Jonathon Paggio and John Vervke are joined by Jordan Hall to discuss the concept of the vertical dimension, and how it relates to AI and consciousness. Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who s been successful multiple times as a tech founder and has developed the capacities that are necessary to serve as a serial founder and entrepreneur, and that means an openness to high-level creativity conjoined with deep technical prowess and the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff under low information conditions.
00:00:48.000Yeah, well, they get harder as you go up the ladder.
00:00:58.000Today's conversation is an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had,
00:01:14.000most particularly, I would say, with John Verveke, who joins me today, and also with Jonathan Paggio.
00:01:21.000And those conversations really center on specifying the foundational principles of iterable society and stable psyche.
00:01:34.000That's a decent way of thinking about it.
00:01:37.000You're specifying more clearly and understandably the apex towards which systems of value strive.
00:01:47.000And that's a very complicated set of problems.
00:01:51.000And so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress.
00:01:53.000But I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan.
00:01:58.000They're also both lecturing, by the way, as well as me, for Peterson Academy.
00:02:03.000And so one of the things Peterson Academy is doing is aggregating a group of thinkers who are pursuing this problem.
00:02:12.000Some directly, like John and Jonathan, some more peripherally.
00:02:16.000And so many of you who are listening will have listened to some of the conversations I've had with Paggio, Jonathan Paggio, or with John Verveke.
00:02:25.000Anyways, we introduced another person into this conversational realm today, Jordan Hall.
00:02:31.000And Jordan is a serial entrepreneur who's been successful multiple times as a tech founder and has developed the capacities that are necessary to serve as a serial entrepreneur.
00:02:45.000And that means an openness to high-level creativity conjoined with deep technical prowess.
00:02:55.000And then also the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff under low information conditions.
00:03:02.000And so Jordan Hall has been talking to John Verveke for quite a long time, a series of conversations.
00:03:10.000And I met John again recently, and we talked about meeting, and John suggested that I include Jordan.
00:03:17.000And he flew in today to make that possible.
00:03:24.000We continued to flesh out, really, I think the best way to conceptualize it is we're attempting to articulate the structure of something like Jacob's Ladder,
00:03:35.000which is this nested sequence of value structures that tends towards a pinnacle.
00:03:44.000And the pinnacle is the transcendent, let's say, or the ineffable divine.
00:03:50.000And we're trying to understand the hierarchical relationship between our local plans and our ultimate ends, let's say,
00:03:57.000which is the same thing as trying to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite.
00:04:01.000And we're trying to do that in a way that's quite differentiated and propositional, but also is true to the phenomena and the uniting reality of the transcendent.
00:04:16.000And so I know that's complicated, but it's a complicated issue.
00:04:19.000And while many of you are familiar with this already and you can regard this conversation as a continuation on the same quest.
00:04:29.000Jordan, I was watching your podcast with Jonathan Paggio, and you started to talk to him about the vertical dimension.
00:04:38.000And one of the things you both discussed was the notion that one of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical dimension.
00:04:50.000Now, cognitive capacity is soon not going to distinguish us by all appearances.
00:04:55.000So I thought we might well delve into that.
00:04:59.000This is obviously something John can immediately contribute to as well.
00:05:03.000I've been trying to figure out the technicalities of the vertical dimension.
00:05:07.000So let me run a hypothesis by you to begin with.
00:05:10.000John, you should perhaps find this interesting.
00:05:13.000I think it's a development of some of the ideas that we discussed when we were on tour together.
00:05:18.000So, in this new book I wrote, We Who Wrestle with God, one of the things I pointed out was that the God of the Old Testament, and this continues in the New Testament as well, is characterized very fundamentally in multiple ways.
00:05:37.000But one of those ways, one of the cardinal ways that he's characterized is as the voice of conscience.
00:05:44.000And I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically, and I think the fact of conscience indicates something like a vertical hierarchy of value.
00:05:56.000So imagine that whenever you do something, whether you know it or not, you have a proximal reason for it, and then a slightly wider reason, and then a slightly wider reason than that, and then a wider reason than that, and so forth.
00:06:15.000And that sort of shades off into the unknowable.
00:06:18.000Now, for example, if I asked you why you're here having this conversation, let's play it out a little bit.
00:06:26.000Why are you here having this conversation?
00:07:16.000Well, they get harder as you go up the ladder.
00:07:18.000One of the things that I've noticed as I've accepted invitations over the past, gosh, 10 years is that oftentimes I don't discover that the conversation was worthwhile until well after the conversation occurred.
00:07:32.000And so there's something like, there's a split between, let's say, the epistemological sensibility of what would it mean for me to know that the conversation was worthwhile, and let's say for the moment, the ontological sense of what would it mean for the conversation to have been worthwhile, regardless of whether I knew that.
00:08:01.000And then what it means to commit on the basis of that feeling is to simply engage in the moment that's occurring, regardless of having to constantly try to decide whether or not what's happening is worth being part of, as you might imagine.
00:08:35.000Right, and that there are conditions under which, circumstances under which you might be willing to proceed down that investigative path.
00:08:43.000Okay, so then we could divide that into two parts.
00:08:45.000We could say that you're making the presumption that there's something worthwhile in conversational investigation, which is a reflection of the logos, let's say.
00:08:53.000But there's also conditions under which you've already been set up to presume that the probability that that exploration will take place is relatively high.
00:09:12.000So, that's not a bad indication of some nesting.
00:09:15.000We could continue because we could say things like, well, this is also a public conversation.
00:09:21.000And so, if we manage it successfully, then we can explore together and hopefully that's worthwhile, which we haven't defined yet worthwhile, but we'd also have the opportunity to bring it to other people.
00:10:20.000And we want to be able to coordinate our purposes and our values so that the most valuable things are the ones to which we attend with the most quality and amount of time.
00:10:31.000And so, to the degree to which we realize the most valuable things on the basis of the amount of time that we're choosing to make, then we are effectively aligning our purposes with our values.
00:10:42.000I actually think this is a bit of a side journey, but it looks to me like that's the basis for the instruction in the Sermon on the Mount.
00:10:49.000So, the Sermon on the Mount, which I think of as an instruction manual in some ways, basically says the first thing you do is orient yourself to the highest possible good.
00:10:59.000And I think you could do that awkwardly and badly and it would still be better than not doing it, right?
00:11:07.000Because you're developing a relationship with the highest good.
00:11:11.000And then once you've done that, you attend with all due care to the present.
00:11:17.000You set the frame, which is what I'm trying to do here is to serve the highest good, even though I might not be able to conceptualize that or articulate it, but that's my aim.
00:11:26.000Having established that aim, John, you might have some things to say here too.
00:11:30.000Like, we've talked about the relationship between value and perception and emotion in quite a bit of detail.
00:11:37.000So, it seems to me that if you set your aim high, then even if you can't exactly specify the goal, you know, concretely, that your perceptions and your emotions will fall into alignment with that goal.
