A Dialogue So Dangerous, It Just Might Bring You Wisdom | John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall | EP 532

voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting meta narrative and that works to unite people psychologically and it works to unite them socially I'll challenge it I think the meta narrative isn't self-sacrifice I think it's sacrifice in in service of getting to what is most real I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically one of the things that might distinguish AI systems from human beings is this vertical Dimension I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception so at the heart of evil is self-destruction why would any system destroy itself that does in fact have an inevitable

collapse in a downward spiral into chaos this goes back to the idea of conscience you know so maybe once you get your goal set the perceptual systems are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation well that's a very hard question yeah well they get harder as they get as you go up the ladder [Music] today's conversation is a an extension and continuation of a series of conversations I've had most particularly I would say with John Veri who joins me today and also with Jonathan pasio and those conversations really Center on specifying the foundational

principle of iterable society and stable psyche that's a decent way of of thinking about it or specifying more clearly and understandably the Apex towards which systems of value strive and that's a very complicated set of problems and so it takes a lot of conversations to make progress but I found I've been able to make a lot of progress with John and Jonathan um they're also both in by the way as well as me for Peterson Academy and so one of the things Peterson Academy is doing is aggregating a group of thinkers who are pursuing this

problem some directly like John and Jonathan some more peripherally and so you many of you who are listening will have um listened to some of the conversations I've had with pajo Jonathan Paso or with John Veri anyways we introduced another person into this conversational realm today Jordan Hall and Jordan is a Serial entrepreneur who's been successful multiple times as a tech founder and has developed uh the capacities that are necessary to serve as a serial entrepreneur and that means an openness to high level creativity conjoined with um like deep technical prowess and then also the

ability to separate the wheat from the sha under low information conditions and so Jordan Hall has been talking to John Veri for quite a long time a series of conversations and I met John again recently and we talked about meeting and John suggested that I include Jordan and he flew in today to make that possible and so we're in our conversation we 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 which is this nested sequence of value structures that that

tends towards a pinnacle the Pinnacle is the transcendant let's say or the ineffable Divine um those are matters of definition and we're trying to understand the hierarchical relationship between our local plans and our ultimate ends let's say which is the same thing as trying to understand the relationship between the finite and the infinite and we're trying to do that in a way that's quite differentiated and propositional but also is true to the phenomena and the and the what and the what the uniting reality of the Transcendent and so I know that's complicated but it's a

complicated issue and while many of you are familiar with this already and you can regard this conversation as a continuation on the same Quest so I think we'll jump right into it um Jordon I was watching your podcast with Jonathan pasio and you started to talk to him about the vertical Dimension and 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 now cognitive capacity is soon not going to distinguish Us by all appearances so I thought we might

well delve into that this is obviously something John can immediately contribute to as well I've been trying to figure out the technicalities of the vertical Dimension so let me run up hypothesis by you to begin with John you should perhaps find this interesting I think it's a development of some of the ideas that we discussed when we were on tour together MH so in this new book I wrote that 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 but one of those ways one of the Cardinal ways that he's characterized is as the voice of conscience and I've been trying to figure out how conscience operates psychologically and I think it the fact of conscience indicates something like a vertical hierarchy of value so so 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

and that sort of Shades off into the unknowable now for example if I asked you why you're here having this conversation let's let's play it out a little bit why are you here having this conversation you invited me okay so that would be an in indication of what reciprocity with regards to hospitality MH okay so why is it why was it important to you to accept the invitation so there was two other people who were connected to that invitation that oriented me towards thinking that it was a very good idea okay we can keep going

but yeah so so then part of that was that there was a social network y that you regarded as valid yep you were willing to take direction from that and they indicated to you that the conversation might be worthwhile is that is that a good summary okay so now we've got two superordinate okay what would it mean for the conversation to be worthwhile well that's a very hard question yeah well they get harder as they get as you go up the ladder one 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 and so there's something like there there's a split between let's say the epistemological sensibility 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 and there's something like a a commitment to a perception or feeling that a particular choice is is worthy yeah and then what it means

to commit on the basis of that feelings to Simply engage in the moment that's occurring right regardless of having to constantly try to decide whether or not what's happening is worth being part of as you might imagine okay okay okay so so I think what you just described is the how you might gather indication that a path that you can't quite specify might be worthwhile yeah first of all you said that there are paths that you can specify that are worthwhile right that that would be part of exploration y right and that there are conditions

under which circumstances under which you might be willing to to proceed down that investigative path okay so then we could divide that into two parts we 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 but 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 yes and you used your social connections partly to triangulate in on that so okay okay so all right so that's not a bad indication

of some nesting I we could we could continue because we could say things like well this is also a public conversation and 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 y well let's see if we could Define worthwhile so what would make the conversation worthwhile well it's happening but then also in retrospect so you would have something like um that's funny part of me wants to go and make it analytic like

to articulate it in an analytic fashion they go there for a while I think this is actually wrong like it's the wrong fundamental approach but let me just take that approach for a little bit just to give some yeah some room um because you can imagine if you have a hierarchy of values then you have a and we have a finite amount of time and energy right so we always have to be able to coordinate our allocation of finite time and energy for the moment let's say our purposes and the things that we can actually

consider to be strategic or have plans we make plans I'm just find that as a purpose and then we have our values and we want to be able to do is we want to be 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 and 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

so so I think I 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 so 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 right and I think you could do that awkwardly and badly and it would still be better than not doing it right because you're you're you're developing a relationship with the highest good and then

once you've done that you attend with all due care to the present right so you 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 articulated but that's my aim having established that aim John you might have some things to say here too how like we've talked about the relationship between value and perception and emotion in in quite a bit of detail so 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 and they'll show you the way so to speak maybe that's and this this goes goes back to the idea of conscience you know so maybe once you get your goal set and the perceptual the perceptual systems are they going to lay out the landscape for navigation you can feel your way along and I don't know if that's something like are 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 and that goal and and then so you could see that both as a combination of conscience and calling in relationship to the goal the 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 and 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 that is there any of that that yeah I mean so um I've actually been doing uh a lot of work around that right now uh uh with respect to uh uh what I call perspectival knowing knowing what it's like and being able to take a perspective and some some some sort of uh Confluence of things I mean first of all we are talking about basic relevance realization like what do we ignore what do we pay

attention to um and then within that I think what you're talking about is there's three interl things there's origin orientation and ostension origin is where am I um and this is very much the vertical Dimension right it's where am I who am I what kind of thing am I where am I in the environment um and and so this is uh this is some like think about think about it very concretely you're you're lost you first have to where's your origin where am I then once you once you have your origin you do orientation and

