start to perceive that there’s something different. And then they give it a name. And then once they name it, then it takes body and it starts to actually manifest as a as a coherent whole. Yeah. So. The analogy that pops into my mind or the the the example that pops into my mind is, of course, parkour, right? So when I started parkour, I was teaching gymnastics and the guy who there was a guy in my in the gymnastics sort of adult class that I attended who they warned to me was a crazy guy. And he was always doing like weird off, like fringe stuff to gymnastics. He was die rolling over vault boxes and swinging between, you know, uneven bar setups and swinging on the rings and all the stuff that gymnasts don’t do. And and so I discovered parkour and I was like, OK, Dane, that’s his name. Like, you should try this because it seemed like the stuff he was already doing. And he he then like pulls me into doing parkour with him. And then we go out and he takes me to all these places that he’s already been jumping and climbing around the city that he didn’t have a name for. And he had friends who he was doing this with for years. Right. And. The same thing happens. Daniel Bach is one of the most famous parkour athletes. Like he he sees a guy doing a wall flip because he’s a capo rista. And then he starts jumping around and on the roofs in his city because he’s just intuits that somehow wall flips mean you can jump off roofs. And then and then Oleg Vorslav in in in Lithuania does the same thing. And so then like all over the world, as the parkour community sort of scaffold itself up, it finds all these people who are already doing it, but they didn’t have a name for it. Right. So kids have always run, jump and climb. And then some people don’t stop. Right. And stop less than other people. And so it’s like the potential was always there. But then that’s a good way to understand it. It was it was it was in a potential form. Yeah. And then when he received a name, then that name became a causal relationship. That is, now people are people who weren’t doing that before now start doing it because they can they see in that name and in that communion. They notice a being, they see a being that wasn’t there before. That was just a scattered potentiality within gymnastics, within military training, within all these different fields and fit under those fields. Somehow we’re a little strange, maybe. That’s why they kind of appeared as this odd thing. And then they’re rebound in a body with a name. And now here you go. It has a causal causal causal relationship. Yeah. So now you know what emanation but the but the emanation emerges. Right. It’s both at the same time. Right. Right. Like it’s but it’s a reality like it’s a pattern in reality. Parkour. Right. No, of course not. It was. It was all these implicit things happening in this one specific place. And then somehow it got enough momentum from this bubbling potentiality that it catalyzed into something. And then it then it received a name. And once it had a name, then it could spread. Right. So that this is how God creates Adam. So God takes the dust of the earth. Right. And he doesn’t and he gathers it into one place. It becomes a body. That’s the that’s the emanation part. That’s right. That’s the emergent part. Emerging. And then he blows the spirit into Adam, blows the breath into Adam. And then that’s the logos that that would be the you could see it as a logo. So you could see it just as the pattern. Right. That’s what spirit ultimately is the invisible part. It’s the invisible part of that body. The name is not visible and the identity is not visible. And the thing that binds it, basically. And so blows that invisible part into Adam and then Adam exists. And so it’s so what you’re describing is the same like you. You see all these possibilities that are there. And then someone somehow starts to gather them. They start to gather to accumulate. And but they’re still not something. They’re they’re kind of. And then all of a sudden, something comes like someone, something names it from above. And now that being has causal. It can now reproduce itself and gather it more into its body. OK, so. That starts to feel like something interesting to me, right? Because because here’s the problem with the way that science has described things. Or one of the problems that I see is that. Is that it’s hard to represent how a thing that that comes from a model or from reduced pieces becomes agentic or causal. Right. So when we when we run through the scientific story, eventually we run out of human agency or anything having agency. We we and I think this is like. I think someone arguing that free will doesn’t exist is a performative contradiction. Yeah, because by arguing with me that free will doesn’t exist, you are you’re assuming that I have the capacity to change. And that your action can change me or that I can choose to believe or not believe. It’s people who don’t believe that free will exists. They don’t maybe they don’t realize that they’re the most dangerous people in the world. Like they are so dangerous because if you go to the end of their argumentation, it’s a scary thing because you can make people change. And the only agent is some kind of force, whether it’s it’s it’s convincing or control. Whether it’s it’s it’s convincing or contriving. That’s what ends up being like you recognize the good. And now I’m going to because people don’t aren’t free. I’m going to make