00:11:54.000And they'll show you the way, so to speak, maybe that's, and this goes back to the idea of conscience, you know.
00:12:01.000So, maybe once you get your goal set and the perceptual systems, are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation, you can feel your way along.
00:12:11.000And I don't know if that's something like, do you think when you're doing that, assuming that the goal isn't concretely specified, that it's transcendent, you're still going to be able to see or feel which steps you're taking forward are, what, reducing the entropy between where you are in that goal.
00:12:28.760And then, so you can see that both as a combination of conscience and calling in relationship to the goal.
00:12:35.580The conscience would be the voice of negative emotion informing you when you're deviating from the path and calling would be the invitation of positive emotion informing you, at least in part at the level of emotion that you're making the path manifest.
00:12:57.120And I wonder, too, if while you're doing that, if at the same time, this probably happens particularly with dialogue, that you're clarifying the nature of the goal further, right?
00:13:10.220Yeah, I mean, so I've actually been doing a lot of work around that right now with respect to what I call perspectival knowing, knowing what it's like and being able to take a perspective.
00:13:24.880And some sort of a confluence of things.
00:13:30.340I mean, first of all, we are talking about basic relevance realization, like what do we ignore, what do we pay attention to?
00:13:37.680And then within that, I think what you're talking about is there's three interlinked things.
00:13:43.600There's origin, orientation, and ostention.
00:14:17.140So we've talked before about Marloponte's idea that relevance realization caches out an optimal grip, getting the right trade-off relations between being too close, too far away, too loose, too tight.
00:16:12.420Yeah, it's like, it's what Hartford Rosa calls, you're looking for moments of resonance.
00:16:19.120You're looking for moments where, right, you, right, you are directing yourself to the world, but the world also, as you said, is calling to you.
00:16:44.420Because you're negotiating, which is this combination, right, of navigation and narration.
00:16:51.400You're tracking, which is navigation, and then you're keeping track of your tracking, which is what, this is the theory of how narration probably is.
00:17:15.640So that means in a deep conversation, partly what you're doing is progressing forward to your various superordinate goals.
00:17:22.540But at the same time, you're transforming the nature of the superordinate goal and the relationship between the goal hierarchy as you proceed, right?
00:17:30.780And that's not a bad definition of a quest.
00:17:33.180And just one thing to make sure that all of our questions are caught up.
00:17:37.720So conscience would be the voice that comes from a higher order goal to you while you're operating at a more proximal, where you're operating more proximally, telling you that your proximal operations are violating a higher order goal.
00:18:00.800Yeah, that's a good way of thinking about it technically, right?
00:18:03.180Because it is still, in a sense, it's your voice still, because it's associated with your goals.
00:18:09.280But then it's also a voice from above, so to speak, especially if your goal hierarchy.
00:18:13.280Now, you could imagine, too, that if you talked a bit about Christianity with Pajot as well.
00:18:20.140So if you could imagine that you made the imitation of Christ your superordinate goal, even if you didn't exactly know what that means, because you can't, that would open up the possibility that whatever that represents could speak to you in the voice of, insofar as you understand what that means.
00:18:39.700That could now speak to you with the voice of conscience.
00:18:43.560And hypothetically, if it was orienting you more accurately, as you practiced it, your understanding of that would increase, and you'd get sharper at it.
00:18:53.380You'd get more skilled at it, because you'd get more.
00:18:59.140You know, she's been investigating the relationship between self-will, so to speak, and divine will, right?
00:19:05.400And in her prayer practice, she's trying to orient herself towards the divine.
00:19:10.260And so what she does in the morning is, that's what she does, is she sits down for an hour, and she thinks, okay, if I was really going to do things right, whatever that means, what attitude would I have to adopt, and how would I do that?
00:19:22.860And then you distinguish that from self-will.
00:19:25.080So I would say, because self-will begs the question, what do you mean by self, right?
00:19:30.620Can you believe that Good Friday and Easter are just around the corner?
00:19:35.120These are the most important holidays in Christianity, and Lent is our time to prepare our hearts.
00:19:40.080Lent is traditionally a time where Christians grow closer to God through prayer, fasting, and giving to others.
00:20:43.920My suspicions are that the more selfish the will, the more a goal that should be lower order is elevated to the highest place.
00:20:56.680So like a hedonistic self, because the hedonist will say something like, I would like to do exactly what I want to do right now regardless.
00:21:06.380But there's a question that isn't answered there.
00:21:10.020And the question is, well, why do you associate I with what you want?
00:21:15.620Because an alternative way of conceptualizing that is that something that's lower order has taken possession of you so completely that you now identify with it.
00:21:25.040And I mean, that has to happen to some degree when we're running out of biological program, so to speak.
00:21:33.500Like if you're hungry, I mean, hunger should grip you and grip all your perceptions until it's satiated.
00:21:38.360But it should, you talk to Paggio about the necessity of keeping everything in its proper place, right?
00:21:44.820Which is something that Paggio is very concerned with trying to think through.
00:21:48.680So, okay, one more question then, at least on this line, with regards to this.
00:21:56.420So imagine this superordinate figure being Christ, just for the sake of argument for the moment.
00:22:02.900So I've been trying to think through what would be the antithesis, I guess it's the antithesis of evil.
00:23:05.880But when they don't refuse to admit that there's a uniting metanarrative, they turn to power.
00:23:15.060And I've been trying to conceptualize what the alternative might be.
00:23:20.380And it seems to me, I'm curious about this, John.
00:23:23.500It seems to me that the central message of the Christian drama is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting metanarrative.
00:23:32.280And that works to unite people psychologically, and it works to unite them socially.
00:23:38.580And it seems to me almost a matter of definition that social interaction is based on self-sacrifice, because that's kind of like the definition of social.
00:23:49.420So, and then psychological self-sacrifice would seem to me to be the offering up of the lower order value structures to something that's transcendent.
00:24:01.700And then you get to have your cake and eat it, too.
00:24:04.780You get, if you adopt the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice, then you unite yourself psychologically.
00:24:10.600But at the same time, it's the best possible strategy socially.
00:24:14.900And that is definitely, that's not only an alternative to power, it's antithetical.
00:24:54.800And then the other thing you said about self-sacrifice, but you said something that maybe qualified it, because this is a qualification I would make.
00:25:02.780I think the metanarrative, I'll challenge you.
00:25:05.000I think the metanarrative isn't self-sacrifice.
00:25:07.000I think it's sacrifice in service of getting to what is most real.
00:26:21.320It's like the moment when you are playing music and you feel the sour note come, that feeling that you have of a direction towards wrongness is conscience.
00:26:29.460Well, this is what I wanted to, I agree.
00:26:31.520And what I would say there is that, but that's the normative, but that's showing up in perspective taking, right?
00:26:37.380As opposed to rule following, what you're doing is you're doing that, like Jordan P said, I'll have to do Jordan P and Jordan Mates, right?
