The Psychological Drivers of the Metacrisis John Vervaeke Iain McGilchrist Daniel Schmachtenberger

welcome everyone this past September September 2023 I had the great pleasure of sitting down in Oxford with Ian Mel Christ and Daniel schmachtenberger and we recorded this video it's an intense and deep and exciting discussion in which we use our Collective attention and whatever Collective wisdom we were able to muster to try and address the question of the meta crisis that's facing us this video has shown up on Daniel's Channel and on Ian's Channel but I thought my audience should also have direct and specific access to it it's a long video but we're getting tremendous amount of positive feedback on how it's worth the time put into it so I'm going to thank you ahead of time for your time and attention so we are here today to discuss I believe the title of this will be called something like the psychological drivers of the metac crisis and what possible responses might look like and so I'll start briefly with uh what do we mean by metac crisis and uh then ask you to share some of the the short version of the models that you have shared at Great depth in your writing and your work and ask you to also share opening frames so that people who aren't already familiar with your work can kind of come along though everybody should uh if they're interested in this go deeper there's a lot of resources to go deeper I'm also not assuming since we're we all just know each other a tiny bit uh enough to have a sense of uh shared interest but not enough that we've already done this this is extemporaneous which is part of what makes it very interesting to me so I'm uh not assuming that either of you share the exact same assessment of the metac crisis that's not implicit in you being here but um I know from our conversations you both share a sense that the state of the world has problems and impending risks that are serious that are not automatically resolving themselves that are novel and history so we can just say the challenging state of the world what in the nature of human mind the nature of human conditioning experience we might even find that the term psychology or cognitive drivers are insufficient which is fine has brought us here and what might uh a different relationship to human mind psychology cognition look like that might allow a uh more viable better future um so just briefly on the metac crisis frame uh before World War II there was no risk that we could very quickly destroy the entire habitability of human civilization that was brought into being with very powerful technology nuclear weapons and uh for the first time ever we had the ability to make a series of bad decisions and radically change the possibility space of the world before the Industrial Revolution we didn't really have the capability of destroying the biosphere at scale that's not as fast that takes a few hundred years but we're at the place where the planetary boundaries in terms of species Extinction in terms of chemical pollution in terms of many planetary boundaries are being crossed the Stockholm resilience Center published its update to the planetary boundaries framework just a few days ago that showed of the nine major boundaries they've identified we've radically crossed six already which means who knows if we were to change the direction already what would happen and that was the result of the Industrial Revolution and the technology that it made possible moving us from half a billion people before the Industrial Revolution to 8 billion people and increasing the resource consumption per capita by about 100x in the industrialized world so 16 times the population 100 times the resource consumption per population obviously without advanced Tech we couldn't do that so there's something about the crises that we're facing and then obviously Ai and synthetic biology and drones and cyber weapons and the radically complicated six continent supply chain uh that is all a very novel human technological development that wasn't true in any previous age um without human technology there is no Global existential risk that is human induced there might be a meteor or something something but not anthropogenic catastrophic risk so we're in a unique position in time the poly crisis is a frame that a lot of people have heard that says rather than just focus on climate change or just Coral or just species Extinction or just nuclear we have to focus on all these issues and we have to recognize that they can inter affect each other that one of these issues getting worse can Cascade into other ones and that sometimes the solution to one can make other ones worse so we've got a uh the answer in World War II to how do we not have nuclear war was mutually assured destruction and the brettonwoods Global Financial system and a whole bunch of like the whole post-war order which did mean we didn't have nuclear war between superpowers but it was also part of what led to the six continent supply chain and exponential growth connected to a linear materials economy that have pushed us to the planetary boundaries and so we can see solutions to some problems can end up leading to other ones the metac crisis frame the slight distinction from that terminology from the poly crisis is that we're not just looking at the Min crises and how they can Cascade but that there are underlying dynamics that give rise to them obviously humans are animals we're part of nature we're also pretty obviously unique when you fly into London or into New York or whatever and you look at the world you see the anthropos scine in a way that uh you know that next most environment modifying creatures are things like beavers this is obviously a radically different scale of environment modification and so there's something about human technology that arises from something about human mind both our capacity to create it and then also how we utilize it so some people look at the origin of the metac crisis starting with stone tools some look at it starting with the Agricultural Revolution in the plow or the Industrial Revolution or various places that I think they're all interesting but if we simply say we have a bunch of risks to civilization's ability to continue uh to continue well that are real worth considering and different than they were historically um it's also worth stating that most early civilizations don't still exist there is no more Egyptian or ottoman or Byzantine or Mayan empire and the collapse of those civilizations has been academically studied but they weren't Global civilizations so there is some precedent that civilizations have a life cycle we have the first six continent Global civilization meaning the tech that is recording this can't be made in any country in the world the internet that is broadcasting this to people requires This Global civilization to produce so metac crisis I think everyone is aware of there's a lot of risks that we face and we can can look at the economic drivers in terms of perverse incentives and externalized costs we can look at the game theoretic rival rist drivers in terms of arms races and tragedy of the commons we can look at the theory of Technology the way that technology itself ends up shaping mind we can obviously look at things deep in the nature of human psychology our value systems our cognition it's pretty clear when we look around that none of the other animals or plants are causing possible self-induced Extinction of planetary systems right there's no planetary boundaries as a result of the activity of deer or algae or oak trees so there's something unique about humans is this innate to human nature and there's no way of escaping it is this something that human nature can do but is not the only thing it can do it can be conditioned that could be conditioned differently this is what we're here to explore today um Ian obviously your book The Master in his Emissary kind of answers this question in a way which is though it's coming from a different angle getting the master and Emissary wrong could be said to be the cause of all the crisis that we Face the situation we're in for those who don't already have that framework do you want to share your introductory thoughts on sure the human condition that has brought us here yes I agree with you wholeheartedly that we need to look for underlying causes of a whole pattern of events that are not just unfortunate things that happen to happen you know we were doing very well and then suddenly people said the climate was changing and the Seas were polluted and so forth there's a whole range of events that can be traced back to the inevitable consequence of a certain way way of looking at the world and that way of looking at the world is in my view associated with and driven by a model of the world that is present to the left hemisphere in a way that is not the case with the right hemisphere in brief the right hemisphere seems to be more in touch with presence with what actually experience comes to us and what we inhabit whereas the left hemisphere is providing a representation no longer the presence but a map a program a theory a diagram but something abstracted categorical removed from and not having the con the the characteristics of the the world that it is intending to map now I mean I should say that to anybody who doesn't know my work um you've probably heard that everything to do with hemispheres um is is wrong um and that it's out moded and science has got past it this is not true if you don't know my work then forget almost everything you think you know about hemisphere differences they're not the ones that you were told but there are although we got the differences largely wrong not entirely wrong but mainly wrong that doesn't mean to say that there are no differences and it wouldn't be important to find out what those differences are and that's something I've researched for about 30 years and in short the difference comes down to ultimately a mode of attention which is an evolutionary development that goes back pretty much as far as we can trace it we think back to trilobites and possibly even Beyond so this is something in which there needs to be two ways of attending to the world that are both very important but appear to be mutually incompatible one is that with which we grasp things we need to get things in order to survive we need to get food we need to uh handle trigs to build a nest or sticks to build a shelter whatever it is we need to be able to latch on to something precisely Target it and get it and that's so important that in a way one whole half of one's brain is largely geared to this particular end that of power but if you pay only that attention to the world then you will be very vulnerable because you won't see the Predator you won't see your con specifics you won't see everything else that's going on of which you need to be aware and so effectively this is a difference in which one hemisphere pays very narrowly targeted precise attention to a detail in order to grab it and another kind of attention which is Broad open sustained and Vigilant and on the lookout for everything else putting it very simply those two kinds of atten change what we find no neurologist in the world will dispute that the two hemispheres attend differently it's very clear they do and no philosopher will dispute the fact that attention changes what it is you see so at the end of this fairly obviously if we attend in two different ways we see two different worlds I'm I'm going to grossly simplify here but effectively in one that of the left hemisphere the world is made up of little bits that attract attention and they are things that we're already targed on because we know we want them they're isolated they're decontextualized they belong to categories they're abstracted and effectively lifeless whereas in the right hemisphere it sees that everything is ultimately connected it's connected obviously to the context of things that are immediately around it or particularly powerful but it's ultimately connected to everything beyond that that the the world is never fixed in the way the left hemisphere needs to fix things in order to grab them it's not built up out of slices or pieces but is in fact a whole seamless flow a very important word and in this right hemisphere World implicit meaning is understood because that's contextualized and part of the context of that is emotion the body other people The World At Large so you've got a a kind mechanistic reductionist World subtended by the left hemisphere spere which is just a representation or a useful diagram and you've got a living complex World on the other hand which has characteristics which are very much harder to pin down but involve all the richness and meaning in life now what I believe and in the master in his Emissary my earlier book I traced in the second part a sort of path through the history of the west from the ancient Greeks to the modern time in which there were Rises and fallings of civilization and in which what happened was that in each civilization the two ways of seeing the world were used fruitfully together and this is not a difference just between science and the Arts science needs both kinds of attention the Arts need both kinds of attention and this is how they flourish to begin with and were highly creative but over a length of time they overreached themselves they became too big they became stereotyped they needed um Global Administration that could be rolled out to parts of an Empire um and so we entered into a world very much like that of the left hemisphere and very soon the civilization either the Greek or the Roman collapsed after this moment appeared I mean a complex story but that's it in outline and I think that we're in another a third um wave of this if you like in in in the west which began in the Renaissance with an incredible flourishing and almost un equal anywhere in the world at any time of everything of interest in The Sciences in the heavens in in art in sculpture in music in in poetry this is incredibly Rich time and then from about the the end of the 17th century very roughly with the Scientific Revolution we began to believe that we could understand everything in terms of mechanisms and this was um a useful way to think and indeed let me be the first to say that we have benefited from it in many ways we have developed ments that very few of us would wish to be without as a result of it but unfortunately it led to a philosophical error and it's not just as it were a philosophical error in an abstract way it's one that runs deep to the nature of how we experience the world that is we believe that the world is made up of parts and that we find Reality by going down and down and down until we've got bits that are almost identical to one another whereas in fact almost the opposite is true that everything happens out of the coming together in into complex holes now when I say coming together I'm suggesting that we do actually temporarily temporarily start from or temporary from Parts but we don't um in our minds in our left hemispheres we start from Parts but in reality things are whole and what we call parts are holes at another level and they can't be understood only by the parts this is a theory which is um sometimes called a gal Theory because the Germans have the word gal which we don't have an exact equivalent of which means a whole which cannot be accounted for by the sum of the pieces the parts we've lost that insight and I think that what has happened is that a combination of factors and it's not exhaustive but the rise of capitalism the development of Empires um both geographical Empires and Commercial Empires um thinking in terms of global generalizations have led us away from the the reality which is always unique implicit um wrapped up with value not just um being sort of facts on their own uh which is not to say by the way that um I don't have any truck myself with the idea that um we all just make it all up Pursuit ourselves no that's not the case but nonetheless our reality is something we experience as a relationship between us observing and whatever it is that is observed and this goes both ways we are affected by it and we affect what we see we literally change what there is there to see now that vision is quite different from the one we have that if only we can Master more and more using left hemisphere kinds of um mechanism we will achieve power and power will make us happy but the roots of Happiness are very other than that I'm sure will come on to that but effectively we we think we've accounted for everything when we think in terms of matter but much more important are values a sense of purpose and as far as I'm concerned a sense of the Sacred so that's really where we're at and I think recovering some of what we've lost is critical to making any progress we can't just STI sticking plasters on a cancer we need to eradicate the cause and change the way in which we think about ourselves the world and how we relate to it before we move to John's opening comments for those who aren't from familar would you explain why you use the term master and Emissary okay this is a kind of a fable um in which there is um a wise spiritual master who looks after a small community so well that it flourishes and grows after a while he realizes he can't look after all the business of the community himself not just because there's know too much of it which is part of it but also because if he's to maintain his overall vision and to see the whole he he mustn't get distracted by detailed bureaucratic concerns so he appoints his brightest and best to be his Emissary and go about and do the administrative stuff a high level assistant um and unfortunately that assistant is hubristic uh knowing much less than the master he thinks he knows it all and he thinks in fact of course he is the real master and because of his lack of knowledge of what it is he doesn't know um he the master and the civilization fall into ruins and that obviously is an allegory which could be applied I believe can be directly applied to the idea of relationship between these hemispheres because one of them actually sees much more is wiser um and you know I'm not just using figures of speech um we know and in the book I demonstrate how we know that the right hemisphere is not just more emotionally and socially intelligent which many people might assume is the case but also more cognitive ly intelligent so that where we have some evidence about what has happened to somebody's IQ we have measurements before and after say a stroke where there has been a significant drop in IQ the insult is almost always in the right hemisphere so it's very important that the right hemisphere should remain the position of the master and as long as the Emissary follows the direction of the master that sees more it's very helpful and useful it's a good servant but a very poor master so the question of why in the global uh civilization the Emissary became dominant relative to the master is something I want to get back to but thank you very much those great opening and something I should have shared in the opening is uh uh I have tremendous respect for both Ian and John's uh work both have done these kind of very deep histories of Western philosophy and uh very meaningful worldviews that address the nature of uh mind the meaning crisis uh and yeah I'm very honored to be in the conversation it's why I wanted to get both of your perspectives on the underlying drivers of the metac crisis that are inside of human mind experience and cognition so John similarly I would love to hear your opening thoughts you've done very deep presentation of what you call the meaning crisis um yeah and what I'd like to do as as well as I'm doing my presentation I'd like to show some deep lines of convergence uh with Yan Yan and I have spoken before we've often realized that uh we there's a lot of convergence and one of the things I'm hoping to do is in this with you but for us to unpack that even more because we had more limited conversations in the past yes so I'm going to start I will get back to to the history in in a minute I want to start with the present we're in the UK 2019 in National survey very comprehensive survey 80% of people found that their lives are meaningless um interesting uh 43% think that's because of financial reason and that goes against a lot of the data that we have that once your finances get you out of poverty they do not contribute very much to meaning in life um 34% uh seem to to be getting a little bit closer at least in an intuitive way when they they attribute their lack of meaning to anxiety where and let's just be very careful about this anxiety isn't the same thing as fear fear you have a definite object something the left hemisphere would very much there's the definitive thing I can point my attention to it focus on it hard anxiety tends to be more atmospheric it is generally associated with uh the right hemisphere um and so what you've got with an aniet is you've got a nebulous sense of of disconnection and and this brings with it a sense of uh uh concern arousal stress and of course uh horror is exactly the aesthetic of when you feel like you're losing a grip on reality so anxiety is on the same Arc as horror most of our horror movies are not actually horror movies they're just startle movies where somebody something jumps out at you and scares you but genuine horror movies they give you a sense of what I'm talking about no anxiety is lowgrade Horror in that sense so people are drifting along and then what we can ask is does well does that have significant consequences and we know from the extents of literature on meaning in life not meaning of life which I'll make a distinction in a few minutes but meaning in Life or a related uh psychological literature especially the work of Kelly Allen the sense of belonging if you don't have meaning in life if you don't have the sense of belonging you're in serious trouble you're in serious trouble psychologically physiologically socially probably predictively uh your overall health uh probably your socio economic status it's predictive of lots of stuff going bad of course it's ultimately predictive of anxiety and depression which by the way are flip sides of the same overall disorientation disconnection problem um it's predictive of course of suicide right although uh TAA Schnell has found evidence that people don't have to go through clinical depression contrary what we think they can just experience meaninglessness and go right to Suicide without going through clinical depression so just on its own it's predictive too so 80% of the population has