Egregores, Mobs and Demons ｜ with Jordan Hall & John Vervaeke (89uP5KiP1sI)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=89uP5KiP1sI

It seems like there’s a good reason to talk about this just because it happened with it yesterday or a few days ago If you followed this story about the Google employee who who declared lambda one of the AI about the sentient, okay the silliness with which such a large fraction of our collective intelligence was effusively oriented towards something is Is is just evidence of the ease by which a relatively mediocre AI if improperly deployed Could take advantage of our lower natures and the decadent corruption and otherwise Uh profane aspects of our of the paperclip maximizer in which we live To further the process of converting us all into paper clips Um This is the problem that I see Um, it’s less a problem of sort of like everything’s hunky dory, but we accidentally create, you know, terminator two or something like that It’s more like it’s all part of a reciprocal narrowing that we call civilization and that we’re living within And we need to actually find our way out of that in general So This is Jonathan Peugeot welcome to the symbolic world I think like one of the things that I think is going to be important in this conversation is that Is that it’s going to be When I listen to jordan when I listen to you speak Sometimes I don’t understand what you’re saying and I think Part of it is just terminology you have a whole set of of terms that are different from the ones that I use and i’ve learned to i’ve learned to To know john’s terms and so I kind of understand what when he says something I know I kind of have a background to what he said. It’s what he’s saying Whereas you sometimes I hear you say something and you and the conversation continues And i’m like, I didn’t I didn’t get like I didn’t understand what he’s referring to there And so I think that we’ll have to be like at least you have to be generous with me in this conversation Sometimes i’ll stop you and say I don’t know what that means. Like I don’t know what that what that term means Well, maybe I can even broaden it my sense is i’ve been contemplating this conversation is that we’ll actually want to be consciously moving quite slowly Because the thing that we’re dealing with is um, in some sense the most esoteric thing possible um and Uh language itself isn’t going to be an adequate tool for addressing it Yeah, that makes sense So we’ve got to Listen to each other but follow the logos. So that’s going to be it’s going to require all of our virtuosity and virtue um so And so I guess I mean this conversation I guess was sparked By a discussion jordan that you had with a few other people on rebel wisdom about egregores And I think that the notion of egregores has been kind of floating around i’ve been seeing different people Uh talk about it also because everybody seems to be reading tomberg’s meditations on the tarot right now Which i’m reading at this moment and he also talks about egregores as well And this this spawned several articles on my website from people that are kind of in my mind space uh, you know talking about my the way I talk about Higher beings and challenging it trying to figure it out And so that’s what at least sparked my interest in having a conversation about this which is to try to understand agency at Transpersonal levels. What does that mean? Is there agency is there consciousness? Can we perceive it? You know, how do we participate in that? Uh, that’s the thing that interests me very much these days and I think it also I mean john I know it’s part of your work and jordan with that conversation. I saw that you were definitely thinking about it. So Yes, well I would say something like um This question this category question simultaneously is um Radically under considered in the I would call it maybe conventional wisdom within the sort of the To the degree to which people are thinking about how to act in the world Very few of those who have a agency in in a sort of material sense at least Consider this category properly or even at all in those cases And to the degree to which this category has any degree of reality, it’s obviously Significantly impactful. So that’s a high asymmetry um, and I’ve I think frankly maybe if the three of us been More along the lines of the mainstream meaning up until relatively recently these sorts of notions popped into my head But I didn’t think about them that much and then over the past five to seven years Increasingly found myself frankly obligated to contemplate them more deeply and so I’m coming in as a as a bit much more of a novice. I would imagine in the category so you can see i’m maybe representing almost more of an audience than a contributor but motivated participatory audience So, I mean where i’m coming at is I mean I’ve recently published three papers with dan shappi and you know Important academic journals really exploring distributed cognition. That’s what it’s called in 4e cogsi This has been talked about deeply in 4e cogsi Especially the work of chalmers and clark for a long time at hutchins work on cognition in the wild where he talked about The distributed cognition the dynamical system that navigates a ship was in the 80s So this topic has been Part of the part of the the one of the fourth e is extended And part of calling Cognition extended is exactly the idea of distributed cognition and dynamical systems And I think we should pay more attention to that Very often fine-grained working out around it and it’s and it is being worked out One way I would recommend right away is that I would I would challenge the word agregore Which I think is a bad term an infelicitous term In that it already misframes the phenomena We are trying to talk about because it’s based on the idea of aggregation Which is a completely bottom-up understanding of the phenomena. That’s what aggregation means I put a bunch of I draw much of things together and something emerges from them and the problem with that purely bottom-up model Is it only gets half of the story? That is actually the case in distributed cognition This is something jonathan and I have talked about and jordan you and I have talked about it to a degree, too To the degree to which these things take on a life of their own and are properly understood it as hyper agents That’s my term or spirits. That’s jonathan’s term and i’m not using that term prejudicially at all They we have to Really understand that we have to understand that we have to understand that we have to understand that we have to understand The top-down element in them from the very beginning and I think The degree to which we try to have these these these purely either bottom-up or top-down models of these kind of phenomena Which are the great temptations is the degree to which we are falling into a We’re starting off on the wrong foot in a fundamental way. I tend to prefer the term hyper agent Which is analogous to morton’s idea of hyper objects and so it has a already has a good provenance And it captures the discourse around the agency of the collective intelligence Found within distributed cognition. Those are the three terms. I would like to put at the front hyper agency Collective intelligence distributed cognition and put them within a framework that is not just bottom-up but also equally top-down So that’s my first proposal My sense is i’m coming at it almost in the direction of a blind man feeling the landscape And trying to notice what the different things are in the landscape and i’m not quite sure what what’s there Um, and it seems like there’s probably a number of distinct kinds of things that are not all the same it might be useful to discern the distinctions and Um And some sense of like what would you call it the not the Bestiary what’s it? What’s a collection of beings called? Definitely don’t want to call it pantheon, but you know what i’m talking a collection a bestiary or a taxonomy. Yeah, taxonomy. Yeah And so I I think that the way that I because i’ve been thinking a lot about this egregore and also i’ve been provoked and Kind of challenged by my own the people that that follow what i’m doing and they’re thinking in similar terms as I as I am uh, and one of the things that they’ve noticed is that there are certain let’s say there are collective beings or like hyper agents the way that john talks about that seem to uh have Let’s say have more logos that seem to be teleologically Structured let’s say the the navigation of a ship for example So the navigation of a ship will have a clear hierarchy and there’ll be a captain who will let’s say Be the top of the of the way that the direction that it’s going he’s going to manage the others But they’re all working together and paying attention to the same telos and so they’re able to function as a as a body, you know But there are also versions of these beings that seem to be something like headless And this is what some of my my friends have pointed to me pointed out to me and that they seem to be more uh They seem to pop up and disappear And so you see that the the type of being that jordan was talking about in his discussion about these these weird morality Codes that rise up online and then start to manage the way that people act Uh, they seem to be these headless beings, but they are they do have they act upon the group they have Ah causative power and so they look like that’s why there’s something of a monstrous effect and that’s why These people were i’m gonna i’m gonna have a conversation with them as well soon, but why they said maybe the term egregore is good for these types of Of manifestations which are these like a mob for example that they did swerving and then people pop up Like if you look at tenement square is a great example of this when when it was happening You’d have you had this mob of people and then all of a sudden a leader would pop up and then people kind of start To follow that leader for you know, like an hour and then someone else would scream somewhere else And then people would just like be moving from head to head and they couldn’t find Uh clear direction and really is like this so it does have a kind of agency But I mean you would say something like a demonic agency. It’s breaking. It’s it doesn’t have a clear telos Let’s say that’s where i’d want to challenge it I think I like I like the distinction and I now see how I would respond I’d say if you want to reserve aggregate to those things those processes that are self-organizing But are not autopoetic then that is exactly where the the boundary of agency is lost Tornado is self-organizing and that to me is what’s happening in tenement square You’re having a social tornado But it is not autopoetic in that it does not self-organize in order to seek out the conditions that produce promote and protect its own existence Whereas I take it that hyper agencies do so an example of a hyper agency that clearly does this is a bureaucracy Bureaucracies in fact often become totally just self-perpetuating entities that have been so they self-organize for this telos But the autopoetic element takes over and sometimes to horrific degrees that’s in kafka, right? And so right so I i’m now seeing a continuum But to me the the line where we ascribe agency is precisely the line Of where the self-organization has passed properly into being autopoetic and when there is no evidence for autopoesis We should not ascribe agency and when we can we can we can ascribe Sophisticate very sophisticated self-organization And if that’s what people want to point to with the term agregore Then I think it’s a good term for that phenomena and I’m willing to accept that correction But for me, I well i’m interested in the capacity for reality to produce hyper agents Because they to me have a significance for our Understand we have always understood our agency in Relationship to some kind of hyper agency to me. I think that’s part of your point. Jonathan, right human beings have always understood ourselves in terms of hyper agents and So I think the current discovery of hyper