orientation is kind of like this um here's the proposal um so we've talked before about Marlo ponte's idea that relevance realization cashes out an optimal grip getting the right trade-off relations between being too close too far away too loose too tight you're you're constantly doing that now I'll use an analogy when I'm sparring I take a stance right I don't actually fight with that stance that stance doesn't you don't do anything with it the point of The Stance is to get me sort of at this Nexus place so that I got the best access to

all the specific optimal grips I Readiness right there generalized Readiness so orientation is this stance taking so this is my well that's what the orienting reflex does psychophysiologically yes right when you detect an anomaly there's the orienting reflex triggers multiple neurophysiological systems but fundamentally what it's doing is preparing you for Action you get a heart rate increase often with an orienting response that isn't exactly indicative of emotion it's indicative of the fact that you're probably going to do something with your musculature once you decide what that is so are are you distinguishing between the you

made reference to figure out where you are that's like an orientation point and then the stance is preparation for for where you're going to go the orientation the the or origin has there's a technical term called in indexicality which is like me here now that's what you're trying to what what who am I what state am I in where am I right like where am I actually standing so happens when you wake up right you so you have your standing and then you have your stance and then you have a stare which is you you

you asend you point right and then you all of those are what they're doing is they're configuring a perspective what is being foregrounded what is being backgrounded right and then now you can begin to do and that's a world creation it's a but it's what you said it it it it's like it's what uh harb Rosa calls you're looking for moments of resonance you're looking for moments where right you right you are you directing yourself to the world but the world also as you said is calling to you you you oh oh there is a

way I can go it calls out to you right and so if you if you're optimally oriented you're both controlling you're finding that sweet spot between control and responsive you danced that out which I think is a good representation totally totally because you're you're you're na You're negotiating which is this combination right of navigation and narration you're you're tracking which is navigation and then you're keeping track of your tracking which is what Nar we this is the theory narration prob you have to include the fact as you mentioned that you're also undergoing a process of

transformation of Self in media rest yes as you said your what happens in an exciting conversation so what's happening here performatively we're we're engaging in the process that currently we're talking about right right so it so that means in a deep conversation partly what you're doing is progressing forward to your to your various superordinate goals but at the same time you're transforming the nature of the superordinate goal and the relationship between the goal hierarchy as you proceed right and that would that's not a bad definition of a quest and and just one thing to to

make sure that all of our questions are caught up so conscience would be the voice that comes from a higher order goal to you while you're operating at a pro more proximal where you're operating more proximately telling you that your proximal operations are violating a higher order goal yeah right then then you could then you could imagine okay so yes that seems reasonable yeah that's a good way of thinking about it technically right because it is still in in a sense it's your voice still because it's associated with your goals but then it's also a

voice from above so to speak especially if your goal hierarch now you could imagine too that if you you talked a bit about Christianity with pageo as well so 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 in so far as you understand what that means that could now speak to you with the voice of conscience and hypothetically if it was orienting

you AC more accurately as you practiced it your understanding of that would increase and you'd get sharper at it You' get you'd get more you'd get more skilled at it because you get more I've been talking to my wife you know she's been investigating the relationship between self-will so to speak and divine will right in her prayer practice she's trying to orient herself towards the Divine and 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 and then you distinguish that from self-will so I would say because self-will begs the question question what do you mean by self right and my suspicions are that the more selfish the will the more a goal that should be lower order is elevated to the highest place so like a hidden istic self because the hedonist will say something like I would like to do exactly what I want to do right now regardless but there's a question that isn't

answered there and the question is well why do you associate eye with what you want because 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 success in business isn't just about offering an amazing product or service though that's certainly essential what truly sets thriving companies apart is having powerful Reliable Tools working behind the scenes to streamline every aspect of the selling process these are the systems that turn the complex challenge of reaching customers and processing sales into something that feels

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should grip you and grip all your perceptions until it's satiated but it should you talk to pajo about the necessity of keeping everything in its proper place right which is something that pajo is very concerned with trying to think through so okay one more one more question that that that at least on this line with regards to this so imagine this superordinate figure being Christ for for just for the sake of argument for the moment so I've been trying to think through what would be the antithesis I guess it's the antithesis of evil that's one

way of thinking about it and at the same time thinking about the postmodern insistence that there's no uniting story but power and so I think the idea that there's no uniting story but power is self-defeating fundamentally like i' I've seen no evidence that in complex biological systems even in chimpanzee troops that power iterates well power is a degenerating game so so one of the things you might ask is well you might say like the postmodernists do sometimes that there is no superordinate game like that's the central claim of postmodernism as far as I've been able

to determine that there's no uniting meta narrative everything we do is United by a narrative at some level and to just cap decapitate that arbitrarily and say well at some point there's no Union it's like well what point that's a really big problem but when they don't refuse to admit that there's a uniting meta narrative they turn to Power and I've been trying to conceptualize what the antithesis or what the alternative might be and it seems to me I'm I'm curious about this John it seems to me that the central message of the Christian DRFT

is that voluntary self-sacrifice is the uniting meta narrative and that works to unite people psychologically and it works to unite them socially and 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 so 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 and then you get to have your cake and eat it too you get if you adopt the ethos of voluntary self-sacrifice then you unite yourself psychologically

but at the same time it's the best possible strategy socially and that is definitely that's an that's not only an alternative to power it's antithetical it's the opposite so so I want to say two things about two of your main points um the first is I I I want to I want to explore conscience because I mean there is conscience that I think is the call to something higher but I think there's also conscience that can be pathological uh because it's the internalized voice of authority figures who have punished us who are who have traumatized

us and so that's like the harsh Freudian super ego oh yeah I tend to have a sadistic super ego so right so there's that and then and then the other thing you said about self-sacrifice and but you said something that maybe qualified it because this is a qualification I would make um I think the meta narrative I'll challenge it I think the meta narrative isn't self-sacrifice I think it's self saac I think it's sacrifice in in service of getting to what is most real I think people make all kinds of okay okay no arguments with

that I was using self I would say in that fractionated hedonistic manner right because you're you're if you're trying to organize yourself in relationship to to a higher Unity you're you're sacrificing what's lower to that upward I agree and but what I'm scanning at is I think what uh perhaps I guess the because we're talking about we're talking about conscience and conscience is is a normative self- knowing knowing yourself normatively rather than descriptively right that's what conscience is okay why normatively uh uh because it as you said uh what you're doing is you're knowing yourself

through a normative lens what is true what is God right so it's cons science knowing of yourself but what you're doing is you're reflecting on yourself through a normative lens okay so that and that ties together the psychological and the social that normative lens let me Che let me check if I disagree I may I don't I don't think I do but I want to check which is um I'm grounding the notion of conscience at a level that is quite below semantics sure it's like the moment when you're playing music and you feel the sour

note come that feeling that you have of a direction towards wrongness is conscience well this is what I wanted to I agree and what I would say there is that that but that's the normative that's but that's showing up in perspective taking right as opposed to rule following what you're doing is you're doing that like Jord Jordan P said I'll have to do Jordan p and Jordan a right uh uh uh uh the dance right the dance of the perspective taken y uh so I when I mean normative I don't mean like a conent code