the state that we have pretty comprehensive evidence is very dilus to their health and then you have a lot of sort of cultural sense that this is happening um so the book I did with Christopher Master petro and Philip mic on zombies why why did zombies become so prevalent and the idea is zombies are u a mythr that has arisen to sort of Express not necessarily articulate or explain but Express the meaning crisis will think about them right they lead by definition meaningless lives they've lost intelligibility they can't speak they move in collectivities but they form no communities they drift aimlessly unlike other monsters they don't have any super superatural connection they're just us decayed right and perpetually decayed they're a perversion of the Christian uh myth of Resurrection because they do not come back to the Fuller life they come back to the Lesser life and then they got they got linked to another Christian myth the apocalypse which is supposed to be the renewal of the world but instead it's the ongoing endless decadence of the world so the zombie mythology is a cultural expression of this and you can also see all kinds of symptoms of course we have the the mental health issues uh death of Despair in the United States and the UK are becoming serious serious problems uh related phenomena the UK has set up this orwellian thing called the ministry of loneliness which is like because the number of close friends we've been having has gone down and everad has shown in her book How The West really lost God is this also has what you might call philosophical even spiritual con consquences because there's a direct correlation between how much people live atomically and alone and how secular the society has become and how how sort of uh shallow people's ontology is um I'm not sure about her causal picture but the correlation is just undeniable so this is having huge effects uh you get it in the virtual Exodus people want to live in the virtual world rather than the real world they express this as an explicit thing and I think we can get a bit of insight into what's going on what's missing in the mean crisis if we what are they finding there that they're not finding here but let me just finish a couple more symptoms we've got the weird uh political Paradox that everybody feels disillusioned and disenfranchised but the political sphere has been uh has been now uh reappropriated a and filled with religious fervor and symbolic religious behavior and we've given over identity and the meaning in life to our political ideologies even though we' lost faith in all of the institutions this this weird thing you have positive symptoms though you have the mindfulness Revolution people are seeking fundamental transformation in attention awareness you have the rise of ancient wisdom philosophies there are more stoics now alive than were ever alive in the Roman Empire right and of course you have the ongoing thing basically from uh uh shophow on of the increasing investigations into Asiatic philosophies in which philosophy and spirituality knowledge and wisdom were not separated and so that whole symptomology let's go back to the the of the video game well what are they getting in a video game that they're obviously lacking in the real world well what they have is they have a narrative structure there's a narrative structure that tells them what the story is and what part they play in it and orients them towards a purpose so purpose they have a nomological structure what do I mean by that they have a sense of there's a set of rules laws and rules that make sense of that world so they understand how that world works this is intelligibility or coherence second that purpose coherence third what else is going on in there well they have a normative structure they know how to self transcend they can level up there's a way in which self-transcendence is available to them and fourth they get into the Flow State they get into a state where they feel dynamically coupled and connected to their environment so what do we have these are the four factors of meaning in life these are the things that you have when you have meaning in life and contrary to what our culture says purpose is one of them but purpose is not the synonym for all of them nor is it the most important of the dimensions you need to have purpose but it's not the same as meaning in life nor is it right sufficient for meeing in life the next coherence people the world can't be absurd to people third right you need significance what that means is you need something that gives you a normative staircase that something that gives you a way by which you can get into in touch with the really real we've got from the Psychedelic Renaissance and the work um in mystical experience and I'm involved in that that people seek out for its own sake this relationship with the really real the more real and once they get it they will they are willing to change their whole lives so that they are in deeper contact with that really real and yayen has shown their lives actually by many objective measures get better so that matters the third one the Flow State the flow state is a very powerful and shik mahai has done a lot of work on that we could perhaps talk about that the the the flow state is a very powerful version of the fourth factor which is mattering people need to feel that they are connected to something that has a reality and a value beyond their own individual existence so you to find this out you ask somebody what do you want to exist even if you don't and how much of a difference do you make to it now you could grap all of these things together and they all fold into this connectedness in sense making we're connected to the world we're ordered to the world the world makes fundamental sense to us we are fitted to the world we belong in the world belonging sense of belonging sense in meaning and life my proposal is that that can ultimately be understood as reflecting uh sort of the core of human cognition um I talk about the core four I think we we've split them up for analytic reasons right uh uh which is attention Consciousness working memory and fluid general intelligence but I think there are all just four different dimensions of an underlying core thing uh and there's good functional evidence behavioral evidence and an atomical evidence for that claim I won't review all of that but I'll just take it that that could be agreed without much uh controversy what I think those that General ability that general intelligence reflects as it reflects um it reflects um two meta problems that you have to solve whenever you're solving any problem you're trying to solve in the world and I and I understand there's two kinds of problems there's problems that are solved by having something controlling it and there are problems of that are solved by becoming something froms distinction which maps on a lot also to the left and right and in many ways well and we'll get back to that but what I think these two meta problems are are and think about your intuition we tend to attribute intelligence to u a creature the more we can see reliable evidence that it can anticipate its world because of course the an oun of prevention right the more you can anticipate the world the more powerful your causal intervention and if I can avoid the tiger that's way less costly than fighting the tiger just to put right and so the thing is as you push out sort of the light cone of your anticipation of the world what you get is you get an explosion of the amount of information all the possible alternative Pathways to get into your goal this just explodes in possibility um so even to take a very limited case here's my initial state I'm starting a game of chess I'm trying to get to the end all the number of alternative pth Pathways outnumbers the number of atomic particles in the universe and this is one of the core problems going back to New and Simon that at is at the heart of the AGI project right and so this is what you can't do you can't check all that information like think about all the things I could pay attention to it's overwhelming think about all the things I could remember think about all the different combinations of sequences of sounds and movements and J it's and yet what we're all doing is we're zeroing in on it right now and what that means is you it's not that you check everything you can't that would take you through the rest of the life somehow and this is really important you ignore Mo most of what's relevant sorry you know ignore most of what's irrelevant you ignore it and you zero in on what's relevant now that that's not cold calculation and this this is what I like this is a matter of care we're different from AGI it still for how long is something we could potentially C we care about the information we processing computers don't we care about whether or not it's true computers don't right so it's not just that relevance is not just it's not just a calculation it's a matter of caring it's a matter of commitment because whenever I'm doing this I'm taking a chance I have to commit to this because when I'm paying attention to Ian I'm not paying attention to what's behind there's a cost there's always a cost I'm always so there's existential risk at whenever I'm doing so there's caring committed connectedness and notice relevance is a connecting relation it's like biological fittness right relevance isn't in the object it isn't in the subject relevance is that which binds the subjective and the objective together I call it transc right and that so that and for the name for all of that I use is religio the sense of binding that carries with it a sense of profound meaning and I put it to you that when people have access to profound meaning in all of these Dimensions they get a sense of the Sacred an inexhaustible Fountain of intelligibility that is not just an intellectual Affair but this connected living Affair but here's the problem the very processes that make you intelligently adapted make you perpetually prone to self-deception this is this is my reinterpretation of the first Noble Truth right because the very process that gets me to be adaptive by focusing in and binding myself and that I take I mean this seriously this is normative for me I'm bound this is what I should do I should be paying attention to Ian means I'm ignoring so much and very often what we ignore can turn turn out to be the relevant information that we actually need to solve whatever problem we're facing so we are perpetually prone to self-deception and and I and I want to talk just a little bit about this is at multiple levels but what that means is and this is a trade-off relationship whenever you try and solve one way in which you're being deceived you open yourself up to an alternative way in you can in which you can be right so I should pay attention to as no no no and then I'll lose the the right I'm always in a trade-off between what should I foreground what should I background right and so it's a very complex process it's very complex it's very Dynamic it's it's create it's co-created by the world and me and also me and other people very D complex very Dynamic very adaptive very prone to self-deceptive self-destructive Behavior both individually and collectively so cultures across the world have had to deal with this really tricky problem how do we amarate the self-deception without undermining the Adaptive connectedness because we can't just shut it off and we have all these trade-offs we can't just pursue simple panaceas that will just do this so we have to get this complex I call it an Ecology of practices practices that intervene in our cognition our Attention our awareness in multiple places you know checks and balances very like think about the the eight-fold path of Buddhism it's this complex set of practices and they're represented by a spoked wheel because they all interconnect and they're all self-organizing and when you do that you need to set that within a community that homes you because you need people who have been practicing it because this is just this is not a matter just of theory this is a matter of transformation and they need to be able to guide you along the way and then that Community has to be set in a world view that legitimates it a world view that legitimates it so another way of understanding the meaning crisis is that unlike most cultures we don't know where to go to cultivate wisdom we don't know where to go to amarate that self-destructive self-destructive Behavior foolishness we don't know where to go to enhance the connectedness the religio so it gets us into deep connection and we used to have world view that gave us both of that this is how you connect deeper and this is how you overcome your fallenness of all using metaphor and that was the sacred the sacred canopy the religious Frameworks were the places that gave us worldviews traditions and ecologies of practices for addressing this and because of the Protestant Reformation the Scientific Revolution actually I would even start it in Med medieval nominalism thank you and and a lot of things and then this has just been put on methamphetamine uh basically uh since uh the Advent of some of the hyper Technologies we are in a position where we don't have a sacred canopy we don't have a I asked my students where do you go for information they they have their phones where do you go for science they're sort of hesitant postmodern concern but I guess you I go I go to science for for knowledge right that's originally what the word Scania actually just meant was was knowledge then ask them where they go for wisdom and they don't have an [Music] answer and they know that without wisdom meaning in life is tremendously at risk there were so many things in that that I would love to respond to but I don't I mean perhaps D you would not to yeah I mean I think we get to play with relevance realization in real time because I would like to go into zombies and video games and all kinds of things but feeling into the highest useful uh the question that's on my mind I'd like to hear what's on yours is so thank you and both having shared kind of opening frames two top questions for both of you is uh ideology so how did we get here how did we get to ubiquitous meaninglessness and nowhere to go for wisdom how did we get to the master in the Emissary backwards culturally and what is the relationship between this interior psychological phenomena and the objective environmental catastrophes nuclear risk AI risk economic issues that we have in the world so how did we get here and how does the interior and the exterior relate uh what are the kind of causal Dynamics both directions I would love to hear perhaps you w mind if I don't immediately address those questions because some some more more burning things that came up and we can come to them as you've announced them and we will come to them I'm sure I mean one was a reflection on what you were saying at the end uh John um about a we can only uh attend to so much we can only remember so much and we need to balance the benefits and risks of everything we do carries as as heiger said you know every revelation of Truth is the hiding of something and I I think that is really important and what this strength of mind for me is is is a couple of things one is that filtering is is creative that if you like filtering of light is how we get colored patterns we get films and and so forth life like a dome of many colored glass stains the white Radiance of Eternity Shelly um so less is often more and part of shaping and intelligence is knowing what to get rid of because you tried to take too much and it wouldn't benefit the other thing about it is that it's not just a trade-off in the sense well we need a bit of this and we need a bit of that that is kind of true but everything contains within it if viewed in my mind anyway viewed um as a whole it has a relationship with its opposite and it only exists because of the being an opposite um so uh it's like the two poles of a bar magnets you can't have the North or the South because they they coexist and co-create and so what what is trying to do is rather like in in the magnet or in a in a Tor string of a musical instrument or the Tor string of a bow is to hold two things together that both need to be held not just go flabbily to a point in the middle because then the spring goes slack and you've got no power for the arrow to fly or the note to take off from the loot so I think that's something important that we ought to bear in mind is this relationship between a thing and its opposite actually it also if I may say because I was listening to your talk uh last night or the night before um to the consilience conference yes and um one of the things I think there was this idea that um well one of you you made a lot of interesting points but one of them was to do with um I've forgotten [Laughter] it what would the transc of relating the subjective and OB yeah there's a bit of that well there might have been something and maybe because uh let me try and maybe there's wrong one of the things I was trying to emphasize and one of the things that a recovery of neoplatonism especially given filler's work on it uh can give us is uh a re-emphasis on the polarity rather than the poles and and I was talking about this I I try to use the Greek word tonos rather than tension I do too yeah because the English word tension is almost purely negative now for right tonos like heraclitis the tonos of the tness of the right and without the tness there is no energy that's right and whatever it is comes out of the torness is orthogonal to the torness so the arrow flies off at right angles the notes come out in a way so it's a very important aspect of creativity I just wanted to reflect on that I wanted to comment very briefly on what you said about anxiety in the hemispheres yeah um I don't think anxiety and depression in in my experience are just parts of the same thing I think they're actually they can coexist um but they're not the same thing at all and they don't need to coexist anxiety I think is not lateralized so I think there is anxiety created by the left and by the right Hemisphere and each of them holds it depression is a complex one and I don't want to go into it in any detail but some depressions seem to me to be due to um an over um an unbalanced overactivity or unopposed activity of the right frontal cortex and that can be unopposed either by the left frontal cortex or by the right posterior cortex so it's slightly complicated I just want to put that on record because people may go away and say well I thought he said you know that's not what anywhere I said but but there we are oh I was just trying to I yeah I was trying to indicate that uh the phenomenology tends to be much more at atmospheric in both of those depression and anxiety rather than narrow Focus it's wide focused and ambiguous rather than to that extent yes but actually in terms of where they originate hemisphere wise I think it's it's hard to be more to be specific in the way it you seem to be saying and and then there just a couple of other things that I want to pick up because we don't have to exhaust them can't exhaust them now but we would want to sort of perhaps comes to them one is about purpose and its nature and the other is about values and meaning so I agree with you that meaning and purpose are not the same thing um but it's very important to make a distinction that will be familiar to all three of us but may not be in the minds of some people watching or listening and that is the difference between what I call extrinsic purpose and intrinsic purpose an example of extrinsic purpose is a to copia its purpose is it was created to copy a sheet of paper and make another image but the other things that the purpose doesn't lie outside itself but in itself they are in themselves purposeful and actually I believe the prayer is of this kind it's see itself s valuable not because it produces a result but also very obviously things like music and dance are not pointless but they're not they're not validated by a purpose that comes out we have better health or anything no they have value in themselves and and the last thing I just wanted to raise um so that when we going forward we can come back to and referen these things is that very often people I mean you said that we need meaning and we need to be directed and I believe that values are things that draw us from in front rather than push us from behind and purpose also beckons to us from in front and draws us forward and of course all our models are pushed from behind because they're mechanical but very important these things exist as it were at the same time as our striving towards them and actually cause us to strive towards them not by pushing us but by calling to us evoking a response and that we ought to be careful not to think that because of a Frailty of the human Spirit we we must find meaning in a basically meaningless Cosmos we must paint values on the walls of ourselves know you're not saying this I'm not but I just thought would be worth clarifying yes we don't have to sort of cheer ourselves up by painting pretty pictures on the walls of a of our hermetically sealed cell I reject that completely and I imagine you do too yeah in indeed we are contacting something which is real and I actually think that those values and purpose are are essential to the cosmos they're not things we made up so I don't want to exclude Daniel from the conversation but I feel cold to respond but I want to make a place for you um I I have some questions I'll follow up with but please go ahead uh so so uh yeah I I mean the that distinction you made is and this is just to provide convergence like it's well established in in the L you know amabile talked about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and uh and then the intrinsic motivation is much more um uh predictive of creativity and insight than extrinsic uh but you actually need a bit optimal creativity is to have a mixture of the two because you need the extrinsic when you're painting the cinee chapel and you're painting the blue of the sky and you just got to keep going right and so you need and it also gives you corrective feedback because if you're just intrinsic you don't have external judges and and things like that uh but I I yes and I think that's important and I think that brings out an important difference I think the things that we think are intrinsically motivation motivating are precisely the ones that get us into that state of connectedness religio optimal intrinsic motivation being realized is a flow State you do the flow