them follow the good. It’s going to be inevitable. So, OK, so you. Sorry, I take you on a tangent there. Yeah, I maybe we’ll try to that. I don’t know. I wanted to go back to this idea that that that within within our understanding of reality, we have to have something that allows us to grok out something that emerges, then becomes a causal factor in itself. Yeah, that parkour emerges and then emanates. Right. But in this in this sense, emergence precedes emanation. Right. It precedes it as possibility. And then it but then it does not identity is what binds it together. And so you’re right. Like St. Gregor Mises says, basically, he says this, the physical comes first and the spiritual comes after, let’s say. And so it’s like it’s almost like it’s it’s like desire comes first. You could call it that. A question. It’s a question comes first. What is this? Yeah, there’s something which is appearing on my horizon, a puzzle. And I’m like, what is this? And then it gets an answer, a name, an identity. And once it has an identity, then it gets an identity. Then it has causal causal factor. And so, like, you can imagine it like that. Like you have you have a bunch of parkour people that aren’t yet parkour guys who are noticing like you’re noticing these a puzzle. It’s like, what is this? Like, there’s something going on like there. There’s something calling. Like, what is there’s there’s something calling from the ground, right? Like asking to be asking for a master, like asking to be to be contained. And then once it is contained, then it then like you said, it then starts to have causal factor. So you can understand that like a question and an answer. You need both. And the question obviously comes first or else. Why would you speak like, like, why would you speak? And you can see it like. Even like in the way that Christian theology developed, it’s always like that. It’s like that there was always a problem first. Like Christian theology never developed as just straightforward, giving, like teaching, like there’s a problem and now there has to be an answer. And that answer becomes becomes the road or the way. But the problem always happens first, like the question, the puzzle, let’s say. I’m going to back up a second because this just what you described, it hit this so many times. And this is I just really think the first the first stands of the Daode Qing is so profound, right? The way that can be spoken is not the eternal way. The nameless is the mother of all things. The name gives rise to the 10,000 things. I think a lot of people from the West, they pay attention to the first two stanzas in that versus in that stanza, and they forget the name. Yeah. Right. Which is the logos. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think it is. Right. So you so you start with undifferentiated potential or you start with mystery, right? What we can describe, what we can model is always an insufficient description of reality. And then there’s undifferentiated potential. And that’s everything comes out of that. It has to come out of that. And then in order for it to come out of it, though, it has to become named in order for parkour to not just be in order for parkour to grow and spread and become a causal factor in the world. It has to be named. It has to become a defined characteristic of the know. Yeah. So it’s in the Bible. I think Christianity, there’s a sense that the undifferentiated gets separated into two. So you have the waters below and the waters above. Right. And so the waters below act like, let’s say, the undifferentiated in the sense of chaos and potential. Yeah. The waters above act as the undifferentiated in the sense of something which is beyond beyond cause, beyond causality or trans rational and then comes down into the name or into into causality. And so so you can. So it’s important to it’s a little important to distinguish those two because they’re not they don’t function exactly the same. But they say ultimately, infinitely, they end up being the same. But in terms of our experience, they end up being different. And so there’s a there’s a space of intuition from which the names come from. And there is a space of potential or or chaos out of which, like they potential is is brought out of. And so then the name comes down and then comes down from heaven and then manifests itself on the potential. And then you have then you have a B. But that that’s already there, like in the in the in the Dow, you have a sense you do have a sense in which they don’t totally differentiate those two, like at least in that first out that first setting, where it’s like there’s undifferentiated. And then but there has to be. Anyways, I don’t want to go to metaphysics too much. Let’s continue on. This would be too complicated. But but just understand, at least like in Christian metaphysics, you have a sense in which there’s there’s this separation. And then the world kind of exists in this space, which is created by the separating of two different. Let’s say like, yeah, chaos and like supra rational. And then that comes down into the world. So in the Mesopotamian myths, you have to Matt and Napsu, right? Yeah. The water is above and the water is below. Yeah. There’s the same water in the clear water. And then and then in in Genesis, I believe my camera died. I have to move to my other webcam. It says God separates the waters, right? That’s like this one of the first few things he does. Yeah. And then the idea is