00:26:49.280So when I mean normative, I don't mean like a Kantian code.
00:26:53.260I mean the very sort of sets of constraints that you put on yourself so that you shape your behavior according to, you're trying to get at what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful.
00:27:07.280So why normative then rather than ideal?
00:27:11.740Because I, okay, so I use ideal in a technical sense, which might be valuable to us.
00:27:17.680So John Keeks makes a distinction between goals, which are states you can realize, and ideals, which are constraints that you bind yourself to.
00:27:27.680So, for example, like a clear goal state when I'm thirsty is to drink water.
00:27:33.460But honesty isn't a state I get to, right?
00:27:36.660It's a constraint I'm putting on all my behavior for the rest of my life.
00:27:40.500So he calls those, he says, and one of the mistakes we can make is we can confuse goals and ideals.
00:27:47.100Ideals are ways of being and goals are states that you can get.
00:27:50.860And ideals like a meta goal, is that a reasonable, but then where does normative fall into that?
00:27:56.960So normative, what normativity is, is normativity are, use that language, normativity are ideals, ways in which we constrain our behavior so that we can shape it, so that we can get in contact with, within and without, with, I would argue with what is most real.
00:28:12.120That is Plato's proposal, that's what is ultimately we're trying for.
00:28:15.960We're trying to, it's a grand act of optimal realization.
00:28:55.260It doesn't cover everything that's covered by trying to make your thoughts as true as possible, trying to make your experiences as, as tracking as what is beautiful as possible.
00:29:07.560So there's a, there's a discussion in Exodus that's relevant to that, I think, maybe.
00:29:13.740So when, just before Moses goes up Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, so he's gathered up a lot of implicit knowledge by that point, by serving as judge for like years.
00:29:29.700Anyways, he leaves, and he leaves Aaron in charge.
00:29:34.560And Aaron is the political voice of the prophet.
00:29:36.880And as soon as the transcendent voice, the prophet, disappears, the political voice bows to the whim of the crowd, right?
00:29:47.000And so this is very interesting because if you have a consensus model of truth, the biblical insistence is that a consensus model of truth will devolve almost instantly into the worship of the golden calf.
00:29:59.040It's kind of like an orgaistic materialism, which strikes me as highly probable because I don't think there's much difference between an orgaistic materialism and a profound fractionated immaturity.
00:30:33.660I think we can ground it concretely and make it really simple.
00:30:36.900Just think about an infant that's learning how to pick up a P.
00:30:40.340There's a whole complex of feedback loops that are going on orienting towards particular, in this case, goal, right?
00:30:46.480But the ability to be able to discern what random articulation of neuromuscular activity, coordinating hand, brain, eye, towards an increasing capacity to actually engage in depth perception, everything else, produces the desired effect.
00:31:01.340That extremely complex, subtle and continuous field of feedback loops and constraints that produces the capacity to move through reality to achieve a goal, that's normative.
00:31:11.060Governed by the law of continuity or the infinitesimal, like all the way continuous, like a continuous wave.
00:31:18.620Ethics is what happens when you endeavor to actually re-articulate that governed by the law of, let's say, the digital.
00:31:24.020I can re-articulate semantically ethics.
00:32:31.760Yes, and that's also to your notion of the prophet and the political.
00:32:35.980At the political, we are now an aggregate of things that are not actually part of an integrated whole and therefore are governed by consensus,
00:32:43.120which is what happens when you try to simulate a whole in an aggregate.
00:32:46.600In the category of actually being in communion, governed by the prophet, we are in fact a well-integrated whole and therefore no longer governed by an aggregate or by politics.
00:32:56.420That's exactly what I think that story indicates.
00:32:59.180Yeah, and so then that vertical orientation, that's symbolized in the Exodus story by Mount Sinai.
00:33:08.560And then what happens when the commandments are delivered, they're delivered in a context of a much wider range of rules, right?
00:33:16.640So there's like these macro rules that are really foundational and then a bunch of micro rules that are more situational.
00:33:23.760And what seems to happen is that the revelation is something, in your language, that would be the translation of the normative to the ethical.
00:34:07.960And so one might imagine that when he finally exits-
00:34:11.320He was a slave at the same time because he was Hebrew.
00:34:15.240So he has a full understanding of that entire hierarchy.
00:34:16.560Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's got the whole hierarchy, yeah.
00:34:18.920That he would, he would naturally default back to an executive form of leadership when he moves into being responsible for governing according to these rules, right?
00:34:27.820He would move the rules into a legislative function.
00:34:29.960He would adopt the executive function, but he doesn't do that.
00:34:46.000This is a question that is actually hitting you the whole system.
00:34:49.200Well, yeah, and so there's something also that's fascinating about that.
00:34:52.360Because if I, if you two have a dispute that you can't settle, you're lacking a superordinate structure that unites two different narratives, let's say.
00:35:22.440It's going to fragment the first time it's stress tested.
00:35:25.780Well, that's what I, but I think this is very close to the point I wanted to make was that for me, the normative, it doesn't just encompass the moral.
00:35:38.940Because, for example, for you to get the common thing between Jordan and I, you have to get, first of all, a shared meaning structure.
00:36:19.400So the reason why I think of normativity as a broader notion is it includes this idea of connectedness to what's real, meaning that I think is actually more foundational than our moral decisions.
00:36:34.760Our moral decisions, I think, are ultimately regulated by what we find meaningly most real.
00:36:41.320I think that's what ultimately orients us.
00:36:43.880Because you need some touchstone that tells you, well, how do I know when this is true?
00:37:07.120Our judgments of realness are, right, this is from Spinoza basically.
00:37:12.680You, like, think about when you're waking up.
00:37:15.380You're in this small world and you're in the dream, right?
00:37:18.820And then you go, you wake up to a bigger world.
00:37:22.000And from that bigger world, you can see the limitations and the biases of the smaller world.
00:37:26.320And you judge the bigger world to be more real than, this is what people mean when they want to be connected to something larger than themselves.
00:37:39.060And then, but how do they know that that's the case?
00:37:44.880Well, they know it's the case because they make a contrasted comparison.
00:37:50.040So notice that I use the length of the stick to explain the length of the shadow and not the length of the shadow to explain the length of the stick.
00:38:33.320It's a transformation of the axiomatic assumptions on which that viewpoint are based, as far as I can tell.
00:38:39.860I think it's the axiomatic assumptions, but I think it's woven with, I don't know if you'll allow me to extend it, axiomatic skills, axiomatic states of mind.
00:47:38.260That'd be the equivalent on the social level.
00:47:40.280And then there's another level too, which is like agents of magical transformation.
00:47:45.020And agents of magical transformation are beings or phenomena that emerge into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being.
00:48:27.880I think the, if reality is, if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility, the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot make it determinatively intelligible.
00:48:48.080And I think what that does is, and this is what my proposal, what I think existential conscience is as opposed to pathological, psychological conscience.