state to be in the Flow State you don't do it for any other reason right and and that sense of at onement that sense of super salience that's the beginning of the taste of the sacred as well and so I think the sacred is are is how does reality disclose itself to us where we're in that mode of not work but serious play that we're doing for its own sake because all we're do like playing music or going to a play we're playing with we're playing with relevance realization in this serious sense we're playing with it like and we're playing with salience and we're saying if I play with this what kind of world is available to me and I agree uh I think especially given the work of La Paul and Agnes callard and aspiration that we need to bring back the aspirational dimension that we are bound right and we have to bind ourselves to the Future in the right way and what's come out of this and this is allows me to make another point and I know we we have different language about this but I think we we it's it's interesting it it's part of what's come out of the way to do this is to quickly describe an experiment okay so you go into a bunch of academics and you say you give them all the evidence all the arguments that they should start saving for retirement right now take any challenges any questions you come back in six months none of them are saving and that has to do with what's called hyperbolic discounting and the way our our our evolutionary Machinery makes distance things in the in the much less Salient to us than current that's why you procrastinate it's why you eat the chocolate cake when you're trying to lose weight right and it's it's very adaptive because you don't get that you're just overwhelmed by possibilities right but now you come back to them and you say okay what I want you to do is I want you to practice this every day notice is a practice not just a belief I want you to practice every day I want you to practice like imagining and we should talk about two kinds of imagination at some point but I want you to imagine your future self as a family a beloved family member that you've always cared for and you need to continue caring for them and you have a lot of compassion and love for them and I want you to do that every day and you come back in six months and you find two things now they're saving and the ones that do the practice more regularly and more vividly imagine it save more you see what this is showing that the imaginal augmentation of the aspiration to do something actually is a constitutive part of being rational dayart reduced logos sense making rationality to computation and we lost the fact no no no if I'm actually going and this is ages card's argument if I'm trying to become more rational that's an aspirational project that's me trying to become somebody other than whom I am I have to bind myself to my future self this is religio again I have to get religio with my future self and that's not something that I can do just in differentially I have to do this using imagination I have to use this with con so I agree with you profoundly that even the even the attempts to be more rational require an aspir so aspiration and rationality have to be rebound together yeah one thing I I I'd want to push back on but just because I know you've got uh see I'm I'm I'm I'm hesitant around the word value because the notion of value comes up basically in the Enlightenment and it's part of the is a distinction and things like that okay do you want to challenge that because you don't you don't have you don't have this notion sort of predating the idea that that value is I think we're talking about terminology okay but it would be hard to say that Plato had no allegiance to the values of beauty goodness and Tru I don't call those values well you can call them what you like John but you know let's not no what I mean is different words but you know what I mean by values I well I I do and I don't and this but I want to do what you did with one of my terms I think most people don't hear see Plato doesn't think we value them Plato thinks we love the transcendentals right and value is a statement of right of choice and preference this is how lo introduces it and makes and you can actually see him change from we are called by the world to we choose and he introduces the notion there and and what I why I want to say that is because I want to make the argument again and this is part of the overall that love is not a purely subjective matter either love is not a feeling love is not an emotion right when I love somebody that can make me happy it can make me I miss my partner right now because I love her so deeply it can make me angry frustrated Joy love isn't an emotion it's a way of binding myself to another person and I think when most people hear the word value because of its Enlightenment history they hear choice and preference and what they want and I don't think if we think we can choose the true and the good and the Beautiful a clarification worth making yes we don't understand that we don't choose them we are called by them and we are called by them to ask to Aspire now I understand you're not using the word that way but I think most people when they hear value are using it that well thanks for clarifying that yeah that's not what I was meaning um and you know there's a important relationship between love and value both Pascal and Shayla said that you can't actually um value something until you love it and most people would think you don't love it until you know how to Value it but it's an interesting alternative way of thinking anyway well but I would say that like but what I want to bring in that people don't usually hear when they hear value is like Murdoch's Point like in the sovereignty of the good right love is the painful recognition that something other than yourself is real there's a connectedness to realness that's important if you're actually loving something you want yes well you know perhaps we should go to love already but it's a huge topic I mean and I don't want to lose whatever it was Daniel was yeah yes yeah but I I think this was valuable because I think we took a lot of sort of the common language yeah of modernity and even of postmodernity subject to the object it all this stuff and we sort of yes put pressure on it and shown that the the presupposition that this is just the Natural Way thought unfolds needs to be challenged no no and above all on the subjective objective divide which is not to say the terms have no meaning of course but just I like you believe that everything comes into being out of a relation it is never just that or just in here but it is the coming together an encounter in fact which is the the root cause of our experience and of our love and our valuing actually anyway yeah so there's something challenging in what we're trying to do here which is as we've seen uh what we take words to mean which words we use what ontologies what references what epistemologies we haven't had time to all sync these and as we've probably all experience I certainly have when I want to do generative work with someone that has a different background that's where we have to start and realize some of our disagreements are because the word means something different and that takes a long time and so I'm noticing that you mentioned intrinsic and extrinsic purpose you said purpose and meaning are not identical but you didn't make the distinction John responded talking about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation which is not the exact same as purpose and then there was a conversation around values there was a conversation around love around Beauty so these are all related not exactly synonymous topics they all obviously indicate something that we value but we're wanting to speak to Value being intrinsic to reality not just something we make up which as you saying we're not just painting values on a meaningless Universe there's something about the ontologies that give us a meaningless universe that are part of the problem that we want to come to that I think is core to the meaning Crisis Core to the place we find ourselves in and why you have to say something like hey it's not that the reality is a meaningless universe that we have to paint meaning on but that reality has something like intrinsic purpose to it so I'm just acknowledging all the really fascinating topics that I'm not going to ask questions about or say anything about because in the short amount of time we have feeling into what has the highest meaningfulness Beauty worthiness of Love uh purpose value um without making the F further distinctions on which of those it is um you said something that I about the intrinsic versus extrinsic purpose that I wanted to click on a little bit because extrinsic purpose being an instrumental or utilitarian concept the purpose of X is defined by its utility to Y and we're assuming y has value so when someone takes that definition of purpose they take purpose first rather than meaning or value or beauty or love they take purpose as the the thing that we're looking for which is itself a very interesting question they take the relative utilitarian extrinsic definition then they ask what's the purpose of it all it's obviously a meaningless question because there's nothing outside of it all to say it is relevant with respect to and so it's easy to say oh there's no purpose to anything and come up with nihilism as opposed to just recognize it was a category error you were using too small a concept now you're talking about intrinsic purpose or intrinsic beauty or intrinsic something intrinsic something that is worth something and you were saying that it also has a pulling quality or a TS right that all that is has something like purpose that is not defined with respect to anything else may be hard to Define at all which the da would say sounds very much like the da it has a nature right so does the direction of reality or Universe reveal something about its nature that we that is worth aligning ourselves with I think is very interesting I want to ask I want to propose what I think is the generator of the metac crisis in your framework and hear your response and then hear how you build on it but I want to just hear first the thing the definition of purpose as extrinsic that the philosophy of science can Orient to so you have uh big bang where the laws are why they are because who knows and the constants are what they are and at some point Consciousness pops out and it's very easy to get nihilism in that model um one could say that model is left hemispheric dominance epistemically and that the left hemispheric dominance can't understand purpose or meaning is that how you would say it when you talk about or I talk about values I'm thinking of a hierarchy drawn up by by Ma Shaya the German early 20th century philosopher in which he had a hierarchy of values the base of which was utility and this is the lowest level of his values and then there came things like um he he called them values of life um D but these were um values of um Fidelity magnanimity generosity bravery and so forth a lot of which seem to have gone out of fashion and then above that came Beauty goodness and Truth the spiritual or gistic of arur and then at the top of the apex of the pyramid was the sacred and I think that structure has been incredibly helpful to me in seeing what we're getting wrong because the value the only really driving value of the left hemisphere is utility it's it's evolved in order to serve utility for us and of course we need it because it's very useful um but we mustn't think that this answers our questions or these this sort of level of value is going to give us the Fulfillment that is promised to Us by our culture which is all about acquisition and greed and competition typical values of the left hemisphere so when we come to talk about um purpose and its relationship with meaning what I would say is first of all to make the distinction which we've really we've made but it it's the distinction between um CES finite games and infinite games fin night games have a purpose and when you've achieved it the game is over infinite games are things that have the value in being performed at all and therefore eternally have that value we've got locked into the type of belief that everything is a finite game um which it it very clearly can't be and the the things that give us meaning I think are for very obvious reasons not specifiable as extrinsic goals we should try and do this and make that and so on there there's a level at which we have to guide our ourselves and think well we need to make a conscious effort to shift our values but in the end these things are not going to be of that kind they're going to be openness to an attractive force and those attractive forces are many but they can boil down in some ways to three incredibly important things that give meaning to life Each of which has been more or less trashed um by our current civilization um the first is our relationship with Society um are being bound to one another in the sense of religio um the the business of sharing one's life with people who share your values whom you can trust whom you can confide in whom you can eat with play with and and generally share a culture which may be based on a religion but has common rituals that we all understand that is one thing and it is extremely difficult to find any such coherence in modern society for a host of reasons which most people would be able to fill in for themselves but we don't have that kind of cohesion anymore and we're increasingly isolated partly by technology and we live lonely lives the the the UCLA loneliness index uh has shot up uh in recent years and I think we mentioned loneliness already and it's one of the key things that people say when you ask them about their lives they say they're Lonely Now meaning can't come from any purpose in being with others and belonging in the social world and contributing to it in some sort of obvious extrinsic way you can't specify ahead of time what that value will be you only know it in the experiencing of it it's it's this is the problem it's the swimming problem you can't have a manual that tells you how to swim you sit on the bank of the river reading and go now I know how to swim you had to get in the water the second is our relationship with the natural world in all its complexity and Beauty so for most people until very recently it was almost impossible for their lives not to be in meshed with the surrounding ing natural world only in the last perhaps 150 years or so Have We Become isolated from nature and this is a a really important divorce a very very important one the divorce from one another is very important the divorce from nature the sense of it as an environment which is a technical term for something that surrounds you but not what you are born out of which is what nature really means and what you return to and the third is the Rel relationship to a realm of something Beyond this again we've mentioned this I believe but it is the Transcendent realm or the realm of the spiritual or the sacred and this um to a lot of people now they've been trained to think that this is a rather negligible issue that it really is a kind of vestage of something that hangs over from A Primitive time when people won't properly educated and they invented superstitions to try and explain life and I mean that is such a terrible terrible diminution and tragedy of what it is travesty of what it is I'm talking about it is a tragedy um so those three things are what I believe fundamentally are most important for bringing meaning to our lives and I can't specify obviously what the meaning is you know what is the meaning of life a question you cannot answer although I believe it's 43 but the but that's what I would say about that and it relates to the hemispheres in this way that the left hemisphere is designed only for acquisition and pleasure getting stuff having fun it's more do energic driven than the right hemisphere it's more associated with addiction than the right Hemisphere and it's certainly more associated with getting a kick out of power and acquisition whereas the right hemisphere is more able to open itself to the sacred and to these other higher values that I specified when recap them now so I think there is a very important thing there that we're Guided by something that literally doesn't see what it is that's pulling us or should be pulling us forward that sense of direction or purpose in life and the the the values that call us forward so I want to say something about this that I feel like is me restating how the hemispheric model ends up getting imbalanced almost obligately gets imbalanced in a way that leads to the world situation we have and see if you agree with that and I very much I'm curious to hear related thoughts so you mentioned that the primary left hemisphere value is utility and you also mention the word power which is a very important word because then civilizations have a relationship with each other that we can use social Darwinism to describe where there's a selection process process defined in war and defined in population growth and things like that where if a civilization has a relation has our relationship to each other our relationship to Nature and our relationship to the sacred all maximizing utility right so we think of Human Resources we think of natural resources and we think of religions as kind of narrative weapons to be able to coordinate then the culture that has those utilitarian power oriented views in all those areas will uh win that war it will it it will basically seeing nature as a commodity uh extract more from nature to grow its population to increase its resource consumption per capita to grow its technological base to utilize humans to use the you know Norbit weeners the human use of human beings in the development of cybernetic systems that are then seen as inexorably in competition with each other so they're going to so we have to kind of mentality and then there's either no sacred there's just that which is good is that which doesn't lose which is kind of I think it's very interesting that game theory was developed by Von noyman at the same time we developed the bomb at the same time we developed Ai and it was Game Theory and economics as kind of the height of the reductionist experiment saying based on a kind of isot Distinction that you'll negate which I'm very interested in this says since philosophy of science is going to say what is and can't say what ought then our best basis for ought is that which doesn't lose in an assumed competitive Dynamic so game theory is the only thing guiding and I would argue that if your only ought is Game Theory and you have the ability for recursive technologies that turn into exponential technologies that are in an exploitative relationship with the environment which even the term environment or natural resource is a crazy term and uh in arm races with each other that that Civilization is self-terminating but it's also hard to it's easy to see how it won right how it emerged that way because any civilization that oriented itself that way a little bit more was going to grow its population more was going to advance its Tech was going to win Wars and then other ones kind of had to do similarly so what the values or the sense of sacred or the connection to Nature or each other that the Native Americans had before colonizers went there didn't matter that much if their weaponry and technology and whatever was not going to compete so the left hemisphere might be less intelligent in some very important ways because wisdom I've never actually heard anyone give a good definition of wisdom that doesn't involve restraint it always ends up involving restraint and binding in some ways and but the utility emphasis of the left hemisphere is very good at Game Theory and then itat creates almost an obligate trajectory um and then nobody wants climate change but nobody can stop it nobody wants species Extinction nobody wants desertification but nobody can stop it the overall topological features defining our world nobody wants but the game theoretic relationship between we can't price carbon properly because if the Chinese don't they'll economically beat us therefore we have to externalize the cost that game theoretic relationship creates a topology that is actually driving us in a self-terminating direction and nobody's steering because there is no sacred there is no we're very good at solving problems and not very good at defining is this the right problem to solve right is this the right goal to achieve that's actually why I was so drawn to your work is because that I wasn't thinking of it in terms of hemispheres but I was certainly thinking of it in terms of capacities and predispositions of mind that the nature of mind that oriented to Parts was was very good at Tech and was very oriented to power and the power Tech thing together was going to win over the other ones and then create this kind of obligate trajectory I would love to hear you respond to that there's very little in what you said that I would disagree with at all we're we're in a a bind which is to nobody's benefit really um gain explains why we get these things wrong and we we need find a way out of this which involves restraint actually I loved what you said about that and in fact it's our lack of restraint that means that we're not Wise It's very unwise um and there are two um levels to that there's restraint in general and self-restraint and and the idea of self-restraint used to be intrinsic to the rise of most civilizations they were founded on a generation or several Generations ations um that were prepared to make sacrifices on a personal level in order to achieve something greater that has moved out of the picture because the the value now is about our personal gain uh but sometimes if we can restrain ourselves from just pursuing personal gain we could produce an outcome which would be far more beneficial for all of course this is very famously a difficult thing to achieve because some people defect from the program we're in a in a situation where we need everyone ultimately to come around to a certain way I think if we to survive um now how how can we do that can we do it at all I don't know but I believe that if enough people are committed enough and model their lives on the shift in relations with Society with nature and with the Divine if they can reorientate their values and stop seeking fulfillment in a in a very simplistic and direct way which doesn't actually achieve its goal and worse is distractive then we could produce um an