that the joining of the waters becomes the place of life, like the place of life. And that goes all the way through scripture. It goes all the way even into Jesus talking to this American woman. She’s next to a well, which is the lower waters. And he says, I will give you a fountain that springs into eternity. So he’s saying, I’m going to give you the living water and you’re going to be the lower water. And then that’s how the that’s how the world exists. Like those two joining together. Like I find this kind of mythological frame to be very useful. And I feel like it. I hit the end of rational materialism, I feel like, right? I don’t I don’t I don’t. Perhaps that sounds egotistical, but like when I listen to to Sam Harris, I’m like, I get everything you say. It’s all it’s all coherent within a certain system. But it’s like you have decided not to look at this thing that says that you have to step outside of that. Right. And I think essentially, like once you really think about Godel’s incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, it’s like you’re you’re stuck. It’s like that doesn’t work. And. And yeah, I think Hume’s ought and his distinction is true. Right. And we need something else. And so the stories and like when I’m reading the book, the stories and like when I listen to you and I listen to Peterson, I’m like that that. There is insight there that I’m not getting from from reading evolutionary biology, right? Or physics. And and and I’ve you know, I’ve crafted this idea within my own work of like, what is the heroic archetype? What are we what are we seeking? So like through Peterson, I got really into the idea of the heroic archetypes. Like, what are we doing when we do parkour? We go out and we confront chaotic potential and extract our own character out of it. Basically, we go do a jump that we’ve never done before. That’s potential. Right. Yeah. And through confronting the fear and the challenge and everything that goes along with that. There’s something beautiful, some gold, some that we take away from the confrontation with chaos. So then I started to ask, like, what is a hero? Right. A hero is is someone who and kind of like through some of Peterson’s ideas and other stuff, I came up with this idea that like the first to hero has to be able to recognize there’s a problem. Like the first thing you do, the first problem that a parkour athlete has is actually being able to see where the problems are. Right. Yeah. How do I go and find places to do jumps? Right. So the first thing is being able to see the problem. And then the second is like articulation of it. Right. How do I how do I recognize what’s going to allow me to accomplish this? And then the next you have to not only it’s like you have to be able to recognize a holy place, like a place that is capable of because if I mean, obviously, if you’re standing in front of a field, it’s like that place is not does not have the right potential for me to engage in what in what I want to accomplish. So you need to find like a sacred people are going to be angry that I use that. But relatively, at a lower level, something akin to a sacred space that when you see it, you recognize it has the potentiality you need in order to embody something particular. Yeah, I mean, the way that I react, the way that I interact with the trees and the nature that I train in is a relationship of sacredness for me, for sure. It has this sense of of helping me transcend and connecting me to something that’s beyond. Right. So I have no problem with that. But and I don’t think my audience will maybe the some of the Christians will. But yeah, it’s like it’s like here’s the Christians using that. You think the Christians will react to this. So it’s OK. So so so first is is vision, right? Or a second is is articulation, right? Say Socrates or something like that. Then the next is is emotional wherewithal to be able to confront the problem, right? To have the equanimity to stand in front of a challenge. Then the next is the physical strength to to accomplish it. And the last is the is the physical skills to to have those embodied capacities, right, to build all that. It’s like and then as I looked at that, I was like, this describes a human being who’s achieved greatness, who’s achieved virtue, but it says nothing about goodness. And in fact, you could apply all of these capacities to being evil. The Genghis Khan is probably really good at all of these things. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so then I asked, well, what what is what what brings us into the good and and for Vickie’s Vickie’s episode 16 of Awakening from the Meeting Crisis, Agape. Is the answer, it’s the only answer that I’ve come up with that works. I can’t I can’t get below that. Right. The only way that I can find the good is is being in relationship to reality such that I am acting from love that wants to bring good into being. It’s like that’s that’s the highest principle. So then I’ve like almost got down to this set of axioms of basically like you’re fundamentally you have to respect the mystery. You have to accept that there’s always going to be things outside of your own capacity to understand. And then you have to be in service of love. And then you have to to do that through truth and the cultivation of virtue. So that’s that’s what I’ve derived from this. But here’s my hesitation. And here’s where I’m trying to imagine myself, especially in the audience perspective. The