I mean the the the very sort of sets of constraints that you put on yourself so that you shape your behavior according to right uh you're trying to get out what is true what is good and what is beautiful that's what I meant by so so why normative then rather than ideal because I okay so I use ideal in a technical sense which might be valuable to us so John KS makes a distinction between goals which are states you can realize and ideals which are constraints that you bind yourself to so for example uh like

a clear goal State when I'm thirsty is to drink water but honesty isn't a state I get to right it's a constraint I'm putting on all my behavior for the rest of my life so he calls those he says and one of the mistakes we can make is we can confuse goals and ideals ideals are ways of being and goals are states that get an ideal is like a metag goal is that a reasonable way but then where where does normative fall into that so Norm nor what normativity is is nor 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 that is Plato's proposal that's what is ultimately we're driving for we're trying to it it's it's a it's a grand Act of optimal realization okay how does that relate because the other connotation of normative might be social social norms for example and I mean there are I'm trying to put together the the definitions that you laid out so yeah so

social norms are supposed to be justified by their appeal to uh uh what you might call ethical Norms but the approximations of the ideal yeah but I don't like the doing that because I normativity for me uh ethics is too limited a sense of normativity it's it's about the right thing to do it it doesn't cut everything that's covered by trying to make your thoughts as true as possible trying make make your experiences as as tracking as what is beautiful as possible so there's a there's a discussion in Exodus that's relevant to that I think

maybe so when just before Moses goes up Mount Si to get the ten commandments so he he's gathered up a lot of implicit knowledge by that point by serving as judge for like years anyways he leaves and he leaves Aaron in charge and Aaron is the political voice of the prophet and as soon as the the Transcendent voice the prophet disappears the political voice yeah bows to the whim of the crowd right and so this is very interesting because yeah if you have a consensus model of Truth the the biblical insistence is that a consensus

model of truth will devolve in almost instantly into worship of the golden calf which is kind of like an orgastic materialism which strikes me as highly probable because I don't think there's much difference between an orgastic materialism and a profound fractionated immaturity because you yeah you agree with that totally okay and so then the prophetic voice speaks for the ideal that unifies what would otherwise degenerate into orgastic materialism it's something like that and so and that so your I think your contention was that nor is insufficient because it doesn't ethal e sorry E I think

we I think we can ground it concretely and make it really simple just think about an infant that's learning how to pick up a PE right there's a whole complex of feedback loops that are going on orienting towards particular in this case goal right but the ability to be able to discern what random articulation of neuromuscular activity coordinating hand brain eye towards an an increasing capacity to actually engage in depth perception everything else produces the desired effect that 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 right govern by the law of continuity or the infinitesimal like all the way continuous like a continuous wave ethics is what happens when you Endeavor to actually rearticulate that governed by the law of let's say the digital I can rearticulate semantically ethics I can take take your Norms your Norms have a field effect of continuity there's something about them which has a um how do you say it right they're irreducible you cannot actually break them apart they're always available to respond to the reality that you're in because they

are developed in complex relationship with reality ethics takes a snapshot just like when I'm digitizing a wave in sound it takes a snapshot of it it reproduces that in a semantic form that allows us to actually do things like look at it what we're doing okay so what would you say given that definition so I think I've developed a parallel notion of that conceptual framework so when anthrop when um ethologists go look at wolf packs uhhuh they abstract out regularities of behavior in the wolf pack so like their hierarchical relationship between wolves and a wolf

pack would be a behavioral regularity it's acted out and you could say it's as if the wolves are following social rules but they're not rules patterns but when you describe them they rules yes that's right okay so is that is that parall yes and this that's also to your notion of the uh the profit and the political right at the political we are now an aggregate of things that are not actually part of an integrated whole and therefore are governed by consensus which is what happens when you try to simulate a whole in an aggregate

in 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 yes okay yes that's okay that's exactly what I think that story indicates that yeah and so so then the that vertical orientation that's symbolized in The Exodus Story by Mount Si and then what happens when the Commandments are delivered they're delivered in a context of a much wider range of rules right so there's like these macro rules that are really foundational and then a bunch of

micro rules that are more situational and it's what seems to happen is that the re is something in your language that would be the translation of the normative to the ethical yes that's correct yeah so okay so you think that did you did you see did you know of the relationship between that and what happened at Mount Si yes okay okay okay okay and we just we something that people generally know so it was worth asking no it's uh um something might be interesting to add is just to think about the The Next Step Vis

Visa Moses because remember Moses was brought up in in train Tred in the most executive situation Humanity's ever produced right fonic Egypt is an executive and name this in terms of commanderin-chief executive yeah yeah y y and so one might imagine that when he finally exit he was a slave at the same time because he was he was he was Hebrew so he has a full understanding got the whole hierarchy yeah um that he would he would naturally default back to an executive form of leadership when he moves in being responsible for governing according to

these rules right he would move the rules into a legislative function he would adopt the executive function but he doesn't do that he adopts the judge function right and the judge operates on on by means of norms first laws second even the common law like I think about the how the yeah definitely what would a reasonable man do this is a question that is actually hitting you the whole system well yeah and so there's something also that's fascinating about that because 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 yeah and if I impose a narrative structure on you if it's an imposition it's going to be fragile I'm going to have to feel my way between your dispute and find a superordinate principle that you can't better y right and unless you accept that as valid like and that would be unless it's in accordance with your conscience and your calling maybe it's it's going to fragment the first time it's stress tested well that's what a I the re I think this is very close to the point

I wanted to make was that uh for me the normative it doesn't just Encompass uh the the the the moral uh uh because for example for you to get the common thing between Jordan and I uh you have to get first of all a shared meaning structure yes we're both and I don't mean just semantic meaning I mean no embodied embodied meaning yeah because otherwise you're going to fight still right and so you could think of a life right that is very ethical and yet is quite meaningless somebody who is leading very there's these are

tropes in literature the person who is very honest and very kind but is lonely that's the rich man in the gospels Parable right he's followed All the Rules and Things aren't good yet right so the reason why I I I think of normativity as a broader notion is it includes the includes this idea of connectedness to what's real meaning that I think is actually more foundational than our moral decisions our moral decisions I think are ultimately regulated by what we find meaningly most real I I I think that's what ultimately orients us because you need