outcome that would be satisfactory I don't know if we can achieve that I don't know I mean it sounds like we'd have to a we'd have to convince everybody really if we convince probably about 3% of the world's influential people people then we might be on to something so I want to come back to how the why the world's influential people might be the psychologically least likely to be able to be convinced based on what it took to become influential I'll come back to that in a moment because you started you said maybe we only have to influence 3% but a moment before you said if we're practicing self-restraint and anyone defects and they don't restrain so they do the more short-term power thing then they win and then they create a world that orients to that thing so defection sociopathic narcisstic defection is pretty key to this thing it is I'm really curious to hear your thoughts Reflections on any of this but also specifically how do we what are the criteria that what is the evolutionary Niche for the sociopathic narcissistic property to be selected for and how would we close that Niche MH to uh because promoting wisdom where it will always lose game theoretically is not that interesting so there's something about the relationship of wisdom and power and I would even say wisdom has to bind it's it's a master Emissary thing and I know this is very uncomfortable as it should be but if the master doesn't bind the Emissary then everything's broken that's it and so that which is power seeking has to actually be bound which requires Power by something that is not power seeking in the same way yeah which is why DSM says the one who who wants to lead everybody should run away from the one who doesn't want to lead and everyone pushes into leadership maybe you can listen to yeah so curious to hear your thoughts on wisdom binding power closing the evolutionary Niche on power seeking those types of things [Music] um so much yeah so the uh I mean I think the I agree with um first of all what you did was brilliant and I really appreciate it like and I'm in very significant agreement with it um John keeks made a distinction between goals and ideals and the word purpose equivocates between them a goal is an end state that everything else is in the service to and it's the utilitarian where an ideal is not an ideal is something that is part of the grammar by which you interpret and make sense of yourself in your life and um I agree and we even did that with the sacred we took sort of transcend an imminent and then we made this world this is the nichan critique only had a utilitarian value for the that world and then when we stop believing in the upper world this world seems to have no value uh that whole framework I think has to be rejected which is not a rejection of the Sacred I just want to make that very very clear and so why I'm I'm I'm I'm sort of on that is because I think that this is part of the answer you can break game theoretic circumstances in which right you get people to remember certain things uh so you can get some very core ones uh like you go in a situation will you take $20 oh sure sure a situation will you take $20 but I here's two people but I got to give that person 40 so there's 60 and they get 40 and you get 20 will you take it and if you don't take it nobody gets it no I won't take it so people there's a symbolic thing that they're oriented towards and it's something like they they want to they want to belong to a world that is a just world and that is more important to them than their own individual immediate gain that's the first thing so there's a symbolic aspect to and Robert nozik made a good point about this that we we didn't put that into a lot of and for good reasons we didn't put it into a lot of the game theoretic modeling because it messes up all that modeling um in a lot of ways and then that connects to we don't actually superv value this is the soop power right we will We Will We Will significantly undermine subjective well-being if we have a reasonable belief that we will get enhanced meaning in life this is part of our evolutionary Heritage as mammals we're also primates we're also sociocultural and the prototypical instance we do this is have a kid when you have a kid all of the measures of subjective well-being go down your health goes down your sleeping goes down your finances go down your social connections go down the amount of sleep you're getting is going down you're sick all the time your partner doesn't like you anymore and you're in a constant stress situation and you ask people why are you doing it like like you couldn't pay most people well why are you doing this well because it's making my life more meaningful because they're connected to something again that has a reality Beyond themselves and right I'll use your term a value Beyonds he used another term interestingly which was sacrifice yes which has related atmology to Sacred of course and something you can't say that you know something is sacred if you aren't willing to sacrifice for it so please continue and and this and this is another a thing to remember that the arrow of relevance for us does not point to just how are things relevant to me yes we do have to feel connected to ourselves because if we don't we're dissociated our agency is under but as Ian said we have to feel fundament not how am how are you relevant to me but how am I relevant to you how am I relevant to us and how are we relevant to the world and yes how is are we and the world relevant to something that grounds that world what Plato would call the good right and and so I think that if we can get people to remember this is what I would want to say I don't I I don't even like the word remember I want people to be able to fall in love with all of these dimensions of being again because and this is one of the this was Spinoza's big Insight right the way you overcome a powerful motivation is with another powerful motivation if we can get people to fall in love again with being within between and Beyond we can we can we can break the game theoretic this is what Christianity did in the Roman Empire Christianity went out and it didn't unlike oism that tried I'm not saying we shouldn't try and get the government but that tried right and it had some success too but Christianity went and said there's a new way for you to love yourself you are not the non-person the Roman Empire says you are here is a new way Agape is a way in which you can love yourself and it's not a hedonistic egocentric power here's how we can love each other and here's how we can love God and it captures Ed the world and it captured a world that was part one of the epitomes of a world driven by power competition the lust for Glory so we haveo historical examples of if you give people if you can get them out of meaning starvation so they're not in a scarcity mental when you're a scarcity mentality you drop into left hemispheric I think Ian's right about that is shortterm utilitarian right what do I need what right because this is emergency mode but if you can get people out of a scarcity mentality and get them to fall in love with being again connectedness to themselves and other then you can get you can call them to something that gets them to remember that they actually do value trying to use your language right connectedness more than success I I really like the Must Fall in Love with I want to play with the scarcity thing for a minute because the people that are pursuing power the most are not in any actual economic scarcity though they are in the perceived relative scarcity relative to the next guy competing with them sure and there are plenty of people who under scarcity share more I've always found fascinating that when there's a disaster either the best or the worst of people can come out and so scarcity can can go either way and abundance can go either way MH so there's something about what is sacred that is actually deeper than that even under scarcity can have someone sacrifice and that even under abundance can still have someone totally self-centered yes but I did want when I was using scarcity I was talking about meaning scarcity yes not economic distin and one of the things that happens uh for example as people go up uh the the this is an experiment is people go up a corporate structure and they and corporate structures tend to favor people who have sociopathic tendencies what you also see is a measurable decrease in the ability of them to take the perspective of other individuals yeah the ability to take the perspective of others individuals is strongly predictive of how many deep connections you can form in your life so they are actually suffering a very profound kind of scarcity as they go up their AB they con they if you'll allow me to coin they suffering connectedness scarcity in a profound way and yeah what what what what I what I've been fascinated with is the number and I'm sure this is happening to both you the number of people who are in these positions and positions of power who have have reached out to me and said like I feel disconnected and there's there's that element of almost of horror and absurdity I feel disconnected and I want I like and I want to be and I don't and the people I talk to in Silicon I don't want my kids to go through this I don't want my kids to go and this is what I mean there is alternative motivations to and I think they have also an evolutionary Providence to the game theoretic motivations and I don't think the game theoretic uh motivations are are metaphysically necessary I think there are other ones that have an equal power to motiv and because we have historical evidence we have current evidence that we can tap into those but I think there's two polls to this for us to fall in love with being again that's that's the agent pull but the world as an arena in which we can act it has to be sacred to us sacred is sacred is the how the world is to us when we are falling in love with it okay I want to I want to go into sacred I want to say something about what you just said you said that as people move up in positions as as we look at places where power is concentrated and we move up the power hierarchy it is there are exceptions to this but it is generally the case that the people who are at the top of the power hierarchies are people who are both attracted to and good at power games yes and there are certain other things that are um attendant and deficient that tends to go along with that and power whether it's economic social or political follows a power law distribution yeah so one of the things I find very interesting is that I think there's a mistake that a lot of Sociology makes where we look at certain human traits like rationality or empathy or whatever on a gaussian distribution and then say humanity is the result of this where realistically the actual power influencing things says that a tiny percentage of people that are three standard deviation psychologically different than almost everyone have most of the determining power and then they create conditioning environments that everyone else is conditioned by I think that's really important we you know hyper agency um I have found that like we had a term psychopathy and then sociopathy and now it's ASD and the DSM um antisocial personality disorder that there are types of people there that have higher and lower ability to take others perspectives and so there are people who have sociopathy or whatever you want to call it that have lower ability to take other people's perspectives but there are ones that have higher cognitive empathy but lower embodied empathy and the higher cognitive empathy means I know how to play you I know how to say what you want to hear and virtue signal good good good point and it's a very important point from a hemisphere point of view because that cognitive empathy is more based on the left frontal cortex it's the simulation of real empathy yes exactly yeah um and and the real empathy or the the the emotive empathy is is more based in in the right hemisphere but also we know that sociopaths have deficiencies in the right vent medial frontal cortex which is an area that's terribly important for forming any kind of emotional relationship with anybody else um whether this is a a thing that they're born with or not is not finally concluded but I think it pretty clearly is something that they they are born with it could be a result of a certain kind of deficient parenting but what we're coming back to there is that again there is this contrast between a connected World a relational World in which the values come out of the relations and another kind which is a linear world of Target getting goal getting in which we think that what is valuable will come out of completing that goal and it doesn't yeah so I want to pick up on what you said because I think that distinction is very important that you made and and and here there's there's there's an ambiguity in taking a perspective you can take a perspective in that calculative way you said that's different from taking up a perspective in which you care and you try to see the world from that perspective this is the danger in teaching people to perspective take like the way rhetor can do it yes is you can create a very good lawyerly person like what I found is the people who are best at perspective seeking are either empaths or sociopaths yes right they're they're good at perspective seeking because they really feel what other people feel and they're seeking to or because they actually don't have any binding to anything real they can take whatever perspective happens have utility without caring about it relationship that's right right right and so that's the thing one has to really watch out for yes is the simulation of empathy and so and it brings up something so you were talking about Christianity binding Game Theory yeah I'm not a Christian scholar so I'm just going to from the outside say the fact that under in the name of Jesus Christ who said let he who has no sins cast the first stone we were able to do the inquisitions is a really interesting Act of mental gymnastics yes yes and so I see that wherever there is a relationship to the sacred that is authentic and it starts to develop the ability to really move people there's power in that then those who are seeking power seek to capture it yes and corrupt it and so then all the religions become these mixed bags of an authentic beautiful thing and the way power ends up capturing them and if they don't Orient to power then they usually lose in a holy war their population doesn't become very big or something like that I would love to hear so because there's how do we have a how do we have a proliferation of the Sacred for which someone will make real sacrifices and for which whole populations will that doesn't lose to other populations that don't do that and that doesn't get captured by power and perverted and distorted right okay so first of all U agreed but I want to I want to I want to say um well the notion of restraint Christianity was successful in pretty much keeping it as part of the cultural cognitive grammar that people other than the male citizens were actually persons it was successful at turning infanticide into an accepted practice into something we find horrific so yes I'm not saying that you know the the power structures came in but there were there was also enough I mean we the we are running on the fumes of the Christian sacred canopy and it's been what has been still keeping some restraints on this otherwise um malukan machine that's running and and and I want to what I'm trying to say is I want to I want to I want to give us a sense of hope about this that it's not the sacred emerges and then it gets consumed the sacred emerges there is the there is the P push back there's the reframing there's the the power consumption but some of the underlying cultural cognitive grammar has been fundamentally changed we haven't gone back to the Bronze Age we're still post axio we haven't gone back to the pre-christian age we right that that that's not what happened and so I'm saying I'm not denying that right I'm not denying that there's the threat but what I'm saying is but if we could be more clear about what gets preserved across the I don't know what to call them the reent of the power dynamics and could we better more better this time focus our attentions there focus our our our our cultural and even our political commitments we could perhaps do it better this time I mean I think we must this is exactly brings up a question I wanted to ask you is in the in the parable that you told of the master in the Emissary I might argue that the responsibility for the failure of that Civilization or tribe or whatever you want to call it was the Masters not the emissaries because the master obviously Mis assessed the master would probably have agreed with you yes and so rather than say the master was wise and the um Emissary wasn't so he did a ding krer thing and messed it all up the master was missing a certain kind of wisdom in his assessment of the actual realistic capabilities of the Emissary there was some stuff in his noticing the hole that he wasn't noticing that was really critical for him to ultimately still hold responsibility so there's a there's an uptick in the master capability that could have kept that relationship right so there's something about needing to be power literate to be able to keep power from corrupting a relationship with the sacred I mean rather than say that the master was deficient in some way one would say that there was an important relationship here which required a certain degree of vulnerability so the master couldn't to remain invulnerable because he realized that he needed to not concern himself with certain things if things were to survive so there isn't a squeaky clean answerit to this he had in a way to trust in some ways it's very like the story of God and Satan that Satan was Lucifer the lightbringer the brightest of the Angels God's right hand and because of his um Power hungriness and his Envy of God everything fell to ruin but at the end of that story isn't ruin because Christianity again again uh I'm becoming more and more convinced during our conversation if nothing else comes out of it how very very important the the sort of overarching effect of a religion such as Christianity is for the survival of a civilization I mean I've always felt that but I see it more and more in what we're talking about but what you what you've averted to adverted to earlier was the the necessary sort of supervision and that is a difficult balancing act as it is for the master in the emery and there's another Fable which I I tell at the beginning of part three of the matter with things which is an onandaga Legend they're anay people and they have the story of how you know because creation was waning there were these two brothers who were sent to sort of regenerate the power of the universe and these brothers are not equal um like the master and the embassy one of them is is wise and he is called the one that holds the the Earth with both hands the other is called hard as ice the Flint and his value is that he he's got a a tool that his father gave him which is speech and the other is an arrow with which he can shoot this is an extraordinary just starting there division between as it were the right ere and the left emisphere but the story gets better and better as it goes on I can't tell the whole thing but there those who are interested recording on YouTube of me reading the the introduction of this chapter in which which we tell the the story but effectively what the good brother realizes is the bad brother tries to imitate the good brother because he's envious of him he's a good brother creating all kinds of wonderful things birds and beasts and flowers and he tries to create and he produces only thorns and flies and bats and um there's a sort of sense that he is dangerous left to himself but he must also not come too close to the good brother because the good brother needs to preserve a degree of his independence without which he is no longer himself so they they can't fuse but one needs to be subservient to the other the one needs to have power over the other but that is not something that can ever be secured 100% right so you could never have the situation where the one that is wise has that power because one of the terms on which wisdom exists is that it sees beyond power now I know that you've made a very good point that there needs to be a certain degree of sort of watchfulness and power awareness I I agree about that quite how this is managed in a way that doesn't actually vitiate the whole business of wisdom because in most cultures wisdom is associated with well in in in Chinese with wo way with Within action the master does nothing but nothing is left undone um the these remarkable and beautiful sayings of the DST literature um so we we have to somehow find a way of making that work and I don't know what your ideas about how that could be made to work are a close friend and colleague of mine that you both know Zach Stein um talks about the distinction between power differentials in an educational setting versus in most traditional power settings specifically he's talking about educative Authority versus propaganda in terms of information asymmetries and that the key distinction and this gets fuzzy but the key distinction is that someone who has information asymmetry relative to someone else who could use that asymmetry to maintain the asymmetry and grow it which is the impulse of power traditionally in the educative example the educator recognizes that they have an information asymmetry but they're in a kind of fiduciary relationship where their goal is to actually bring the student up to symmetry with them and even Beyond so their goal is not to maintain their power asymmetry they they use the power asymmetry to close it and whereas in most power dynamics if someone has an economic asymmetry they use that increased economic power political power to both maintain it and grow it and so we would say the first one is an ethically legitimate utilization of the reality of a power difference the second one is not a legitimate one but what that also means is let's say that the educator who trying to bring this person up to competence recognizes that there's someone else who's trying to exploit them the educator now has some ethical responsibility in their fiduciary responsibility to the student to also do something over here to do something in that relationship and that is where I think it's very interesting is if those who are pursu pursuing the true the good