The Fall Into Meta-Consciousness ｜ with Bernardo Kastrup (More Christ) (BUaVNrktCk4)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BUaVNrktCk4

If we interpret the fall as the fall into metacognition, then I would say empirically, that’s obviously true. We broke our relationship with the harmony of instinct before we were prepared. And what happened was that we became able to develop technology because of metacognition, but without the empathy required to apply that technology wisely, as opposed to that very narrowly contracted field of personal benefit, which is exactly what we leverage when we use technology. So I would say, yeah, the fall happened before it was a good move on the part of nature or on the part of the divinity. It was too early. And the evidence for that is life as we live it today and the risks that we bring to ourselves and everything else that lives on the surface of this planet. This is Jonathan Pagel. Welcome to the symbolic world. Welcome to Our Christ. My name is Marcus. Today I’m joined once again by two brilliant gentlemen, Jonathan Pagel and Dr. Bernardo Castro. Jonathan is a French Canadian icon carver, public speaker and YouTuber, exploring the symbolic patterns that underlie our experience of the world, how these patterns emerge and come together, manifest in religion, art and popular culture. He’s also the editor of the Orthodox Arts Journal, a host of the Symbolic World blog and podcast. Bernardo is the executive director of the Ascensia Foundation. His work has been leading the modern renaissance of metaphysical idealism, the notion that reality is essentially mental. He has a PhD in philosophy and another PhD in computer engineering. So I suppose just to begin then, I’d love to know really what was what stuck with you gents from the last conversation we had and maybe some of the threads that you’d like to follow up then. I really enjoyed the last conversation. I thought that it was, I thought that I was able to understand Bernardo’s thought more and also able to connect it with the errors of thinking and research that I’m involved with. I’m more, I’m definitely interested in exploring more the question of mind as it applies to higher beings or distributed consciousnesses, the different ways that people are phrasing it. I’ve been thinking a lot about that even more now. And so that’s something that I’m interested in exploring still seeing how we can make sense of agency in terms of agency that appears above us as humans. You know, on my side, it was a delight to sort of get live confirmation of the fact that there are people out there still that consider it important to have a symbolic religious life, religious symbolism, religious icons, and consider it important to nurture those as well. I find it surprising that even amongst many, many Christians, Catholics, Protestant Christians, the value of symbolism has largely been lost. And there is a overemphasis, in my view, on morals, which is something that can legitimately be derived from religion. But morals are not the sum total of religion. There is much more to the religious life than morals. And symbolism, to me, is crucial to that. And Jonathan is sort of the living embodiment of that attitude in the world that, frankly, began to be lost during the Reformation already. The Reformation was inspired by legitimate, good and important reasons. But as almost everything human beings do, it sort of careens out of control and throws the baby out with the bathwater. And religious symbolism, iconic symbolism, has been lost even to the Catholic Church. And today is kept alive only by the Orthodox churches across the world. So it’s nice to see that that vein in the human mind is still nurtured and kept alive. Thanks, Bruno. And would you like to phrase what you just described as a question, then, Jonathan, and take it from there? Sure. I mean, so maybe I can just… So I’ve been thinking a lot about the problem of… We talked about the idea of, for example, the China, or like the Angel of China or something like that. The idea that there is some kind of agency, there are agencies which act above us, above the human level, and seem to constrain us in our own agency, let’s say, as we act. And this is something with John Verbecky we’ve been discussing a lot. He tends to be willing to use the word agency, though he really wants to avoid the word consciousness in that question. And so that is really what I’m really curious to explore a little more. Based on our discussion, maybe I can start with this. So I talked about this idea of, let’s say, the Angel of China, let’s use that word, or the Principality of China. And you were bothered by the notion of how is it that it exists, let’s say, how is it that it exists outside of the time that China exists in the world? So does it have prior existence? Does it continue to exist after its existence? And what is China? How do you delineate China? That’s the other question. Where do you find the spatial boundaries? Well, I think that I was thinking about that later and I was starting to wonder if that’s not the same problem from in the case of humans as well. The idea that we have permeable boundaries, humans do as well, both mentally but then also physically, our physical boundaries, because they’re at the level of our perception, we see them as more solid, but they are, they’re permeates. And the same would be for a higher being, let’s say a city or a state. It has, you can still locate it, even physically in the world, you can locate it conceptually, but it does have permeability on its edges and it seems to, so you can’t fix it that way. So like here I’m really going to be more like Neoplatonic in the sense that you can only fix it in its higher aspect. You can fix it in its identity. So it’s actually its name, the name used more in a more ancient way that fixes it and then its manifestation or the quantity of it will always have permeability and change. So it’s the Ship of Theseus problem, right? It’s like, is the Ship of Theseus still the Ship of Theseus even though its parts have been, have changed, have been, in my answer would be yes, it is, because it’s actually held together by name, by memory, by attention, by all these mechanisms. Before I comment on that, can I ask you a question inspired by something you said? If I don’t ask the question now, it will be lost. Sure, sure, go ahead. You said John Vervecky was comfortable using the word agency for higher levels of meditation, but not the word consciousness. Do you know what difference he makes in his mind between the two and why this distinction? Well, he seems to, he seems to, he seems to think, first of all, that the consciousness is a very specific aspect which has to do with certain amount of speed. And so speed of connection is what would give rise, let’s say, to consciousness. I mean, I don’t really agree with that myself, but that is that that is his main argument. He might, he might say I’m not getting him right, so let’s be careful here. But this is the understanding that I have of his argument is that, is that in the human brain there is, there is a certain amount of speed of connection and interconnectivity which can give rise to a state of consciousness. But that you can’t perceive that, let’s say, at the city level, the connections are slow, you know, like writing emails and writing letters and, and, and, you know, people talking amongst each other in order to organize the activities of the city, you would have a, would have a slower connection. And so I don’t, to be honest, I don’t, I don’t mind that. I think that there are just different types of consciousnesses. I don’t mind the idea that that it would be a slower consciousness or just a consciousness that has a different function than the human. But that that’s that that is the argument that I’ve heard him make. I think I understand. I think he’s basing that on information integration theory, which I think applies to meta consciousness, self-awareness, metacognition, not necessarily to consciousness in the phenomenal sense, pure experience. So I think he is probably conflating the two like a lot of neuroscientists today conflate the two. But I understand where it’s coming from. I also don’t agree, because when I talk about consciousness, I talk about phenomenal consciousness, not meta consciousness. But I understand the motivation. Now, back to your point. What I would warn against Jonathan is attributing private conscious in their life to anything we have or can make up a word for, because words are cheap. What is China? Does it include Tibet and Hong Kong and Macau or not? And depending on the decision you make here, whether China includes these three things or not, does it affect the ontological reality of there being an angel of China or a separate angel for China and another one for Hong Kong and another one from Macau and another one for Tibet? You see what I mean? Yeah, the same applies to a table in the case of panpsychism. The panpsychist says the table is conscious, has a private inner life of its own. If I pull out one of the feet of the table, one of the four legs, do I create some kind of dissociation and I create a new conscious entity? And does that new conscious entity re-emerges with the table if I nail the leg back to the table or a rock that detaches from a mountain? Does it become separate from the mountain, the private inner life of its own? And does it reunite every time it touches the mountain as it bounces off the slope? So we create a mess if we see everything identifiable through a noun, through a word, as an agent, as a conscious agent, because the way we apply words is arbitrary. The way we define sets, subsets and supersets in language is arbitrary. It’s nominal, as philosophers call it. It’s done by convenience and doesn’t necessarily reflect any ontological reality. OK, so there are two things I would say to that or that I think when I hear that. One is I can apply, again, the same problem to myself if I see myself as a conscious agent. I can ask myself, when I cut, does my hair participate in my conscious agency? You know, do my fingernails? What about if I cut a finger off? Does the finger now, you know? So I can ask the same question. That is why that I tend to think that categories are captured in their name or in the place where they come together rather than try to find them contained in the place where their multiplicity has a possibility of breaking apart, let’s say. I see your point, but I think you miss the one criterion we have to define the boundaries of us as individual agents. Individual agents with private conscious in their life of their own. And it’s a criterion that applies to us and doesn’t apply to objects, doesn’t apply to the table, to the mountain or to China. And it’s the following. If I pierce the chair I’m sitting on with a needle, I don’t feel it. But if I pierce my arm, I do feel it. If a photon in my study hits the wall behind me, I don’t see it. But if it hits my retina, I do experience it. So there is a objective criterion for defining the boundaries of the human being. And that is what you register as an experience when something interacts with it and what you don’t register as an experience when something interacts with it. Now, I acknowledge that based on this criterion, there is a question that is valid, which is, are we the totality of ourselves or are we only our nervous system? Because it’s only the nervous system that