agency has a spiritual potential and significance That the discovery of just these so of social self-organization does not have Okay, let me throw something in that just came up and i’m not sure this is a good idea, but it occurs to me um that to the degree to which um this conversation Has a capacity to be an embodiment or a manifestation of one of these kinds of beings Yes That would be the self-referentially proper way to guide its directionality Yes, i’m saying what being is endeavoring to express itself to these particular humans so we can take it as a applied experience experiment excellent Something that I noticed that this particular one seems to have as a orientation is precision and as you were talking about the distinction between a Tornado And let’s say something else um, I wanted to get very very close because that line is actually a very Subtle line. Yes, but if I zoom in at the edge of a tornado There actually is a shift in the probability of brownian motion at the event horizon of the causal structures of air molecules That is what produces the Autocatalytic characteristic. Yes distinction between autocatalytic and autopoetic Yes, the fine point and i’d be interested to see if it’s worth spending time trying to get down there Although it is of course a tremendous rabbit hole that may implicate the whole question Well, um, I don’t want to trespass on jonathan but I since I think the question is directed towards me for me um the The Autocatalytic and this is of course, you know what cuffman says it’s it might be necessary, but it’s not sufficient for life But because an autocatalytic process Right is in some sense Perpetuating itself, but it is nevertheless not seeking out the conditions that have to Obtain and so my evidence for that is tornadoes will move onto terrain that immediately destroys them And as jonathan was saying the self-organization is starting to coalesce into you know Something that might do something around this leader and then it shifts to this leader and then it shifts to this leader Right, and so it’s not there is not there is no there is no well to my mind There is not enough top down and that’s why I wanted to emphasize in in in The agregore i’ll use that term now to refer to these social social self-organizing social self-organizations if that’s Okay, um, there’s not enough top down to attribute cognition because I take it that what we’re trying to Talk about when we’re talking about things like when we are invoking terms like spirit or what I try to invoke like hyper agent is we have something that Has the has a capacity to not just self-perpetuate but to self-promote and self-protect And that in that sense we want to sort of equally attribute cognition and something like a life to it Okay, so me the other thing i’d like to bring into this what you’re saying jon is what would be the difference between let’s say so we have the notion of a of a being that Is properly organized towards the telos and structures itself hierarchically in a way that that seems to give it agency, right? So then we have these these momentary beings that kind of shift from one One way to the other and don’t seem to be able to do that And then you have something what I would call something like parasitic processes. Yes. Yes, right So let’s say I see that more easily within within within oh, let’s say the mob So the mob is a good example like at a social level and that an addiction would be a good example at a personal level Where you have a process that is self perpetuating that has all the mechanisms to preserve itself, but then is can ultimately be the demise of the The structure that holds it together can ultimately kind of break can kill you like so you can have an addictive pattern within you That is doing all these things, but then it ultimately could could act against against the body that’s holding it together It’s funny as you were saying that I immediately thought of parasitic processing. So I think i’m right. I’m really catching your perspective I hope yeah, I think I think the idea of Of something like a self-organizing process that Is parasitic And but it’s nevertheless self-destructive of what we might call it substrate. I’m trying to use terms very neutrally here Yeah, I I think that’s right Um but I mean since I coined the term with leo I I guess I could speak to its provenance the intent of parasitic processing Is it’s actually something that is destroying agency. That’s one of its defining features it it it it it insinuates itself into the agency of Well in the case we originally talking about of an individual cognizer takes on a life of its own But but at the expense of the agency that it is dependent upon Um, and so for me, um That’s I I think what that calls for then I mean I I feel what’s happening is we’re being called to Like a continuum in the taxonomy. We’ve got agregores and then we have hyperagents and now there’s this in-between thing um, uh, and I yeah to me it doesn’t it doesn’t cross the line the threshold into hyperagency because Uh, it’s like an addiction. It’s ultimately It’s a twist in the potential for agency that is being actualized as the self-destruction of agency if that makes any sense Yeah well, one of the reasons why i’m i’m using i’m trying to bring that up is just because I I’m also trying to account for the iconography. Let’s say that is One of the reasons why demons are represented the way they are like if if you look at the way demons are represented They’re always represented as hybrid monsters. That is they’re represented in a way that they have no definite Identity, but they can nonetheless Act on you and they act on you in a manner that wants to like you said john to destroy your Agency to destroy your your being basically they want the Ultimately want to get rid off of you until you die And so they’re actually represented visually if you look at the way they’re represented in in medieval Art in a way that seems to represent this problem that we’re talking about so they’re like they’re they’re agregores in a way because they’re like this mismatch of Of beings, you know, they’re like a fish mixed with the with the human mixed with you know With the tail and all these weird things, but then it also is able to act upon you and in a way that’s violent, right? They’re sticking for you. They’re they’re they’re basically torturing you ultimately I like where this is going. I like the how we’re getting this This articulation of of the continuum that is Trying to be birthed in the taxonomy. I like this a lot So let me throw some more parameters or um, what you call that sort of like edges shape um One is something like closure thermodynamics closed system disconnection separation, okay And in particular something like the metaphor of of death. So if I consider for example an animate body Let’s just go with a rabbit that’s hopping about as a being and then it’s a dead rabbit All right, something has happened a discontinuity has occurred The physical body and the components that made up that physical body are now subject to a completely different regime of dynamics, right? They’ve now become thermodynamic and characteristic In fact a more fundamental notion. I think of parasitic process which is there’s a gradient of possibility Or a stored capacity that has been built up by the organic being Which is now a feedstock for a completely different set of regimes that are in fact From in relationship with the with the rabbit are in fact bottoms up right there bacteria and predators and parasites and whatnot They’re going to decompose that stored energy, which is living precisely in the gap between what was at one point a Autopoetic process and is now transitioned. Okay, that’s one two um, uh, yeah the The how would we say the the the confusion that arises? When something of that sort Let’s just go with the bunny that died for a moment Happens to be made up of human beings aha The difference between a tornado and the mob Is the tornado it was made up of air molecules And the affordance of air molecules for engaging in cognition in any meaningful way is quite small Whereas the mob is made of human beings And so the affordance of human beings for engaging in cognition is relatively quite high And so we may ascribe to the mob a level of cognition that is in fact not properly happening at the mob But is what happens when something that was alive is now in this parasitic process dynamic But its subcomponents are in fact fully functioning cognitive agents and that creates a little bit of a confusion about what’s actually going on I see that that’s really interesting. That’s really interesting. Yes So there’s a you’re saying there’s a great temptation for We have to be very careful of a category in a classical sense a category mistake mistake Yes, misapplying between the species and the genus. Yes And if you take the notion of short term and long term or or uh, what’s it called global optimum and local optimum? Yeah, and apply that against the choice-linking landscape of a cognitive agent So let’s go with a mobster Effectively what’s happening when we refer to the notion of disconnection or separation is we’re reducing the scope of self That is actually in in the context of making choices What what had been a larger self a greater being is now made up of a very field of smaller selves That are making choices in the basis of a much smaller scope of capacity, which is their orient towards local optima Because they’re orienting towards local optima they’re in fact degrading the landscape that had included a global optima Right is the whole wholeness of the auto poetic beingness But because these are in fact functional cognitive agents, there’s a substantial amount of activity that’s going on that looks in fact in fact is Cognition, right? So they’re shaping the landscape in a potent way So really looking closely at what’s going on inside that gap gives us a lot of insight effective by the way It may be like a a 10 000 year long thermodynamic process that is constantly eating up the the feed stock that emerges in the context of ordinary human uh, how humans come together into wholeness and what is possible in the context of humanness as a Source for parasitic process and every time that source comes together endeavors to reach a more whole Basis it actually provides a niche for this parasitic process. This goes back to your demons. I think That’s brilliant. So that you if I hear you, right? You’re proposing that the demonic Is actually a case where there’s a degradation of the hyper agency into parasitic processing And we can understand parasitic processing in terms of how it’s undermining the cognition of the individual agents Did I understand you correctly? Certainly a piece of it. Yes Well, if i’m missing an important, please, please say, please tell me uh something along the lines of the um, how do we say this? The notion of tornado so the idea of there being a An eddy or a standing wave or a strictly causal Dynamic that provides a niche where this degradation process holds the relationship in kind of a medium um, yeah, there’s a uh How do we say this? This is I haven’t quite got it like I can almost feel it But there’s something at the level of the top down That has to and then the level of the bottom up and then the relationship that feels like it’s all part of the context Well, let me try me something that was missing out of what I just said that I’m hearing you say Is you were talking about like there’s something like in in right? My point was the agregore is completely bottom up Right, that’s what I was arguing and then we’ve got the demonic and what I heard you saying is the demonic is now a disproportionate relationship between the top down and the bottom up in which the balance that is found within the hyper agent is being lost because Right the top down is now in a self-destructive process of undermining the individual cognition Of the of the component people that’s what I that’s what I heard you saying like like there’s a top down Right instead of the balance between the top down and the bottom up There’s