T some Touchstone that tells you well how do I know when this is true how do I know when this is good how I why Touchstone because I think what we're talking about um is is what's the metaphor is contact with reality yeah yeah well there's a foundational element to that there's two points it's contact and comparison so think about this our judgments of realness are right this is from Spinosa basically uh you like think about when you're waking up you're in this small world and you're in the dream right and then you go you

wake up to a bigger world and that from that bigger world you can see the limitations and the bioses of the smaller world and you judge the bigger world to be more real than yeah this is what people mean when they want to be connected to something larger than themselves that's more real well that's interesting that that's upward eh of course it is of course it is and then and and and then but what how do they know that that's the case well they know it's the case because they make a com they make a

comp a contrasted comparison so notice that I used the length of the stick to explain the length of the shell Shadow not the length of the Shadow to explain the length of the stick one thing explains the other one is a source a source of intelligibility for the other and it's not reversed so we judge things in terms of a comparative contrast of increased realness and that is a matter of like you have to you have to do this you have to transform that's what you were saying earlier Jordan you have to transform you you

have to wake up like ultimately the the truths are not truths that you can get to without having undergone transformation so the Touchstone is it's a transformation of of the axiomatic assumptions on which that Viewpoint are based as far as I can tell can you believe that Good Friday and Easter are just around the corner these are the most important holidays in Christianity and lent is our time to prepare our hearts lent is traditionally a time where Christians grow closer to God through prayer fasting and giving to others and guess what hallow has created an

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assumptions but I think it's woven with I I don't know if you'll allow me to extend it axiomatic skills atic states of Mind partic pars wouldn't have to be propositional there's paradigmatic and then even perceptual even perceptions can change right that's right right so the the Touchstone is I want to be in contact I want to do this comparative reflective thing that makes me aware of the inexhaustible intelligibility that which is most real so the re compare a real object to a dream object the dream object like you could do some yion analysis but the

number of properties are limited you get the real object and think about the number of the amount of information I can extract just from this thing here that's what makes it real it's this inexhaustible realness constrained inexhaustibility right and I think that that well I think you have an you have you have a fountain of inexhaustible intelligibility and I think that is ultimately the the Touchstone it's the sense of contact and it gives us the comparative reflective Judgment of what is most real so you know that reminds me of of the representations of Moses staff

I was thinking about Moses staff when you were talking about that first stage I think you described it not as orientation origin origin yeah so Moses staff is a symbol of Center Point right right right and it's got a it's got a stable element which is the tree let's say it's the tree of life it's the staff of life but it also transforms into a serpent right so it's it's order its order with the lifeblood of chaos still within it and wisdom because the Serpent's also wise right yeah well serpent wise partly because it sheds

its skin and can transform entirely right exactly so Moses Moses staff this is relevant to your concern about pathological super egos that's right you know cuz you could say and maybe this is partly why the left like the left suffers from that I think to a large degree because when the left examines hierarchies they see corrupt power and the thing about that is that hierarchies can degenerate into corrupt power in fact it's probably apart from hedonic dissolution it's probably the most for common form of of pathologization but the fact that some hierarchies dissolve in the

direction of or what what yeah deteriorating the direction of power doesn't mean that all hierarchies are deteriorated power right that's taking it but then the question arises if some hierarchies aren't degenerated into Power then what's the principle of the hierarchy right you can see Echoes of that in the culture war that we're having right now about the definition of Merit right what's well what's the principle that rules if it's not power right now this is why I've been playing with this too so some of it's voluntary self-sacrifice but that's also where I think ideas of

play start to become important yeah I think it's I think I think what we I think it's not power I think it's this like love beauty reason play are all what uh what Frankfurt calls voluntary Necessities they're compelling but they're not compulsive yeah we we we say I I would do no other but I feel totally free in doing it so when you when you when you read a good argument you come to the conclusion you go yeah I get that but you don't feel like you've beened into it yeah right and do you think

it would be reasonable to make play Central to that notion because my suspicions are this is informed partly from studying Pep's psychology play right and play is a fragile motivational state it can be disrupted by the Dominion of virtually any other motivational state but you added Beauty and love and like order values to that but I guess my question would be is what you're doing with those higher order values in that state of voluntary what did you call the voluntary voluntary necessity voluntary necessity is that state of voluntary necessity is that the definition of play

I I think it's the definition of the genus that play belongs to um okay yeah I think they I think and I think there're all ways of tracking I'm I'm proposing the alternative to power which is uh to come into contact with reality is there is there is an element of we have to exert some control but there and this is this is the notion of resonance look think about the moments when you feel called you come around the corner as you're tracking through the Wilderness and unexpectedly uncontrollably there's the sunset that's beautiful and you

enter into a moment of resonance and you feel that you're in contact with something more real see reality has to have an element that exceeds us that is beyond us and we have to have a responsivity to it a faithful openness to it that's also that's something that's intensely desirable I mean I think like one of the insistences in both the Old and New Testament is that in the fundamental in the in the final analysis what's at the Pinnacle is ineffable right so if you there's no end to to the traveling Jacob's Ladder and that

means that the ineffable Transcendent is by definition outside our reach and there's there's a there's a cost for that the cost to that is that you can't conceptualize it completely you can't articulate it but the advantage is it's like an inexhaustible good yes right and so no matter you know you could imagine that you're looking at a beautiful sunset while you're walking along the a pathway in the forest and then you for the first time come across the uh the the edge of the Grand Canyon and you see the sunlight playing out in the Grand

Canyon and you stop looking at the sunset right and and you could also imagine that there isn't a limit to that that the Mysteries that might grab your attention even if you're operating at a relatively high level of apprehension There's No Limit upward to that that's kind of what totoy experienced when he had a dream that resolved his suicidality and he had a vision of a first of all being hung over a uh he was he was at a great height right he was hung over like an abyss an infinite Abyss which is like an

existential catastrophe and when he finally looked up he could see a rope that was holding him above the abyss but it disappeared into the unknowable right and that it it appeared at least the way he wrote the story was that that was enough to snap him enough that Vision was part of the process that snapped him out of his existential dread and you're the point you're making is that there are moments see those are magical moments yeah I I I think we talked a little bit I was at a party with you recently we talked

a little bit about an extension of ecological what's the ecological approach to visual perception who's that gibon Gibson right so Gibson talked about tools and obstacles right yeah so you you set a goal you see a pathway the objects that you perceive are tools and obstacles everything else is irrelevant that's associated with your idea of re relevance realization but there's you can add layers to that so you have tools and obstacles you have friends and foes that' be the equivalent on the social level and then there's another level too which is like agents of magical

transformation and agents of magical transformation are beings or phenomena that emerge into your field of apprehension from a higher order level of being and the the the more distant up the Jacob's Ladder that Emissary the more the quality of magic would obtain and it the magic would be that the interloper is bringing with it a new set of axioms a new set of rules so that's the magic it's right like something magic plays by different rules and so then there' be a hierarchy of rules up Jacob's Ladder essentially something like that yeah I think uh