registers. There are no nerve terminations in your hair. So it’s not part of you. But then I would say, well, there are no living cells in your hair either. It’s just keratin. The same applies for your nails. So I see that there is a question there, but I don’t think it’s a free for all. No, I don’t think it’s a free for all either, for sure. But in terms of China, for example, I agree with the table. Let’s say if you look at China, the question that you ask could be answered in terms of China, so in terms of boundaries. So you would say, so imagine there’s China and then there are a bunch of people that are coming in and taking things from another state. At first, they take refuse. Maybe they take the trash on the side. And when they do that, they don’t hurt China. And China doesn’t care. But then at some point, maybe they come in and they start to take things or they take part of the land or they take certain things that China perceives as belonging to it. And then then China will react very much like a pain reaction will send out soldiers, antibodies and will will push away the threat that it’s that it is feeling on itself. And so if you see it that way, then at some point, the question of Tibet or Macau or these other identities would be something like you can imagine it like it’s a conflict of identities. This is what’s happening. There is a conflict of identity where China wants to extend its body to include these smaller identities. And those identities are resisting. You can almost imagine it like someone in the forest hunting a deer and wants to to to integrate the deer into himself. And the deer is resisting. My street has a neighborhood watch. So if there is a strange person doing funny things on my street, it will be ejected by the nervous system of the street. Does my street have an angel? Is there an angel of the street where Bernardo lives? Yeah, I don’t know. These are the questions that I’m asking. I’m trying to figure out like to what like where how can we proceed like to what it because there are some example. There are some theologians that go all out with this. They’ll say as soon as two people encounter themselves, there is a third being there. Soon as two people have a conversation, there’s a third being. And and and it’s like that’s I know it’s like I’m not sure I want to go there, but I’m just saying that these these these problems have been thought about in different ways to try to account for the manner in which in which there is a higher in which when two people come together. There’s something more than just the accumulation of the two and we experience it. That’s what the team is right. If you plan a team, you realize that there’s an agency beyond my individual agency or just the accumulation of agency that seems to manifest itself when we’re dancing together towards a common purpose. I think the crux of the matter is what one means by agency. If agencies defined in such a way that an agent has its own private conscious in their life, then I think it’s tricky to say that there is a third agent when two people talk because there is no evidence that in addition to the private in our life of the two, there is a third private in our life constituted of the combination of the two. Can I disprove it? No, I cannot. But there are countless things one cannot disprove and yet don’t entertain because we have no reason to entertain. I would caution against conflating. Cons concepts. With on tech realities like an agent with its own private conscious in their life. I don’t think it’s concept. If you notice, for example, that conversations you have with different people have different flavors, they have different implicit rules that sometimes you can’t even say. You act a certain way with your brother, with your parents, and then you act a different way in different relationships. There’s something which is binding the conversation, which is beyond even each of our own wills. We couldn’t decide to make our relationship something else than what it is. There’s a kind of binding, let’s say, and that is there’s a kind of agency that binds the relationship in a direction. And so that these are the things that I’m just trying to understand because it’s not it’s not just concepts. It’s an experience even on our side. To be the member of a team and to be playing basketball and going dribbling down the field and not having to look and then passing the ball because you know that the person is there and they know that you’re going to pass it before you do. And that and you’ve seen it in a play and then people exult. I mean, when they see something like that, when someone sees multiplicity joined together in a common goal in a way that looks almost like it’s it’s one body, there’s a joy that we experience. We experience that almost like as a kind of ecstasy, which explains the reason why sport is so is so one of the reasons why sport is so popular. So those are the types of behaviors that I’m trying to figure out how they relate to because they can be reduced to just I don’t think they can be. My allusion to concepts was motivated by the analogy made between the army of China and an immune system. And why is that conceptual? Well, because it’s an analogy made at a very high level of conceptual abstraction because there is no similarity at all between the army of China and an immune system. If you think about them literally, what is an immune system and what is the army of China? They are completely different things. You do find a valid similarity, but to find it, you have to operate conceptually at a high level of abstraction. And then I warned against attributing private conscious inner life to something to some similarity or based on an analogy that operates on a very high level of conceptual abstraction because that may have nothing to do with the actual reality of the situation. Regarding team dynamics, I’m totally there with you that something emerges, weak emergence, something emerges when entities interact and that emergence can be very well synchronized dynamics across the members of the team. I don’t think that provides reason to say that there is a higher level agent that has a private conscious inner life of its own just because of amazing team dynamics or because of the way I don’t know birds synchronize their flights in the late afternoon. And even from the fact that your personal inner life, your inner experience changes when you are involved in team dynamics, because look, every conscious agent always stands to see something happen within itself once it interacts with the outside world, including other conscious agents. So that’s not a surprise. We change ourselves the moment we interact with the not ourselves, with the world out there with others out there. But I don’t see a logical reason why this should imply that there is a higher level conscious agent with a private conscious inner life of its own that corresponds to that basketball team or to the anthill. There may be, I think the argument is stronger for the anthill actually than for the basketball team. But I don’t think the suggestion is strong. I think we can account for all that just based on system dynamics. But look, if I’m there is a thing called cellular automata in computer science. One of them is called the game of life. It’s a very, very simple game based on a matrix of cells and obeying two very simple rules, only two rules, extremely simple. If two or three of your neighbors are alive, then you’re alive. If less or more than that cell dies because it’s overcrowded or doesn’t have companionship. And then you program a system like that and you set it off based on these extremely simple rule applied recursively to itself. And you see amazing dynamics emerge. You see guns that fire projectiles. You see populations of seemingly living entities emerge. But we know that that’s the simple dynamics of applying a simple rule recursively. And we need nothing further than that to explain that amazing collective dynamics. So to me, that’s the recursive the recursive structure. That is the one that I’m attached to. Let’s say that is the notion that the notion that let’s say I am made up of smaller. Mentations, if you want to. I’m going to try to use your your desk. Try to come close to the language you use it. My idea that I recognize myself as one to a certain extent. And I see myself as one. But I can also notice in myself a multiple agents in me that are sometimes fighting towards with each other, sometimes acting in collaboration with each other. And when they act in collaboration with each other, then I experience more unity. And when they act against each other, when they fight with each other, then I experience disunity. And it can get to a form of despair if it’s too strong. If there’s too strong a disunity among my constituents, then I can experience I can experience despair. And so that and so what I notice is that that recur that recursive pattern within me. I can notice that I seem to be participating in similar patterns above me. And I can’t have like just as my as from above I can perceive my mental states fighting with each other. I know that those mental states can’t perceive me like they can perceive the unity that I experienced that that sees that multiplicity. And so in the same way, I notice that I am participating in the same type of fractal behavior above me in groups. And and and and and and I can see the same pattern where it is that if members of a group collaborate, then we then there’s more unity towards the purpose. And if we don’t collaborate, then there’s more disunity to a point where the group can die or can can actually can actually fall apart. And so that is the thing that I’m interested in noticing the recursive nature of this layered structure, we could say that moves seems to move down below us, but also seems to move up above us. First, just a very quick comment to to to clarify what I meant by the term. When I when I said recursion applied to the cellular automata, what I meant was you apply a rule to define the next state of a cell and then you apply the same rule to that next state to generate the next state. And then you apply the same rule again and so forth. And I didn’t mean fractal self-similarity when I use the word recursion. I sympathize with your intuition, but I would say the following. The logic logic question we have in front of us when we sort of take this intuition seriously, and I have the same intuition, by the way. So I take it very seriously. The logic question is the following. Are we talking about one mind that seems to be many, or are we talking about many minds that somehow integrate to be one or less? Or less. I would suggest that the very fact that you now can sit there and say, I notice myself being many suggests very strongly that the direction is top down and not bottom up. It suggests very strongly that you are always one mind and and that you just seem to be many when there is conflict across different mental processes in yourself. Well, I see it. I see it both ways. This is the way that I see it. I see there’s a top down and then there’s a bottom up aspect, which seems to be represented in different ways and at different scales. But let’s say it’s something like love. This is maybe the best word to use that there seems to be this notion that if we love each other, then we actually are becoming, let’s say I use Christian language, that if we love each other, then we’re becoming the body of the God