a there’s a misalignment and the top down is now imposing and infecting the lower process so the idea would be something like let’s say the system or the hyper agent is trying to be to Is trying to to fill up too much space is not leaving enough because you need a little messiness Yeah on the edge for things to to to work and so If you if you’re there not careful, it will create it or give the opportunity for these give reason for these parasitic processes to kind of to kind of appear and and uh But i’m not I don’t see I can kind of see it. I can see it. I can see it mythologically Sorry, this is my problem. It’s like I think in storage so I can see it mythologically Which is that a good example is, you know in um, In the bible there are these laws about how to till your field And you kill your field, but you have to leave the corner of the field untilled And you have to leave that for the stranger So you have to leave it for the processes that aren’t part of your hyper agent You could say you kind of have to leave a little bit of room on the edge for for a buffer between But if you’re not careful with those corners They can they can start to impose themselves If you try to till them too much then they revet they they come back like a revenge they come back like But and if you if you if you leave them too big then they also kind of they they tend to want to eat your system I don’t know if that makes sense like you have to be careful because this whole system no hyper agent can fill up all of its Like the world isn’t the world has all this chaos on the edge So you can’t fill up the world with the system. It will always leave a remainder So the the way that’s coming to first of all what came to mind is kafka precisely because what happens in the bureaucracy Is it becomes a parasitic process that drains? Sovereignty and individual cognition away. That’s the horror of the kafka of the kafkas, right? That the there’s been the the like so Bureaucracies are this is max Weber. They’re supposed to be Bottom up error signal and then top down prediction right sort of mimicking Aspects, but what happens right is you get the bureaucracy just being the top down discharging of blame and not any upward tick of error correction And you get that you get the horror right because the the line of communication has just become unidirectional Yeah, and a bureaucracy that’s too strong will produce corruption. It will necessarily produce corruption That’s how that’s what happens in a bureaucracy that is too that is too pervasive exactly exactly And so what what it comes to mind is is karsa’s idea where what like the hyper agent is oriented towards the infinite game Right, whereas the parasitic process is engaged in in a finite kind of game Because what it’s trying to do right is get some sort of final closure right because it Because it’s i’m sorry i’m stumbling it because it’s parasitic because it’s self-destructive. It can’t be an infinite game player Do you get what i’m trying to get at it? It can’t whereas leaving the corners of the field is that there’s going to be stuff beyond the game and we’re going to have to One of the things we have to do as we play the game is change the rules by how which we play the game because It’ll be the stranger right? That’s the infinite game, right? But the finite game says no, no, no, that’s the top-down bureaucracy We can encompass this completely And when you look at parasitic processing within individuals, what what’s typically happening is is that is is reciprocal narrowing? Until they get to like it can’t be any other way than this. It can’t be any other way than this sorry, i’m just trying to Like rock what you said, but I got I got a powerful sense of right that There’s an inability of a parasitic processing the demonic I mean, but this this is you know, this jonathan This is like dianesis evil is ultimately totally parasitic on the good, right? It it it pretends to help its self-existence, but it can’t actually play the infinite game So you but if you think think of it like in a person in terms of let’s say a fast binge pattern Right where someone is on a diet a diet binge pattern where someone tries to make create a top-down Pattern of being in themselves where they’re either like i’m gonna lose weight I’m gonna do this i’m gonna do that They make it so strict that the opposite happens because a parasitic process sets itself up Then you find yourself at two in the morning eating a tub of ice cream and it’s like that is and you know It’s destroying you but it’s like there’s something else taking over your will right? Yeah, because what’s happens is instead of a dynamic right between bottom up and top down you’re getting a vacillation You get the top down Right the the kafka-esque and then you get the bottom up Explosion of impulsivity. That’s the binging. I lose all agency and then I right and and you you’re getting that going back And that’s typically what’s happening in parasitic processing Hmm So it comes up for me there and i’m so i’m noticing two things one is I how do I say this right symbolically I heard John referenced the notion of changing the game And so it landed that landed for me was perhaps a orientation or an invitation to shift the game That we’re engaging in Uh, and I noticed that I felt something Hmm, how do I say strong perhaps or certain clarity? When jonathan was orienting us in the direction of the mythological They’re part of the invitation. I would say is to shift more into a mythological poetic artistic religious mystic mystic mystic mode Uh, okay. The other one that came up as I was myself doing that was I was the word golem came in And it spoke to something like, um, there’s a kind of part In humans, we might call this the mind or the ego that has this one of its characteristics both a Uh a capacity and in some sense a propensity to take itself as the whole so this is that That thing where you don’t actually have relationship with with proper relationship with wholeness and i’m wondering if this is that That that delicate balance of the four-cornered field um, you know the The silla and caribdis on either side of that very delicate balance um, but actually It takes itself and presents itself as representing the whole but in fact it certainly can’t and this is what gets you in real trouble like that’s the that feels like the Two sides of the coin like one side of the coin is the the real actuality of the lived delicate balance of relationship with the actual lived whole and Particular i’m not sure if this is a commonplace thing. I think it may in fact be a precisely human thing, but we’ll see the the challenge or the risk of a particular aspect of Human holes again, i’ll say things like mind and ego that that will endeavor to present themselves as in fact actually being a whole Um, and therefore get in the way right and this is that sort of mob problem like the demonic capacity something like that So there’s a bunch of things there that maybe can we can play with Well, there’s definitely let’s say in the image of the demonic hierarchy You have the devil as being as pride being the sin of the devil. That is definitely That is there the idea is that what the what the the devil says is I am I am god, right? I I am god and so comes into conflict with the whole because he wants to be The totality of all things in in himself, let’s say and not participate in something bigger than him and that is what leads to The the the two so in terms of what we’re talking about in terms of the flip Between one side and the other saint maximus the confessor talks about talks about sins of the right hand and sins of the left hand And he says the first sin is always the sin of the right hand That is its pride self-sufficiency all of these types of sins and then those secretly lead to sins of the left hand Which are you know passions falling apart, you know, you know all these thoughts and you can’t control and so you have this This movement from one to the other but it is rooted in the the idea of Not let’s say a being not participating in a greater whole but wanting to just exist As itself like as this kind of self perpetuating thing So that I think this is a good move because Participating like what’s the participatory relationship? Right, and so you know levin s makes the famous distinction between totality, which is what the bureaucracy is trying to do Or what the passion is trying to do also and infinity And then right and so the totality is the idea that this can be this can be grasped this be closed upon right Whereas the living thing is the it has the proper relationship to infinity In the sense that the living thing has a capacity for evolution that the parasitic processing thing doesn’t have Right, like this this is the sense i’m getting in fact from maximus I’m reading him right now if if if i’ll use mythological language as jordan invited us if god was to completely remove He can’t I get it But if he were right and the demons were allowed to run completely free they would disappear in an instant Right because they would reciprocally narrow to nothing. They don’t Actually, they do not have a in fact the defining feature of them. I would put it to you is they’re incapable of evolution They’re incapable of Right that movement that is constitutive of life, which is the participation in infinity Without ever claiming to have a totality And so the thing I see in the mob is exactly that feature Right, it may be self-perpetuating and so therefore it’s different than the pure agregore But it can’t evolve or I would put it this way if it starts to evolve it precisely ceases being A mob and becomes a proper hyper agent So right right and just just to hold that little piece right there is that there’s a um Just a that thing I brought in earlier about the fact that we don’t want to be confused so the mob We have a very very nice term actually is the distinction between evolution and development Yes, yes development is Is the exploration of a potential that is already present in a closed domain? Yes, yes So the mob in fact can develop meaning it has a period of time whereby It can in fact expose a novelty that was already imparted into the reality that it was that it was at the moment of its being Yes without actually being connected to a wholeness and therefore is incapable of evolution, right? Yes. Yes Yeah, okay Jonathan this doesn’t this resonate I mean at least in some deep ways I mean like I said, i’m doing lexio divina on both dianesis and maximus right now and that’s right and i’m both I’m in sections both where they’re wrestling with right the the existence of evil and they’re both making the argument That you know evil is kind of pure self-destructiveness And like like jordan says it has a capacity for development Because it’s not completely self-existent. Although it pretends to be yeah Right, but if it was to if it was completely unconstrained by the love of god Yeah, it wouldn’t it wouldn’t it it would actually like completely self-destruct Like I don’t think i’m imposing that on them when i’m no, no, no, I think you’re right Yeah, so a good I think so the way that I like to think about it at least So would be something like the constitutive elements of an egregor. Let’s say they’re they’re these parasitic patterns parasitic structures, but they have They have the they could have the possibility of being more than what they are It’s just that they aren’t they they’re they’re they’re self They’re looking at themselves and it’s it’s called a devolving because of that. So so an addiction is a good example So every addiction is based on a true desire which could lead you into something more But because it closes itself off and then then acts as this weird Self-existent being then it then it becomes parasitical and tends to destroy the higher agent So now we have to bring in the notion of selling your soul The addiction Captures the actual vitality of a living being Yes, and it it enslaves it whips right it drives that living being it actually will extinguish it But in the meantime, it will actually tap into whatever degree