uh I I agree I think the uh if reality is if if the experience of realness is the experience of inexhaustible intelligibility the inexhaustibility points to the fact that we cannot make it determinatives intelligible we can't fully grasp it I think that's the ineffable and I think what that does is and and this is what my proposal what I think existential conscien is as opposed to pathological psychological conscience exist potential conscience is to realize our correct attitude our correct comportment towards the fact that reality shines in intelligibly but it also withdraws in mystery and 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 uh the Continuum or even the completion of Greek philosophy the correct comportment Plato talked about was finite Transcendence you have to hold like this tonos this cre like the tension of the bow you have to hold that we are simultaneously finite and Transcendent we are finite in that we are capable of failure and sin and decadence but if you just

identify with that you fall prey to Despair and you become servile and manipulatable you have to remember your Transcendence capable of orienting towards the true and the good and the Beautiful but if we identify just with our capacity for Trans sentence we fall prey to huus and then we become tyrants over others we have to hold the two together and I think existential conscience is the call to constantly reinhabit and re-identify with holding both remembering that reciprocal remembering of your finite and your Transcendence and I think the Incarnation and the crucifixion are the enactment like

of finite Transcendence that's just what I was thinking because I thought if pasio was here that'd be the first thing he point out yeah so that's extrem point that out to me well well yeah because you have this insistence in Christian theology that Christ as God puts on mortality comprehensively right it's not just death it's kosis it's the Deep self-emptying right and this all the way down the all the way down not past death into hell right and so what that would mean practically speaking I think is that obviously one of the elements of exist

assistance that's limiting and terrifying is death and 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 that's a fre that's a Freudian Trope but that's a problematic presumption in a variety of ways one been empirically undermined too well we'll have to talk about that cuz 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 but in any case the pro 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 now 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 people can actually tolerate a brush with death without collapsing into psych like an actual brush with death without collapsing into psychological chaos but if they're naive and they encounter someone malevolent then like all bets are off and 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 it's also grappling with the reality of evil I agree I agree I think and and and and first of all I'll I'll say something and I want to be quiet because I want you to talk more uh um because I value what you have to say um I I I I think Whitehead he said you know the the defining of the the central thing of evil is self-destructiveness um and so I see evil you 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 um and I think that's how Transcendence offers us a response to our finitude right well with be a consequence of failing to establish the proper relationship with the rope that that that that that extends upward right because it's very how do you avoid falling into Despair and resentment if you don't remember the your relationship with the infinite I think you need both I mean and I find both I find The Temptations of Despair and The

Temptations of huus are constant uh Y and that's a nice way of elaborate so I'm going to I want to revisit this with regards to the tyrannical super ego idea yes okay so Jordan I wanted to ask you you've you've had a pretty practical life in many ways I mean you've been involved in many business ventures and I believe that that's what you were most known for to begin with yes so but you've taken and I don't know how much of this was the case with you all the way along but you become more known

for your philosophical investigations as of late and so I'm curious about how is it that you made your entry into the more philosophical domain from the entrepreneurial let's say I'm gonna answer that in a moment but first I want to just say something here um I think it's it's useful to notice again 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 and I feel like I'm quite present to what's happening right so it may very well be the case that

I participating meaningfully even though you can't hear the sounds come out of my mouth and you're gifted at that I just uh I'm also aware of the fact list I'm also aware of the fact though there there's an opportunity here for you sometimes I say things okay um so I I would say this is going to be a little bit odd but in point of fact it actually is the inverse okay so I was always very curious about both the nature of reality and what is right right so both the sort of metaphysics and ethics

always as far as I can recall um somewhere around the um probably late Elementary School I began to notice that the world that we live in or at least the world that I have been thrown into was suffering significantly from making any sense whatsoever it was s of haphazardly thrown together in a fashion that tended to produce more negative than positive think about just what happens when you go to school how old were you when when that started to become a focus of attention do you think about fourth grade oh yeah okay um and 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 and yet that seems to be something that the people who are around me seem to be perfectly okay with hm that's interesting so 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 so you can see how those two things link together so you said TV and

school yeah were there other experiences that you remember at a young age that like I'm kind of curious about what triggered this I mean that's pretty early another one was uh you we we live in a neighborhood behind the neighborhood is a large Forest sort of a virgin Forest I don't know how virgin it was um and so we play the kids play back there and we build structures and tree houses and everything like that and then one day it's just been clear-cut to build out more of the neighborhood and the building out of the

neighborhood is supremely ugly like Suburban ugliness and so again an aesthetic sense of again there's something deeply wrong about that it 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 called say the sacred and it was perfectly profaned it wasn't just clearcut it was clearcut and then then they built ugly buildings in that place again these are all happening roughly at the same time and so the journey that I went on then was a journey that was always entangling um

how can I have agency in the world to make the world less off less wrong think normative and how what does right leing look like because I don't have a context that gives me any good answers to that question every time I go out in the world and try to query it the the signals I get back from the world tend to be nonsense or wrong you look at TV hm the president's lying do you have any sense of how old were you were when you were able to articulate that as a like as a

propelling principle I mean musk told me that he was about 12 or 13 when he had a very serious existential crisis and started really religious material and his existential solution to that was really a quest like he found that if he concentrated on learning yeah and investigating that that produced a sufficient influx of meaning so that his propositional concerns were they were no longer foregrounded uhhuh interesting I had clients who were like that too creative people if they ever stopped creating they'd fall into the grip of their rational mind and just tear them into pieces

right yeah but as long as they focused on that continual exploration Play creativity they then then they were fine they'd fall into it like a child playing and so and that's kind of interesting cuz 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 but if one of the things you do as a therapist with people who are depressed especially if they're intelligent is help them identify it's probably something like a higher calling you say look let's let's 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 and for this gentleman who's a very creative architect as long as he was creating it was fine now now and then his rational mind would crop up and say well what's the what the hell's the point of all this creativity you know which is a well it's a it's kind of a bottomless pit isn't it if the in if the ultimate goal is ineffable there's no