man. Right. Could say it that way. But then it also is a top down process, which is that he is the head, we are the body. The highest mind is also the cause of the lower minds. But so you can experience it, seems like you can experience it in both ways. So let’s say if the intuition of the scaling, I know that if I want my family to be one, then I’m not going to experience it as a top down experience. I’m going to experience it as an effort to love my wife and to love my kids. And ultimately, it can be a top down reality. Like I can you can come to realize that it is in some ways. Higher, a higher mind, which is imposing itself and that the conflict that we had was a distortion was an illusion. Once we’ve resolved it. But I definitely experienced it top bottom up in my in my behavior, maybe is the best way to say towards these towards the I don’t know if that if that makes sense. It does. But I would suggest the following that the experience that you’re going bottom up is consistent with top down being fundamental in the following way. If the apparent fragmentation of mind in this universe, you have your mind, I have mine and the amoeba in swimming. My turulet has its mind and my cat has another mind. If that seeming diversity and separation is illusory because illusions are part and parcel of experience. So one mind can have the illusion that it’s many. And we know that that happens because people suffer from dissociative identity disorder, which is now clinically established as established as a fact. And they experience themselves in exactly that way. They experience themselves as being many because of dissociation. And yet they are not. They are one mind that has the illusion of being many. You experience that even without pathological levels of dissociation, when you repress your memories, repress your emotions, when you experience cognitive dissonance. Now, if that becomes the starting state, the illusion of separation, the illusion of being many. When some of that illusion is dissolved and you come one step closer to the reality of the matter, you will experience that as if it were a bottom up process. Well, in fact, it’s not. It’s a return. It’s not going forward. It’s going backwards to where it all started. So I think for sure. I mean, I think we agree fundamentally, not the illusion part. I get to that. But like fundamentally in terms of, you know, like to use Christian language again, we could say, you know, like grace. Grace comes first with without grace. It has to come from above first. Everything has to kind of flow from above. But the love part, the reason why I think it’s important is because love doesn’t annihilate the multiplicity. Love actually preserves the multiplicity. And that’s why I think it’s such a fundamental concept in Christianity, which is that love will say something like we can be both one and many at the same time. And so I can both move towards unity and perceive the multiplicity and see them as, of course, not having an equal ontological state. The unity is superior to the multiplicity, but the multiplicity can fully participate kind of indefinitely as this indefinite variation in multiplicity in the one. And so I find the language of illusion, I tend to find the language of illusion more dangerous, like in terms of in terms of morality and the implications of what that means. You know, you see that because it seems like the notion that multiplicity is illusory and that unity is the only thing that’s real. The one mind is the only thing that real seems to lead to something, at least in the ways of thinking that I brought this about, it seems to lead to something like degradation in multiplicity, where the multiple is lesser in almost in a moral sense, where you see that in the caste system. We see that in Gnostic cosmologies where creation is evil in itself and love seems to be the way that Christians tried to reconcile that with reconcile unity and multiplicity together. I didn’t mean to pass any value judgment on illusions at all. I use the word in the very dry technical analytic philosophical sense, which is when things seem to be something other than what they in fact are. It’s the seeming that is an illusion, but I didn’t mean to pass value judgment on illusions, meaning I don’t see it as good or as bad. I see it as something that happens. It’s one of the potentials of nature and it happens. And the usefulness of the idea is just to distinguish between what seems to be and what we have reason to think is actually the case. And we know that a person who is suffering from dissociative identity disorder only seems to be many because that person can be cured, can reintegrate all of its alter personalities and remember the memories of each one of them. And know that the person was one hour long and it just seemed to be many. Now, using a pathology as an example may suggest value judgment because pathology is bad. So illusion is bad. And that’s where my metaphor went wrong. I didn’t mean to pass on it at all. But there’s also I think there’s more, at least in my vision, there’s more than that because there’s a sense in which… So if there’s… Obviously, I’m making a lot of leaps here, but just hopefully you can indulge me. But let’s say we talk about this fractal system of embedded beings in each other and that this is a reflection of the one mind and this fractal manifestation of how the one and the many coexist in each other. So we have that sense. There’s a way in which… Because I see that in many of the thinkers that I admire. I see that, for example, C.S. Lewis had some very beautiful imagery to talk about that where he would talk about how as you get closer to the one, the multiple becomes more real. It actually shines with more reality because it’s connected to the one. And it’s when it’s disconnected. So you could say that about the multiple personality person. The problem with the multiple personality person is not that they have multiple personalities, you could say, but it’s that those personalities don’t know each other and aren’t united above. But if they’re united above, then you notice that you do have within you a multiplicity of desires and of thought patterns and of directions. And that you could something like love all these multiplicities and give them the reality they deserve, let’s say, in the human existence. I’m totally with you there. Sometimes I speak of myself as many when I say that I have a diamond and the diamond sets the direction, pace and tone of my life. And that I’ve learned to not try to resist that anymore, to just apply some kind of adult moral supervision to the diamond, because the diamond is a force of nature and it doesn’t really pass by the judgments. So I even speak of myself as many. And I’m totally with you that to mature. Not only as a person, but even as an entity in nature entails giving space to the multiplicity within us, accepting the existence of all that exists within us. Giving it its time under the sun as opposed to trying to slash it away to mutilate yourself or repress or pretend that it’s not there. That doesn’t work. So I am with you there. My pushback comes from that nuanced, subtle and very tricky boundary when we cross from speaking metaphorical language, which is meant to evoke something in the mind of another. And we cross it into some literal statement. And crossing that boundary can be tricky because it may involve, for instance, in my case, saying that there is a actual diamond inside me that is not me. And then it becomes a demon, not a diamond. And it’s a fundamentally separate entity that sort of tricks me into doing its bidding. Then it goes wrong. That’s where it goes wrong. And I sense that if we are too relaxed in terms of defining entities, we cross that boundary and we start projecting angelic entities everywhere in anything that we can use a word for and conceptually distinguish from its surroundings. And the reason I find it tricky, Jonathan, is the following. It’s not limited to the discussion you and I are having. It sort of gives the tone to everybody’s worldviews, even in the West, mainly in the West, which is the conflation of nouns with entities. We have nouns for all kinds of sub entities that are part of the world, the world. But these objects, these sub entities are carved out in a completely nominal way. In other words, it’s an arbitrary separation, an arbitrary inner boundary within the totality that we call existence. For instance, where does the river end and the ocean begin? Why do you say arbitrary? It’s a functional. It’s a purposeful distinction, one which fits our purposes as conscious agents. And so it’s like the difference between the river and the ocean is an important distinction because you can drink from the river, you can’t drink from the ocean. And therefore, even though there is a buffer of inter interdeterminate indeterminacy, those categories are nonetheless consciously attributed. Like they serve our consciousness, we could say. Yes. What I meant by arbitrary is that it’s nominal. In other words, it’s determined by convenience and use and does not necessarily reflect a ontic aspect of the world. Doesn’t necessarily reflect the world as it is in and of itself. For instance, there is a subset of existence that we call a car. And we say, well, the car ends here on the surface of the tires and whatever. And if I ask you, OK, give me a clear criterion or criteria for determining what is part of the car and what is not, because the car is made of components and pieces that are just brought together. So are the spark plugs integral to the car? And you might say, well, yes, because without the spark plugs, the car doesn’t function, doesn’t move. And then I will latch on to that and say, OK, then the engine is part of the car. Yes, the tires are part of the car. Yes. Now, let’s go ahead. If there is no road for the tires to grip, the car doesn’t move. So the roads are part of the car. No, no, no. Wait a moment. If there is no gravity to pull the tires towards the road, it doesn’t grip either and it doesn’t move either. So the gravity needs to be part of the car. Where does the gravity come from? From the total mass of the planet. So the car is everything. It’s the entire planet. Oh, actually not, because the planet is what it is, because it rotates and is kept within a stable orbit of the parent star. So the star, the sun is part of the car. And I will go on and on and on and on with this and never. That’s why you don’t. That’s why you don’t. You don’t. The boundary of the thing is not in its physical quantities or in its it’s actually in its name or in its purpose. That’s what that the it’s the limit of the car appears in its limb in its name or in its purpose rather than in its. If you so what you could what you’re saying is true of everything like anything that you even your even conscious agents like, you know, you can stretch that either that you cannot find a fixed a fixed boundary between things. They are all permeas. There is one exception to this. Every carving out of existence is nominal. I’ve stopped using the word arbitrary. It’s nominal. It’s done by convenience. So it’s epistemic. It’s not ontological. It reflects our convenience and not the actual states of affair affairs in the world. But there is one exception to this. And I already mentioned that the boundaries of us as entities are objectively determinable, because if I stick a needle in my chair, I don’t feel it. But if I stick a needle in my skin, I do feel it. It’s the only thing the boundaries of living minds as determined by what they can experience and what they can’t everything else carving out the inanimate universe into objects is nominal. It’s done by convenience. And therefore, I don’t think it’s logical for us to say, well, something I carved out merely by convenience has a private inner life of its own. Why? Because it’s akin to taking an abstract painting and saying I will nominally determine that the subset of all reddish pixels on this painting are a thing. Yeah. And now there is an angel for the reddish pixels on on the canvas. Why? That carving out was completely based on convenience or taste or whatever. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the states of affair beyond your own mind. That’s what I was warning against. No, I. Attributing conscious agency to everything we create a word for. Yeah. Well, one of the ways one of the ways that it seems this is something I’ve been thinking about recently. Some people watching this are really going to struggle with what I’m going to say, but that’s fine. We’ll say it anyways. So there’s a there’s a sense in which in the in the Bible, there’s a figure that appears the son of man. Right. You see this figure appear in the Book of Daniel. You also see it appear, but not named in the in the Book of Ezekiel in the divine vision where there’s the shape of a man on the on the divine chariot. And Philo of Alexandria develops this idea of Adam Katmon or universal manner, heavenly man, different ways to talk about it. Of course, in Christianity, we have the sense in which Christ is that incarnation of the heavenly man. But even if you don’t believe in Jesus Christ, you don’t even need that yet. In order to understand the notion of positing man at the right hand of God ruling over the angels. And the sense would be that that there is a manner in which I think we talked about this last time, which is that all perception of agency in the world is reflected through human agency. So it’s actually mirrored through the human, the human that we can perceive images of agency in the world, both below us or on the same level, but also above us. So the image, for example, that, you know, the image that the son of man rules over the angels, that the son of man is above the angels. And the sense would be that the angels serve man. When you see, you hear that in Christian theology. But that could have a more technical meaning, which is the notion that the perceptions of agency that we have or the cohesion that we see in the world actually are in the service of man. That is, they are real to the extent that they serve human in the with man with the big M, you know, the man with the big M. So that is for me, at least it’s been a way that I’ve been trying to think about the problem. So if you think about a team, for example, right. So higher agencies like China or all these other higher beings that seem to have some kind of agency over us, that if we have the notion that they ultimately should serve man with a capital M, then it seems to make more sense that although they have agency over us, ultimately they are mirrored through our consciousness as something which is there for us because basketball is there not for, you know, it’s there for us. It has it has a human. Yeah. Anyways, I don’t know if you what do you think about? I am totally with you. Now I converge fully with you. It is. In so far as it helps us in some way, even if not metacognitive way to project agency onto the world. According to the liniations that serve our purposes best. I think it’s perfectly all right to do that. I would call it a metaphorical carving out of the world. And I do that with myself. Even it it helps me regard my own mind as a multiplicity and talk of talk of the diamond. The diamond reflects its usefulness to me. I create the diamond by looking at myself with those lenses. So in that sense, I’m playing the role of the son of man. And I determine what are the angelic entities within me based on what will bring me forward in the most productive, deliological, you know, morally positive way. I’m totally with you there. And so could you perceive that this would. So the idea would be the way that I see it would be that that could also go awry, that process. So it could also become parasitic where where where where you know, we have we have we project if you want to use that term or there are angels that are supposed to serve us and that have that hold beings together that have agency over us, that become that become twisted because they were. They were created with with with with parasitic desires or whatever it is, or these multiple personalities that were were acting at a higher level. So I think about like Facebook for me is the great example of that, you know, where it’s like we create this thing. And then the person, the people who created it did not understand the they didn’t do it in wisdom. You could say they didn’t understand the side effects of the being they were unleashing on the world. And so now Facebook has agency over people. It actually it actually manages the way that they pay attention, the way that they communicate, the way that they come into relationship with each other. And now all the side effects of that are starting to show themselves in, you know, in hyper politicized groups and all these types of things that everybody’s been complaining about Facebook for for years now, but that you can see the process of. The process of a good angel that would manage our behavior together, going awry and becoming parasitic, let’s say. Yeah, I think we don’t even need to go to Facebook. We can stay within the universe of our own minds. I think anybody who pays attention and has paid attention for a while in their adult life knows that demons are real, not real in the literal sense. In the sense that my demons would still be here and exist even if I were not around. No, that crosses the line to literal territory. And I think that not only is wrong literally, but it flattens the message of the metaphorical world too much. But if I don’t cross that line. That there are demons within me. It’s an obvious fact of existence. There are the demons of addiction within me that are insatiable and will eat myself alive if there aren’t the angels of teleology and meaning that keep them in check. You could describe. Almost the entire depth and richness of human conscious life with the language of angels and demons. And I think therein lies the profound truth of religious language. But I would push back a little bit on saying that they don’t exist outside me. And the reason why I would say that is because I can gain insight about my demons from others. And so I can recognize that other people are dealing with the same demon that I’m dealing with. So although its manifestation is purely individual, you could say that if there’s this fractal structure that there’s an analogous aspect in me, a passion is the way that the Church Fathers talk about it. There’s a passion in me that’s out of control and that passion corresponds to something which is transpersonal. This transpersonal thing will hook on to that and then will run like a program in you and will run this parasitic program inside you. And so I can read a Church Father from the 5th century and that Church Father can help me deal with my demon because they had to deal with the same demon, let’s say. I will agree with you even there. The distinction is how we use the word I, right? Because you said, well, there are things outside me. What is the me? I think if we call the I our core subjectivity, I think there is nothing outside that because the core subjectivity in me is the same as that in you. And it’s the core subjectivity of the divinity itself. It’s that field of transpersonal subjectivity that underlies all nature. Nothing exists outside of it. So all angels and demons exist there and they are outside my ego. My angels and demons are certainly outside my ego. And that’s why it’s useful for the ego to talk of them as external entities. But I don’t think they are outside my core subjectivity. Right. So if you understand the fact that the like when you would say something like the fact that you are connected to the ground of being at the core of who you are, like the divine spark or Christ in you or different ways of expressing it in tradition that at the very core of you is the same. Right. Is that is that one? Yeah. Yeah. That one ground, I’d say. Yeah. And that’s why there is a sense, even though you may not like that sense because of the use of words. But that’s why there is a sense in which I lost my train of thought now. But there is a sense in which unity is fundamental and not diversity, because all diversity unfolds within that one core subjectivity. That’s what I meant when I said that multiplicity is ultimately an illusion, which is not to say that there aren’t levels in the hierarchy of being where those illusions are very real. Yeah. You as illusions, but very real for every conceivable practical purpose. Yeah. Well, for sure. For sure. And in Christian theology, they try to make put multiplicity right at the highest. Right there. Right. You know, the Trinity is is the really the expression of the multiplicity at the at the very core. And that that one in many are the very principle by which all things exist, like that this loving relationship between the one and the many is the mode of being of all things. And in that context, are there transpersonal angels and demons based on my own inner experience? I would say, yes, there are. I personally have very little doubt about it, if any. I see three levels of identity. One is the ego, that narrative we think of us as being that narrative, that little person born on that date, married to that other person who has this job and so forth. That’s the ego. That’s the first level. The next level is what is yours personally, but is beyond the ego in Jungian terminology, the personal unconscious. It’s all your of your repressed stuff, your the stuff that you don’t acknowledge about yourself, the memories that you’re not recalling. It’s still you as an individual mind, but it’s well beyond your ego. And it’s much, much, much bigger than the ego. But it’s still you as an individual agent. And then there is a transpersonal, which in Jungian terminology would be the collective unconscious, which is still psychic. It’s still mental. It’s still phenomenally conscious. It’s just not the meta conscious. And there are psychic processes there, psychic complexes that Jung called the diamonds that may not have a physical correlate, which evolution did not have a motivation to create in as a perceptual apparatus capable of picking those entities that are not there. They may not have a direct bearing on our ability to survive, may not pose a direct physical threat to us. So we didn’t evolve the sense organs or the perceptual apparatus to pick them out. But they may still be out there in that in that ocean of mind of which we are apart and within which we are immersed as individual agencies. And they may impinge on us. They may not have a direct bearing on our ability to survive, but they most definitely have a direct bearing in our ability to be happy or be depressed or be sad or engage in addictive patterns of behavior of being capable of developing a certain degree of self insight. Do I believe they are there? I think, well, speaking as an analytic philosopher