00:48:56.900Existential conscience is to realize our correct attitude, our correct comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly, but it also withdraws in mystery.
00:49:09.640And I think that, and this is Plato's central argument, which I just, sorry, I had a really sort of powerful realization that this is, I finally understood what Augustine meant when he said that Christianity was the continuity, the continuum, or even the completion of Greek philosophy.
00:49:24.040The correct comportment Plato talked about was finite transcendence.
00:49:28.100You have to hold, like this tonos, like the tension of the bow.
00:49:32.220You have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and transcendent.
00:49:36.380We are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence.
00:49:41.380But if you just identify with that, you fall prey to despair and you become servile and manipulatable.
00:49:48.740You have to remember your transcendence.
00:49:51.420You are capable of orienting towards the true and the good and the beautiful.
00:49:54.340But if we identify just with our capacity for transcendence, we fall prey to hubris and then we become tyrants over others.
00:50:04.180And I think existential conscience is the call to constantly re-inhabit and re-identify with holding both remembering, that reciprocal remembering of your finite and your transcendence.
00:50:16.660And I think the incarnation and the crucifixion are the enactment of finite transcendence.
00:50:24.400That's just what I was thinking, because I thought if Pazio was here, that'd be the first thing he'd point out.
00:50:28.460Yeah, so that's extremely interesting.
00:50:29.200Yeah, you'd love to point that out to me.
00:50:30.460Well, yeah, because you have this insistence in Christian theology that Christ as God puts on mortality comprehensively, right?
00:50:50.540And so what that would mean, practically speaking, I think, is that obviously one of the elements of existence that's limiting and terrifying is death.
00:51:00.600And like the terror management theorists, who aren't very pessimistic in my estimation, think that much of human motivation springs, or even all springs from the denial of death, right?
00:51:14.580But that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways.
00:51:18.240And it's been empirically undermined, too.
00:51:20.400Well, we'll have to talk about that, because I don't know about the—I know of alternative models that fit the data better, but I don't know of any direct challenges to it.
00:51:27.820But in any case, one of the problems with that presupposition is that it isn't obvious at all that death is the worst thing life has to offer.
00:51:36.560Now, one of the—because I—the people I've seen in my life that were most damaged were damaged by an encounter with true evil, with malevolence, not with death.
00:51:46.780People can actually tolerate a brush with death without collapsing into—like an actual brush with death, without collapsing into psychological chaos.
00:51:55.460But if they're naive and they encounter someone malevolent, then like all bets are off.
00:52:01.460And so part of the reason that, you know, Christ descends through death into hell is because the whole acceptance of that finitude is not merely acceptance of mortality.
00:52:12.660It's also grappling with the reality of evil.
00:52:17.220I think—and first of all, I'll say something and I want to be quiet because I want you to talk more because I value what you have to say.
00:52:30.400I think Whitehead, he said, you know, the defining—the central thing of evil is self-destructiveness.
00:52:38.020And so I see evil—there's malevolent evil, of course, but I think evil gets its home in the fact that we are all prey to self-deceptive, self-destructive behavior.
00:52:50.200And I think that's how transcendence offers us a response to our finitude, right?
00:52:56.440Well, would that be a consequence of failing to establish the proper relationship with the rope that extends upward, right?
00:53:04.760Because it's very—how do you avoid falling into despair and resentment if you don't remember the—your relationship with the infinite?
00:53:47.260So—but you've taken—and I don't know how much of this was the case with you all the way along, but you've become more known for your philosophical investigations as of late.
00:53:57.900And so I'm curious about how is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from the entrepreneurial, let's say.
00:54:12.260But first, I want to just say something here.
00:54:13.720I think it's useful to notice, again, and I guess I'm playing the role of self-referentiality, that while it may appear that I'm not talking, we don't actually really understand reality very well.
00:54:28.940And I feel like I'm quite present to what's happening.
00:54:54.620So, I was always very curious about both the nature of reality and what is right, right?
00:55:02.640So, both the sort of metaphysics and ethics, always, as far as I can recall.
00:55:08.480Somewhere around the probably late elementary school, I began to notice that the world that we live in, or at least the world that I had been thrown into, was suffering significantly from making any sense whatsoever.
00:55:23.640It was sort of haphazardly thrown together in a fashion that tended to produce more negative than positive.
00:55:29.720Think about just what happens when you go to school.
00:55:32.060How old were you when that started to become a focus of attention, do you think?
00:55:39.700And then, similarly, the same noticing, for example, like, oh, wait, I'm sitting in front of a television in the context of my home, which is lying to me continuously with a highly effective capacity to manipulate.
00:55:51.880And yet, that seems to be something that the people who are around me seem to be perfectly okay with.
00:55:58.340So, a sense of, there's something way off, it's way off, and curiosity about, okay, well, what would right look like and how might we accomplish that?
00:56:05.880So, you can see how those two things link together.
00:56:30.380And we build structures and tree houses and everything like that.
00:56:33.480And then one day, it's just been clear-cut to build out more of the neighborhood.
00:56:38.160And the building out of the neighborhood is supremely ugly, like suburban ugliness.
00:56:41.920And so, again, an aesthetic sense of, again, there's something deeply wrong about that.
00:56:45.700It went from being a beautiful place of play that had an aliveness to it and had a feeling of connectedness to what I would now call, say, the sacred.
00:57:18.220Because I don't have a context that gives me any good answers to that question.
00:57:20.780Every time I go out in the world and try to query it, the signals I get back from the world tend to be nonsense or wrong.
00:57:27.360You look at TV, hmm, the president's lying.
00:57:29.980Do you have any sense of how old you were when you were able to articulate that as a propelling principle?
00:57:37.140I mean, Musk told me that he was about 12 or 13 when he had a very serious existential crisis and started really religious material.
00:57:46.140And his existential solution to that was really a quest.
00:57:51.800Like, he found that if he concentrated on learning and investigating, that that produced a sufficient influx of meaning so that his propositional concerns were, they were no longer foregrounded.
00:58:27.700And that's kind of interesting because it, you know, you might think of the real as what you think because then certainly lots of people who are intellectual fall into that problem.
00:58:37.220But one of the things you do as a therapist with people who are depressed, especially if they're intelligent, is help them identify.
00:58:44.440It's probably something like a higher calling.
00:58:46.440You say, look, let's attend to your experience and see when you're depressed and when you're not, and then see if we can characterize the moments when you're not, and then concentrate on expanding them, right?
00:58:59.960And for this gentleman who's a very creative architect, as long as he was creating, he was fine.
00:59:06.340Now, now and then his rational mind would crop up and say, well, what the hell's the point of all this creativity?
00:59:12.360You know, which is a, well, it's a, it's kind of a bottomless pit, isn't it?
00:59:16.800If the, if the ultimate goal is ineffable, there's no, there's no final answer to that question that you could proposition a lot.