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well you're not suicidal when you're doing it you know that's kind of an exist well serious like it it quells your pain it quells your existential dread if 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 right that seems like a reasonable proposition okay so back to I we call that pseudo metanoia right there like 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 yeah yeah yeah kind of like dead reckoning yeah and the trouble of course is if you get stuck in pseud 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 right 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

because that's a manifestation of a deeper he would actually have to find a way to embed himself in a world that was in continuous contact with that sort of respite to expand that territory to include the whole of his life and the whole of all that he loves yes yes yeah that's probably what the Protestants are like and that was that was my my Pivot in sixth grade okay okay so in sixth grade was when I had that thought of it's you can't solve the problem by don't 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 and so that was the the Dual Vector for me um and so then you know part of the process was okay agency and this leads to starting businesses and 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 yeah uh for reasons

right there's obvious reasons why that's a good thing to do um and then in the meantime like here's a a scene we're in 2005 my third company has gotten to the point where it's quite successful and worth a lot of money I'm in the office at the Google headquarters where I'm going to be meeting with Serge Brin they're talking to me about buying the company which company was this it's called DivX DX and in the lobby I'm reading J deo's um a thousand plateaus and so in the 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 Def 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 uh post structuralism so these teams they're very tightly wound for me continuously um so that was the answer to that question right right yeah so you laid out the order so it was the that reminds me of a variety of things that the developmental psychologist P spent his whole life studying children's play there were other

things he studied too because he was a polymath but the reason he did that was because he was trying to reconcile the gap between religion and science none of the psych olist that I ever encountered ever told their students that which was really quite sad because it was like that's actually an important detail you do yes that doesn't surprise me John let's go back to the super ego issue because this is this is a very interesting thing to delve into because there's a personal element to it which will make it more germine but there's a

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 aist from what I've been able to understand requires two things one is a kind of alliance with a reductive materialist rationalism and there's a kind of a luciferian pretention that goes along with that but that's that's insufficient it also really helps if you were viciously hurt by someone religious yeah yeah and so so if we let's let's delve into the nature of power a bit and

and not as not as ability but as are when the postmodernists make the proclamation that everything's a power game let's say that they're basically saying that power is the uniting meta narrative or or procedure or world now 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 these this other orientation that we're trying to flesh out so let's see if we can characterize the world that's governed by power now you said that you're subject on a fairly regular basis

to like uh a tyrannical Freudian super ego how do you how and that'll make itself manifest as a pathological conscience right as guilt when guilt is not warranted that's right right okay so now we know that for Guilt to be an appropriate manifestation of conscience conscience has to be properly oriented but 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 how do you distinguish and I mean this personally for to begin with how do you distinguish between an

Impulse of your conscience that's a manifestation of the tyrannical super ego and one that's orienting you towards a higher good how can you tell the difference so good so my response to the the situation that you were describing with the architect what I do what I've learned to do uh is um I ask the source of the normativity of the Judgment that's being rendered against me the voice is saying wow that's not real I okay tell me what real is then tell me what your standard of realness is I 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 okay so so let me ask you a clarifying question does that mean that conscience without call is unreliable like is like if I'm stopping you and calling you out on your misbehavior let's say but I'm not providing alternative pathway forward is that one of the markers of patholog like tyrannical conscience I I I I think so I but I don't know if that's the point I was making no no let's not lose that point it's

a good point let's put a pin on that point the point I was trying to make is I can the pathological conscience isn't consistent about normativity what it does is constantly invokes normativity that it doesn't ref that it refuses to submit itself to okay so it's not playing by its own rues it's not playing by its own rues so I'll say is it incoherent because it is and this goes towards Whitehead's idea I find that which in it which is ultimately self-destructive I think by the way the the implications that notion that being incoherent it

is not cohere with you right so well it might not even cohere internally like because one of the things like if you're super ego is the voice of a sadist then it's going to say what whatever it can say for the purposes of making you guilty or or hurting in some way right it's not like that's orienting to you towards something higher it's a it's a power maneuver and sadism is a power maneuver fundamentally it is and so what you what what I've learned to do is to uh challenge that and say yeah like I

like in addition to whatever pain it might be inflicting and pain can be born if you understand it right yeah it can be salutary as well if it's appropriate what what what conscience gets is is the is the the claim often implicit that there's an authority behind the pain that that the pain is based on that the the 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 and 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 W you know you you know the the thing you said you know well what's the point of this well what's give me give me give me a clear example of something that has a point voice if this is pointless give me a clear example of something that has a point because 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 so what is it you're

saying what is something that actually has a point voice and then it will it'll if it's genuine conscience if it's calling me to finite Transcendence it'll say blah and it'll call me to a virtue if it's this pathological thing it will start to thrash it'll start to flounder because it will realize that it doesn't have an up it it it it doesn't have something that it can actually bind me to it can inflict pain on that's definitely the voice of a demon right it's got no upward or trapped in hell it's got no upward orientation

so that that's that that's my personal answer to your question but that that that therapeutic intervention if I can call it that is coupled to the philosophical reflection yeah that finite Transcendence is what I am most called to identify with that is what I am that is what my humanity is is to hold together reciprocally remember and recognize my finitude and my Transcendence you 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 it it has a certain degree of immediate

self um evidence to it well like how could it be otherwise for a human being like how could it possibly be that we could bear the catastrophe of our infinitude without remembering our in ineffable relationship the well right you can fall into despair but and people might say well that's a rational response depends on what you think the point of the rational is it's it doesn't seem to be a rational response if it's well we could go into that if it's self-defeating yes right so then why don't we investigate for a minute what that means

like one of the symbolic representations of that that's the blind leading the blind right they're going to fall into a pit okay well why not what's the difference what the hell difference does it make anyways if you fall into a pit right and that's a discussion about the nature of reality well there's endless suffering in the deepest of pits and that I don't know that seems well let me give you an example yeah the the person like oh it's all meaningless it's like well you feel you felt you feel that called to speak that because

you're actually committed to the truth you find the truth intrinsically valuable so you would you your actions are based on you holding things to be intrinsically valuable which you actually is is is in contradiction to what you're actually saying right right right this this is you accept the principle of non-contradiction well but then but but then the point is if they're trying if if trying to con I mean if they're just being violent that that's then I just they're trying to be coherent right if they're trying to persuade me then I can appeal to the

normativity that is intrinsic to any Act of persuasion right right right right yes well okay it seems to me that the mere fact that someone who's Des desperate and and nihilistic is in fact desperate is because they regard their suffering as is wrong mhm because 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 that's kind of like the pain of an animal I would say and then it seems to me that in your realization that the suffering is wrong or unjust there's a

there's a seed there yes because you're you've got an IND you you've got an indication that something that's actually a good is being violated and that's a right right so 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 you can't find an accurate way of orienting yourself to what's highest unless you Traverse the lower Realms that's what happens to Jonah right in the whale he's all the way down in the bottom of the Abyss then he orients himself upward and

and the voice of God makes itself manifest but only under those conditions so cognitive I would say yeah this is right there is no self Transcendence which is a form of self-correction unless there is a deep and I don't just mean propositional I mean a deep uh uh ownership and responsibility to one's capacity for self-deception okay that okay now you've gone sideways with that now I've been interested as you know in self-deception for a very long time previous was the thing that you really focus on and that that's the thing he really focuses on if

we can find the place where those meat we've got D something really yeah yeah yeah yeah well okay so so tell why bring in the theme of self-deception because I think is I think uh this is I think that what drives self-destruction is self-deception so if at the heart of evil is self-destruction why would any system destroy itself I mean this is a platonic argument I think at the heart of it is is self-deception I mean this is in the to use a Christian Source this in the Epistle of John like we are prone to

self-deception and that's what keeps us from the love of God uh in a profound way W what's the what's the motivation for the self-deception there is here here here's a specific uh sorry I'll use my name as an adjective for vacan proposal that 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 are also the processes that make us prone to self-deception because we might we can lie we we think of sin we miss we miss our aim