woman at the well, she represents the lower. Jesus represents the higher. Here’s a relationship of hierarchy between male and female. Right. And for so you have an intuition, let’s say that chaos. That chaos maps to the feminine. But for many people, that that intuition runs maybe the opposite way or that that creates a reaction of the higher waters also map on the feminine. There you go. Well, that’s that’s actually in a way not exactly. But there’s a way in which this is this is the these are the mysteries that we’re not supposed to talk about. But let’s say that St. Ephraim the Syrian talks of the womb of God. He talks of he talks of the divine womb out of which the the divine persons emerge, which is the divine essence. And there’s a very mysterious thing going on there. But anyway, yes. So go ahead. Continue what you were going to say. So. If we take this intuitive approach and then some sort of pragmatism and some sort of of a multi multi factor, we still run into the reality that people have different intuitions or different orientation, symbolic systems that they operate within. And there’s not necessarily. I one there’s conflict there is what it feels like. Right. Yeah. And one one reaction to that is sort of, I think, the verveky response, which is let’s step outside of the narratives and treat them as instrumental rather than existing within them. Right. And then we can have the religion that is not a religion. And then we don’t have to deal with the fact that that that. That that the Islamic description, the Muslim description of of the of of Christ is is not congruent with the Christian description of Christ. Right. Like he he he’s respected there, but but the meaning of what he did isn’t possible to glean from the description that they give. And so. So there’s inherently a potential for conflict. And I don’t know if that’s the same in Buddhism and Daoism versus Christianity. I tend to think that they’re more potentially congruent. But but whatever, there are going to be places where that’s not where the where the two systems are going to be in conflict. Right. And. How do we how do we navigate those waters without without a clear epistemology? Sorry, you broke down. How do you said, how do we navigate those waters without a clear epistemology? Yeah. So. Obviously, OK, so there are many things to say. One is that. We can only perceive the pure pattern from an embodied place and and to pretend that you can or to pretend that you are leaving that. Is to delude yourself, this is what I think. And so I think that the position or the universalist position of saying I’m going to step outside of these narratives in order to be able to see them all is is a delusion. It’s still a narrative. It’s just that you don’t you don’t see it. It’s the it’s the narrative, the Tower of Babel. It’s the narrative of, you know, and it and it doesn’t. And what it leads to is it actually will lead to to fragmentation. It’ll lead to a breakdown. The desire to kind of lead to not having a common, not having a real common narrative. And so therefore it’ll be like a competition. That’s where it’s going to be even more so a competition of narratives because you have to embody something like you have to. You have to be in a path like you have to be on a road going somewhere. If you say, like, I’m going to stand above all these roads and I’m going to say, well, actually, I noticed that all these roads lead to the same place. But you’re not you’re not doing it. You’re not on the you’re not actually doing it. So that’s one thing. Like, that’s one thing in terms of the of that of that problem is I think that the idea of saying that someone is going to not engage or kind of rise above is it’s similar to Brett Weinstein when he says it’s similar to Sam Harris or Brett Weinstein when they when they say something like, don’t you see, like when when Brett Weinstein just says, don’t you see that this is obviously moral? And you’re like, what? You don’t see your own story like you always are in a story. To me, it’s just inevitable. Unless you’re like in the mystical vision. Like once you like if you enter into a mystical vision and you enter into, let’s say, kind of this this moment of pure transcendence where you’re completely united with God, completely united with the infinite in every way, then yes. But then when you when you talk about it, when you come back down, you still you now have to give it flesh and body and story. It has to retake body and flesh for it to exist. So where where where I get really caught in this in all these discussions is again, is it comes back to scientific epistemology works and delivers truth in a certain way, but it doesn’t deliver all the truth that we need. Right. But if we adopt any other system that collapses that, then that it’s really a problem. Right. So so we have to we have to do that. And what where I get hung up is like I I’ve said that I think I’m a non theistic Christian and the I think part is a really important qualifier. And I can I can go a little deeper there. But but when I listen to a lot of Christians describe their relationship to the resurrection, what I hear them doing is trying to operate a a logical, coherent system that looks something like science, where they’re making all of these exceptions to how they would treat a actual scientific question. Right. And so so in terms of the resurrection of Christ, yes. Yeah. Yeah. What what I tend to think is that’s it. But that’s