and the Beautiful those who are pursuing a deep relationship with the sacred and wisdom don't do anything and don't develop any levers of technological or economic or other types of power Lotus eating so to speak then they're leaving the direction of the world to those who maximally seek power orientation for the illegitimate use and so then you have to say is it really wise to say I see Power I see power of the world to the sociopaths including in the risk of eminent Extinction and the destruction of the Sacred and and not just the future destruction but that 10 to 20 animals go extinct every day from Human Action that there are two orders of magnitude more mammals in factory farms than in the wild today like there's some ethical obligation of those who give a about that to have that give a do something to be actual as you say actual meaning that it acts so are our values is actual if they're actual do they have a causal effect yeah well are they obligated to I mean if I may just respond to that I I I'm not suggesting that we just sit back and roll over and let everything go to hell in a handcut that's very far from what I'm saying but what I'm saying is that even if we were to find ways of um reducing certain kinds of harm unless they were accompanied by by a growth in wisdom that really wouldn't achieve what is what we need to achieve yes we would leave the psychopaths in charge actually so it is a difficult one I mean your analogy is not meant to be perfect but for example with the teacher bringing the the pupil up to his standard and maybe Beyond which I I like that idea and I think it's it's a real one um but if the if the the student is in fact um basically Psychopathic then has he done good by doing that I mean once you start looking at the outcomes of actions rather than the motivations behind actions you get into famously into trouble so I there's three things I want to respond to um one is I'm hearing uh we've been talking a lot about the master versus the Emissary but it seems to me that we we're in a weird problematic here um and I I know this isn't an accurate representation of your thought but I want to pose it and but I want I want to also State all three things because they belong together one is yeah but that also requires that the left hemisphere has some reverence for the right hemisphere but reverence is properly a property of the right Hemisphere and so you've got this weird the weird catch22 thing going on um and then I think part of what how we how we've have done this and this is why bringing up the educator is important is we've done this by saying oh but there's this there's another variable in here which is there's not only individual cognition there's the collective intelligence of distributed cognition there is something that comes out in a we like what's here right that um is not not doesn't belong to you or to you or to me right but it takes on a life of its own and of course this is the whole tradition of the Ecclesia and the the tradition of the Guist and the tradition of the logos and right and with the socratic dialogue we follow the logos wherever it goes and what that what that does is this this is Plato's pivot problem right because the the example you're talking about is exact like exactly the problem that Plato was wrestling with with Socrates and elotes here you have the most attractive not physically but the most attractive right representation of wisdom and here you have this you know glorious figure um who's attracted to Socrates but is ultimately properly you know a psychopath Al is is willing to screw any body over for his own personal and betray everybody and Plato really is vexed about how why why doesn't he turn what what makes somebody pivot towards that and and then Plato wrestles with this and he has sort of two answers one is there's a there's a sort of Seduction and I hate to use that term in our charged atmosphere but there's a seduction which is you basically get get sort of the left hemisphere really involved with the kind of stuff it likes to do running arguments and discussions but as it's doing that you use that as a way of getting it to pay attention to the nonpropositional right in very very powerful ways and this is why Plato writes dialogues because the drama and the character development are as important as the argument we did a great disservice we just took the arguments out and stuck them over all right but if you do that that's that that that's part of the answer and then in that what what part of the seduction is and and and and it's not like if you try to make somebody follow the sacred it's not sacred right right but the the the the seduction is like again how how we fall in love right is if you put people into these circumstances where they can catch the fire of the logos then they will often feel called to reorient themselves they they will do the Plato's pivot it's not an algorithm because if it was an algorithm it wouldn't be the thing we need we can't make it an algorithm but when we're looking for something algorithmic we're we're fundamentally misapprehend the ontology that has to be at its basis but I've seen this when we do these biological practices people say and this is regardless of where they come from religious or secular they're say this is a kind of intimacy I've always been looking for but I didn't realize that sounds like platonic anamnesis right and that and then if they go longer right they start to they start to move beyond the intimacy between they say there's the we space or the Guist or the logos and they start to feel intimate with it and then they're called to that and then some people are called beyond that they're called to through all of that I get a sense of intimacy with being itself and they get the possibility of falling in love again but I can't argue them into that I can put them into a place where there's argumentation going on where there's conceptual reflection going on but this thing we have to structure it with a lot of finesse so it takes on a life of its own and can draw Us in so we can get people to do the platonic pivot that's that's how it would address what you're saying logic has this compulsory kind of um nature if you like that it's trying to compel a position yes and what you rightly are pointing out is that the things that really matter like wisdom and love can't be compelled in this way no um and if they are they're no longer wisdom or love there was always a vulnerability involved here that's terribly important in my view and it's not necessarily anybody's fault if that vulnerability leads as it usually does eventually to some kind of a a downfall but without actually taking the risk we can't have the great things that we have had so it has its own value and and and purpose even if we can't actually always guarantee what kind of an outcome there's going to be okay but I want to pick up on the seduction I agree with what you're saying yeah but what I want to say is can we get I'm trying to use your language because I want to play with in your can we get the left hemisphere involved with speech and logic and it likes to play this this is what happened but it gets drawn it it gets drawn into something that it is beyond itself it does and that takes me back to a point you made early on that how can it ever be that the the right Hemisphere and the left hemisphere have that right relationship because the left hemisphere has this intrinsic loss of of reverence or whatever yes but I don't think that's necessarily the case because I think the problem comes when we give too much power to the Emissary in that myth so um to begin with in civilizations the left hemisphere and right hemisphere work very well together the left hemisphere is given exactly that kind of a job that it's good at and it it if you like to put it this way I'm being ridiculously anthropomorph but it it it's happy to be in that role and to contribute but the problem comes when we start to lose I'm going to come back to this thing about the value difference between the right and left because I think it's absolutely essential to the situation we're in is our complete loss of orientation towards the right values and and what happens then is that the the values of the left hemisphere are encouraged and the left hemisphere starts to see only its own point of view and it's it thinks itself in a Dunning Krueger likee way to be more intelligent than it is okay and I agree with this wholeheartedly and but I and I want to say something that overlaps with Daniel uh what he's saying because one of the things that the enlightenment why it takes off I would argue is it gets it gets a way of really clarifying the difference between Authority and power and this is one of the you know so you got Kant right and and then I want to correct it with Hegel but Kant is basically saying No Authority is when I recognize you as being able to say something that I will fundamentally be persuaded of as true so I recognize that you are you know this is a Cony model his language is dangerous but just let me use it for now right I recognize you as a rational being and therefore I should acknowledge that what you say I should take it seriously and allow it to possibly persuade me and then when I do something because you have persuaded me I do it because uh I have recognized ized you and you have recognized me and then Hegel said oh but and but this reciprocal recognition which is what you get in the student and the teacher that you don't get in because the Master Slave this is Hegel you don't have reciprocal recognition right but in the in this but and importantly that is not the relationship between the hemisphere I talk about that exactly exactly and this is exactly so one of the things I think the one of the things why the enlightenment takes off is because it brought this tremendous liberating clarification but wait wait wait we want we want we want all the governance even my self-governance to be based on Authority which is based on reciprocal recognition and Hegel says not only moment to moment but all of the people before you and all the people that are going to come after you the biggest possible distributed cognition machine you have you are you want to be like listening to them and you want to be trying to get the future to listen to you and you get this tremendous model of authority and I think that was tremend tremendously liberating now the the and then what I see happening is that some of the things that came along with that is how the the right hemisphere started to seed power or not realize that power is getting seeded because once you give right this this priority to this right then you start to give a a it's it's very easy to get into the idea oh but all the all that the reasoning is all of the all that the rationality is it's not a way of being it's just a way of calculating Hobs proposes this right so right the enlightenment gives us something that is tremendously of value and I don't I don't think we want to go back to and give that back again we don't go want to go back to Master's SL no no right and you right and so we have to get to that that that point where no no no reason isn't about calculation it's about being with each other in a way that we are reciprocally responsible to each other so we are governed by Authority rather than by power and that's how I'm trying to answer you that that is that is possible for us there was two things in the enlightenment that got inappropriately bound together I think the very legitimate understanding of the difference between Authority and power and then the illegitimate reduction of rationality not as a way of being with each other but as a way of calculating each other's Behavior which is in my term the handing over of reason to Mere rationality rationality being schematic logic as a way of understanding things whereas reason is a way of balancing rationality with the intuitions that come from a life well lived from experience and that is what it reason it was always thought to be the main purpose of an education for 2,000 years and the West to produce a reasonable person yes and that's what one would expect of a wise judge or a good politician but we don't have that right so my language for that and I don't think it's in any way uh different I talk about the ancient no notion of logos and with dayart you get it reduced to logic and and and and then we reduce reason to just logical manipulation of propositions and we lose all the other we lose the perspectival yeah and the the participatory Notions yeah so you said something at the beginning I want to come back to which is how can the left brain have reverence for the right if it doesn't have reverence as a capability yeah and I think this was something I said to Ian when he and I had a brief visit yesterday is uh what girdle did with the incompleteness theorem was use math to show the upper boundaries of math sure and but that's a Socratic project that's what Socrates does almost all of the dialogues end in aoria for that reason and it's what the gani yog path and the viic tradition in Zen it's what tarski did with formal logic using formal logic to show the upper bounds and I think it's exactly what Ian is doing in describing the master Emissary relationship in a way the left brain can understand because you know I was saying earlier wouldn't the master be the more responsible party I think they're both responsible right and so there is a reverence the left hemisphere has to have for the right there is a Rec nition of the developmental maturity capacity and relationship with the environment the right needs to have right and we're of course using left and right hemisphere than the individual to also represent forces in the world distribution of people and like that um and I think the very best thing that the parts-based one of the best things the parts based mind can do is recognize its own upper boundaries being insufficient to what is actually worth caring about in which case it has its own kind of transcendence right it has its own recognition of something Beyond itself worth listening to so again evolutionary Providence for this right I think one way I would say of Ian's hysterography is right the the what should be properly opponent processing and I I'll explain what I mean by that has become adversarial processing and this is also the problem at the level of our distributed cognition if you look throughout our biology you have opponent processing going on component processing is when you have two systems that have complementary biases and then you you lock them together so that each is the best corrector of the other so non-controversial example is the autonomic nervous system you have the sympathetic system biased in one way use everything as a threat and opportunity the parasympathetic is everything is and they're like this and so your level of arousal is constantly evolving and there doesn't have to be any king or Emperor over this because it is a self-correcting system your attentional system the the task Focus the default you're constantly moving between focusing your attention and varying it opponent processing opponent processing between uh foregrounding and backgrounding and I can go on and on why does nature keep coming to this because it is how you solve the no- free lunch theorem every heuristic has a complimentary bias this is a mathematical theorem and appr proov but and this is one of the things I I put in my original 2012 paper but if you put two complimentary htics together they can toggle between each other and you don't fall prey to to the no free L you can escape the Trap that you you you have to constantly fall into the bias from your hrista nature figured this out and I think I would put it to you if if if we understand it the way I've explained it to you that the proper relationship between the hemispheres could be opponent processing rather than adversarial Crossing if each hemisphere could come to see the other hemisphere as a b valuable source of self-correction because as as you say they solve different sets of problems well-defined problems left hemisphere very IL defined galsh problems in the right hemisphere but this is also something not at the individual level democracy has to democracy requires this commitment which is not game theoretic but it it is has evolutionary Providence you are the best possible entity for me overcoming my self-deceptive bias because you have alternative biases and I am the best for you and if we both commit to the Guist the logos between us we can get the best self-correcting system which is what democracy is supposed to be but not just for individual cognition it's supposed to be for cognition distributed cognition but again I'm trying to offer you I the theme you have that I keep wanting to answer is there's evolutionary Providence for the Alternatives that are being discussed here that can be tapped into did that land yes I I want to propose something in relationship to this and here your both your thoughts one very simple way I would sometimes describe a the generator of the metac crisis is that humans have radically Beyond evolutionary capability via technology development and still using relatively close to evolutionary motivations mhm that you can't apply apex predator Theory to sapiens and have a biosphere that doesn't self-destruct M because a polar bear can't make nukes um and an orca can't kill all the fish in the ocean but we can do both and so we're obviously not an apex predator we're we obviously are something well beyond that because the evolutionary process having most of the Adaptive capacity in the other animals be corporeal and very slow evolving and slow evolving through processes that create co- selection create a symmetry of power whereas the Orca gets faster so do the tune in they get away and as the polar bear gets faster the walles get bigger and all that kind of thing and with the complexification of our cognitive processes that could start to do Techna and I would say I'm just going to call it techn in general both physical Technologies and language capitalism Etc um that our adaptive capacity and our preda capacity increased rapidly faster than any of the rest of the environment increased its resilience or relative capacity absolutely and so I would put the origin of the metac crisis not with evolutionary processes but with the beginning of stone tools right and it's a stone tools were pretty slow evolutionary curve and so then with the Agricultural Revolution we got a big bump and then the industrial we get a big bump I think we get a big bump in the upper pill lithic transition and that's my response to which is we get a big bump in the upper P lithic transition in which we seem to get the Advent of the appreciation of the Sacred that goes along it is sewing into some of our biggest cogn cognitive advancements so you have the technology like you said is like this right and then we get this bump and we get projectile weapons we get calendars uh we get but we also get music we also get representational art we SE if here here's my argument actually it's you're you're making it okay humans have been a very mixed bag in from a ethical perspective of the only creature that really scientifically optimized torture to have the most subjective suffering possible but also the only one that will sacrifice itself for other species and that can make the vow of the bodhisatta right our abstraction allowed us to search a very wide search space so the most kind of beautiful numinous stuff and the most kind of horrific stuff what I'm arguing is that that mix mixed bag that we have been with exponential Tech near planetary boundaries self-terminates and that we don't get to keep being that mixed bag and this now comes up to the vulnerability of if the relationship to the sacred is forced or compulsory it's not actually a relationship to the sacred if you remove Choice it's not ethics anymore it's mechanism and so there's a vulnerability in the recognition of actual choice and in the honoring of choice yes but we have to do that in fundamentally differently than we've ever done because if you say how well have we stewarded our power historically if you ask the other species that we inhabited the planet with or the lower classes within civilizations or whatever that mixed bag stewarded it pretty poorly in many places but we couldn't split atoms and we couldn't change genomes and we couldn't make ai ai so the question comes and so let's take AI for a moment because splitting atoms takes G8 nation state level capacity to do it actually doesn't the G8 has made sure nobody else gets to use it through the Ia and making sure that if anyone even tries to obom them preemptively because we don't want the power to get distributed and yet we're Distributing the power of synthetic bio and AI rapidly that is every bit is destructive to not just other state actors but anybody in a way that is UNM monitorable so when you have decentralized catastrophe weapons and things that can create the catastrophe even by the intentionally good use but with mistaken externalities from doing too much narrow problem solving and not enough is this a good goal is this the right problem orientation and anybody does the AI weapon everybody has to do the AI weapon or they lose by default those types of Dynamics I would argue that that our abstraction capacity exploring that whole search space the power sides of it end up and you know um Robert writes nonzero of course you have in you have a selection for increased coordination within an in group that can do sometimes coordination with an outg group that we call trade but sometimes zero sum or negative sum competition with an outg group so there's a shelling game where I'll coordinate with you when it's in my benefit while reserving the right to defect on you when that's in our benefit and if anybody does that then everybody's in that kind of game theory and if someone says well we'll just sacrifice ourselves comprehensively great then there's just no more of those people those people are gone and the people who made through are the people who won the game theory thing so what I'm saying is that both through conflict theory people who want to do M up stuff with this much technological power and through mistake Theory people who are just I don't want to cause climate change but I want to do stuff that requires energy multiplied by the conent imperative of there's eight billion people all wanting to do the same thing we go extinct in all those scenarios or we at least radically lose civiliz any definition of civilizational progress anybody could want to argue I would already say when