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01:00:19.300One answer would be, well, you're not suicidal when you're doing it, you know, and that's kind of an existential, well, seriously, like, it quells your pain, it quells your existential dread.
01:00:32.500If you believe your pain is real and that's enough to make you despair, why wouldn't you have faith in what rescues you from that?
01:00:42.740I would call it pseudo-metanoia right there.
01:00:44.840Like, if you imagine you're going the wrong direction and metanoia is to turn you into the right direction, pseudo-metanoia at least turns you perpendicular to going in the wrong direction.
01:00:56.060Yeah, and the trouble, of course, is if you get stuck in pseudo-metanoia, you don't get pointed in the right direction, you're now in a therapeutic loop where you're constantly drifting back here, unless you happen to be in a very healthy context, which will begin to drift you in this direction.
01:01:07.060Right, so for him, like, where that would have gone over time, had it deepened, would be to identify the source of that respite that he was experiencing when he was engaged in creative action, right?
01:01:19.700Because that's a manifestation of a deeper-
01:01:21.740Well, it gets even bigger. He would actually have to find a way to embed himself in a world that was in continuous contact with that source of respite-
01:01:38.760So in sixth grade is when I had that thought of, you can't solve the problem by controlling a particular sphere in which you can find something like solace or joy, because you have to create an entire world that has that continuity for everything that you love.
01:01:53.260And so that was the dual vector for me.
01:01:55.580And so then, you know, part of the process was, okay, agency, and this leads to starting businesses.
01:02:02.040And by the way, specifically the businesses that gave rise to this kind of thing, like digital media, digital video on the internet, making the internet available to be able to do this, you know, create like your podcast and yours as well.
01:02:15.860There's obvious reasons why that's a good thing to do.
01:02:17.700And then in the meantime, like here's a scene where in 2005, my third company has gotten to the point where it's quite successful and worth a lot of money.
01:02:27.500I'm in the office at the Google headquarters where I'm going to be meeting with Sergey Brin.
01:02:33.400They're talking to me about buying the company.
01:02:38.060And in the lobby, I'm reading Gilles Loi's A Thousand Plateaus.
01:02:44.040So in the moment where I'm about to actually have a serious business meeting about my company being acquired by what at the time was by steps, the ascendant giant of the space, my curiosity is still pointing to, okay, what's going on here in the world of like post-structuralism?
01:03:00.720So these teams, they're very tightly wound for me continuously.
01:03:04.240So that was the answer to that question.
01:03:08.840So it was the, that reminds me of a variety of things.
01:03:13.200The developmental psychologist Piaget spent his whole life studying children's play.
01:03:18.380There were other things he studied too because he was a polymath.
01:03:20.880But the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science.
01:03:26.860None of the psychologists that I ever encountered ever told their students that, which is really quite sad because it was like, that's actually an important detail.
01:03:34.480You do, yes, that doesn't surprise me, John.
01:03:37.260Let's go back to the superego issue because this is a very interesting thing to delve into because there's a personal element to it which will make it more germane.
01:03:46.560But there's a generalizable element that's very, very important because I do really think, like one of the things I've seen about the atheist crowd, for example, is that to be an atheist, from what I've been able to understand, requires two things.
01:04:00.900One is a kind of alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism, and there's a kind of a Luciferian pretension that goes along with that.
01:04:15.680And so, if we, let's delve into the nature of power a bit, and not as ability, but as, when the postmodernists make the proclamation that everything's a power game, let's say,
01:04:34.180they're basically saying that power is the uniting metanarrative, or procedure, or world.
01:04:41.440Now, we're trying to distinguish between, or partly what we're trying to do is distinguish between the world that's governed by power and the world that's governed by this other orientation that we're trying to flesh out.
01:04:54.740So, let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power.
01:04:58.240Now, you said that you're subject, on a fairly regular basis, to, like, a tyrannical Freudian superego.
01:05:06.040How do you, how do, and that'll make itself manifest as a pathological conscience, right?
01:05:11.100As guilt, when guilt is not warranted.
01:05:13.700Right, okay, so now we know that for guilt to be an appropriate manifestation of conscience, conscience has to be properly oriented.
01:05:21.380But now we're left with the problem of how the hell, this is the problem of how you distinguish the spirits to see if they're of God, right?
01:05:28.240How do you distinguish, and I mean this personally to begin with, how do you distinguish between an impulse of your conscience that's a manifestation of the tyrannical superego and one that's orienting you towards a higher good?
01:05:43.440So, my response to the situation that you were describing with the architect, what I do, what I've learned to do, is I ask the source of the normativity of the judgment that's being rendered against me.
01:05:58.760The voice is saying, whoa, that's not real.
01:06:01.060I say, okay, tell me what real is then.
01:06:03.700Tell me what your standard of realness is.
01:06:05.500I get it to commit to a normativity, and then once it commits to a normativity, then I can bind it to what I was talking about earlier.
01:06:12.580Okay, so let me ask you a clarifying question.
01:06:14.960Does that mean that conscience without call is unreliable?
01:06:18.740Like if I'm stopping you and calling you out on your misbehavior, let's say, but I'm not providing an alternative pathway forward, is that one of the markers of pathological, like tyrannical conscience?
01:07:18.680Because one of the things, like, if your superego is the voice of a sadist, then it's going to say whatever it can say for the purposes of making you guilty or hurting in some way, right?
01:07:33.360It's not like that's orienting you towards something higher.
01:07:41.320And so what I've learned to do is to challenge that and say, yeah, like, in addition to whatever pain it might be inflicting, and pain can be born if you understand it, right?
01:07:53.940Yeah, it can be salutary as well if it's appropriate.
01:07:56.220What conscience gets is the claim, often implicit, that there's an authority behind the pain, that the source of the pain has the right to inflict pain on you because it has an authority, because it's speaking according to some standard that you should be following.
01:08:17.960And what I try and do is get it to tell me what that standard is, and very often that I can then bind it to, wow, you know, the thing you said, you know, well, what's the point of this?
01:08:30.200Well, give me a clear example of something that has a point.
01:08:37.220Give me a clear example of something that has a point.
01:08:39.900Because if your point is that nothing has a point, you are engaged in self-destruction, because there's no point in me paying attention to you either.
01:09:24.200So that's my personal answer to your question.
01:09:27.360But that therapeutic intervention, if I can call it that, is coupled to the philosophical reflection that finite transcendence is what I am most called to identify with.
01:09:42.400That is what my humanity is, is to hold together, reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my transcendence.
01:09:50.000You know, it seems to me, to some degree, and I think this is something that happens when you do get to something fundamental, is that it has a certain degree of immediate self-evidence to it.
01:10:04.380Well, like, how could it be otherwise for a human being?
01:10:06.940Like, how could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our finitude without remembering our ineffable relationship with the infinite?
01:10:15.940Well, right, you can fall into despair, but, and people might say, well, that's a rational response.