under the premises of analytic idealism, I would say it’s a virtual statistical certainty that they are out there because what are the chances that we would have developed the perceptual apparatus that is required to pick out everything around? Zero. That’s not how evolution works. That’s not that’s not how stuff works. So there are semi autonomous psychic complexes up there, which you could call individuated agents to some extent, still part of this single core subjectivity, ultimately still part of the one, but behaving as a distinct aspect of whatever is going on that have subtle bearing on on our conscious in their lives. Sometimes even less than subtle bearing on our conscious in their lives. There are there is what you called the collective shadow, which can grip an entire country and entire civilization. And on the other hand, there are the archangels that can grip entire countries and entire civilizations as well. And they are not us as individuals. They are not us as egos, even less. But they are in us as core subjects, core subjectivity. So from that perspective, I think unity is fundamental. But in practice, diversity is what life is about. I know, Marcus, if you want to pipe in, if you have something that you’re that this is making you think about. So one of the things that’s coming across to me is the once we reach the limits of language, as it were, that we arrive at the series of paradoxes. And I got the same impression whenever you were speaking with John Verbecky that the nature of reality lets us out of this kind of narrative pattern, but also the synomological and collapse it into one is damaging. And then I sort of wanted to ask Bernardo a bit about this as a scientist to the science itself, even a point beyond itself in this kind of paradoxical way with things like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle or Goodell’s incompleteness theorem, things like that. And reading somebody like McGilchrist’s work, the work that he seems to do it on the brain even seems to suggest this, where he’s using the best sense to point beyond science and he ends up resorting to things like music to convey his deepest reflections. Does that make sense? And I wonder what you would think about that. In philosophy, there is a serious and significant school of thought that puts forward the notion that true paradoxes exist, and they can be as trivial as language paradoxes, such as the following statement. This statement is false. This is a true paradox, because if this statement is true, then it is false, but it is false, then it’s true. So the statement is either both or neither, and the law of excluded middle, one of the five axioms of Aristotelian logic, is out the window. Something as trivial as a phrase, this statement is false, is a true contradiction from that sense. But it is a contradiction only under the axioms of Aristotelian logic, and namely the law of excluded middle, the notion that something is either true or false, never both and never neither. But as every axiom of logic, this too is a fundamentally arbitrary axiom. We adopt the axioms because they seem to us to be self evidently true, but you cannot logically argue for the validity of logic without incurring circular reasoning or begging the question. So I take this notion seriously. Having said that, I think, abuse to science is proving that there are true contradictions in the world, are misleading at best and probably flat out fallacious. For instance, this notion that particles can be waves or can be particles at the same time is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of quantum theory. There is no such a thing as particles being waves and being particles at the same time. The waves in question are models of probability distribution. The particle itself isn’t a wave and isn’t a particle either. What we are talking about is the probability distributions of making certain measurements. And if you truly understand that, then wave particle duality is not an instance of a true contradiction in the world at all. That’s based on very superficial misunderstanding of the science involved. So and that’s a pity that people do that because they don’t need these misrepresentations and misunderstandings to make a strong case that Aristotelian logic has brought us so far, but cannot bring us further. That we need to revise our basic axioms of logic, particularly the law of excluded middle and get rid of it like a Dutch philosopher called Lautzenbrauer proposed in the very early 20th century. Get rid of that axiom because it leads to ridiculous situations. For instance, let me give you an example. Because we think that everything is either true or false, never both and never neither. I can prove that a completely unknown and undefined thing exists, even though I have never seen it, even though I can’t even describe it. I can’t say what it is, but I can prove that it exists by proving that it cannot not exist. Now, that’s insane. That’s ridiculous. That’s taking our epistemology and projecting it onto the world as ontology. It doesn’t work. To prove that something exists at the very minimum, you have to describe precisely what it is that you’re saying that exists. But the law of excluded middle, if it’s taken into our axioms, allows for something that I don’t even describe to be proven to exist, which is nonsensical. So I’m all for revising our logic and maybe adopting intuitionistic logic, which is the technical term for the logic proposed by Lautzenbrauer. But I think it’s fallacious to say that quantum mechanics proves that the world is illogical. No, I think that’s based on misunderstanding of quantum theory. And what is your view on? Is it Gigerenzer and people like that and his notion of unconscious intelligence? I think it’s the notion of unconscious intelligence, Bernardo, and we come across much by him that kind of rationality beyond rationalism, which seems to suggest that, well, one, humans are not primarily rational in that kind of smaller sense, but also that we are in kind of studying persons as if they could be reliably and rationally predicted. I think that we can easily predict patterns, but different populations produce different kind of results and tests by economics professors and things like that. Because us and our choices are so hard to predict in part and multifaceted, if we have this kind of, say, economic system built on these prior myths that were primarily rational in that cruder sense and free choosing agents. So then as long as we maintain that bias, will we see these more impoverished results and misleading metrics then? And I’m interested in how that’s built into our institutions. And do you see any examples that concern you? I’d prefer to call it spontaneous intelligence as opposed to unconscious intelligence. When people refer to it as unconscious intelligence, they are implicitly defining consciousness as meta consciousness. In other words, the ability not only to experience, but to know that you are experiencing that’s meta consciousness and the denial of that people call loosely unconsciousness. Well, in fact, it’s just spontaneous intelligence is when you take several steps in your line of thinking that you are not explicitly aware of taking. But those steps, steps are still conscious. You just don’t know that you’re experiencing them, but you are experiencing them if you know what I mean. So you could call these this form of reasoning spontaneous intelligence, which is a form of intelligence that unfolds without being under the microscope of explicit introspection. I do I believe this exists? Absolutely. And the proof of it is the universe. The universe is the product of the spontaneous intelligence of nature. Can start talking about the fine tuning and all that stuff, although I find that stuff disconcerting and probably human projection is involved here. But even if the order of the universe is a human projection and there is a very strong case to be made that it is, and I personally believe that it is. But even if it is that, then then it’s a projection of spontaneous human intelligence. Because we don’t catch ourselves constructing the order of the universe. If you know what I mean, it’s just there. Once I made an experiment, I decided to I’m an amateur chess player and I don’t play tournaments or anything. I just have fun playing chess and I don’t want to ever go beyond that. But once I decided to do an experiment and play chess without what chess players call calculations, which is the difference is the following. Sometimes you look at the position on the board and something in you knows how you should go forward, what your next moves should be, what you should try to do. But you don’t know why you know that you don’t know why you think that this is the right move. And what you do is you start calculating. You start playing out the moves in the imaginary board inside your head. Often you catch chess players like this. They are not napping. It’s just that they are calculating 20 moves ahead. And if they’re watching the board in front of them, it disturbs those calculations because they are seeing pieces not moving while they have to see the pieces moving now. And the board, the physical board keeps on bringing them back to that position, doesn’t let them calculate. Or you often see chess players doing like this. Nakamura, which is an American chess player, he’s often like this. And you’re like, what does he see in this ceiling? Well, he sees the chess board 20 moves ahead. That’s calculating. I decided to play three chess matches without calculating, just following my intuition. And the results were well above my ELO rating. I had a much higher score than normal. And then I started believing in this and I played the fourth game totally spontaneous and I lost miserably. And what I’m trying to say by this is the following spontaneous intelligence definitely exists. It’s definitely very powerful. But if you indulge in it too much, you can step on mines. It can go wrong. So the ideal situation is how to find the balance between explicit intelligence in which you take your steps of reasoning explicitly and you cross check them. And the holistic approach of spontaneous intelligence, which is not focused on discrete steps, but focused on seeing the whole pattern at once. Finding that balance is the key to being successful in many aspects of life, not only at playing chess. Was that anything about Jonathan? No, I’m seeing I really I find it very interesting what you’re talking about because you can find examples. You find types of people, too, types of people that have followed that spontaneous, you know, and for example, the Franciscans for a short part of their existence. They would get up in the morning, they would just turn on themselves and then whatever direction they would stop, they would just go in that direction. And then they would just, you know, without food, without anything and just encounter whatever it is that they encountered, you know. And so like Renato said, it probably led to some great things, but also led to some pretty some darker moments. Because I know people like that. I know people like that. They they they in Christian terms, people say something like we follow the Holy Spirit, like the Holy Spirit guides us. This kind of intuition that they sometimes it goes great and sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Like just worse than any. I mean, you get up in the very worst place. So