you talk about the the enlightenment that if you ask how was the Enlightenment and how was civiliz how is generally The Narrative of civilizational progress to the Native Americans or to any of the indigenous species that were you know indigenous people that were extincted or any of the other species or whatever the progress narrative is a very challenging narrative um and I'm not going to throw out all of the baby with the bath water but we have to hold the complexity of it sure but the question that I'm really curious about is given the amount of technological power that we have and that we're rapidly getting and given how much that power has already eroded the biosphere to the point of tipping points and given how distributed all the people are and there is no one king of the world I'm not saying we would want it who can make choices can we imagine a Humanity that has the wisdom to Steward that power reasonably well well here's my here's my challenge back to you because you've made this argument before and I find it compelling but I also find it frustrating because the argument is set up um but that basically says we have no examples from the past that we can rely on um and then asks us to imagine the future uh where how can we possibly imagine a future without relying on the past examples it's it's a request to do and I know you're not trying to do that do you see what I'm saying I would argue that we have examples from the past temporarily that were able to use restraint via wisdom via relationship to the sacred adequate to have their own population in some relative sustainability with its environment and some reasonable quality of life producing I would I I have indigenous scholar friends who've said that the early indigenous wisdom Traditions we're talking 40,000 years ago actually emerged in relationship with human extinction of megap and that they had already messed stuff up and we're like whoa we're too powerful to be this dumb we have to be a lot wiser men are not the web of life we a strand with than it whatever we do to the web we do to ourself that the first wisdom Traditions were already their response to the anthropogenic crisis and so then they might have had a while of relatively good binding of that level of tech then someone else got a higher level of tech didn't have the same binding and then those people got wiped out or had to join the thing so I'm not saying we have no precedent of people doing a wisdom binding power thing I'm saying we have no adequate precedent to the current situation because obviously we have a totally different Power dynamic and so but it's okay to say that new stuff is required right like so this is an Innovative question it's innovating in the domain of wisdom question that of course draws on but is not limited to what we have done so far so to my ear this just sounds like an exaptive proposal can we take stuff out that's been working one way and repurpose it and some like the way the tongue has been repurposed for speech is am I am I understanding you correctly so you're not you're because sometimes I've heard it has to be exaptive right okay so it is I don't think we were evolutionarily selected to wisely Stewart Ai No I don't think anyone would argue that so we were evolutionarily selected to have hemispheres that do this stuff and that created in the same way I don't think we were evolutionarily selected to cause the anthropos and all of the problems and cause climate change right so I think the problems and the solutions are both exaptive yes to the evolutionary capacities right okay excellent now that's a good reframing because then the question is how much hope can be place in the sapiential the wise oriented exaptations compared to like let's call them the power Dynamic exaptations the technological power Dynamic exaptations and uh it's it's difficult to know what where we I'm not trying to be difficult I'm just trying to say for me it's like where would we stand to ask that question what like what would be the place in which you see us being able to like where are we standing such that we can look at these two and say I can make sort of uh I don't want to want to say objective but a relatively neutral evaluation of these two and say Here's how we can place hope here because you're not just asking people to place hope I hear you saying can you give me good reason to place hope is that is that fair I think so you know my process coming to this with regard to Global catastrophic risk obviously involved recognizing none of the other species were causing global catastrophic risk and people with stone tools couldn't cause global catastrophic risk and people with bronze tools couldn't so it was a relationship to human mind our mind's ability to create vast economic industrial communication educational government technological systems the way those systems in turn reinforce patterns of mind that lead us to a novel situation of self- induced Global catastrophic risk that is increasingly eminent and then saying what do all these different risks have in common in terms of the patterns of human experience and behavior individually and collectively particularly collectively that give rise to them because if we can identify those generative Dynamics then we can say a future that is not described by these catastrophes has to deal with these generative Dynamics and so we talk about the third attractor of like neither a future defined by increasing catastrophe nor a control response to that that gives dystopias what's left and so really it's a what are the necessary criteria of a civilization that could Steward the amount of technological power we have well so then this is great this is helpful uh I think Ian and I have been trying to point out what some of those underlying generative Dynamics are exactly and then propose um any and I don't mean to put words in your mouth so if I say something inappropriate please intervene uh but but propose you know is ideas of wisdom uh correct intra cerebral intra psychic relation correct distributed cognition replacing adversarial with opponent uh bringing back love of virtue love of the transend dentals pointing out that those aren't just Ary fairy they have an evolutionary Providence so we can depend on deep motivations to empower them but I sense that you're still sensing an inadequacy in this well I think at an individual level these are good thoughts right at the how do you have those Define the way AI is developed and rolled out and the way synthetic biology is developed and rolled out and the way that NATO and Russia engage over Ukraine is different so one is saying what would more wise like is there a basis there's a philosophic questions is there a basis in reality for intrinsic purpose or meaningfulness or sacred is there are there different capacities maybe hemispheric orientations within humans to understand that better I.E are there ways of developing wisdom that could Steward power better that's like the philosophic and then developmental at the individual level but then it's the you pointed out the word defection earlier right which is the defection from the wisdom that is directing the power that can end up leading to these kind of slippery things and you can never totally close that but in the time of stone tools or bronze tools the worst thing it could do was way less bad than the worst thing it can do now so I'm asking for better thoughts on what would it take to develop wisdom at the scale necessary to actually have a human A continuing human presence on the planet that doesn't destroy itself or totally suck well I've offered an answer to that I thought okay uh but uh my proposal is we need to basically co-opt and exit the Machinery of religion um because religions have been able to do ma theyve shown that they are proper distributed cognition collective intelligence machines that can fundamentally reorient civil at a civilizational level they have a they can do that for good or for ill right and that what we need is uh something like that and and I'm not proposing that I'm going to start a religion because that's a ridiculous proposal but I that so I'm think we have done this in the past yeah and and of course nobody makes a religion there's not an algorithm there's a way in which and I'm sort of hiigaran about that the sacred has to somehow break through the way the complicated has failed in the face of the complexity of reality and speaks in a new way and something is called to that and then we have something like but but it can't be like the it can't be like the axial religions it has to be as different to the axial religions as the axial religions were to the Bronze Age religions this is the proposal I make it okay great so this relates to what Ian said a few moments ago when he said if I'm getting anything out of this conversation it's how powerful something like Christianity um must be so you were speaking to this hierarchy of values and the utility values at the bottom which obviously is not how the world is oriented currently and some sense of the Sacred at the top um we mentioned wisdom being something that has a concept of restraint bound so that utility is not always maximized uh that power is not always maximized in service of something that is other than utility absolutely you're proposing that religion has served this function before and that something like that is probably needed um what obviously we know the history of why church and state have been separated we know all of the critiques of uh religion that are worthwhile um what do we imagine the relationship to some sense of sacred that is developable that creates something like wisdom that creates something like restraint and power binding that creates something like increased felt meaningfulness increased sense of coordination that is other than Game Theory what might that look like because it probably won't be just religion as its own domain it'll probably be how it relates to the educational system into media and even how it's encoded in economics and what are some of your thoughts on what the criteria of such a religion might need to be and uh what it might look like and what the transition from here to there or its development might look like so I really want to be really clear that I am not uh proposing the founding of a religion or anything ridiculous like this because um uh relevance is not subjective it has to it has to be co-created by reality and us religio has to be co-created by real there's a sense in which reality he has to disclose something to us so I just want to re re iterate that contextualization now within that what I've been trying to do are two related projects um one is to try and look for what can be exapted from the past and and I want to use that language very carefully and see some of the central things uh that come out of that um one is um sorry these are both very long arguments so I'll just be very but I'll be very compressed one is is you take a look at what becomes pretty much the spiritual backbone of the West and Arthur B Lewis I think has argued this very well which is something like neoplatonism neoplan has this neoplatonism has this tremendous capacity to enter into reciprocal reconstruction with Jud Judaism with with um uh with Christianity with Islam um with science does this at the beginning of the science so it has this tremendous thing and then and I think filler uh his wonderful book and his series of essays has made a very clear case a very good case that what neoplatonism is trying to get us to do is give up um a substance-based ontology and I mean substance not just in the cartisian sense but the Aristotelian sense like that we think of the world the most real things are are physio Spa uh you know spatial temporal physical things to which properties bind and that relation emerge out of these things and that what neop is trying to say no reality is ultimately about intelligibility uh or we can use something analogous from our modern thinking we have to play with it though information and this is inherently relational intelligibility information right are inherently relational and that so reality is fundamentally primarily relational but it takes a lot thought of transformation of individuals for to get them into seeing the ground of being as uh that the relations have ontological don't think about this temporally because that's a mistake but they have ontological priority over the relata the things that are bound in to the relations and that way you can ground intelligibility and information as fundamental uh um well I don't see any word I use going be inappropriate but fundamental features of RA even that word is is inappropriate and then what you see and it's this sort of grand unifying field theory of Western spirituality then you see Zen Gathering Together elements of Daoism Buddhism Confucianism and Shintoism and also coming to you know a very convergent kind of no no underneath it right isn't right it's it's actually the interconnectedness and the interconnectedness in time relationality is the is the deepest ground and you have you you have like a philosopher in the west like haiger trying to open us back up to that and then you have the Kyoto School in right in Japan trying to bridge between this and then what that brings back it what that brings up is the possibility of what I call the philosophical Silk Road the Silk Road belonged to no one and it allowed people to Commerce not only a Commerce of things but a a Commerce of ideas but they needed a lingua franka and it was sort of neop platonism from the west and Zen from the East and then there also seems to be interactions with vidanta and other things and and and and what it gives you is it gives you right nobody owns this no just like nobody owns English but it gives people a grammar right a a a deep grammar by which they can right they can enter into these large scale Recreations of fundamental understanding of human being in the world and so um I think that's a real possibility for us um and we by the way there's a there's a there's a long history of trying to bridge between there's there's a there's like 40 years of history in the west of what's called Zen Christianity where people have been mapping Zen this is something that people are are are now I'm not saying that the religion of the future is Zeno platonism I'm not saying that what I'm saying is these two could be Pro brought into because they have important differences they could be brought into a profound opponent processing that could be that from which the acceptation can occur that's that side of the project the other side of the project is can we build ecologies of practices can we build networks of communities like what happens in the early Christian Church can we can we and can we get them integrated with our best understanding of meaning making of religio can we build these communities can we build these ecologies of practices can we Network them together and I'm invested and involved in creating that and trying to get can we get this and this going together and the hope is out of that can emerge the possible acceptation and it has to be as different from the axial religions as the axio religions were from the Bronze Age religions that's the proposal it's a project even now notice what I'm not saying I'm not saying I'm going to make this what I'm going to say is can I get can I get the very best of what Drew everything together draw together put it into a living community living ecologies of practices so that there's a possibility that the sacred could speak to us again that's what I'm proposing I think the sacred is beginning to speak to us again that's my observation yes um and I noticed one of the nice things for me is that a lot of young people are very interested in my ideas and extreme ex remely dissatisfied with the the thin grow of if you can call it a philosophy by which our civilization yes now lives or fails to thrive um so I think there's a thirst for it and I think it can't be compelled in any way I I I don't believe we can invent religions at will at any rate I think they grow organically um or or are found Ed by communities in in a way that we don't need to think about Reinventing religions there are religious Traditions wisdom Traditions spirituality Traditions um that are very robust I've become less enthusiastic about um a kind of spiritual sense that is sort of made up to do with you know I don't want to sound patronizing but the the some kind of almost pseudo religious cults that are growing up that I think could be quite worrying actually because a religion carries with it a lot of power that's why we we it's one of the few ways in which we we can exert power not we can exert power but Power can be exerted through us for good I I'm not saying it couldn't be for bad as well that is part of what I'm saying but if we to think of the things that we really need like this closely or more closely bound society in which we learn to trust one another and share values that's extraordinarily important I can't remember his name but I think a third Century Chinese emperor said for a civilization there are three things that are important guns food and Trust if you have to give up one give up guns if you have to give up another give up food but if you give up trust you you cannot survive and that is what we are losing very very fast there's a sort of way in which people now think which is that if I can get away with it I should so in other words we're relying on external pressures external constraints external restraints on us and if they aren't there when we can just do anything which is not obviously it's not any kind of morality but it's also very dangerous because at some point um faced with that kind of philosophy it will be impossible to constrain and restrain everybody who wishes to do wicked things so I I think that's I want to just say a few things so um it may take a few minutes but um please uh so I think it will provide many things it will provide a kind of structure philosophical framework um a sense of a tradition through which we can re-experience something very beautiful um beautiful good and true in my view which is what the greatest art of of our civilization has produced and I I'm not here excluding other civilizations as Anyone who reads my work will know I derive a lot from Chinese Japanese Indian and other kinds of um cultures so there's that and I think also there is something highly motiv motivating which is I'm I think it's very important that we get away from the idea that we are simply passive here in this world that we come into it and certain things sort of are blasted at us and we are receptive or non-receptive to them rather like a photographic plate or a or or a or a sound recorder I don't believe that's the way it works um on a whole number of levels the first is that I think we have we have responsibilities on several levels and this needs to be saided because it's not known anymore one is and I know you would share this that the way in which we attend to things changes what there is to attend to MH and that means that we are whether we like it or not we have a moral responsibility to be careful about how we use and how we dispose our attention because we can create bad things by attending in a certain way or we can produce a good result by attending in another way with a different disposition of one's heart and mind so I think that's one I think another is that we may actually in some sense help to bring about at a sort of more Cosmic level um a a a turn for um for good for promoting the sacred so I didn't think my model of whatever it is that we mean by the Divine ground of being is not that it's just sort of sitting there passively but that it is interacting with its Creation The Creation that it has grounded and that it is coming to know more of itself and its creation is coming to know more of itself in the dance of evolution that the two do together this is really a whiteheadian idea but it's one I find compelling as I find much of white heads philosophy deeply compelling um and I think there are other ways too that we can help prepare things in a way which is even if we don't succeed is a fine project to devote Our Lives to so in the lanic cabala there is a story of creation which is rather different from the one in Genesis but it begins with the Divine being the ground of being ends off um bringing something into existence because a off is essentially relational the found foundations of everything are relational I believe and I think you have said this too that I I certainly think that relationships are prior to relata relations are the foundations of everything and the relata come out of the network of relations at the intersection points we see things that attract our attention there's a thing so if that's the case then anyway you'd expect this Divine being to want to create something that was other than itself in order to have have a relationship with it and if God is as is held in almost all spiritual Traditions love then love needs to have an other and it needs also not to compel that other because it cannot it cannot love something that is under entirely predictable and under its control otherwise it's not other at all so that view of the cosmos which I think is in is wonderfully developed in Christianity through um the idea of a God that makes himself vulnerable by a creation that is free either to reciprocate his love or not to reciprocate it I want to come back to the cabalistic story so the First Act of this creative God is not to stretch out a hand and make something happen it's to withdraw it's it's it's to re itself in so there's a space for something other that's called simum which simply means withdraw and then the second phase is called sherim which means the shattering of the vessels because in this space that's been created there are 12 vessels and a single spark comes out of an off and lands on the vessels and shatters them in fact it only shatters eight out of the 12 but so explaining why it would take me too long so let's just accept that and then the third phrase in which Humanity according to the judaic tradition has a particular role that only it is capable of carrying out which is to repair the shattering tun repair and the idea is that we are tasked with creating again these vessels so that they are more beautiful than they were before they were shattered and the image that always comes to mind for me here is the Japanese art of kugi whereby a piece of ceramics that is broken is repaired sometimes with lines of gold and is considered more special more precious more beautiful afterwards than it was before now if it is