also because, like, look, I don’t deny the sad state of Christianity, like I really do not deny that. I think that Christianity has become with one of the reasons why it has led to where it is. I think it’s part of the bigger story. I’ve talked about this many times before, but it’s nonetheless happening. Christianity is dying. And it’s and in part of that is has been Christians embracing of a really strange materialism and a kind of scientism as their worldview. And so the idea of understanding the resurrection is you have to understand the resurrection as a OK, as a something, something like strong emergence. You could say something as. Something as a phenomena, which is which actually gives you the key to all phenomena, and so it doesn’t it can’t completely act on the same level as the phenomena that it’s that it’s that it’s giving the unity to. And all miracles are like that. Miracles are not just weird are not just like weird exceptional things that happen. That’s never the case. It’s not just like something unexplainable happens. And that’s a miracle. Miracles are not. That’s not what they are. Miracles are always higher up on the level of pattern. That is, they’re actually embodying the pattern of reality at a level beyond the normal usual levels of causality. And so what it looks like is actually looks like it’s it looks like it’s it’s like it’s like it’s pulling in the multiplicity into itself in a way that doesn’t seem to make sense at the lower level, just like qualities of certain beings, if you try to look at just the lower elements when you’re like, well, this doesn’t make sense. Like why is water wet? Oxygen and hydrogen are neither of those. And so how is it that I get to wet? You can’t find it. It’s emergent. It’s like, but it’s a strong emergence because it’s more than that. It’s not arbitrary because that looks arbitrary. Like the miracles of Christ and especially the resurrection is like. Once you realize that, let’s say, once you see resurrection, then you’re like, actually, you know what? That’s how that’s how reality works. Resurrection is something that I see every day. I see resurrection all the time. I get that symbolically, right? I do. I mean, like when you describe it, it makes total sense to me. But it doesn’t it doesn’t establish to me. In any sense that that that I could that I could believe that Christ died and was resurrected in the same way that I believe that my dog is scratching itself behind me or that or even that that evolution happened, right, because I can verify aspects of evolution in a way that I can’t verify that story. And you’re you’re you’re making an argument from a sort of it makes sense of things, right? It’s like the C.S. Lewis argument. Like it’s a key to actually comprehending. So therefore there’s a truth to it. But like you’re not a biblical literalist, right? You don’t believe that that the description of Genesis. Is true in the sense that it falsifies the existence of dinosaurs. I I don’t think that I don’t think that the description in Genesis is a scientific description, if that’s what you want. But I think it’s true. My goodness. The best way to describe the world is in Genesis is the is the is is is the death and resurrection of Christ true as a scientific fact? Well, you mean a scientific fact in the sense that you could prove it scientifically, how could you prove it scientifically? It happened two thousand years ago. Exactly. So so here here’s my perspective on this. I feel like a lot of Christians feel like that has to be asserted with certainty within and then they’re there within that materialist frame. And I don’t exactly know your relationship to this. I haven’t I don’t I don’t know. But I believe the resurrection is real. I believe that it happened. I believe that the description that are in scripture are the best way. So describe what happened. So let me let me ask you if this would make sense, because the way that I could imagine myself relating to this and I don’t precisely relate to it this way is something like. I need to have access to scientific epistemology, and if I operate that system and I ask the question of Christ’s death and resurrection, the answer I get is probably not right, but I know that that system itself is incomplete and it cannot tell me for certain what’s happening. Now, there is a broader ontology that I exist within that I think within. And in order to. To make my ontology work. The resurrection actually is key. So so my question, so let me ask you a question. Have you ever experienced a miracle? No. OK, so have you ever experienced a had an experience where. The world around you, the causality around you, which was not related to your experience, all of a sudden merged with your experience. I. Like like like like that doesn’t that doesn’t I don’t know what you call synchronicity, if that ever happened, where the inside and the outside like joined together, I mean, I have had moments where it seemed like. So I interviewed Paul VanderKlaai recently, right? And Paul had been talking about superhero stories, right? And he published a superhero story the day that Jordan Peterson was satired as Red Skull by Ta-Nehisi Coates, right? The day that that came out. It’s like, well, that’s a strange coincidence. Right. And I’ve had those strange coincidences happen in my life. Now, as someone who’s trying to operate within rational materialism, I just think coincidences happen. Right. So when people talk about