so I kind of understand that. Can I make a quick comment on that, Jonathan? Yeah. Just to make sure that people understand my position. I don’t think the Holy Spirit ever gets it wrong. No, I know. Of course not. No, I agree. But, you know, people just go with their. No, no, no. Without that. That’s the point. Yeah. When it goes wrong, it’s not the spontaneous intelligence of nature that failed. It’s when we take. Ourselves to be the subtle intelligence of nature. Yeah. You see what I mean? It’s a very, very subtle state of mind to be in tune with the subtle intelligence of nature that underlies us and everything else and believe your own bullshit. Yeah. In terms of in terms of the chess that that the training that you gave yourself, let’s say for many years, I imagine playing chess is also the proper body in which to maybe let that intuition go. Because you just get someone who’s played chess once in their life and say, yeah, just just follow your intuition. You might not make it very far. Like there’s there’s as if there’s an you have to imagine like a sports player to you play your 10,000 hours or whatever. And then at some point you stop thinking. You just act because it’s so integrated in you that it’s almost leading itself into into realizations. I get that when I’m carving now, when I’m carving for so long that I just just go and I don’t and I just experience this this flow of movement where I don’t have to think about what I’m doing. It just happens. I think you practice your your right training is what allows us to sort of synthesize to that frequency, that carrier wave of subtle intelligence in nature. If you’re not trained, you can’t connect to it. But I think now I will go now our roles will be reversed. I stopped being the analytic philosopher now. I think we are lying on top of a vein of subtle intelligence that is not ours at all. And it doesn’t depend on training at all. It’s just very, very extraordinarily difficult one to synthesize with it to resonate with it. And two, once you do resonate to distinguish that resonance from your own bullshit like my fourth game of chess, I thought, oh, I can win everything if I don’t think I’ll just play the first move that comes to my mind and boom, then I lost because I mistook my own bullshit for the subtle, spontaneous intelligence of nature. But I will tell you another part of the story that I was not planning to tell. And I don’t know how you’re going to judge it. But several years ago, as a philosopher of mine, I thought that it would be an accept unacceptable for me to talk about mind and consciousness without studying my own mind and consciousness in every way available and one way available in my country where it’s legal is to use psychedelics. There was another time in which I played those games of chess during the reentry of a psychedelic trip. And I don’t know whether you have ever taken psychedelics. You probably don’t need if you live a symbolic symbolic life, you probably don’t need that. I have I had a very, very hard mind. So I needed to take a hammer to it to sort of open myself up to certain things. So I did need it. I mean, it has been useful. It’s a phase of my life that is behind me now. I don’t feel compelled to do it again. But at the time I did, it has been very helpful. But one thing you anybody who has done psychedelics know is that during the reentry, when you’re sort of beginning to reconstitute your daily self, your mind is sort of reconstituting its narratives, reconstituting its cognitive associations, that web of associations that gives it a sense of personal identity. During that transition, you there’s no way other way of putting this. You can’t think straight. You’re very open as if you weren’t dreaming. When you’re not thinking straight, your the imagery of a dream unfolds spontaneously. And that characterizes that phase of a trip. When you begin to come back, you can take certain decisions. There is a sober part of your mind standing behind you, but you can’t think logically. In other words, you can’t calculate in a game of chess. And I played games of chess in that state. And I won all of them. And if you ask me, was that based on my training? No, because that that mind standing behind me was saying to me, I have absolutely no idea why I want to play this move. No idea whatsoever. It looks like a completely absurd move to me. Why am I doing this? Fifteen moves later, to be clear why I absolutely needed to play that move. And I knew it. Was that because of training? No, I think it was a very, very difficult, subtle state of mind in which you plug in to a collective stream of spontaneous intelligence in the mind of nature. And if you plug into that for briefly, before your ego reasserts itself and mistakes it for its own bullshit, that brief window of time, you are manifesting spontaneous intelligence that has absolutely nothing to do with your training. Look, let me be more objective now. There are people who suffer from so-called acquired savant syndrome in which you suffer head trauma, damage to your brain. Ordinary brain function is not impacted, it’s damaged. And they become geniuses. Like they can do enormous mathematical calculations instantly, as fast as a computer. And if people ask them, how did you know the result? They will invariably say, I don’t know, it just came to me. I looked at it and I knew the answer. They don’t take explicit metacognitive steps of reasoning to arrive at the solution to a mathematical problem. You just do it. And that is a possibility, that’s a capability that is unlocked by damage, brain damage, lightning strikes to the head, head trauma from car accidents. Even the progression of dementia can unlock acquired savant. So how do you make sense of that? I would say the only way to make sense of that is that damage is so specific. They got so lucky in the kind of damage they suffered that instead of the damage impairing their normal metacognitive intelligence, or in addition to impairing their normal metacognitive intelligence, it unlocked a part of the human mind that blocks out the spontaneous intelligence of nature in order to benefit metacognitive intelligence. In other words, deliberate reasoning, deliberate thinking, deliberate decision making, which probably had all kinds of evolutionary advantages because it’s based on the notion of an individual self that needs to survive. And that somehow obfuscates the spontaneous intelligence of nature that is always at the foundational level of ourselves and the whole of nature. And when that is unlocked by, of all things, trauma, damage, then you see true spontaneous intelligence at work that has nothing to do with training. Acquired savant didn’t train musical composition, they didn’t train mathematics, they didn’t train any of that. Yeah, no, I’ve seen examples that there was one guy who all of a sudden could see, he saw geometric shapes everywhere, like you could see extremely complex geometric patterns underlying reality and would draw them just freehand, like these complex geometric patterns. So I know it seems like there’s something there for sure. I have a question for you because it’s something that I have heard you talk about and I hear you brought it back again in this conversation, which is the difference between cognition and metacognition and let’s say the fact that we are metaconscious or self-conscious. Do you perceive or do you think that there are other beings that have that characteristic or do you think that at least as you know, only humans are self-conscious? I think to the degree that humans are self-conscious or metacognitive, only humans are. I think there are and there’s enough evidence to very seriously contemplate the possibility that cetaceans and pachyderms and perhaps some other higher primates are to some extent metaconscious, but not to the extent that we are. And the reason I say this is the following. In the evolution of metaconsciousness, there is a point in which you cross over a crucial boundary and that’s the boundary of instinct. When you become extremely metaconscious, you stop listening to instinct, you stop listening to the spontaneous intelligence of nature, and you will listen only to your deliberate planning, your deliberate action taking. And that unbloods us from the web of instinct that keeps nature balanced. And that’s why we risk destroying the planet and ourselves. Well, destroying the ecosystems of the planet. We will never destroy the planet. Give it a million years and it will be full of trees and animals again. But we would destroy the present ecosystem. Why? Because we have become alienated from the ebb and flow of instinct, given our extremely high level of metacognition. And even if cetaceans and pachyderms have a degree of metacognition, it clearly has not yet been enough to unplug them from instinct. Otherwise, they would be building technology by now. Okay. And so I imagine that when you look at the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, you see that in that story, which is the shift between cognition and metacognition and the knowledge of good and evil, let’s say. Yeah, that’s when we were expelled from the garden. What a beautiful metaphor for when you are expelled from the web of instinct. I mean, the story in Genesis, it raises the hairs in my body when I think about that story, because the level of insight in that story, if you have the eyes to read it and you don’t cartoonize it by taking it literally, the depth of insight there is amazing. And when you think, sorry if I go on a tirade, stop me if I shouldn’t. But when you think of how long it took us to see the truth in that story and how much effort it took us, it raises the question, how did the Jews exiled in Babylon two and a half thousand years ago come up with that stuff? How on earth could they? I mean, it’s astounding. Only very recently when we’ve discovered that the rise of symbolic thinking in humans occurred only 30 to 50,000 years ago. About 150,000, maybe 250,000 after whatever genetic mutations happened that made us anatomically modern humans. We have existed as anatomically modern humans and biologically modern humans for two to 300,000 years. But only 30 to 50,000 years ago did we begin to think symbolically. In other words, did we develop metacognition, which is astounding because whatever mutation has led to our unique ability to think symbolically happened and was fixed in the genome. Thousands of years before it was of any use. How on earth this contradicts evolution in a certain way? And there is a famous guy, Ian Tattersall, the curator of the American Museum of Natural History. He is on record saying in his book, Masters of the Planet, he’s saying the only reason we have to believe that such a thing, the fall, that such a thing could ever possibly have happened is that it did happen. Otherwise, it would be reasonable. It’s beyond implausible. It’s downright ridiculous that it could happen. And the Jews exiled in Barcelona in Babylon knew it two and a half thousand years ago. That boggles my mind. I don’t know about yours, but I just become disorientated with it. Yeah, well, I mean, because you see, according to the genesis, we didn’t fall into humanity. We fell as humans. That’s an important differentiation, which is now what we know scientifically was the case. Sorry, sorry to interrupt you. No, no, no, no, that’s fine. So this is, I mean, this is really where my question is leading to this problem, because