true that we have the capacity to see how to repair things and no other beings can see that and I think that is probably right it's no disrespect to to the the rest of animal life that probably we have this ability to see other things and see beyond and foresee things in a way that they probably don't so I think if that's the case then we have a special role there and we may even have a role in bringing about the existence of God because that may sound very strange um and and possibly Blasphemous but the way in which I think this works is is like this we all know Pascal's wager and Pascal's wager was a simple one um either there is a God or there isn't if there is a God then it's very important that we should recognize and reciprocate our relationship with that God if there is no God then it won't do us any harm to behave as if there was a god but I think there's a third possibility which is Miguel Chris wager and it has the first two of Pascal in it but there is a third one which is that maybe we play a role in the development the evolution the furtherment the Fulfillment of whatever is divine and if that's the case then once again we have an incredibly ennobling obligation which is to make sure that we do help that good progress in the world so on various levels to do with how we dispose our attention the role we play in repair the role we play in furthering and bringing about the Divine we can influence things and we may not be able to stop certain specific Wars or whatever but that's never been part of what is imaged here part of what is imaged here is that we like it or not are gathered up into something that we have to respond to and I believe that the reason for the being life at all and especially human life is because whatever it is that is the ground of being needs response it needs that response and while it can be satisfied by the response of the inanimate World up to a point what life brings because I believe all life is is sacred but also the inanimate is sacred as well the difference is not that one suddenly is involved with Consciousness and the other isn't I think they're both manifestations of Consciousness but the thing about life is that it can respond enormously much faster and to a greater extent so that things can move instead of having to wait for this very slow slow process with creatures like us that can be um an acceleration of the the evolution of the cosmos and the Divine being that grounds that Cosmos together so all in all there is an enormously optimistic in my view and real and I you know I'm I'm a skeptical person in many ways but I'm also skeptical of skepticism when it rules things out that should we should open ourselves to and if I'm honest about my my my thinking my reading my experience of Life as a person as a doctor and so on I do believe that the this is the way the cosmos is and how we relate to it and that is surely something that brings hope hope brings dignity to The Human Condition and it also takes the burden off us of having to solve certain specific problems I'm not saying we shouldn't try to solve those specific problems we must um but it's in a sense secondary it's it's like the role of the the Emissary is to get on and find ways of you know purifying the oceans this is terribly important but it mustn't stop there because as I say you could purify the ocean you could save the rainforest and if the only reason we did that was because of our own economy and for our own flourishing we would have lost the main reason which is because these things are powerful beautiful Rich complex entities that have their value in themselves they are intrinsic in their nature not of extrinsic use to us I reply that or do you want to reply I go ahead um first of all um I share that Vision in a lot of ways um as I mentioned kabala comes out of the intersection of neoplatonism with uh judaic thought um but what I what I would like to try and afford and not make and there's a big difference you you don't make wisdom you cultivate it you you don't do nothing you cultivate the conditions and it has to take and it has to flow right um I would like to afford something that can work at the global level that needs to be addressed here given the novelty of the global level of the problems that Daniel has so I'm trying to find something that is properly pluralistic so running through white head and running through cabala and running through Sufism is this neoplatonic framework and then running through many things in uh for lack of a better word I don't like the word but the East right is is is a Zen Sensibility absolutely and and then there's ways in which really helpfully they converge but they differ so proper opponent processing between them is possible and and then the idea is this could take on a life of its own such that something could well EXA out of it emerge out of it that that's what I'm proposing and so I think that's needed because we need something where like the Silk Road everybody can like everybody can participate in it but but but the Christian can go on the Silk Road and then return with their Christianity enriched the Buddhist can go on the Silk Road and return and their Bud Buddhism and but there's also something that's alive like at a global level that is also affording something new to be born that that's the proposal I'm making I agree with you and and there was nothing in what I said that suggested that it was restricted in its scope yes in fact I was talking about the way in which we actually have power which is not mechan mechanistic and therefore to do with effects of individual actions of human beings but was a relationship with with the cosmos in fact and you know one of the great sayings of course is to live the change or be the change that you wish to see and so in all these movements I think there has to begin with one's own orientation and one's public commitments these two go hand in hand and you can't create wisdom you can't instill wisdom it's not like that but you can follow people or admire people or model yourself on people we all do this whether we realized it or not we have people that we have thought exceptionally influential and and vulnerable that we we don't somehow have rules about how to be that kind of person but we know in irely there is this kind of a person and we get moved towards what that is and so sorry you want to come in well there's two things about that one is yes there's empirical evidence supporting this from very that the the the thing that is singularly most predictive of people aspiring and carrying out an aspirational project properly aspirational not utilitarian but I should be better than I am is the degree to which they have internalized a sage internalized Ro model that's the thing and that's the perspectival and then the second thing is is right you know what tnan said the next Buddha is the S I think there's a way in which the role model doesn't have to necessarily be an individual it can be a community in a powerful and new way that is also something we also need that and if there's going to be regeneration and you know tomorrow I'm going to Bristol to take part in the local futures um Symposium the idea there being that if there's a future for us we must generate it locally we mustn't rely on the global everything to supply us we must start growing our food locally and trusting and using the the contributions and Gifts of those around us not just through an abstract machine like Amazon now I mean that may be difficult but it's a it's a important aspiration and I think it's necessary too so we need to be balancing in the sense of opponent processing we need to be able to pick up the things that need to be done at a global level but we also need to be modeling that at the local level and and what we need to do is create the circumstances in which wisdom can grow because it can't be made to happen all you can do is stifle it or permit it it's like a gardener cannot make a plant The Gardener can either permit the plant to flourish or stifle it this brings up a place where I was wanting to go which has to do with more local religion yeah um first I just want to acknowledge you were kind of reifying choice that we're not just uh receptive beings here but we have choice and inherent to reifying Choice was obligation and that obligation was not imposed from the outside but was the result of a kind of recognition and I really like that I think that's an important thing that obligation wisdom restraint I think are all going to be critical topics and as you said we can't impose that on people we cannot mechanistically make it but it can be cultivated to your project the idea of a deeply respectful giving the benefit of the doubt inquiry into the previous religious philosophic Endeavors that had some success and some kind of synthesis not homogenization you know but a synthesis that recognizes that they might Orient towards different but meaningful things and holding those together um useful I think this is really good and I'm appreciating that you said Western and certain Eastern things but what comes to mind is that both what we call the Western and Eastern Traditions are very new relative to most of Sapient history yes and there's a reason I'm saying this that isn't just kind of like the obligate point to point out that there is a global South and there's you know things pre- civilization there's actually a really important reason to bring it up is um if we've had you know some hundreds of thousands of years of Sapient existence and we've only had these kinds of religious philosophic structures for some small number of thousands of years most of Human Experience is in the this other thing and a big part of it was that it was always local and that means that it wasn't trying to create a mtic structure that scaled no and there's something intrinsic to mimetic structures that scale that goes along with technoeconomic military structures that scale that I think is worth exploring a little bit um you were mentioning in one of your talks that uh intelligibility is not just about abstraction where all the differences go away being able to notice uniqueness and instantiation and distinction differ difference has to be as real as sameness and that's the fundamental challenge to reductionism reductionism says only what things have share as the same counts as real so there's something about scale standardization and reduction that go together very well this has been pointed like this is deep to the postmodern critique and wisdom cultivation is always unique to the moment it's not trolley problems right it's in stated what is a good choice in this moment utilizing all of the capabilities left hemisphere right hemisphere all the chakras what however you want to think about it and also unique to this person unique to this time and context ex I find it interesting that like almost every indigenous wisdom tradition that developed in much smaller contexts where everyone had much more intimate relationships to each other rather than abstracted relationship we're all Christian we're all Hindu whatever that they were all animistic and so in terms of like the Catholic and Hindu conversation around is God Transcendent or God eminent they if anything aired on the eminent side right that the Creator is indwelling within the creation yes and if the Creator is indwelling within the creation maybe also Beyond any part of it so Transcendent not meaning elsewhere but beyond any aspect but in dwelling in each aspect then any destruction of anything yes is sin is a violation of the Sacred there's something about airing in the direction of eminence that is less dangerous um direction of eminence yes and there's something about also at the small scale like we're talking we're having a conversation a lot of people are going to get to see but we're not necessarily taking people through a practice that is inducing the kinds of states the right hemispheric state where the numinous is there right where the sacred is there where the intimacy is there and I don't want to violate something I'm intimate with no there's something about the small scale that has high intimacy High touch in which I'm not relating to the abstract concept of their Christians they're on my side they're not Hindus on the other side or whatever I'm relating to this unique person and this one and this one that is inherently I think hemispherically different I was also thinking about so I'm curious how much you see hemispheric dominance having to do with scaling is one question I'm also very curious about and I've had other friends want to ask you this M um if matriarchal and metrocal cultures had any difference in this particular way given the uh is there a evolutionary difference in um tending the babies and tending life that orients in this way and and then we come back to the challenge of we have global scale problems that have Global drivers if the Chinese are the US has to and because the US is the Chinese have we have to deal with that but scaling if it involves standardization abstraction and a loss of instantiation is inherently part of the problem so how do we get something that is profoundly instantiated profoundly unique profoundly local and also cultivate that in a way that has the distribution that it needs yeah and I I I'm sympathetic to animism and um one interesting thing here is that if you experimentally suppress the left hemisphere um for say 10 or 15 minutes people describe things that they would normally consider inanimate as animate so they see the Sun as animate moving across the sky giving energy and so and and if you do the opposite and suppress the right hemosphere they see things that we would normally think of as living as not so um people like bits of furniture or like zombies or simply machines so there is clearly a difference there I'm so fascinating I'm a panentheist um and I think that's an important analogy um if you like but it goes further than animism and it manages to bring together imminence and Transcendence so pantheism simply says God is all the stuff that there is pantheism says God is in all the stuff that there is and all the stuff that is is in God now I think that is a maybe we don't need to explore that too much but I I would say that is a very to me important and sounds to me feels to me a wise way of thinking about the world and would also if taken seriously um stop us uh fighting between religious groups and would stop us despoiling the natural world and would instill a sense of proper reverence and there's nothing of course in religion that says that we've got we've got to see ourselves over against other people in fact in in many religions your first duty is those who are not of your kind I mean I know that's part of um Zoroastrianism actually but it's also in Christianity and that doesn't mean that the history of these religions has not been a war between those who really understood the mystical meaning of of it and those who used it as a a lever for power and influence and and for adversary adversarial um approaches power grabs so all of that now you said something else um how do we what was the first thing scale scale yeah the thing about scale actually brings me to something that I was thinking when I was listening to your talk to the consilience project or conference um which is that you made the important point that um what gives something a sense of reality and tells us something about itself is in the differences not in the sesses but of course we need to be able to aggregate things in order to be able to live we we can't experience everything as new and original and unique have to generalize and both hemispheres generalize actually but in different ways so the left hemisphere generalizes by um there's a feature here that they have in common whereas the right hemisphere um generalizes by there being a sort of what with binstein called a family resemblance so there're being a general gestal um holding together of things but what it really intriguing is people think that because the left hemisphere is focused on detail that it must um somehow um not involve generalization and that because the right hemisphere is sees the whole it's neglectful of the individual case it turns out that to understand the unique case is very strongly dependent on the right temporary parietal region it's a right hemisphere that understands uniqueness the left hemisphere doesn't understand uniqueness because it's already categorized things as a it's another one of those and goes in that box so and there's a huge literature on that and some of it that I I report in my various books but the point there is that there are two ways of thinking of the small if you like one is the tiny part that is a detail the other is the uniqueness of something which is not strictly measurable it's how big is the uniqueness of your wife you know excuse me this is not a sensible question and also in generalizing the right hemisphere doesn't generalize in the sense of trying to find a way in which it all fits a known schema but see is the bigger picture whereas the leftand manages to get that wrong by not seeing the bigger picture but seeing lots of examples that can be generalized so the conflict between sameness or Oneness on the one hand and difference and multiplicity on the other crosses the hemispheres in a recognizably different way and I think what's important about Union and division is that we need them both not just one but we need them to be unified not divided so at the matter level Union trumps division but it must not abolish division so we need in our in our ontology to be able to at least distinguish but that distinction doesn't mean there's an irreparable separation and unfortunately in the way we talk we often think that if we differentiate we've completely divided and sundered whereas it's very important to realize that distinction is enormously important to be able to discriminate differences is what we have a mindful in Us and how we come to experience the multiplicity of life but it doesn't entail Us in in um in a sort of Abandonment of um a sense of the togetherness as well well I'd like to reply to that and reply to both of you um and again uh and the argument I was making at the consilience conference is that intelligibility is actually the complete togetherness of the integration and the differentiation if you have difference yeah and you but like there has to be both for there to be intelligibility agreed then yeah right and then and the neoplatonists we're very much on about that the one is that it is not the one of the numerical sequence they're only using that word because they so they go on and on about this is not the numerical one this is not we're talking about the Oneness of of integration and differentiation which are very hard there is no logical Oneness between them there is the deeper Oneness of intelligibility upon which logic rests logic logic presupposes that deeper thing and there therefore we're called to it and then what they get to see we we we're a cartisian and we think the appearance reality distinction is just the inner outer the subjective objective the ancient world has had a different way of understanding the appearance reality distinction it was the one mini which is the problem we're talking about and and it and what it did is it said this deep reflection of neoplatonism on intelligibility and the one in the midi the emergence up the emanation down they're completely interpenetrating right what it came to in like The Coincidence of the Opposites is this idea right that skania intiva right that you have to be able to see the whole and every part and the part as properly participating in all of the whole you get the same thing in the Zen not the same thing sorry wrong word that's a logical word you get something convergent from the Zen tradition in Indra net how everything is the center of everything else and that and that it's a different way of framing things and I would also say the Transcendent and imminent have to be completely interpenetrating and you seen late neopl platonists like Nicholas Sauza and like uh Arena proposing this I'm worried about our category of animism cuz for me it sounds like us trying to capture this transcity and this transcity and then stick it into substantial things which I think is I'm worried about that for example I don't think life is a property of an organism I think it's a property of an organism in relationship to its environment in a profound way and so again um I think we're agreeing and I'm just trying to say that I I think that if we can teach people sets of practices that get to realize this as a deep monological truth then they will be called to new ways and I we can't say what they're going to be exactly but they can be called to new ways of bringing the small and the large I'm not happy with even those words the imminent and the trans I but they'll be called in new ways beyond our current grammar for how to bring them into relation that would be a that would be for me evidence that the new religion is emerging what do you think about that well I'm curious because the term new religion is provocative and especially right especially in the presence of there being existing religions that have billions of people in them I don't think you mean uh that has to replace or supersede those existing ones I think it can reify them yes and I think uh you know we we probably all agree that all of the religions have different ways of interpreting them some of which lead to holy war and some of which lead responsibility and so the question of uh it's very interesting obviously Zen and bant and laurana cabalism and Christianity are culturally different historically myop poetically but you could say that there might be certain underlying structures they all have to have to orient the human adequately there's almost like a meta metaphysics that is necessary exactly exctly where does it get the relationship of the one and the many does it get the relationship of the determined and the free does it get the theou all of those things and um and it might be that those metad dyamics have both the capability of giving rise to new philosophic inquiries as well as reifying the versions of the existing ones exactly that are capable of being in harmonious relationship with the other ones and capable of being able to understand and steward the power of our technology well which I would say if if a religion doesn't do that it's not adequate for the purpose of being able to orient humans in the world today to Steward the world you almost sung that and it was beautiful that's yes sorry I got so then so then I think one question I have for