W sin or death that's what you just said the wages of sin or death well as soon as you can abstract you can lie right because you can you can build a representation like you can build multiple representations that's really the or multiple worlds for that matter that's the essence of the capacity to abstract well then there's no reason that you can't falsify those I think even animals I I I agree they don't lie I think lying requires a reflective commitment to the truth of what you State um but I I think animals can deceive

themselves because they can be deceived uh so one organism can mislead like chimps do this to each other all the time um and and my capacity to deceive you is dependent on your uh capacity for self-deception okay fair up yeah yeah yeah so one more step along that line and then I'm going to ask you Jordan if if the discontinuities that you saw when you a kid how you feel that they might be related to this issue of both deception and self-deception because you talked about lies the lies that were being pro prated you 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 so I spent a lot of time thinking about self-deception like a lot yeah pass cross multiple times yeah yeah yeah and so um it seemed to me that it's it's akin to Freud's notion of repression but there's an important difference because as far as I could tell repression is like a sin of commission it's something you do whereas most self-deception looks to me like Omission yeah

it's Omission that's what that's what I was just saying yeah exactly I omit so I think I failed to explore okay so lay out your your theory of of omission in relationship to so it's an omission of insight so think about the think about the insight I thought he was angry but it turns out he's afraid that's an insight and I realize that I have oriented the wrong way right now I have to reconfigure right right but think about 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 and what we do is I think there's an Omission we make ourselves resistant to insights we might have intimations of so here here's a here's an account of that I've got you wrong you weren't angry you were afraid okay well now I have to figure out at what level of presumption I got you wrong like maybe I really got you wrong yes and and maybe I didn't just get you wrong maybe that's an example of a pattern of me mistaking fear for anger that's permeated all my relationships

okay now I've got an entropy pit in front of me right so so I'm going to have to that's a journey down Dante's Inferno I think I'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 and the easiest thing for me to do is just not do that right I can just not do that that that and this you just made Iris Murdoch's argument in the sovereignty of the good she talks about the example of the Mother-in-law who has like this

attitude towards her daughter-in-law she's coarse and then she realizes oh she's not coarse she's authentic she's not rude she's spontane and then she does the thing you just did and then she thinks oh but maybe this isn't an isolated maybe there's a systematicity think P maybe there's a systematicity to my error and then she faces the choice the choice is do I change in right in order to properly address that systematicity what does the future hold for business ask nine experts you'll get 10 different answers bull market bare Market inflation up inflation down can someone

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saw this in my therapeutic practice a lot too Dante put the betrayers right by Satan right and so so imagine that you engage in one of those sins of omission in the situation that you just described well that now that means that you've betrayed yourself MH right because you've betrayed your capacity for transformation I think that's that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost is that you've now divorced if you Divorce Yourself yeah well because it's the sin that can't be forgiven right and so you think what the hell is that it's like well if you

violate the spirit of transformation itself then how in the world could you possibly recover from that because 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 exactly right 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 a certain kind of of blindness right willful blindness that that might be associated with that cuz the payoff for her that's the secondary game gain of the freudians the 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 so who the hell wants to go through that that's a metanoia but it's always

down this is the problem with learning I think is that before you transfigure there's a dissolution into an atropic State that's that descent into chaos well you see that in Insight entropy goes up first before you get the reduction yeah now you said that's been demonstrated yes can you tell me about that uh so it's been demonstrated the work of Stefan and Dixon it's it's very complicated but what you can do is you can use um sort of State space math to translate uh like where somebody's looking or pointing a finger into uh like a

measure of the entropy of the cognitive processes that are producing the orientation it's it's the math is well established um and and so excess neural activation is that associated with that increase in entropy it depends be because that's hard to measure right because because it could be you know it could be excitation or inhibition and so you can't just track right and so um but what you get is you get a significant increase in entropy and then you get with the Insight the the decrease I'm going to bet it looks it'll look a lot like

what we on Twitter around the H1B thing for the past three days if you were able to measure yeah that's interesting because I I've been toying with that idea Jordan of the of being able to see the Insight uh mechanics in distributed cognition not just in individual cognition absolutely well that'd be that state of confusion yeah right where okay so now you've thrown an anomaly into the into the mix and then everybody's chattering about how that might be reconciled notice how it's governed initially primarily by the sin of omission like 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 so this this is part of what builds up the entropy is the 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 well that's like a definition of tyranny I want to pick up I want to pick up on the humility thing yeah so the the one of the things you know uh Kaplan and

Simon found it was predictive of insight is a thing they called the notice invariance turistic which is what you have to do when you need an Insight is so the advice we give people isn't actually the best advice think of previous instances where you solved an analogous problem that's actually not the best because what you need is you need to think of previous instances where you failed to solve the problem now why yeah yeah good that'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 and that's the thing you should probably change in your current situ that's that too so that's why the Tyrant doubles down in the ex story right humility as the anomalies Mount which is exactly what happens in life right and all over the place in our world right now yeah yeah yeah yeah so okay so I just want to make one point I think humility is the virtue of identifying with finite Transcendence humility is not Despair and it's not huous humility is a confidence in uh a Rec a recognition of a

reality that transcends you but a confidence that you can nevertheless address it you can be in contact with okay so I was at church this morning with Tammy and I'm kind of getting accustomed to going to Catholic services and one of the ways this service opens and 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 this is something that really bothered me when I was a kid because I

thought it was a reflection of a kind of tyranny and I think it can be it it but but I think more when it's oriented properly it's that prayer for something like humility like 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 this disjunction and 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 and 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

especially if one of the views introduces some uncomfortable entropy into the other one it's like just shut the hell up I'm right and then the problem goes away but the problem with that is that if you do that all the time then you're always right and your partner's always wrong and that's your metagame argument yes exactly exactly and then but so you can step back and you can think okay well what the hell are we trying to accomplish here then you have to remember that while you're married and the person's going to be there tomorrow