of evolution that living being actually still has left in it And so if you imagine sort of your classic let’s go with jim morrison somebody who I have a sort of a connection with you a vital Genius connected to wholeness in a particular way And written by a demon That pushed the being into a self-destructive Like a local optima extraction Of what was available in terms of a short-term burning brightness that generated a an energetic flow of Capacity that was extracted by the demon until of course the underlying host died at which point The demon also evaporates or in this case has to find a new a new host a new host. Yeah um And many of us may in fact be associated with that So there’s a very interesting that’s now we’re getting to a very interesting place to begin exploring what that looks like um But I think you’re right the idea of selling your soul is that’s exactly what it is It’s like I mean you could say that every time that you see a good in itself Or that you try to attach yourself to a good in itself that isn’t leading you to better higher goods that isn’t That isn’t placing you in a system of higher goods. Let’s say then you are somewhat selling your soul or you’re letting your soul be captured By something which will feed off of it Anything anytime you profane the sacred you’re selling your soul Yeah, and so you can understand like it’s a a country for example Could have that that problem where they get caught up in one specific aspect of what it is to be A country and then they they kind of revolve around that and then it captures the soul of the of the country. So And then it ends up it can end up just devouring it. I think you saw that in in communist countries um, and I think you probably see it now let’s say In america, you can see how entertainment has become let’s say this massive weird parasitic thing That is that is devouring everybody’s attention Uh, and is in some way blinding them to higher goods in which they can participate It’s kind of capturing the soul of a of even a country and there are different forms of that. I think so Is the demonic in this sense Sorry, I I will you two can keep exploring the mythological i’ll try and play that game But I keep coming back to the biological maybe we’re trying to actually get bios and mythos and logos to talk to each other here um, but um Like the metaphor that’s coming to mind for these kinds of things is like like a virus like that, right? Um as right? Like the I’m trying although viruses can evolve so that’s where the analogy breaks down But i’m trying to get almost something like a computer virus is what I want Um that can infect and spread and replicate But it’s completely dependent asymmetrically. It’s asymmetrically dependent, but it can’t ever become a bona fide, you know Program that does anything useful in the world. Um I’m trying to get at right The reason I bring it up is because it’s a there’s a real debate and I don’t mean like just academics doing their typical hair splitting There’s a real debate about whether or not viruses have agency That’s why i’m bringing up that as the analogy because they they and there’s a real debate about whether or not they’re actually alive Precisely because they they’re sitting on that boundary, right? Uh right between right they sit right on this gray line between uh agency and non-agency in between living and non-limbing and and I i’m I feel like we’re wrestling with a deeply analogous problem with The demonic or whatever we want to call this this meddling thing is right Is it perhaps also that? Because for me the notion of hyper agency, I think is very well developed And I think the notion of aggregation is very well developed. You can get cybernetic systems, etc, etc, right? But this intermediary thing it seems like it’s difficult for us precisely because it’s falling between The right the living and the non-living the agentic and the non-agentic like a virus right, and and and i’m just wondering if if we’re struggling because We are we are bringing categories to bear on it that it Definitionally eludes Right Like i’m like no, I think I think I think you’re right, but I think that your understanding of in between Is extremely important, right? And if I if I bring about the image of the chimera like the way that the chimeras represented The demon is represented as a chimera. And so this is the in-between space This is the problem of the in-between space the problem of transitions, right? All this all this issue and so I think that this is what the virus represents by the way john You know that jacques derrida in a famous interview said that Everything that he’s ever done is about a virus. Everything that he’s ever done is is about virology Because exactly of that point, which is that the virus is is a more vivant. The virus is a living dead It’s like a zombie in a way. Yes, like this in between character that because we and then when we focus on it it it tends to Deconstruct the the the identities it tends to actually kind of devour Parasitically the different identity that it’s attached to yes. Yes, I’ve forgotten that but I thank you for reminding me I was thinking of uh burrows that language is a virus from outer space Um, I was thinking of which was I guess is very deridia Also, but thank you for that. Yeah that that I I do knew I did know that but I had forgotten that that’s a fantastic Uh remembering yes There is so I think that one of the reasons why we’re seeing This now is that on the one hand we have a system Let’s say a system of control that control of information which is the internet which is also the states The states moving into things like digital identity and digital control. So we have these systems happening so we can notice This this top-down thing that is coming down strong But at the same time we also have this deconstructive mode in the culture this idea of destroying of breaking down identities of of These parasitic behaviors and so I think that it’s those two extremes happening at the same time are Possibly the thing that is making people able to perceive these hyper agents again Which because they’re you can see they’re pressing down on us We can kind of see it it happening in a way that you know, because you think like who controls twitter, for example It’s like well, no one actually controls twitter They get taken up by these ideological things that come back down But it’s not you couldn’t point to one person and say This person controls like say the the narrative right now. It’s it’s happening organically for sure But but that was always the case to get to my point language is a virus from outer space That was always the case for language. Nobody controls it. Nobody runs it There’s nobody in charge of it yet But it evolves and it changes and it has a life of its own in powerful ways We are all asymmetrically dependent on the languages that we know right in powerful ways Uh, I think I think the point of the jonathan’s making is something like because we’re in a moment where A whole category of hyper agents are in the process of dying inelegantly Um, it’s easier to notice that that’s what’s happening right the sort of the the The bunny is no longer just sort of a no long maybe it’s no longer maybe sleeping like the rot is set in Quite significantly is a sort of certain stench And a certain Awareness that if you touched it, maybe something bad would happen to you. You don’t want to eat it anymore It’s definitely not a healthy thing to be connected with simultaneously the Kind of the game is afoot to see what new kinds of hyper agents might want to step in And integrate us so neatly into their body And so both You know the the sort of decaying dead body of the hyper agents of the past Sort of collapsing titanic like into the ocean and maybe pulling us down with them is present very viscerally um As are all the various kinds of the previous simplicities of the ways that you would go about solving basic problems in life Like going to the grocery store are no longer obvious and simple and so shit’s fucked up and you have to think about it Oh shit, I have to think about it. What’s happening? Oh, and it kind of pushes the mind into a greater and greater awareness of what’s happening and because this novelty is there there’s both a An awareness of the of the moment of jeez if we don’t make some of us If we don’t make choices in a certain direction, then we will be brought into a new kind of thing Probably kicking and screaming um and also One thousand time if we would like to have something be slightly different you couldn’t have done it in 1977 There’s no chance of that but now you can’t because the space of transitions upon us that kind of thing So I think those are bringing into the surface this awareness and the mythopoetic is activating it within us Hey guys, this is sort of one of those times I agree with that. I think that’s a good point. So thank you for that I guess I would want to say I would That the point I was trying to bring out I think is then needs to be brought into proper relation Which is I wanted to indicate that it has always been the case That there have been things that nobody’s in charge of language culture, etc, etc um, and that we we have lost A cognitive cultural grammar in order to talk about them That is also part of the problem. I agree with you jordan You know, I do that we are now in a time of accelerating rated complexification um, I I I I like this almost mythological idea of hyper agents becoming zombies Right. This is a term actually used of certain distributed cognitive systems, right? They’re like the the zombies in between the the viral entities Um, and and they’re infecting us and that makes us aware of them, but I also think we’ve lost a way of Talking and thinking and conceiving of Uh the hyper agents, uh, that is also part of the problem. Um that and right, um I think that for many people and This is no backhanded criticism to jonathan who I consider an important friend, right? But for many people They are not willing to take up the ancient language the Anquaint languages. That’s I can’t say Keep coming back to language as a metaphor here the ancient languages by which these hyper agents were properly related to um and uh And lived with if I can put and lived through And so I I don’t deny everything you said I I that there’s something happening here But I also think there there is also an impoverishment on on our side of our capacity to enter into a proper Receptivity of these entities that is also making um everything much worse Sorry that ended it very well if I wanted to monopolize the game of hyper agency Then I would impoverish the language of humanity Yes Yes Yes, yeah, and there’s also something which I think is happening Which is which is also part of this which is that as we notice? I mean, let’s be honest like as we watch christianity die, let’s say One of the things that’s happening is that there it’s leave. It’s giving the space for these competing Hyper agents to appear like jordan was talking about basically you have all these these beings rushing in and now fighting Amongst each other to figure out who’s going to take over Um, aren’t they all often just zombie christianities? Yeah, that’s right Well, that’s what I think that what I was coming to is the idea of antichrist Like I I think that this is something it seems like christians had perceived at the outset That the idea that in the moment of its death or in the moment that christianity would Would would fall apart like there would be this spirit of antichrist which would appear which would be a strange remainder a strange parasitic version of Christianity that would that would appear and would kind of take over the space and so even if you look at They’re like weird neo-pagan type things that are coming in. They’re all framed as strangely anti-christian at the same time, you know So you at least in the west for sure I mean, I don’t know about in another place but in the west this is what seems to be happening but then now the the thing is that now these small little beings are Appearing and manifesting themselves