synchronicity, that feels like they’re operating some kind of epistemology. It doesn’t make any sense to me. All right. Well, I guess it’s hard because if you haven’t, like, I mean, you had little experiences like that, but there are moments in your life. Like, I think most people have these moments where the outside world and the inside world seems to come together, where all of a sudden the world outside seems to be wanting you to see something. Oh, yeah. I mean, I have those experiences. I just don’t believe them. Why don’t you believe them? Because what I understand about the way the human mind works from an evolutionary perspective makes me skeptical of our storymaking and pattern making behavior. We know that this can mislead us in important ways. Right. And when I see people and this is the other the flip side of that, like the background that I talked about, when I see people who become who fall in love with this story that they have in their mind of how reality is laying itself out and making them, giving them some sense of transcendence, those people become very dangerous to me and very likely to be full of shit. Yeah. Well, that’s also because usually they’re not embedded in like a bigger pattern. Like they usually don’t have some they don’t. Not a part of a normal. But what I’m trying to when I’m trying to try to get you to see is that there are moments where there is a causality of meaning which happens and that the multiplicity of the world in its mechanical causalities doesn’t account for the causality of meaning, doesn’t account for the fact that all of a sudden, like I have to deal with certain problem and all of a sudden everything around me is screaming at me, like everything I see is screaming at me to deal with this problem, like all these weird accidents, all these weird things. And there’s like this moment where all of this kind of comes together. And I can only see that as having it can only be reasonable if I understand that it’s it’s it’s joined together as a body. But it’s all these multiple elements are joined together as a body and they’re they’re waiting to be waiting to find a name, let’s say. And so that’s that’s actually it’s kind of like that’s how. At least that’s how so I mean, a good example, like let me find another. Let me give you an example from what I gave you before. It’s like. Constantine founds the city, right? And then all of a sudden it becomes a city. But the mechanical causality, like the guy, the cart with the with the wheels and the guy driving the cart, like that mechanical causality has nothing to do. Like his cart is going to Constantinople to become part of that city. But the the the mechanic, all the mechanical causation has nothing to do. You can’t find it in the mechanical causality. The reason why he’s going to Constantinople, the reason why he’s going to Constantinople is in the meaning. I’m not sure that’s true. I mean, I think so. So that’s a little part. But like the thing is that sometimes that becomes bigger, like it actually becomes bigger and it starts to it starts to grow and to accumulate in ways that can only be described as miracles. And so it’s like I’ve never experienced that. I don’t know. Like I’ve experienced it quite a bit. And. But I don’t know. And so what I would tell you is that the resurrection is like the is the keystone of that process, is like the top version of that, because it actually reveals how death can come together and become alive, like how something dead, things that don’t have any coherence with each other, can join into a body and that they can find life like that’s what that’s basically what resurrection is. And so anyway, there’s no way that I’m going to I’m going to convince you in this discussion. I’ve already been going for two hours anyway, so I should probably go. OK. Yeah. One thing that I really like is people have mystical experiences, say on psilocybin or whatever, and they come back and have the sense that they have the most profound meaning that they’ve had in their life and they have a lesson. But those lessons can be completely incongruent with each other. And the positive impact on somebody’s life is is the same whether they come back and say, God is definitely real or God is definitely not real. So this sense of the miraculous, like I don’t maybe it’s just broken in me. Like, like, like, so, you know, the cognitive anthropologists say that that the the origin of religious belief is overactive agency detection. And that’s an evolutionary feature. And that’s reasonable to me. And maybe I have less of that than other people. I used to think that’s listen to what they say. It’s hilarious. Look and listen to the terms they use. Overactive agency detection. Like, on what ground do they stand to to to tell us what the limit of agency is? Like, do they even know what agency is? Like, how are they even saying that? I mean, so seeing a face in a cloud, is there an actual face in the cloud? Or does your from an evolutionary standpoint, is there an actual face in front of you? Like, if I look at your face, is there a face there? There’s pixels on the screen. Have you ever have you ever have you ever had the experience of not recognizing someone you know, and then all of a sudden you recognize them, they become the person? Like, is that is that scientifically, materially, is that real? Like a face is not is not a is not a scientific concept. A face is meaning. And so the idea of seeing a face in the cloud, why an