01:10:22.400It depends on what you think the point of the rational is.
01:10:25.240It doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's, well, we could go into that, if it's self-defeating, right?
01:10:31.960So then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means?
01:10:35.000Like, one of the symbolic representations of that, that's the blind leading the blind, right?
01:10:40.120They're going to fall into a pit, okay?
01:10:57.660The person, like, well, it's all meaningless.
01:11:00.880It's like, well, you feel the call to speak that because you're actually committed to the truth.
01:11:07.140You find the truth intrinsically valuable.
01:11:09.080So you would, you, your actions are based on you holding things to be intrinsically valuable, which you actually, is in contradiction to what you're actually saying.
01:11:45.180It seems to me that the mere fact that someone who's desperate and nihilistic is, in fact, desperate is because they regard their suffering as wrong.
01:11:57.920Because if you're just, if you're just suffering and you don't think it's wrong, well, then that's a different kind of suffering, right?
01:12:06.500That's kind of like the pain of an animal, I would say.
01:12:08.860And then it seems to me that in your realization that the suffering is wrong or unjust, there's a, there's a seed there.
01:12:24.960So maybe this is also why that union that we discussed of death and hell with the infinite, you probably can't find, yeah, that's probably right.
01:12:37.060You can't find an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you traverse the lower realms.
01:12:45.320That's what happens to Jonah, right, in the whales.
01:12:47.920He's all the way down in the bottom of the abyss.
01:12:50.140Then he orients himself upward and the voice of God makes itself manifest, but only under those conditions.
01:13:46.220I think at the heart of it is self-deception.
01:13:49.060I mean, this is in the, to use a Christian source, this is the epistle of John.
01:13:52.860Like, we are prone to self-deception, and that's what keeps us from the love of God in a profound way.
01:13:59.100What's the motivation for the self-deception?
01:14:01.840There is, here's a specific, sorry, I'll use my name as an adjective, Vervakian proposal.
01:14:08.020That the very processes that make us intelligently adaptive, relevance realization, which means we have to frame, we have to ignore, we have to prioritize, we have to orient,
01:14:17.860judgment are also the processes that make us prone to self-deception, because we might be-
01:14:31.360Well, as soon as you can abstract, you can lie, right?
01:14:34.760Because you can build a representation, like, you can build multiple representations, that's really the, or multiple worlds, for that matter.
01:14:43.280That's the essence of the capacity to abstract.
01:14:46.040Well, then, there's no reason that you can't falsify those.
01:14:49.240I think even animals, I agree they don't lie.
01:14:52.400I think lying requires a reflective commitment to the truth of what you state.
01:14:58.420But I think animals can deceive themselves, because they can be deceived.
01:15:03.840So, one organism can mislead, like, chimps do this to each other all the time.
01:15:08.780And my capacity to deceive you is dependent on your capacity for self-deception.
01:15:17.400So, one more step along that line, and then I'm going to ask you, Jordan, if the discontinuities that you saw when you were a kid, how you feel that they might be related to this issue of both deception and self-deception?
01:15:33.580Because you talked about lies, the lies that were being promulgated.
01:15:37.060You talked about the desecration of this play space that you had, which is not precisely a lie, although the erection of the ugly buildings might veer in that direction to some degree.
01:15:47.540So, I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception, like, a lot.
01:15:53.780And so, it seemed to me that it's akin to Freud's notion of repression, but there's an important difference, because as far as I can tell, repression is like a sin of commission.
01:16:37.380But think about, right, certain egocentric bias or proclivities or whatever that makes me the opposite of prone to insight, that makes me resistant to insight.
01:16:51.300And what we do is, I think there's an omission.
01:17:30.380That's a journey down Dante's Inferno, I think.
01:17:33.060I'm going to have to go into that pit of uncertainty and do the hard work necessary to reconstitute the world that that insight demolished.
01:17:42.700And the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that, right?
01:18:32.020Can someone please invent a crystal ball?
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01:20:07.880Yeah, well, because it's the sin that can't be forgiven, right?
01:20:10.480And so you think, what the hell is that?
01:20:12.140It's like, well, if you violate the spirit of transformation itself, then how in the world could you possibly recover from that?
01:20:19.400Because you foreclosed off any, and then like in your scenario there, there was a painful realization of inadequacy on part of the self because Murdoch's character would now have to think, okay, not only did I make this mistake that's really hurt my relationship with my daughter-in-law and caused her some suffering and elevated me morally as well in comparison to her, but maybe I did that with a bunch of other people.
01:20:46.240Right, and God only knows how many discontinuities that placed in my life, but maybe there's a reason that has to do with me, like a certain kind of blindness, right?
01:20:58.680Willful blindness that might be associated with that because the payoff for her, that's the secondary gain of the Freudians.
01:21:05.780The payoff for her was that she got to be falsely elevated morally over her daughter-in-law, and even worse, that she was punishing her for that authenticity that would be her own pathway out of her misery, right?
01:21:17.560So who the hell wants to go through that?
01:21:19.220That's a metanoia, but it's always down.
01:21:21.880This is the problem with learning, I think, is that before you transfigure, there's a dissolution into an atropic state.
01:21:39.900So it's been demonstrated, the work of Stephan and Dixon.
01:21:42.760It's very complicated, but what you can do is you can use sort of state-space math to translate like where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into like a measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation.
01:22:03.560So excess neural activation, is that associated with that increase in entropy?
01:22:07.800It depends because that's hard to measure, right, because it could be, you know, it could be excitation or inhibition, and so you can't just track, right?
01:22:16.240And so, but what you get is you get a significant increase in entropy, and then you get, with the insight, the decrease.
01:22:24.640I'm going to bet it'll look a lot like what we saw on Twitter around the H-1B thing for the past three days, if you were able to measure.
01:22:31.220That's interesting, because I've been toying with that idea, Jordan, of being able to see the insight mechanics in distributed cognition, not just in individual cognition.
01:22:57.500Notice how it's governed initially primarily by the sin of omission.
01:23:01.860Like nobody actually listening to anybody else, like nobody actually stepping back, taking the stance of humility, which allows them to say, wait, maybe I'm making a mistake, maybe I'm reading you wrong.
01:23:10.780So this is part of what builds up the entropy, is the hardening of the dialogic space around something which isn't able to actually step into an appropriate level of humility to allow the insight to land.
01:23:22.100Well, that's like a definition of tyranny.
01:23:24.360I want to pick up on the humility thing.
01:23:27.120So one of the things Kaplan and Simon found who was predictive of insight is a thing they called the notice invariance heuristic, which is what you have to do when you need an insight is – so the advice you give people isn't actually the best advice.
01:23:41.680Think of previous instances where you solved an analogous problem.
01:23:45.000That's actually not the best because what you need is you need to think of previous instances where you failed to solve the problem.
01:23:55.400That's the – that's exact – because what you do is you look for what you have failed to change, what you kept invariant across all your failures.