and people are noticing them And the fact that a lot of people haven’t noticed these beings before let’s say Means that now they’re fascinated by them Like they’re fascinated by them. Like I even like I think the whole psychedelic thing a lot of it has to do with that it’s like people they they they take these psychedelics they encounter these Intelligences and they become fascinated no matter what it is that they encounter. They have no way to they don’t discern These beings that they’re encountering they just encounter them and there seems to be something of that going on which is like if I can have a You know people join these little weird subcultural groups and become extremely passionate about About it because they are looking for hyper agency They’re looking for ways to participate in in common stories and in common, but there’s no there is There is no there is no way for it to They all appear these parasitic things and they’re all devouring people’s attention and you know, whether it be like star wars jedi culture or or crazy, you know Political activism like all of it is the same It’s like these little parasitic processes that are taking up people’s attention and driving them towards Separation at least like Sure, we should throw baudrillard into the mix We we brought his buddy jock in we might as well bring in baudrillard Simulations Simulations and simulacra, right? Yeah, but I would I would like to point out maybe two things to help expand one is Yeah, i’ll say it’s actually two parts of the same thing uh, I don’t know that we we are are really properly in relationship with the degree to which humans Have been living in These sort of dead decaying um No longer wholesome Contexts I I would say something like and i’m gonna make this proposal. I would say something like 98 percent 95 85 percent of all of history has been the history of human beings Being in this game of being like in the mob meaning The the thing they are not living a living whole Being system they are in fact participating in the development the exploration of the sort of Accept extraction of the decaying body of something that they are part of which lasts hundreds of thousands of years at an arc um, so we’ve been living in a period of momentary eruptions of Um, I think guess that we’re probably is properly spirit in some very specific sense Which then provides a a temporary of course in human arc hundreds of years or thousands of years temporary sort of body to be slowly decayed um And that as a consequence, we actually get very confused, right? We we we mistake the game of playing mob mobster for the game of actually being in connection with wholesome reality Um because our metaphors and our references are still pulling examples of the same fucking thing Just maybe at a larger scope or a different period of its death And here i’ll call out specifically two guys who i’ve i’ve got a lot of reference to one is carol quigley And there’s peter turchin, uh who talked about the rise and fall of civilizations um, and and quigley I think did the best job because of the period of time when he was writing which was uh, You know when a civilization is born, let’s go with rome On the on the pelotine hills just barely pushing back against a uh, the celtic invasion there’s a A point at which a certain kind of let’s say codes or generator function Uh a moment of evolution occurs in a period of absolute uh crisis This thing creates what he called the expansive principle that once that is born There’s almost like the whole story of rome for a thousand years is locked in at that point You have this arc through which it deploys it develops it explores the space that is born more or less in a in a generation And it expands to the degree to which that expansive principle gives it power the ability to extract power and concentrate it on itself It just expands and of course it explores the edges and the fringes because it’s using human beings as cognitive agents And it becomes a sort of demonic principle expanding on the backs of those who are brought in more and more and more into the body of Rome i’m noticing that as a really interesting metaphor or a mythopoetic babalon, right? But it’s already dead Right. There’s a point at which it will appear by the way quickly very specifically says when you think you’re in a golden age You’re actually at the point at which you’re eating the seed right that you’re consuming the last vital energy And then by the time you realize you’re in the decline The civilization is actually passed into the point of its of its inevitable death It just may take a while depending on how much it can continue to consume how much can eat You know how much energy was contained within the reservoir that it that it stayed And so, you know if we imagine that that’s the story that it’s only actually at the edges, right? It’s only in moments of true gathering. I would when jeez when spirit is present that the upwelling comes But for the most part for the whole of civilization, we’ve actually been living in Dead things and we’ve built the mindset of parasitism so deeply into our grammar into our sensibilities that we’re going to have to be extremely careful not to Take a simulation of something that seems like a really good copy of the real thing as the real thing So you’ve you’ve you’ve got a version of the fall to speak mythologically That’s right um So but the thing the question is So so jordan peterson his his the way that he talks about it. He says He says something like you’re right That’s how it works but the only way to do it is to go down into the valley of the whale and resurrect your father like because The problem with the way you’re saying the way that you’re saying it is that you can’t manufacture The kairos moment that will cause the monumental change. You can’t manufacture the moment of expansion You can’t make it up. It’s something which kind of which happens In a in a in a in a revelation you could say and so until that revelation happens It seems like even though Maybe what you’re saying is right. The only thing to do is to try to breathe life into The the forms that have been given to you because or else what I disagree A real but or else you have all these like 60s like cults like you have all these weird You have all these like little definitely a bad idea You know, so so what what else then? All right, you ready? Yeah, go for it. This is fresh or not fresh. It’s ancient Um, so I was really thinking about this after reading that essay Um, that was the sort of the precursor of this conversation And I was uh, sort of sitting with you know, what my apesios point of view on The top down emanation I believe is the term you use. Yeah um And the thing that kept coming up for me was a question of creation And the notion of the moment of creation And I couldn’t help but continually find myself in a circumstance where I was finding uh, Taking the perspective it just showed up for me is obvious that the moment of creation is omnipresent That is it is not operating in what would be chronos So it’s not operating in in sort of time as we understand it in that fashion Yeah, and so that the possibility of kairos is always present One does not manufacture kairos by any stretch of the imagination, but one becomes affordant to the possibility of perceiving And playing with the kairos that is always present For what it is wear what it is Right and that is sort of the beginning and the end of the story. So you certainly definitely don’t try to create A fucking cult right but beyond comprehension a terrible idea But simply dancing with the presence of the kairos that is always present Is the only ethical only proper thing to do anyway No, but I I agree with you That is I agree in the sense that I agree that so the way that I would say Say it is that the only thing you can do is become a saint like that’s actually the only thing you can do the only thing you can do is Transform your passions transform yourself transform Your your life and that then you will become in a way what is it christ says, you know become become a tree And then the bird will land in your branches, but you that has to that has to happen and so Uh, and so I agree, but there are different levels of that like there are different levels of Of kairos, let’s say they’re they’re they’re different that I can play that role But i’m not going to Start a new religion, right? I can play that role within the story that has been given to me and i’m not going so even let’s say even if you take For example christ he’s not making a new thing up You know what he’s doing is he is he is coming into the judaic tradition And then you know if you believe what he was and what he said He’s basically breathing life back into it and showing us the brightness of what was there Like kind of giving life to something which was which was given to him And so I think that that’s the only thing we can do at each of our levels Like I think it’s the same even with buddha like buddha didn’t didn’t make something up like he was coming into an ascetic tradition He looked he looked at the different aesthetics and he gathered that in and then he he transformed it or represented it in a way Which was which was full let’s say um Well, I want to respond to that. I mean christianity isn’t judaism and buddhism isn’t hinduism, right? They’re right. So there is something that’s going on there. I I I agree with you. We shouldn’t be making a religion but I’m I’m i’m wondering about Like part of morton’s point about hyper objects is that they force us into a kairos Right, like I like I do think the kairos is upon us And I thought both of you were saying that earlier there’s a sense in which this we know that something is changing here because all Of these entities are now the the plausibility of the existence of these entities is now Prominent where it was not 20 or even 15 years ago That seems to me to be an important marker about the fundamental levels of our ontology So I do think the kairos is upon us, but we’re not going to direct it like I don’t think But I I agree I agree i’m not trying to direct it that that is that is exactly to confuse That is exactly the thing. It’s all top down neither. Are we just supposed to passively wait? That’s just not really bottom up. We have to figure out the proper proportional participation And that’s what I mean by right I I don’t know if we have the language For that right now for the concepts of it. So One of the things we can do is I agree with you like jordan I I don’t disagree with you know, we’ve been playing the the the sort of You know the the the extraction model of civilization and we can’t do that anymore Uh, we’re at another kairos, which is we’re global And right we we can’t we can’t just have an extraction mentality so two things are pushing on us, right we have the advent of the reality of the parasitic entities and the hyper agents And we have the fact that civilization now encompasses the globe which it never had before And so there’s no outside. We can’t extract and move on. We can’t wait Right. And so for me Like I I want to I want to sort of bring it back around to What is it for us to enter into proper relationship with These hyper agents and these parasitic agents such Right because I mean I thought that there’s a biblical truth here. I thought yes We don’t direct the kairos, but our decisions matter to the kairos, right? And so how can we How can we virtuously and with virtuosity? Participate in the largely virtual medium in which the kairos is presenting itself so that We can discover the proper relationship To the the emerging ontology if I can put it that way that to me Is the question like I I am interested as a scientist in all of these ontological questions But what what what comes back to me is Yeah, but what’s and I think this is what jordan is saying there’s there and I think maybe you’re saying it too. Jonathan We’re at a kairos the kairos is upon us Right. We’re and And yes, and I get it the historical kairos is situated against the eternal kairos But but that’s exactly just to put the