evolutionary biologist would be bothered, why would see that as less real than seeing the face in front of you, to me is mind boggling. Like, why is it seeing a face in the cloud less real in terms of pure biological like understanding, like because there is no reason for these like in terms of evolution. Pragmatically, pragmatically, me interpreting your face as a face allows me to interface and interact with you, whereas if I try to do the same thing with the cloud, usually that’s considered craziness. I mean, you never see the face in a cloud. Well, I’ve seen a face in the cloud, but I don’t talk to it. And I don’t hear it talking back to me. But let’s say that that would happen. Like, let’s say that that could happen. Sure. That might have a causal it might have a causal function. Especially in a world that is totally coherent, like in a world that’s completely coherent, that might have a causal function that you might struggle to understand. Like seeing a cosmic face, seeing a bigger face and that face informing you of some meaning that could I think that I think that biologically, just in terms of evolutionary thinking, I think that could happen and that it could it could it could be a way for a group to cohere. It could be a way for it could do all kinds of things. Well, yes. And it could be real. Like it could be it could be really you’re really seeing a face in the cloud. I don’t know about that part as real as seeing your face. Like I’m saying, a face doesn’t exist in the material world. Well, it does. Is a meaning is that is that is that it’s a way. Right. Because because like my face or your face, they’re made up of muscles and bone and blood and nerves and they exist through an evolutionary process to give us the capacity to to see and smell and eat and now to express to each other like human faces are way more variable than say wolf faces. And it’s because we need the ability to to easily recognize each other through vision and the ability to then communicate effectively through faces. Right. OK, so I know I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I’ve got it. Listen to this. This is this. OK, so can an emoji have a causal effect? Yes. Is there a face there? No, there’s a symbol there. But we recognize it as a face and it has a causal effect like you can actually change the way you act, change the way you feel, change the way you interact with with with with what you’re seeing. Yes. And so the same for a face in a cloud. Like you see a face in a cloud. It can have a causal effect and it’s a real causal effect. Yeah, no, but it’s not a real face. An emoji has a real causal effect, but it’s not a real face. Right. So I just find that funny that you’re saying that, like as a materialist, I find it funny that you would say that an emoji isn’t a real face. But this like sack of flesh in front of me, that’s a real face. Well, the emoji contains aspects of what a face is because it’s a symbol. It’s a face. So let me say it’s a pattern. A face is a pattern. That’s what a face is. And so the face is a pattern that has that has it embodies itself in the people around me so that I can recognize them. But it’s a pattern. And so if I draw a face on a piece of paper, I’m also manifesting the pattern. You represent a pattern, at least, and I recognize it and it can have causal and it can have causal effect. Sure. Like if I. Yeah. So to go back to just to go back to active agency detection, the idea is that you hear a bear in the woods if it’s possible that there’s a bear in the woods, whether it’s there or not. And this is was important to our survival. And that is this the way that that that that mind was built then inclines us to this capacity for religious belief. I used to have a sense that that aspect of me was just not as turned up as some other people, right? Yeah. I think that may just be hubris. Right. Another way to to to interpret my particular worldview is just that I’ve trained myself very intensely to view the world from a specifically rational materialist frame for whatever reasons, right, as a reaction to all the crazy hippies around me. But but but the thing is that when you talk about the the pattern sort of boom, synchronicity, all that stuff, I don’t have any way. I don’t have any way to to sort that from hearing the same thing from my hippie friend who just went on a. Yeah, I understand. But the emoji, the emoji example I gave you is probably a really good one in the sense that that emoji has it’s just a bunch of pixels or ink or something on a piece of paper, but because it participates in a pattern, it can have a causal effect on. And so so it’s actually doing that, like it’s doing it’s a little miracle, like very little one. Yeah, very, very small one. Well, this is then the well, this is where we get into the question. And we’re going to probably I’m going to say the problem and then we’re just going to let it go because we can’t we can’t go in. But the problem is, is the pattern just emerging from the human mind or is it something more? And I mean, that that that question to me doesn’t mean anything. Like it will, because it’s like, is it just what’s the every time someone uses the words just to me, it’s like I, I, it’s like a little, it’s like a little itch that I have. It’s like, what does that mean? Just emerging from the human mind is part of reality. It’s like it’s so there is no just emerging from the human mind. It has to it has to be. The human mind is there. It