01:24:03.680And that's the thing you should probably change in your current situation.
01:24:41.100Okay, so I was at church this morning with Tammy and I'm kind of getting accustomed to going to Catholic services.
01:24:47.380And one of the ways this service opens in many of them, and maybe this is a constant across services, is that the entire congregation professes a disjunction between itself and the transcendent in the form of, like, I have sinned my most grievous sin, right?
01:25:04.940This is something that really bothered me when I was a kid because I thought it was a reflection of a kind of tyranny.
01:25:12.800But I think more when it's oriented properly, it's that prayer for something like humility.
01:25:19.840Like, if things aren't going right for you, especially if they repeat, I mean, one of the things you could pray for, so to speak, reorient yourself towards, is to allow yourself to come to some conclusion about how it is that you're misaligned with the ideal in a manner that's causing this disjunction.
01:25:40.440And so, I wonder too, then, with regards to insight, so you said, reflect on your tyrannical past and essentially, so how you can shed that in the moment, but is it also, so I find, for example, if I'm arguing with my wife and it's not going anywhere, one of the things that the two of us have learned to do is to step back and think, okay, like, what the hell are we trying to accomplish here?
01:26:02.980And at the lower level, it's, well, there's a conflict of goal or micro-world, say, and then that can easily devolve into the wish that one of them would dominate, right?
01:26:14.600Especially if one of the views introduces some uncomfortable entropy into the other one.
01:28:06.320You know, one of the ways I used to treat my socially anxious clients was when they were having a party, I'd say, well, just concentrate on putting everyone else at ease, right?
01:28:14.900And then they'd forget about themselves, which is exactly what they were hoping to do.
01:28:18.400But you can't just forget about yourself, right?
01:28:29.660And these experiences that you had when you were a kid, you saw this disjunction between what you were perceiving, what you were perceiving, and what you knew.
01:30:14.620Yeah, but they can easily become the same.
01:30:18.240Like, people, you know, if your faith in the patriarchy, so to speak, is demolished, then why not go all the way down to the bottom and assume that everything's pointless and deceptive?
01:30:32.640I mean, this happens to people when they despair.
01:30:58.240Well, I think the answer to why I didn't despair was that so much of my life was still very much connected with just base reality as a kid.
01:31:05.740Living in a physical environment, maneuvering around.
01:31:08.800And so something like 95% of my life was, it's possible to navigate reality in a fashion which works.
01:31:49.800My own sort of physical body, my ability to maneuver in space, my ability to connect things, my relationship with my parents and my close family, my relationship with friends, my relationships with nature were all pretty solid.
01:31:59.280So when I come against this error at the level of culture, that's the anomaly.
01:32:05.260I don't have to worry about the center.
01:32:08.740Why phrase it in terms of center and anomaly?
01:32:16.280Well, anomaly in the sense that for the most part, again, everything is actually functioning reasonably well.
01:32:22.280You know, this notion that we talked about at the very beginning of being able to have values aligned with purposes and being able to make choices that land with a sense of, yep, this is landing.
01:32:40.260My new purpose is to cajole my parents into taking me to McDonald's to get a happy meal.
01:32:44.080I have noticed that in the act of doing that, I'm creating dissonance with my own relationship with my parents who are not happy about this thing.
01:33:09.940And such that when you were introduced to the abstracted digital world, so to speak, and you saw that it was faulty, that didn't shake your face.
01:33:20.220You know, one of the things I noticed when I was a parent, this was a lot of little kids, you know, this is almost 25 years ago.
01:33:27.860So I'd often take my little kids over to see other people with little kids, and the first thing they do is put on a movie and put the kids in the basement and put on a movie.
01:33:36.620And this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement and let them amuse themselves, right?
01:33:46.020They have to learn to get along with strangers, and that's an excellent—and you just short-circuit that.
01:33:50.940But now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital, and they come to that realization, you know, that they're being deceived in multiple ways.
01:34:00.700The question then is, like, what the hell's their center?
01:34:11.640I'm interested in your response to this, John.
01:34:13.720So I read recently that—many times, by the way, and I think Jonathan Haidt details this—60% of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness.
01:34:28.220Now, that's self-reported, you know, and so there's problems with that.
01:34:32.940But I'm wondering to what degree—and I'm not necessarily pointing the finger at the liberal ethos here—I'm wondering about this immense rise in neurotic mental illness that seems to be characteristic of our culture.
01:34:50.060Let's just bring in to the image of the golden calf, right?
01:34:54.820Because I think the key insight is to recognize that any time a group of people move themselves into this way of being in relationship with each other and with the world, that is—the word I used was aggregate.
01:35:08.080I think we've used different words to describe it, meaning they're not in communion as a well-integrated whole, but are in fact parts endeavoring to pull themselves together by means of something like consensus.
01:35:17.760There's a lot of other things to bring in together, but that's the—a way we've talked about it.
01:35:21.700That does, in fact, have an inevitable collapse and a downward spiral into chaos, right?
01:35:27.100That was the argument that you made earlier or that you brought forward earlier.
01:35:30.900And from my point of view, as well as I understand it, that is the case.
01:35:51.420I'm going to take it up, like, one level that may be more than we can handle right now in this, like, where we are.
01:35:57.280But the basic idea is that the ability to actually form well-integrated wholes that include a diversity of people outside of a small group of people who are genetically related has not actually been a solved problem.
01:36:08.940So we've actually had three cuts of this.
01:36:11.980One is the indigenous mode, which is small groups of people who are genetically related live within a culture that has been the same culture for everybody for a very large number of generations.
01:36:20.180And by the way, if you investigate the indigenous modes, they have incredibly powerful psychotechnologies for inhibiting things like self-deception or tyrannical norms.
01:36:29.640So it's a whole integrated complex that forms a relatively stable—over long periods of time.
01:36:48.580And has the inability to actually integrate people who have any real diversity of intrinsics, either different languages or different genetics or different—actually just ways of being raised.
01:36:59.100They have a small amount, but not big.
01:37:01.800The problem with that is that if you flip over here and you discover there's a new toolkit that has the ability to have a cosmopolitan, expansive polity that can, in fact, grow a large number of people and can absorb a wide diversity of people,
01:37:15.980this produces a certain generative capacity along the dimension of power.
01:37:42.760And it can deploy more focused power on a particular problem domain.
01:37:46.560So, by the way, it goes very high at the level of purpose, but it's not able to actually go as high at the level of values because the values have a very hard time being integrated.
01:37:53.980A coherent, well-integrated top to bottom where the conscience is non-tyrannical, which is why it has to develop tyrannical conscience, i.e. the pharaoh, to be able to establish something like order in that context.
01:38:04.520You think that's a necessary first step?
01:38:06.440Mm, probably about a third step, I'm guessing.
01:38:08.960You look at, like, you move from Moses to Saul and then ultimately across.