question is how do I enter into a proper relationship? to this emerging ontology so that I can have some trust that i’m Being virtuous in relationship to it. I mean the problem with by moment. I mean now going to dynamical systems when they’re in criticality They right small differences matter in the way that they never mattered before Very small differences like when when civilization sort of rumbling along along the chances that what anything you or I do can make any Difference are very small But when a system becomes hyper critical like it is now in both senses of the word by the way, right? Small differences can make small actions can have huge differences. So I feel a tremendous responsibility And the question that comes for me is okay, but how can I exercise virtuosity grounded in virtue about this? Because for me jordan, that’s the way of stepping out of the all-too-human repetition Of the the extractor function of civilization and trying to get to something more primordial Hmm So there’s a there’s a lot that just happened there a number of different things. So let’s see one I would say Ah The first thing that popped out very sharply for me was this this phrase did not make something up And I think this is quite important to really focus on that That phrase like to make something up it for me it speaks to that notion of golem right it speaks to that notion of simulation To be sure it did not make something up And I would say even more powerfully to make something up is precisely this mistake of mind taking itself to be the whole so Category air don’t do that ever bad idea And so then it’s like what does it mean to simply be kind of making choices or to to act In right relationship with the kairos in some sense. That’s all there is to it So that’s all we’re talking about. What does it mean to simply make proper choices in the context of making proper choices? Um And so You know the to express the logos with humility and integrity Is very different than to make something up Yeah Yes. Yes. Yes, like quite quite the I would say opposite but not even the word opposite It’s not the proper it creates the wrong frame. It’s not the word opposite isn’t even part of the story um Hmm and and you know if we think about the If we think about the magnitude of the notion of creation itself in relationship with the epiphenomenon of human civilization Uh that which is possible in the context of simply expressing the logos properly in kairos Uh is not a historical event We can’t sort of measure it against historical events. That’s nonsense. It’s like saying you can’t stack two grains of sand upon the other um All that has happened in the long arc of human history is as nothing in relationship to the Potential that is embedded in the creation itself so to the degree to which even a small number of people come to a capacity to Speak the logos or express the logos with integrity and humility Then we literally have no possibility of understanding exactly what might fall nor should we endeavor to do so Ours is not to understand it. Ours is simply to endeavor to do it as well as we can Um again within tremendous humility, um So that’s the what came for me as a in response to that that last little bit I think I think I mean I think your point is very powerful and I think that it talks about this idea too of the seed, you know this image for example of of the arc Is a is a good one because you would think you know the arc Noah’s arc is just this little dot in an ocean of breakdown and chaos and everything falling apart, but That’s it. Like that’s that’s it. That’s all we can do Is to let’s say manifest the seed and then that will Grow, you know with with time as the as the the shift happens Then then it’s it really is in a way the only thing we can do. Um Right Okay, I I get that But I still want to press the Socratic point which is the virtuosity and virtue of the logos in relationship to the hyper agents These are virtues and virtuosities that we are not Properly explicating and cultivating right now in our culture, right? If putting this Like here’s the emerging ontology. This is reality saying i’m going to break into everything you thought you made That’s what’s happening, right? That’s what the hyper objects and the parasitic entities are doing I like this idea that they’re degradations of the hyper agents the in-between. I think that’s beautiful But then okay, how do I how do I not exercise this wrong word? How do I participate? in the virtuosity and virtue of logos with these aspects of my ontology given that they are eruptions into what What has been a stable ontology the ontology is being destabilized right? It’s entering right and so You know this comes up It comes up for me in my practices. Yeah, right, right. How what is it like? In or what is it like to? Exercise I keep saying exercise to practice. That’s the word I want to practice the participation of the virtuosity and the virtues Of logos with respect to the emerging aspects of the ontology Right that to me it like I say, this is not an abstract problem. This comes up for me in lexio divina This comes up for me in philosophical fellowship. This comes up for me in dialectic into dia logos And that’s what I think I want like I I’m like sorry I’m getting too passionate, but that’s the part that I really want to bring into right into prominence We have a kind of You might not agree with me on this jonathan But to my mind it looks like we have a profound ignorance about this and first of all, we have to admit the ignorance That’s socrates and then secondly what how are we going to respond to it? How are we going to respond like I? I’ll stop So I mean, I think that the the surprise is maybe that There’s a in this world of kind of breakdown what one of the problems that happens is that the person who’s trying to humbly express logos will appear as a thorn at first and then and then my Might not make it I don’t know what to say I might not make it, you know might just be there to plant the seed and might not make it into the Into the holy land. Well said. Oh, yeah Yeah, well, yeah, I would say that this is this is a very How would I say? Yes In fact, it seems quite likely That making it to the whole land is not part of the not part of the gig. They’re part of the plan And that’s okay, that’s okay Um So so this is another idea. I think I feel that what was happening earlier more clearly. Um Okay, not make something up Yes Which is to say something like What is? What is real? Being in relationship with what is real, right? One is not creating one is not the creator one is being in relationship with what is real And one is allowing the creation to flow through Um Hold on So there’s maybe two or three there’s several moves that come up that seem to be proper One which is clearly incredibly challenging is merely perceiving reality for what it is. Um Okay, yeah, so where I want to go with that and I’ll say a little bit more But I want to hold this because this is what feels like the most meaningful at this moment is The the nature of reality which is transcendent which is to say that there is a This is very much connected to jonathan I think some of the things are in that essay, uh, Jesus Not words. Yeah, that which is is not that which we can say And yet it is not without order, right? There is a A sort of necessity or a proper order to being which is intrinsic to being and that we can discern and this of course is invariant under transformation to use a Contemporary geometric language and provides a ground against which we can orient our choices Uh in regardless of the fact of chaos in the larger sort of actual Human context so that’s that’s a big piece. Um, maybe it’s the only piece The other one you’re right. You’re so right because but it also one of the things that happens when you orient yourself properly In a world of chaos is that it really does It it shines brighter actually probably than in a world where all things are are going their own way And so, you know, and so it actually can really act as a transformative agent for good and ill like people will hate you And then some people will love you but it it can’t You know if you’re if you’re that mean a good example would be that if you’re in a corrupt world and you decide you’re going to Tell the truth You will have an effect. There’s no way around it. They might kill you They might get rid of you that all of this might happen But you’ll have a transformative effect because that light will shine in the darkness. There’s no way around it Yeah, so john flipping it to the language of virtue, uh There’s two ways of being in relationship with virtue one Something along the lines of sort of a a conservation law of evolutionary process so An adequately large number of blind people sort of feeling around in a In a maze will find their way through the maze, right? And they may remember it they may like try to write it down and say hey left right left left That’s how you get out. Yeah, that’s the the human beings living in cultures surviving and dying and discovering the things like humility and courage and integrity If you if you have those woven deeply into the nature of your culture You’re going to be more likely to live well than others, right? That should have that perspective right that way of looking at it The other way of looking at it, of course is you simply turn on the light And you look at the maze and you notice there’s there’s actually a structure to the maze And there’s a way of noticing just how to get through it without having to go through the process of searching groping with your with Your eyes closing your hands out um, and this is what I was referring to earlier, right so The proposition is that both of these are accurate like both. These are very valid ways um, and that there’s something like our capacity now where we are now as as as humans Is we can be aware of that and we can say, okay, there is actually a beautiful almost like a hint um a clue to This thing virtue the virtues That is hard-worn we can look back at the history of history and say okay Here’s where these things have shown up. Here’s the edges and the parameters and the shapes of the thing But now we actually are in a process where we can and I would say must Turn on the light when we asked in fact become capable of perceiving that use the the evolutionary process To kind of act as a scaffold and a support but step To the last you know that next step that is available which is beyond what’s available through trial and error Because we haven’t got any time left to engage in trial and error We have to become really significantly virtuous and the best way to do that is to actually have a much better sense of the nature of what the underlying Intrinsic order is that has been constantly rediscovered and rediscovered and rediscovered um, and then jonathan something that keeps coming up for me and I think this is very much connected to A stream that i’ve noticed coming from you and i’ll say it in a very different way because it creates a space um, I spent a lot of time last year with the hawaiians and um They taught me substantially about the validity and importance of restoration for them politically, but also from a point of view of lineage from the point of view of uh, culture that Spent a lot of time figuring out how to actually create a way of holding perception of reality and making effective choices well and As they taught me their language I discovered that It didn’t have a whole lot of the corruptions that the language that I was taught as a child namely english Um, so something very powerful also about restoration and then jon you and I’ve been spending a lot of time restoring english And in some sense group Yes, and rediscovering for me like as a as just an ordinary kind of secular western Uh capitalism suburbs kid What the word faith maybe really needs right not not the Seventh order derivative of propaganda faith that has been sort of loosely insulated and integrated into my mind, but what it may actually mean and therefore a restoration To its proper place and so this notion of