happened. It came about. And so it’s part of the world. Like, so so it’s not. It can be just there’s no there’s no there’s no just. So. Hopefully this works. We’ll see. We’ll see. It’ll be interesting. Ivan and Aljosha Karamazov, right? Yeah. They’re not real human beings. We’re not real human beings. They represent things that are real and powerful and important and have causal impact on the world, but they were never flesh and blood human beings. They’re not the same. They’re not the same level of they don’t have the same level. They don’t have the same level of existence as you do. They have a they have a different type of existence. So so they are characters, let’s say, that are that whose meaning is utterly collapsible to human psychology on on one level, maybe. I mean, the reason why we recognize them as having value is because they’re embodying things, they’re embodying patterns in a way that that resonate with us, right? So it’s not just it’s not not just collapsible to human psychology is that they they’re they’re embodying patterns that we want to attend to. Yeah. Right. And there’s a reason why we attend to things. Attention is not arbitrary. It’s not just it’s not just reducible to human psychology. It has to do with a whole level of things that make us exist in the world or not exist. And there’s a bunch of stuff involved. It’s so. So so I have this, you know, I would say I’m an atheist, right? In the sense that I don’t think that the objective, the question of the objective existence of God is answerable or particularly fruitful. Right. But I would say that I feel fairly certain within a rationalist frame that God is a psychological reality of human beings. But within that same frame, I can’t claim that it’s a object outside of me. Like, I believe that if I walk by a tree today and I leave and walk somewhere else and it’s no longer in my field of attention or or awareness, the tree doesn’t disappear. Right. It’s not simply a psychological aspect of my existence. It is obviously a lot of what it is to me is psychological and symbolic. But the tree is still there. And that’s that’s materialism. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But God is not there. God is not outside of your frame. God is not God is not a thing. Yeah, God is not a thing. And this is like it’s a totally orthodox. Like, I always tell people, if you think God is a thing, then I’m I feel better telling you that God doesn’t exist. Like, if that’s what you think, if you think existence limits itself to things that can be identified and quantified and all that, then I would say God doesn’t exist because even in the very traditional Christian theology, God is as the source of all being, God is beyond name, beyond characteristics, beyond that’s what God is. God is the source of characteristic and being and and and all names and all essences come from that infinite non being and non being joined together. I guess same access as God is being a non being. Do you think do you believe or? Yeah, do you believe that God has self-awareness in a sense that we would recognize? I how can I say this? Like the best way to understand that would be to say that I believe that God has what you would call something like infinite awareness. And our awareness is actually a participation in that infinite awareness. Like our intelligence comes from. God. And so it’s like because we can’t that’s how that’s actually the best way to me to explain consciousness, like because it’s very difficult to explain consciousness, like consciousness emanates from an infinite consciousness and that we are we are sparks, let’s say that our personhood is a spark of the divine. So. I don’t think Google has a consciousness or self-awareness. Google does not does not think about being Google, but there’s no there’s no inside of the Google experience. It’s an intelligence and it is causal and it is an agent that that that we interact with, but it’s not self-aware, but you also can’t verify that. No, I cannot. I cannot verify that. I don’t know that that’s true. I can’t verify that in you. Like I can’t verify that. Right. I could be a philosophical zombie. Rafe, I need to go, man. I’m sorry. No, I think we should we should like I love I really enjoyed it. I enjoy conversation, but should probably we should probably set up another one because I think because I think we there are more places to go. But I actually I need there are other things I need to do. I also need to go. I’m glad that you enjoyed it. I felt like this was really fruitful. I stayed pretty close to what I was hoping, but definitely went in different directions and I really enjoyed it. And I look forward to for future conversations. Yeah. And I will definitely be I’ll really be happy to share this because I do feel like you do feel like you are making like a real genuine. Like effort to to to to understand what I was talking about, and I and I feel like you’re I feel like you get it, at least most of it, let’s say. And so so that that’s that brings me joy, I guess. Also, I’m glad I could provide some joy and hopefully a better bridge. Because it didn’t feel like it was getting built. And I think I’m genuinely really impressed by the power of your insights. And I want people to be able to absorb them and not get tripped upon the language. Yeah, yeah. So I appreciate you very much. All right. Let’s set up another another time for another discussion. Absolutely. Thank you. All right. Bye, Jonathan.