01:38:12.460You kind of see it happening over time.
01:38:14.380Like, there's a period of time where it can be held together by something like a shared esprit or a felt sense of a deep moment of being together.
01:38:25.200Like, think about the Romans on the hills with the Celts coming to destroy them and they managed to come together and they produced something.
01:38:31.380And the republic is actually able to achieve a certain level of being a republic for a while, but it goes through a degenerative cycle.
01:38:37.580But it still has to, ultimately, the only toolkit it can go to is something like a golden calf.
01:38:43.380Something like a way to hold an aggregate together because it has still become an aggregate.
01:38:46.820Because we have not yet figured out how to turn these kinds of large cosmopolitan at-scale groups of people into a well-integrated whole.
01:38:54.460Well, so one of the logical, likely pathways of devolution, you talked about the golden calf, is, like, sequential appeal to sequential hedonistic demands.
01:39:15.880I conquer my neighbor, so I'm able to actually bring booty back to my people, so they have a sequential satisfaction of lower self-demands, which keeps them relatively stable for some amount of time, but not for a very long time.
01:39:28.100Because it is structurally, fundamentally unstable, as you said, so it will undergo collapse, which is where we are.
01:39:35.080Okay, so partly what we're trying to do here, and I would say in the broadest possible sense, I think this is what you're trying to do, John, and correct me if I'm wrong,
01:39:44.400is we've been investigating the propositionalization of an ethos that would unite iteratively and relatively permanently, and we're investigating the possibility that that must, by necessity, be predicated on something other than that hedonic, immediate hedonic gratification.
01:40:05.180And it's also not predicated on power.
01:40:09.580Okay, so, you know, one of the things you see in the Old Testament—
01:40:38.280Now, I investigated that a little bit in We Who Wrestle With God anthropologically.
01:40:42.340I mean, part of the reason for that was, well, imagine that there are relatively isolated cities, and a stranger comes in with wares to trade.
01:40:51.320Now, you can steal his wares, but you don't get any more, like, stuff, and so that's a drag.
01:40:57.420But worse than that, you don't know who he's associated with.
01:41:01.480Like, the primates that we're related to are very good at remembering who each little primate they could pound flat is related to, right?
01:41:10.480Because you pound the little primate flat, and then his three more powerful relatives come along, and you're dead.
01:41:15.920So they see the little guy in its social web.
01:41:21.260Okay, so the stranger's there, and you could be very inhospitable, but then his army comes marching in, and you're all dead, right?
01:41:27.760You don't get to trade, plus you're all dead.
01:42:40.080And it looks like the innovation that we hopped upon, again, you have to be careful because the evidence is very undetermined when you're talking about prehistory, but was expanded trade networks, where not only trade of good, but trade of information.
01:42:59.060So what seems to have happened is human beings figured out if they could create larger networks of information gathering and good distribution, they could deal with what looks like, probably there might have been challenges to the food supply.
01:43:32.340And so one of the proposals, which I find very powerful and interesting, is that you need individuals who are capable of being liminal and willing to undergo significant self-transformation and move between worlds.
01:43:45.120And so you get the proposal of the invention, notice I'm doing it this way, of shamanism.
01:43:50.220That what the shaman is good at is the shaman is good at actually mediating between different perspectives and different groups.
01:43:58.760And what the shaman starts to do is you start to create.
01:44:06.620Yeah, and he can move between communities and he can negotiate and he can also deal with any of ways in which the foreigner has introduced social disharmony to the group because that's one of his or her skills too, right?
01:44:23.440But what the shaman has to do, right, is the shaman has to somehow translate their capacity for like this cognitive flexibility into something that can be learned by other people.
01:44:35.600And the proposal is that we get the invention of important sets of rituals, that you get the invention of like something perhaps like even like the handshake, which is a ritual which is designed to try and speed up the process by which you and I, who are strangers, might be able to recognize each other as at least potentially trustworthy.
01:45:01.480And then, but you have outward-facing rituals like that and then you have inward-facing rituals of initiation.
01:45:10.000Like, okay, we have to tighten our identity.
01:45:12.000So we like, in order to be willing to interact with them, we have to know clearly better who we are.
01:45:18.840And so you get the initiation rituals, you have like interaction rituals, and then in connection with that,
01:45:27.980you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible.
01:46:35.640Right, that's identity with the hero, I think, rather than with the tyrannical father, let's say.
01:46:40.800So I think there's, I think hospitality, right, is a name for a set of rituals that were invented and discovered to deal with this problem of how do we expand our networks?
01:46:58.520Yeah, well, it's got to be something like, let's say you're being hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger.
01:47:08.580Right, and so what that means is that despite the evident differences, which might be racial, linguistic, and ethnic, let's say, so profound differences, you're making the proposition, you're acting out the proposition when you're hospitable that there's a core identity that's shared.
01:47:25.620Right, and so that's got to be a transcendent identity because the obvious identity markers are radically different.
01:47:31.800So while it is the case that there is something happening at the level of the horizontal, you have more goods, you have more ideas.
01:47:40.080By the way, we could just take note of the strength, the strength of a protocol or a ritual over time and across contexts lets us know something about how important it is.
01:47:48.340So if we think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, how critical the hospitality protocol was.
01:48:01.600And so the vertical dimension, the fact that we are now able to enter into a state of communion by means of properly exercising this ritual, this protocol of engagement, to form a new identity that has completely new capacities and competencies that are an expansion in the vertical dimension as well as in the horizontal dimension.
01:48:19.400And that's like, that's the key unlock that enables everything together.
01:48:22.020Yeah, yeah, well, that's so, it's so cool that that hospitality has that imaginal element.
01:48:27.720It's right, I'm going to, I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome.
01:48:32.400Well, on, there's, there's a question, on what basis?
01:48:50.060Right, well, I think that's partly pointing to the fact that the thing that you're actually establishing the hospitable relationship with is only, it's only human on the surface, right?
01:49:01.860That's a pointer, because we've already made the case that when you're hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger, you're removing from consideration all the obvious differences.
01:49:14.560But you're doing that in the realization that there's something, well, you could say in the context of that story, something divine underneath, that every stranger who comes your way is an angel in disguise.
01:49:26.860Right, yeah, well, that's, certainly that's what Christ says in the gospels.
01:49:29.500If you do proper hospitality as an ascendant coming up.
01:49:32.360Well, then you could also imagine that the more hospitable you are to someone, the more the angelic element of their nature is like, I think this is, I noticed this in my clinical practice.
01:49:44.220Even with the worst people, like if you're engaged in a dialogue with someone who's hurt and bad, the best possible thing you can do is to listen and never say anything that's the least bit false.
01:49:58.440Because as soon as you do that, as soon as you do that, you're in their territory and you're not going to win that.
01:50:04.360Like that's a very bad, that's a good thing for everybody watching and listening to know if you ever fall into the hands of someone truly dangerous, lying is a very bad idea.