healing or bringing back into wholesomeness the restoration of the lineages that are Were developed in integrity in relationship with actual reality and did their living best to build structures that would hold and transmit That capacity to thrive in relationships reality into the future is a profound now. It’s a fundamental move Um, it sits to the right hand of simply turning on the light I agree with this like profoundly. Um I I think what I need to do is bring a concrete in Um to like so I was involved in philosophical fellowship practice and what you do is you Like somebody reads a text very slowly and then somebody picks out the read The first reader usually picks out a phrase you you chant the phrase and then you do what’s called you do a kind of speech Uh precious speaking anyways, the point is in this practice you’re not speaking to the text You’re addressing the you’re trying to presence the perspective of the author so you’re trying to actually Presence the perspective of the sage so you can enter into conformity to the The perspective of the sage not just taking information from their propositions This is a way of trying to bring about a transformative relationship to texts so that they have the capacity for transformation other than just information Now what happens is people and This is part of what I teach people to do They were we were reading a passage from simon de Beauvoir and what starts to happen is other people start to They start to speak things that you can’t think about the text and they they they begin they start to become the voice of simon In a way that’s hard to explain because you get a sense of wow That’s all there and I didn’t see it and the other people are speaking it and everybody’s doing this And then there’s a pivot point and I did this deliberately And provocatively because i’ve been doing it in my practice where people I don’t just talk about, you know I don’t just talk third person. I shifted to second person address And I said simon And a couple of one other person picked it up layman picked it up and he immediately started doing that Right and and two other people said they wanted to do that Cool They wanted to do that. They wanted to take an eye thou rather than an eye it or an eye me Which is how all the discourse was going eye it eye me they wanted to take an eye thou and they were choked They couldn’t do it They couldn’t do it And I said well challenging the choke is where i’m finding most of the transformation i’m saying i’m not claiming that i’m sort of You know resurrecting Simone de Beauvoir, but i’m also not just talking to her text. I’m trying to do something else Right and what it is is for me what happens is the logos of her text is present and it conveys something that was Both universal and particular about her and i’m trying to address that and trying to get right And the and I find and people said it’s it’s uncanny and it’s weird and i’m and i’m really you know, and there’s part of me That’s like yeah, it’s uncanny and it’s weird But it’s also if I stay behind that choke point, I don’t get the full impact Of the process, right there’s and I thwart the capacity to internalize Simone de Beauvoir, uh about right and and and for me Right and and and for me that would be a loss because she has a particular understanding of the female perspective that I think is valuable for a lot of people And i’m not advocating for this No, but I think do you think maybe that I mean this is this might be might seem a little torturous on my Party to say this but do you think that maybe the choke came from the fact that people didn’t think that simone de Beauvoir is worth praying to Maybe that’s just where the choke came from. It was like I I it could have been I I thought about that but but the people were very honest And in fact, they wanted to talk about why they were choking and it was more they it was more Towards something we talked about earlier That it was the liminality of this the in-betweenness uh, they wanted to say like simone is You know the I got a strong sense of the presence of the perspective Because I make a distinction between the presence of the perspective and the full-blown presence of the person, right? um And and they said but that the it was that that was uncanny for them and they they they Didn’t want to speak it precisely because It would disturb the sort of stability of their categories That was the sense I was getting It was introducing them to a third way in which things are real neither subjectively nor objectively There’s this other way they’re real the way lerman talks about in her book how god becomes real and that third way of things being real Was deeply disturbing to them. So this is i’m using this as to say I think if we try to enter into Diologos With these emerging aspects of reality we’re going to be encountering this third way in which things are real And people find it very very challenging that’s now I don’t know yet. I I I understand what you’re saying too jonathan and I I think I i’m not just i’m not denying that that can also be a possibility I don’t think that was the case in the particular instance. I was in Yeah, I would just i’ll invoke Uh that piece um We westerners particularly americans for the past. Oh probably the totality of our being for the past 200 years or so Have been unreasonably reckless with regard to this particular question. So I’m noticing the importance of what jonathan’s presenting Um, okay, so creating our proper boundaries and we’re entering into a space john is john is pointing out. Hey There’s a There’s this place this is way of being in relationship that is real and important and present to the moment we’re in Jonathan is saying yes, by the way, we know a lot about this place. Be very careful when you enter exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes right That’s exactly my point though. I I in fact if that’s what you if if that’s what Jonathan is saying that’s exactly my point. I that’s what i’m trying to get at with virtuosity Yeah, and virtue the proper care of this third way in which things are real Because I agree with you just flinging yourself into it is is extremely foolish Right. Yeah, that’s the point i’m bringing up. That’s exactly the challenge i’m posing Because there was a moment like this at the end of the 19th century You know when we have all these occultists that are very present And so you have this moment where all of a sudden people started to notice that they could engage with these These beings and they could they could they could have seances they could manifest them they could get together and then you know Someone would would channel something else and they became very fascinated by that because it was like hey something’s happening This is cool. It’s like kids playing with the ouija board, right? It’s like hey, look, this is actually doing something and so and I think that that’s that’s maybe my my reservation Towards this type of behavior is that that there are That it will just because something happens and that things you can engage these these types of of beings or these types of residues of beings that say It yes, I think that there’s a danger in that and this is I I talked about that in terms of fascination with these with how people become fascinated by the fact that all of a sudden They’re able to perceive these these let’s say hyper agents and and higher beings and so because of that they lack the the discernment and knowing Why would I engage? And how and what is the proper way to do? So is it just out of curiosity? Is it just out of you know, what is it that i’m trying to accomplish and I am I just trying to have some spiritual experience? Am I is this aimed towards a higher good? Uh, and so those are all the questions that I would that I would definitely ask I agree and and and just to give you Probably not complete reassurance, but at least some that is all part of what I what is going on in these practices, right? Those questions are asked deeply and seriously but yeah, I do worry I do worry about the the the the sort of potential polarity here, which is like a foolish fascination Um, or or or kind of a I don’t mean this necessarily religiously a fundamentalism that says no. No, there is no change to our ontology possible Those are the two things we’re trying to sail between here and That’s for me Like I think we need Sorry This is almost funny to say but we need sort of new virtues or at least a A reno a reinventio of uh of some of the older virtues I don’t know quite what i’m saying, but like how to properly like we like orient in that Is the thing that i’m i’m bumping up against? Or maybe we need something like a fullness of the of virtues in a sense that jordan talked about which is that There’s a manner in which we’ve noticed a degrading of the words that we use We’ve noticed a degrading of words like faith words like beauty words like truth, you know And so we’ve noticed that happening where now beauty just becomes Pleasure, you know Where faith just becomes believing in something unreasonable so we have these weird transformations that have happened over the past 500 years and so by recovering the actual the the actual highest version of these of these terms and of these meanings then we we run less Less a danger of going astray, let’s say and it’s there like you I mean and I think john you know that that’s why Like I go back to to at least the authors the christian authors that I think have captured the highest version of christianity In their work. It’s like it’s like st. Gregory st. Maximus, you know Uh, these are these are the saints that seem to have had the highest vision of what it is that that that that These virtues or the way in which we can embody this reality in the world today is and so and the same with the philosophers like You know going to the neo-platin is going to to back to playdo These are the ways that we can we can do this and I and i’m trying to do that Yeah, so like and and and and jordan’s right and you’re like we’re like that that I I like the latin term inventio to discover and and and also to create But like like the the work i’ve been the work i’ve been doing and the conversations i’ve been having about trying to reintegrate phenomenology With the theory of the forms so it doesn’t become this abstract Notion but becomes this process the adeptic induction of literally trying to practice finding the through line Through line in our intelligibility. That’s what I mean about and if for and if you’re right that is in a sense a recovery Of playdo, but it’s a recovery of playdo that benefits from things after playdo like phenomenology, right and marla ponti, right? and so i’m very much trying to do that and I I guess what i’m asking for And it’s it’s too great of an ask I get it, but i’m trying to get like that i’m trying to see how that right and and and and How that can be brought into like the the proper diologos relationship, uh to Because I agree with you I to the the the that’s again why Like you i’m exploring neoplatonism so deeply about how can we get a proper understanding of? the orders of Agency if you if you want to put it that way so that we can just avoid just You know the foolish fascination which is rampant but also the opposite which is rampant which is no No, no, no, no, everything is fine. You stay with the ontology. We’ve always had just work harder boxer. Just work harder, right? um, and so sorry, I I’m hoping this is being helpful. I feel for like me like i’m moving forward in this conversation I hope the two of you also feel that as well Definitely I have a I have a before we’re because I said we go until two if you have a few more minutes It seems like there’s a good reason to talk about this just because it happened with it yesterday or two days ago uh, if you followed this story about the google employee who Who declared lambda one of the ai? About the sentient, okay uh, and so So I I mean i’m asking about its sentience. I think is is irrelevant at least to me the actual sentience of the the program But the the idea that this is let’s say