I’ve shown you, even now you were talking about unconsciousness and you’re talking about, say, the ground of being or the ground of subjectivity as being an unconscious. And so you seem to be you seem to not like the idea that meta consciousness is. So let me rephrase this. So there’s a sense in which you see this in the mystical fathers. You see this in San Efrem and several of the Church Fathers where they talk about how the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, the reason why it made us fall was because we were not ready for it and that it is ultimately a blessing, but it’s a blessing that had to be prepared, you could say. And so either either Adam and Eve would have sometimes Adam and Eve are represented as children. You see that in St. Irenaeus, for example, and that that this fall is necessary for their it’s like an educational process in which they will then come back up on the other side as having integrated both the consciousness of good and evil and the garden. And the image of that, of course, is something like the heavenly Jerusalem. We see that at the end of the Bible. And so there’s a sense in which at least in this type of vision that conscious meta consciousness is what brings about the fall, but is ultimately which actually makes us similar to God. And and because I’ve heard you talk about God more as this kind of unconscious or basic consciousness that doesn’t have metacognition. So I was wondering what your thought is on that, which is that at least in the Christian understanding and I think in many other religious understandings, the idea that God is unconscious or is just this is very, very basic form of conscious that doesn’t have metaconsciousness seems to imply that metaconsciousness is is a degrading from that or that it’s a fall again, that it’s only a fall or that it’s it’s a it’s a that it’s a less it’s less than what where it comes from. There’s a lot. Sorry. There, Jonathan. Go back to to my true story and how I played chess extremely well while lacking metaconsciousness because I was under the effect of drugs. If you regard it from that perspective, metaconsciousness was limiting because a limited but deliberate form of intelligence metaconscious intelligence obfuscated a spontaneous, much broader but less reliable form of intelligence. In other words, the spontaneous intelligence of nature. But the guy who won those games was the spontaneous intelligence of nature. Yeah. Unobfuscated by my explicit deliberate reasoning. From that perspective, it is a step backwards because it contracts intelligence. But whatever stays within the field of metacognition, which is a contracted field, vastly contracted field, it’s like looking down a microscope. You only see a tiny part of the world. But that tiny part now is visible. So you are as far as that tiny part is concerned, it’s better. You see it more clearly. It’s like looking down the microscope. You see one square millimeters, but you see it more clearly. It is better, but it’s worse in the sense that you don’t see anything around it anymore. And to me, that’s metaconsciousness. And that’s why metaconsciousness was favored by evolution. Because as far as survival is concerned, you only need to look at the tiny subset of existence that is in your immediate surroundings, because that’s what has a direct immediate bearing on your survival and your ability to reproduce. So metaconsciousness is like a microscope. It blinds you to nearly everything, but it makes you see much more clearly whatever remains within its field. It obfuscates everything else, but it amplifies what it focuses on. So it’s both a step forward and a step backward. Now, in the Bible, it’s written that the serpent tells Eve that after she takes a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she will be like God. Now, you may interpret that as God being metaconscious, but interpret it differently. And I’ll show you with you my own interpretation. The key characteristic of the deity is the ability to create realities. That’s that ultimately is the single most defining feature of the divine mind is the ability to create realities. A non metacognitive mind cannot create realities because it’s always in the present. That’s the Eastern Advaita and Buddhist approaches. You’re always in the present. In other words, you’re always in the world created for you by the divinity. But when you metacognize and you identify yourself as a subject of your experiences as opposed to the experiences themselves, metacognition is what allows you to say I have hunger as opposed to I am the hunger. If you’re always in the present, you are the hunger, but you don’t have hunger. You are the hunger. You are the world created for you. But when you become metacognitive, you invent futures and you manipulate pasts. You create worlds, you create realities. And I think it is in that sense that Eve would become like God having taken a bite from the fruit of metacognition. And that is a fall in the same way that looking down a microscope is a fall. It’s a contraction. It obfuscates everything else. You become blind to everything. But it is a step forward in the sense that it allows you to see that tiny subset more clearly. So have you ever thought about creation that way, which is that if you read a creation account in Genesis, you have at the outset you have, you know, heaven and earth, the earth is chaos and void, emptiness and void. And then God creates names at the outset. And if you see the way it works is that God says, let there be light and then God sees and God says it is good. It is good. Right. And so there is that narrowing. It seems like that narrowing is actually part of the separation of phenomena itself, because the completely unbridled potential or just like, you know, that anything that has no identity yet that is completely just potential is not in. You can’t inhabit that. Like even when you took your psychedelics, you didn’t. If you had, I mean, imagine that some people say they do reach that point of complete, you know, but then you couldn’t stay like that for, you wouldn’t stay there for very long, right? Because you would probably just die of hunger at some point or you wouldn’t. But there has to be this focus where there is a contraction and pointing and then a recognizing of the good. So that’s why I mean, I really like the idea that you’re saying that there’s a sense in which metaconsciousness is part of the creation of worlds. I think I see that in the in the Genesis creation narrative itself. I will agree with you. I’m not going to interpret evidence differently just to fit my narrative. So I will agree with you that that part of Genesis where God passes value judgments on his creation is an indication, an indication of metacognition because value judgments can only be passed through metacognition. That’s why animals are amoral. They are not metacognizant, so they can’t pass value judgments. They carry no moral responsibility. We do. And the Bible does suggest that the creation, the creator divinity was metaconscious in so far as it could pass value judgments. So I’ll give you two answers based on a purely analytic approach, the natural sciences and no empirical evidence, rational thinking. I would say we have every reason to believe that the broader mind of nature, mind at large, is not metaconscious. Why? Because metaconsciousness seems to have been something that evolved at great cost through eons of evolution by natural selection. It seems to be an ability that forms in response to a challenging environment, an environment that requires appropriate and timely responses to environmental challenges. And therefore, that narrowing of metacognition that allows for a more efficient localized, narrow, but much more efficient and clear response was favored by natural selection. So if metaconsciousness is something that evolved, then it was not there in the beginning. And the divine mind or the mind of nature, that especially unbound field of subjectivity that underlies all nature, did not have to put up with the challenges of a local ecosystem. So it wouldn’t have metaconsciousness. Another reason is we don’t seem to see metaconsciousness in the simpler forms of life on this planet. The evolutionarily speaking earlier forms of life, there is a clear correlation between more evolved species and increasing metaconsciousness. Bacchyderms, cetaceans, and higher primates are highly evolved species. If you look at paramecium or paramecia, which are single-celled organisms that go after food and run away from danger, even though they don’t have a nervous system, they react instinctively. Crocodiles are very instinctual creatures. You can tell precisely how many inches you have to be close to a crocodile before it tries to lounge on you. It’s not a deliberating metaconsciousness. So from an analytic and empirical perspective, I would say we have every reason to think that metaconsciousness is evolved and it’s not there from the beginning. It’s not in the mind of nature. It’s not in the mind of God, which doesn’t mean that nature isn’t intelligent because spontaneous intelligence isn’t metacognitive. And spontaneous intelligence, although it doesn’t amplify things, it has a very broad view. It’s the telescope as opposed to the microscope. It doesn’t discern the microscopic details, but it sees a lot more. Now, if I ignore analytic philosophy and natural sciences, and we speak purely from religious scripture and religious insight, then I would have to acknowledge that there are plenty of suggestions throughout the religious traditions of this world. That the creator divinity, even if it’s not the ultimate divinity like inostasis, the creator divinity was metaconscious. That seems to be suggested throughout. Do I think that is a possibility? Well, certainly it is a possibility, but in my mind, it’s a possibility that would require the following. It would require this reality to be a deliberately created reality and not a spontaneous naturalistic unfolding of what is not a product of nature, but an artificial creation with rules set in a premeditated way for a deliberate purpose. In other words, a kind of theater that was set up for a purpose by a metaconscience intelligence. That’s what it would require. Do I see external empirical evidence for it? No, none. Do I see conceptual reasons to entertain this possibility? No, none. Do I have intuitions every now and then that resonate with this possibility? Yes, I do. And so if we take that again, so let’s say we go back to this notion of metacognition as being in some ways a fall and a narrowing, but there is also a manner in which we act. Once we have it, we act in relationship to that. That is that, for example, spontaneous intelligence. A berserker has spontaneous intelligence, right? That’s actually a good example. Like the berserker enters into a state of flow where they can kill indeterminately with the strength of 10 men, and it’s an ecstatic moment. So there’s a sense that natural intelligence or that spontaneous intelligence that we see in animals does not have a sense of the good, at least not the way that we do. And so once we have that, then we act. That’s why it’s also the knowledge of good and evil. That’s why, at least in Scripture, it is related to it is a fall, but it is also an entering into something which can bring more, let’s say. Value judgments, morals. Yes, exactly. So that’s why I, because the thing I’m worried about in the