you since you've been thinking about this project but for all of us is um how might we imagine the reification of the existing religions in a direction that allows them to have something meaningful to say about ecological overshoot and planetary boundaries and Ai and synthetic bioregulation and the war in Ukraine and whatever like the to orient them to be able to play a role in the stewarding of the world to the in the development of the wisdom individually but the stewarding of the world locally and not just locally because it's all that how how might we see the reification of those religions and the development of new ones or at least new philosophic metaphysical systems the interface of and then how do we see the interface of those with the other systems of human coordination if I value things differently does my economic system change if I if I have a different relationship to what is a good problem to solve does my tech design change how does education and media change since those are affecting the nature of human mind so profoundly so the reification of the religions the development of new philosop philosop opic Traditions but also the development of those when we say you can't force it but you can Garden or nurture it how do you imagine being able to garden and nurture the type of adequate wisdom moving forward in all these ways so can can I just ask little terminological you use the word rify and reification a lot he uses it positively I know but do you mean validation because reification do mean means making it a thing and of course that's what we don't want to make it so I mean um thingify yeah so when I was saying to reify I mean to be able to interpret the religion okay in a particular direction that is commensurate with what it must be for H given the constraints Humanity faces okay so there's kind of like a pragmatic forcing function on the metaphysics it's like Ray and the respect looking at it properly right that's how that's how I was getting it and you're nodding so I think that's Landing um so so what is the real interpretation is what the scholars will argue on so there's an interpretation of what does this really mean that can be different and also as you said we're not just painting meaning on the walls of a meaningless universe but there is a there is a no there is actually something intrinsically real they're pointing too there is but there's no one way as you were of seeing it that's very important that's what I was saying is that there's something like almost like how every personality very healthy psychologically healthy people don't all become the same right as we become psychologically healthier we don't become the same cultures also wouldn't become the same but they would be and the culture is almost like the psychology of the many the religion could be thought of that way yeah but but that's how a proper prop that's how proper pluralism differs from a relativism like think about let's use a biological analogy there are Universal principles of evolution but evolution doesn't say that all the creatures are going to be the same it in fact tells you that all the creatures are going to be very different and contextually sensitive not only spatially but temporally right so can be Universal principles that predict why you must be contextually sensitive yes and and and I think that's the kind of thing I'm I'm trying to point us towards and then what you can do with I mean I I think Ian said this we off camera and um me too I get a lot of people that come to me and say you've given me a language so that I can go back and reome myself in the religion I was brought up in and then you can think of then you can think about that homing process is a much deeper kind of education than what we now have it's closer to what Zach is talking about when he's talking about education as insul Etc so let's talk about that kind of education and then we could properly Empower people let's let's do a concrete example okay let's see the proposal I've been making not just me people like philler a whole bunch of people cars I think we all these people are wrapping into this in powerful way but filler makes this argument in one of his recent spook he said look really try to get really really try to get that the Trinity within Christianity is saying that relationality is primordial really get it don't think of this as three guys stuck together think about them completely interpenetrating interconnecting relationality intelligibility the logos the the reality the indwelling in people the spirit see all of that is deeply profoundly relational go back and start to practice your practices that way live that way and then people are going to find different things re relevant and Salient in the world and their relationship to the world and it could open up the like it could SW switch people from the having mode to the being mode it could make a difference in right in the in their in their relationship to their spouses but also in their relationship to economic systems like and you understand okay so I want to yes the pragmatic question I'm asking is so let's say the Vatican calls you up or or and says we agree we would like to have a uniquely Catholic version of this and maybe we're stoked if there's a uniquely Muslim and uniquely Hindu kind of Enlightenment of similar types but we would like a kind of Catholic version how would you change the way we approach our practices philosophy Etc or let's say the the minister of the Department of Education reached out and said we want to implement K through 12 a wisdom development process I'm very interested to hear your thoughts on how could the institutions see start to actually Implement wisdom development practices practices insights philosophies such that rather than just we compelling the person on YouTube see so this is where I think I differ from Zach I think we have to create enough enough theologies of practices within the community before a Reformation of it education becomes possible because unless the live normativity of the culture changes attempts to change the education will just be co-opted by the current Machinery I've been signed education long enough to see how that works right everybody gets you got to do stuff with the parents and you got to do stuff with the culture if the kids are getting trained for the market that has inherent limitation so it becomes tricky because to change anything you have to change everything so there's some SE can't start with one thing you've got to do lots of things together exactly which if change the grounding that has led to the problems we have will lead naturally to these things flourishing exactly at the at the slightly higher level and but but how we do that has got to be through an implicit process because if we try to as I constantly saying if we try to instigate the things we think are valuable into people we have not instigated those things instead we've instigated a kind of chain of of thought which is actually contrary to the way in which we is your very first book right yeah yeah yeah exactly cannot make implicit things explicit without damaging them yeah that's right that's against criticism yeah but Pia's argument was but right but you can and this is Plato's argument too you don't you can't make people wise but you can you can properly again seduce them so that they can come to love wisdom but yeah but I was going on to say that really I mean all I was going to say is we can't do it by a direct approach but we can do it by a more implicit and less direct approach and that approach is actually sadly um not original but is actually to start re-educating I mean or educating is what I'm trying to say we I think we stopped educating children about 40 50 years ago we started indoctrinating them and giving them information and testing them on how much of that they retained but we didn't do the really important things which are relational all the people who really inspired me and taught me did so by their being who they were and by the way in which the spark jumped across the Gap in the way that Plato describes in the seventh epistle that this is how philosophy is done not by writing it down I mysteriously Plato completely betrayed socres into doing this but um so we we need to reimagine what an education is that would mean freeing up teachers from a dead weight of bureaucracy in fact that's one of the very practical things that could be done tomorrow which would be go around universities go around hospitals go around um schools and look very critically at all the superstructure of management and so on and I reckon about 80% of that could go tomorrow and nobody would suffer in fact there'd be a lot more money for doing the things that we really want to do we've become we've become sucked by a parasite if you like which is the externalization of the left hemis is drive for control which is Administration and so I mean that's that's a practical answer to the question but also we need apart from freeing up teachers to teach in a way that is individual responsive and and Alive rather than just a carrying out of procedures we need actually to I'm sorry give people back their their cultural tradition they need to read literature that it's not fashionable to say this but they need to understand the last 2,000 years otherwise they don't know what they're doing here they have a very shallow routing so we actually do need to teach History Literature philosophy music all our cult not just it not just um procedural learning but actually creative empathic understanding of other people not sitting in judgment on our forbears or on other cultures but in fact trying to see our way into how they saw the world because they stupider than we are and they might actually have seen something we've lost okay so I have a proposal specifically practically about this which is uh first I mean first of all just I put a pin in something the problem we face of course is the bureaucracy has wrapped itself around a pseudo religious ideology that justifies this exist tremendously and that so that's a problematic it's the pseudo religion yes very much and what I what I would want to say is I don't think we should have teachers in any one institution so if you look I'll just take the west but there's parallel things elsewhere you had the university you had the monastery and you had the church and they were all interrelated and one is a knowledge institution but it has reverence for the wisdom institution that's the monastery and then you have the church and the church is oh but all of these ideas and all of these philosophies have to be have to transfer to real lives and right if I may just add also hospitals yes yes yes and you and what I think we need is we need to have teachers in multiple kinds of Institutions that are acting again in this this opponent processing with each other not adversarial part of the problem is you know and then the process Reformation comes in and splits them from each other we get all that all that but the proposal is you cu what we have is we we have this idea that teachers are only legitimate if they're in this one institution and that and we have anybody out I face this but the stuff I do outside of the university is like why are you doing that why are you doing that all right um and and I know lots of excellent teachers that can't find a home in the University because they want to do the kind of stuff that universities don't any longer do right so I think we need to think about uh we need to think of a living system of teaching institutions where you've got people sort of but they they're they're bound together in a field again where the relationality is important we this is the pole of knowledge this is the pole of wisdom and this is the pole of life and they have to all and we and we have that and I think that's also something that we need to think about bringing back in terms of institutional structures that could actually transform Society in the way we're talking about and I I'd like to just add sorry yeah um we need to encourage and provide institutional support for people who are bright to oversee the whole picture to some extent that doesn't happen in our culture anymore it used to happen and it used to happen in this University but now everything has shifted here as everywhere else in the Western World towards ever greater specialization now while we need Specialist of course we do it's not one or the other we need people who also are able to take the broad right hemisphere View and see CRA look what's happening here and you know I believe that what I've done if I've done anything in my writing is to open people's eyes that's why of course once you see it you see what's going on here and we we we don't have any institutions that do that but back in the 60s I think the Rand Corporation and others sort of put money behind people that they they thought were going to be good and they just gave them a desk in an office and a xerox machine and said you know do what you want and out of that came a lot of um you know genuinely Innovative creative thinking and we need to bring that back could I respond to just that one thing so because this this is dear to my heart because I represent I I I represent the the a discipline that is all about the synoptic integration across the disciplines cognitive science and trying to create the lingua franka between neuroscience and information processing machine learning psychology Linguistics anthropology philosophy trying to do that and and and and and the I mean it there I I I there has been a turning an increasing recognition by some about the value of this because the specialization went into psychology in which we we incentivized people to innovate something that nobody else had discovered before finding the effect the new effect right and this is one of the driving motivations of the replication crisis because if you don't pursue synoptic integration you don't work out your theoretical grammar well your conceptual vocabulary is vague and equivocal and what you and then you're the fact that you get empirical data is almost irrelevant because if you get a vague enough construct that isn't bound responsible to anybody else's work of course you can find empirical verification and so the replication crisis has basically started to put up a flag some people are recognizing it that we need the synoptic integrators as much as we need the Specialists so that's I just want to put that you both made this point and I think when people look at the arguments about all the things that are supposedly getting better in Civilization some of which are they relate to things that specialization does well and when we look at the things that are getting worse and heading towards Global catastrophic risk they look at the lack of Integra they arise from the lack of integration cross specialty areas um I think that's actually very important um so you we're speaking to that the existing educational institutions have a history that we actually want to revive some things from and that we've like we've actually lost some very important aspects you were also speaking to not just the educational institution as a single thing but lots of them you didn't mention guilds but also manys andbe of the current situations the world new insign as well but you said something else that I found really interesting when you talked about cutting some of the bureaucracy and administration which was almost like an externalization of left hemispheric dominance um what David Graber calls jobs um that there's this recursive relationship between kind of left hemispheric process and building a world that is the result of that that in turn conditions that and that kind of recursive relationship means we're not just asking how can we develop things that will give people more wholeness more integration more numinous more sacred but also how can we undo some of the things that are excessively making us hypertrophic on the wrong modes of mind and I think we have to do both well one good thing that might come out of a scarcity crisis is that we find quickly what are the things we can dispense with and what we can't at least if we maintain enough right hemisphere overview of what's going on but I fear that now the power is concentrated in the hands of frankly mediocre people who occupy administrative jobs and that they're not willing to re relinquish that power and Will it's their their validation but we do desperately need to do it and you're quite right that what happens is in a culture like that people are trained to go into jobs like that and the people who fit the role best are not the people you'd want to be be making big decisions about our lives but they go into it and the the thing is a positive feedback loop so how do we break the positive feedback loops that Orient us towards Futures nobody wants and how do we or at least weaken them and how do we simultaneously develop other positive feedback loops because they have to have some positive feedback where they they won't be able to do anything that move us in a recognition of the Sacred wise individual and Collective governance we did not answer that question in full we we spoke to different elements of what it might need to entail but the clock is saying that it is time that we must wrap yeah um there are questions that we can answer questions that we can offer a Direction for in questions we simply can't in the nature of things answer so I think we've done the best we can yes and um I'd like to think that we could shout this from the rooftops and people some people just a few might listen so this is my kind of closing question is um if some people do listen and respond and there's interest maybe we'll deepen this conversation and explore some of these how do we weaken the existing positive feedback loops how do we deal with the fact fact that power is entrenched in certain ways currently like there's a lot of very interesting open questions we could get into um further but in closing thoughts uh I guess now for the listeners who have made it through all of this any closing thoughts that might give them some sense of orientation or agency in the relationship to all these topics well I'd say don't despair that is achieving nothing whatever and it's bad for the soul so we have a a duty to see what is hopeful and do we're not ask nobody is asked to do the impossible we can only do the bit that we can and that means doing things in our own life and with our own life and furthering larger causes in the way that we are best in a position to do but we all have a role and I think one of the things I tried to emphasize was that although the materialist reductionist picture results in a vision of the cosmos as a heap of junk with no meaning beauty or purpose and that we have no role here I would you know I'd go to my death to defend the opposite point of view that actually it is beautiful is Rich and it is our pleasure our duty and something we should be grateful for to help further that yeah I like that you said I would go to my death that's the sacrifice and service of the Sacred it needs to be a sacrifice yeah I would want people to hear that the love of wisdom and the love of being are real possibilities that there are already people of good faith and good talent doing this individually and collectively and that that opens up a possibility for a kind of transformation so that as you fall in love with being again instead of the reciprocal narrowing that we've been just been talking about and how we get addicted because that's what addiction is reciprocal narrowing a reciprocal opening is equally possible this is what Plato proposed with anagog and that that is still actual and there are people and communities and practices that you can go to to actualize that to realize that and there is nothing stopping you from doing that right now may I make a hemispheric comment the left hemisphere closes down to a certainty the right hemisphere opens up to a possibility and so what you've really said is we need to further the processes of the right hemisphere which are always expanding and exploring rather than those that close down to the Arid bit of something we think we know yeah I don't want I'm not proposing cognitive closure I want continuity of contact I know you're that's why I said it yes yes I think the religion the concern about religions that many people have actually has to do with people orienting to certainty with them and then closed-mindedness and Holy Wars and whatever as opposed to the exact opposite holding the mystery at the center holding unable the unknowable but the real and so there is a epistemic humility that is built in Forever yes we spoke about this yesterday and you said don't despair but we actually I I liked in our conversation you were saying when we are actually open to the beauty of reality there's a sense of awe and a gratitude and uh humility that comes with that exactly but when we're open to the beauty of reality being harmed which is in the factory farm and on The Warfield and whatever we're also um feel the suffering of others such that it's overwhelming see and the overwhelm in the suffering and the overwhelm in the beauty are related because if the reality wasn't beautiful you wouldn't care and both of them make you transcend your small self and both of them motivate the sacred obligation yeah so there's something where the sacred obligation just comes from seeing clearly letting yourself be moved by the beauty of reality and associated with that the meaningfulness to protect it yeah and the role of the new religion philosophy whatever in so far as it can help people be more sensitive to both the beauty and sacredness and thus a protective impulse towards reality is what I am hoping people take away excellent well thank you both yeah like it was a joy it has been a great pleasure really a joy being with you thank you for watching this YouTube and podcast series is by the Veri Foundation which in addition to supporting my work also offers courses practices workshops and other projects dedicated to responding to the meaning crisis if you would like to support this work please consider joining our patreon you can find the link in the show notes

Channel: John Vervaeke

Views: 31,117

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, religion, meaning, meaning in life, meaning crisis, personality, meaning of life, U of T, university of toronto, john vervaeke, vervaeke, lecture, existentialism, continental, analytical, consciousness, cognitive science, insight, mental health

Id: P7i1ughRGcQ

Length: 201min 10sec (12070 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2023