that there’s a scandal related to that There’s a scandal which is finding media attention related to someone saying this getting fired or getting suspended because they are saying this Have you put any thought into that into what’s going on right now? Yeah, I have I mean first of all, I’ve my whole career has been these pronouncements Minsky famously said in 1967 within 10 years computers won’t even be keeping us as pets We have to be really we have to be my response to any of these claims are initially skeptical Uh when the when the first versions of these came out like oh, what are their names? One is jurassic and the other what is it cpt3 or something? Right, oh look look it passes the train to all you do is just take the two of them and have them talk to each other For one minute and they spin off in really weird shit really fast, right? So there’s a problem with you know human beings Interacting with these things and saying ah Because human beings have a tremendous capacity to find salient find sentience in things that might not properly be sentient Right and so that to my mind first of all, that’s not the right test Right. The right test is for us to actually have them talk to each other And see if it goes off because that is much more powerful because they very quickly reciprocally narrow into weirdness Right, which and and that is the way of telling whether or not you’ve got a simulation In the in the sense that jordan was saying or you’ve got an actual instantiation So as a cognitive scientist, that’s my first response. I want to see the correct test Right and especially don’t want to hear the test of somebody that might have been involved in the creation of this Because they’re going to be heavily invested, right? This is not a good scientific test That being said we might come to the day where that’s the case However, I doubt that it’s going to be the kind of machines that are being offered right now Because there’s good reason I think to believe that for there to be real intelligence general intelligence You have to be embodied you have to be You have to be you have to be properly social you have to be emotional, etc, etc, etc the fact that our categories for Terms like sentience are so impoverished that everybody freaks out That’s to me the thing to really pay attention to here. Like why isn’t it that we get like, oh Well here we’ve got a well thought out understanding of intelligence and sentience and consciousness Let’s discuss it and bring it to bear on this problem. No, no, no, we freak out we we we we create some sort of crypto-conspiracy theory and like like what like for me it’s like Is if this is what it claims to be it is a scientific discovery and should be responded to in that fashion The worst people to ask are the creator of it, right? The media and the politicians This is properly Right a scientific question and I would want to I would have journalists somewhere somewhere in that mix is just yeah Yeah, general purpose makes things worse What we right so as a cognitive scientist? I have suspicions about it Uh, because generally these machines are completely syntactic in nature and they work in terms of probability distributions Which means human beings can easily comport themselves and they will perform fantastically But it’s very quickly easy to reveal monster monstrosity doesn’t mean there isn’t real progress being made there by the way Jordan do you have something to say about this? Yes, I do go for it so Maybe maybe we have putting it would be something like it’s This thing that we’ve been talking about a lot The simulation And the naming that I said that maybe we’ve been living 85 percent of our lives As humans as civilized humans for the past say 30 or so thousand years In a simulation i’m going to say that that is a paperclip Optimizer if you’re familiar with that notion from kind of ai ai has this this this metaphor of Of a risk of what happens if you produce a super intelligent ai Uh and task it with the responsibility of producing the most efficient maximum number of paper clips And it accidentally converts the entire earth into nothing but a floating cloud of gravitationally balanced paper clips Um, sorry paperclip maximizer This is basically all that happens is when you you yoke intelligence separate from sentience and sapience or yes soul Uh to a narrow local optimization function And so we describe civilization in more or less that same fashion, right? It it is that mob it is that unconscious it is the egregoids in that earth that sort of variation that we’re sort of Brushing on a little bit um You know, so I would take not the opposite. I would take another perspective on this most recent, uh, What you call it fad. That’s not bad fads. Not bad um The silliness with which Such a large fraction of our collective intelligence Was effusively oriented towards something Is is just evidence of the ease by which a relatively mediocre ai if improperly deployed Could take advantage of our lower natures and the decadent corruption and otherwise Uh profane aspects of our of the paperclip maximizer in which we live To further the process of converting us all into paper clips That’s beautiful. This is the problem that I see Um, it’s less a problem of sort of like everything’s hunky dory, but we accidentally create, you know terminator two or something like that It’s more like it’s all part of a reciprocal narrowing that we call civilization and that we’re living within And we need to actually find our way out of that in general um, can I can I loop a little bit of this last piece about um, Let’s just say prayer the way you described to jonathan like you said perhaps they didn’t want to pray to simone um Over a few years ago. I found myself in an interesting conversation with some uh, A variety of different folks from the north american indigenous community different different different bands and tribes And somebody said something that I thought was quite nice. He said that um, in silicon valley. There’s a phrase that has how would you call it? It’s just sort of has obvious currency which is information wants to be free And he said to his people Nothing more absurd could possibly be uttered that information is quite often extremely dangerous and Uh, the proper thing is to have the proper people holding the proper competencies in a proper way In support of what is in fact a wholesome way of life Um, and in some sense it’s obvious like we don’t want to give these sort of the keys to the nuclear codes to literally everybody um But these this is true in general if you really think about it all the way through this capacity to be humans in relationship with being and to speak Meaning in world is profoundly powerful Uh, and ai just happens to be an example of that profound power but but the whole point is the whole fucking thing is profoundly powerful and learning how to Enter into right relationship with that capacity particularly since we’re in medias res and we’re sort of None of us are grown-ups and yet all of us have capacity um Is quite meaningfully important right now And so what I would propose is to take the thing that sort of practice that you were talking about john Uh dia logos and for almost everybody The safe place to practice dia logos is like with your wife or with your child around ordinary life Like the simplest most basic ordinary wholesome human experiences Practice dia logos there Until you’re very good at it Then consider the possibility of moving into more sort of potent practices of dia logos By the way, you won’t be able to help but it will simply enter more and more and more into your life Um, but the more it’s grounded to ordinary life the more it’s grounded to how we are just making the choice That’s in front of you better The more it’s able to be in service to ordinary life and then it is woven back into livingness And not in this space where we bring things into sorcery service from the top down. Yeah Wrong top by the way from the simulated top down which gets in the way of our relationship with the top um And that like that distinction strikes me as being sort of a fundamental distinction at this moment Which the distinction between sorcery and theurgia or the distinction you made in practice. Yeah the distinction of practice the distinction of Weaving our potency in relationship with meaningfulness within the relationship with life the actual the real actual life that you’re living moment to moment Bring it into service of that first and keep it at that level of scale And don’t do the sorceress apprentice thing and avoid the sorceress apprentice thing at all costs Once you’ve become capable of bringing a higher degree of beauty and life and life Aliveness in the relationships that are directly in front of you then expand You know build that capacity if by the way that is yours to do this goes back to the notion of living kairos properly It turns out that your moment of living kairos properly is to bring something in service to the logos in a powerful way Then do what is yours to do? um, but Probably still practice, you know to do it artfully in a very powerful way Um, no, I think I think that that’s probably at least for me That’s probably a great way to finish this I think you’re totally right and I think it does wrap up a little bit all the things that we were saying that is that that we have a certain amount of capacity to affect the world and that that is especially like if we think of hyper agents, for example, like the the big the closest hyper agent you’ll have To deal with is your family like that is the closest one that you have With you and if like you can build that into something that isn’t parasitic and that is that is together in a higher In higher participations, then I think that it’s like maybe that’s the best thing you can do, you know apart from that I would I would actually say one one thing closer. Yeah for almost all beings alive today The closest type of agent is yourself. Yeah, exactly I was actually going exactly there i’m gonna say apart from like move bringing all these broken processes within you Together in yourself like then then after that, like you said, it’s with your your your close Close people. So so guys, thanks for this conversation. I definitely would like to To continue it and to have more because I I think that this is the question that everybody is thinking about and everybody’s asking So I need some time to think about what we talked about today, but I would like to continue if you if you agree Well, uh, then i’ll end with a provocation go for it provoke us john the advice that you both made is good advice the problem is that Again we’re I I think we also need to get people into a relationship with People other than their family and their friends. This is the notion of fellowship and that We need that and we need part of the fellowship and to use your language jonathan we need part of the fellowship is the communion of the saints and that They have to be part of the family too in some way if if playdoh and socrates Can’t enter and be part of my family then i’m kind of doomed In a way, so I don’t want to i’m not rejecting the advice you gave But i’m turning it into a provocation granted what you said is correct jordan And I agree with jonathan. I think it is right nevertheless right Well, there’s a very beautiful way of synthesizing that which is to remember that the word family means those who love most Yes Right. All right. Well, that’s great. And uh, and i’ll give my last provocation to you jon I’ll say that’s why I tell people to go to church Well, okay, so i’ll stop talking uh, I just want to say thank you Yeah, thanks to both of you. This has been wonderful and we’ll definitely set up I really that was me saying yes to any future conversation. All right. Great. Me me too. I really found that There was a tripolar thing between us that really gave a powerful field Of exploring I really felt the logos coming into the conversation very powerfully And so just thank you both. Thank you very much. All right. Well Thanks, and we’ll talk again. All right Take good care