way you describe it is that if we don’t, let’s say, I’ll say it in very gross religious terms, like if we don’t have a God that’s good, then we have a problem down the line, which is that at some point there’s no justification. There’s no ultimate justification for the superiority of our ethical intuitions to the intuition that would drive a berserker to rape and pillage and kill everybody in a village. You know, and so where does the sense of the superiority of one over the other, like, where does that come from? Most of what you will see or hear me argue is what I can argue for based on analytic reasoning and evidence. And if you put me against a wall and a gun to my head and say, okay, now make your best bet about what’s going on. If you’re wrong, I’m going to shoot you. If you’re wrong, I’m going to shoot you, then that’s the position I would hold the position informed by analytic reasoning and empirical objective evidence. But I entertain other possibilities in my mind, which I don’t talk about because I can’t argue for them. I cannot write a book by saying, well, I have an intuition that this and that. Yeah, okay. Thank you very much. But why do I care? Right. Why would they read their care? So I would try to defend the point you’re making from an analytic perspective, which doesn’t mean that I completely reject the point you’re making. Okay. I just tried to do my best to defend it from an analytic perspective. I think the responsibility for morals, for morality in the naturalistic universe, in other words, a universe that unfolds spontaneously because it is what it is, as opposed to an artificially set up environment that follows a premeditated plan. In the naturalistic universe, the responsibility for moral judgment is stronger for us than it is in a universe created by a meta conscious divinity that has its own moral book. Because in the latter case, we are just ignorant. Somebody has the right answers. So the responsibility lies more with that entity, which then raises questions like if God knows what’s good, why does it allow the berserker to do what it does? Who has ultimate moral responsibility for the berserker doing what he does? The berserker, you and I, or the God who created this whole thing and set it all up? Who has the moral responsibility for what’s happening in Ukraine right now? In a universe that was meta consciously and in a premeditated way set up by a thinking self conscious divinity. Is it you and I? Is it Putin? Or is it the divinity that allowed for Putin to exist in this reality? In the naturalistic universe, the responsibility is ours, including the berserker. And now you might ask, well, how do I know who has the best moral call, the berserker or me? There is no outside answer for that question. That’s the price you pay in a naturalistic universe. Nietzsche has been brilliant in the late 19th century, picking apart Christian morals. And to this day, it’s difficult to refute some of the things he says from a purely logical and evidence based perspective. And that was the genius of Nietzsche, that he could just trounce things that seem to be morally obvious to us and actually defend the very opposite, the Superman, the morals of the strong as opposed to slave morality. So the answer is I don’t have an answer, Jonathan. I just would defend the notion that whatever the answer is, the responsibility for finding the answer is ours. We carry the ultimate moral responsibility in a naturalistic universe that has no pre written book of moral codes because people tend to think that unless morals are etched in stone before the rise of human beings, then morals don’t exist. Moral responsibility doesn’t exist unless it’s grounded on something prior and external. I would argue the opposite. It’s the very fact that in a naturalistic universe, there is no tables of moral codes. It’s that very fact that imbues in us the ultimate supreme moral responsibility. The responsibility for discerning between good and evil, the responsibility for reacting to what Putin is doing now. It’s not a satisfactory answer, but it’s the best. No, no, no, but I understand. And I think that you obviously put your finger on the most difficult question. The problem of evil or the problem of suffering is definitely always the one that makes all religious people stand back and wonder and question because that is definitely something that the way that Christians would defend the answer would be that it is something that is related to the fall somehow, that there’s a relationship to the fall, that we have an intuition in us, that things should be different. We could at least frame it that way. That there’s something awry about the way things are. There’s something which is not aiming properly towards the good, that isn’t properly aligned towards the good. And we represent it in this story of the fall. And so there is a sense in which the fact that things are not good is due to, is actually due to us. So I do think that also in the Christian cosmology, like the real Christian cosmology, there’s a sense in which the responsibility does come back on to us. Because although it’s not something that you can describe scientifically, because if you try to do it, it gets weird. But that intuition is real, the intuition that something is wrong, something isn’t right. And we have the responsibility to aim ourselves towards the good and that that is the best thing we can do to reshape the world, let’s say. And if we’re willing to end it, of course, the image of Christ ends up being the ultimate image in the Christian cosmology of that. It’s actually through self-sacrifice that this will happen. That if you are able to give yourself to the good, then that’s the best thing you can do. But I agree that for many people, that’s not enough, especially in a scientific frame, because they’ll say things like, you know, things have been dying and eating each other and killing each other for millions and millions of years before humans, humans woke up, let’s say. But nonetheless, I think that if we understand it more as an experience, I would say that would be the best way that I would frame it. There is something you said earlier that there is some theology suggesting that the fall in and of itself was not bad. It was the timing. It was too early. It was before we were prepared for it. Eating the fruit was before we were ready. If we interpret the fall as the fall into metacognition, then I would say empirically, that’s obviously true. We broke our relationship with the harmony of instinct before we were prepared. And what happened was that we became able to develop technology because of metacognition, but without the empathy required to apply that technology wisely, as opposed to that very narrowly contracted field of personal benefit, which is exactly what we leverage when we use technology. So I would say, yeah, the fall happened before it was a good move on the part of nature or on the part of the divinity. It was too early. And the evidence for that is life as we live it today and the risks that we bring to ourselves and everything else that lives on the surface of this planet. The fall is nature’s biggest gamble if it was a gamble or nature’s potential biggest mistake if it was a mistake. And from that perspective, I think the language of we are born in sin makes sense, not in a literal sense, but we are born in sinning so far as we are born metacognizant. Having said that, and while acknowledging that metacognition is the the fountainhead of suffering, psychological suffering, there is this other thing that is horrible and doesn’t depend on metacognition, that’s pain. And nature has copious amounts of it. I always refer to this documentary that impressed me very much a few years ago, A Pride of Lions isolated a grown elephant from from its group and brought it down and ate this elephant from the hind legs upwards for six hours before the elephant passed out. That’s nature. You know, earthworms are being cut alive into wiggling pieces by ants in your backyard every day. That’s not good, if you ask me. If I were the divinity and if I were metaconscience, I wouldn’t do that. On the other hand, and that’s when I surrender to everything you said, What we consider good or bad is largely dependent on scope. If you don’t have a broad enough scope to see how what seems very bad locally is ultimately good, then you can’t make a wise moral judgment. The philosophers have a problem that illustrates this. The problem is the following. There is a train coming and there is a wide split on the railway. And on the one side of the split, there is a guy tied down to the rails. And on the other side, there are four guys tied down to the rails. And the railway is set up in such a way that the train is going to go to the one guy as opposed to the four and it’s going to kill that one guy, but the other four will survive. And you have your hands on the lever that allows. So sorry, the train would go to the four guys, would kill the four guys if you don’t do anything. And the one guy would survive. You have the hands on the lever and you can switch the rail line in such a way that the train kills only the one and not the four. Yeah, but now you’re killing him. Now you are the one. And you only see you. You don’t see the other four. He only sees himself and you with your hands on the lever and he sees you moving the lever. So the train goes to you, to him. From his narrow scope, you have committed an unfathomable act of evil. But from a broader scope, you’ve taken the decision that one should take. So who are we to judge? Who are we to judge whether that elephant shouldn’t have suffered for six hours? I have to go, but I love this guy. Thank you so much for this conversation, Bernardo. I think like I still feel like we’re always just scratching the surface, though. That’s the thing. We do a third round. I enjoy it very much. I really enjoy it. I appreciate it. And I’d definitely be willing to go for another round. So thanks so much. And thanks, Marcus, for organizing this. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you, Bernardo. It’s been a pleasure to listen to you both for the most part again. And yeah, I’d love to do it again with you guys, of course. Online, number one and number two, I was thinking if either of you are interested in coming to Ireland, say next year for an in-person event, that would be fantastic. I know we had a great event recently with Paul Van der Kley and Paul Kingsnorth and that. So God willing, we can make it happen. And I don’t know if you have any interest in that. I’d definitely be. I mean, I’ll be probably traveling a few times to the UK next year. And so if we can organize it, I would love that. I know Bernardo is probably super busy, too, but if it can work, I’ll be there. I cannot promise. I would even say it’s unlikely. I get I would say I have to deal with lots of requests, which is a great honor. It’s not something I complain about at all. It’s humbling. But every time I have to jump on a plane, it’s not only the time of the event, but two days before and two days after. Yeah. And that can be very tricky. So I’m not going to promise you. On the other hand, one of the holes in my life is I have never visited Ireland. I’ve gone around the world multiple times and I haven’t been directly acquainted with the green fields of Ireland. So who knows? No problem. Thank you so much again, gents, and have a lovely evening. God bless you. Thank you, guys.