and that you love them then you have to remember what that means and then you have to remember what it's like when you're not arguing which is often very difficult when you are arguing and then you have to call to that spirit I think and that's what delivers the inside it's like okay what are we trying to do here we're trying to make productive peace okay the argument was power let's say a power manifestation at least in part but the proper goal is productive peace and then you'll get you'll get an answer from the spirit

of productive peace so you do this you do this uh you know by ask you can even do this with like individually um a Solomon Paradox uh you eigor Grossman's work somebody get get them to describe a problem they can't solve they will inevitably describe it from the first- person perspective ask them to redescribe it from the perspective of a friend or somebody who knows them well and then when they redescribe it from a perspective other than their own they'll often get an insight into that because it breaks them out of the fact that they're

like that's interesting because you know you may know that there's no difference between being self-conscious and being in a state of negative emotion right they're they're statistically Inseparable and you and depressed people are much more likely to use first person pronouns that's right yeah yeah and socially anxious people too that's right you 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 and then they'd forget about themselves which is exactly what they were hoping

to do but you can't just forget about yourself right you have to put put put up a new frame so okay so all right now you talked about self-deception these experiences that you had when you were a kid you saw this disjunction between what you were perceiving what what you were perceiving and what you knew like it's interesting that yeah okay do you and you said that the television essentially was full of lies right okay flash that out a bit and let tell tell tell me and everyone who's listening and watching what deception you think

you were Det just make it very concrete as an example there were two uh that I remember quite clearly one was a McDonald's Happy Meal which was in fact not at all happy when you actually got it um and then the other one was uh the president Richard Nixon um you explicitly saying something on the television and then having my grandfather over here letting everybody in the family know that that was a lie right so those are two events that I remember going huh so I live in a culture where this kind of thing happens

I didn't think it in that way but the feeling Landing very heavily on me um huh that means I can't actually this is like the the child who has an alcoholic parent who begins to have to take responsibility for parenting because they notice so our culture is an alcoholic parent it's actually a really good metaphor that's brilliant that's a really good metaphor um and so that feeling of oh I need to start taking responsibility for navigating this world why did you make that just okay but that's not the only like going in the story of

kanaine and Abel Kan fails and he gets alienated from God and in consequence of that so he experiences a landscape of trouble let's say but his response isn't to take responsibility his response is to curse fate and I wasn't alienated from God I was alienated from our culture those aren't the same in point point conscience yeah but but they they can easily become the same like people you know who if your if your 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 I mean this happens to people when they despair okay but that didn't happen to you when you were a kid and you said you were you decided to take responsibility okay and you also made reference to your grandfather Yeah okay so so did did he play a role in this only in this particular episod only in that episode okay so why why didn't you Despair and why did you decide to take respons ility and then what did that mean I think the answer to why I didn't despair was that

the so much of my life was still very much connected with just base reality as a kid living in a physical environment maneuvering around and so something like 95% of my life was it's possible to navigate reality in a fashion which works and were you doing that successfully yeah yeah along what dimensions you had friends I had friends yes I was not hungry often I could explore I could adopt challenges like catch catching the the Frog and accomplished catching the Frog and noticing that it was delightful I could go crawl in the in the creek

you know so you had a track record of success what about your relationships with your parents at that point pretty healthy I'd say I think so okay so you were fairly firmly grounded so you had a platform that enabled you to determine constituted the TR you do it from the center out the center out was pretty solid right my my own sort of physical body my ability to maneuver in space my ability to connect things my relationships with my parents and my close my relationship with friends my relationships with nature were all pretty solid so

when I come against this error at the level of of culture that's the anomaly I don't have to worry about the center the center is pretty solid yeah why why phrase it in terms of Center and anomaly well anomaly in the sense that for the most part again everything is actually functioning reasonably well you know this notion that we talked about the very beginning of being able to have values align with purposes and being able to make choices that land with a sense of Yep this is landing and I mean in a physical sense um

so when the anomali anomaly in this case would be an experience that throws an error in that category of huh yeah I I have set now a new purpose my new purpose is to Tool my parents and to taking me to McDonald's to get a Happy Meal I 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 I get the Happy Meal The Experience sucked and I made my family mad anomaly purpose of value alignment not this Center oh yeah

so H so that's interesting because you pointed to the fact that you had a multiple dimensions of success and I mean qualitatively distinct Dimensions so that's important 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 faith so now we're in a situation you know one of the things I noticed when I was a parent this was of little kids you know this is almost 25 years ago 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 and this always annoyed me because my attitude was throw the damn kids in the basement and let them amuse themselves right they have to do that they have to learn to play they have to learn to get along with strangers and and that's an excellent and you just short circuit that but now imagine that we have all these kids that are dominated by the digital and they come to that realization you know that

that they're being deceived in multiple ways the question then is like what the hell's their Center they haven't won do you think that's true yeah so there's data coming out I'm interested in your response to this John so I read recently that six many times by the way and I think Jonathan hey um details this um 60% of young women with a liberal political orientation have a diagnosed mental illness now that's self-reported you know and so there's problems with that but but I'm wondering to what degree and I'm I'm not necessarily pointing the figer 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 let's let's bring in to to the image of the golden calf right because the the I think the key Insight is to recognize that anytime a group of people move themselves into this way of being in relationship with each other and with the world that is word I used was aggregate I think we've used different words to describe it meaning they're not in communion as well ingret whole but are in fact parts endeavoring

to pull themselves together by means of something like consensus there's a lot of other things to bring in together but that's the a way we've talked about it that does in fact have an inevitable collapse and a downward spiral into chaos right that was the argument that you made earlier or that you brought forward earlier and from my point of view as far as well as I understand it that is the case and so um well it's sort of by definition if if the if it's an aggregate that isn't unified by the appropriate higher order

principle it's going to disintegrate yes that's correct that's that's that's why that principle isn't ideal because it disintegrates and so can we go here I'm going I'm going take it up like one level that may be more than we can handle right now in this like where we are but the basic idea is that the ability to actually form well- integrated holes that include a diversity of people outside of a small group of people who are genetically related has not actually been a solved problem so we've actually had three cuts of this one 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 and by the way if you investigate the indigenous modes they have incredibly powerful psycho Technologies for in I in things like self self-deception or tyrannical Norms right so that's it's a whole integrated complex that forms a relatively stable over long periods of time long periods of time 25,000 years right long periods of time um but has the inability to grow Beyond a certain number of people

oh 200 um 1,500 if you think about the way they create metag groups okay okay um and has the inability to actually integrate people who have any real diversity of of intrinsics either different languages or different genetics different actually just ways of being rised have a small amount not big the problem with that is that if you flip over here and you you discover there's a new toolkit that has the ability to have uh a a Cosmopolitan expansive polity they can in fact grow a large number of people and can absorb a wide diversity of

people this produces a certain uh generative capacity along the dimension of power because it has that deteriorates in that direction well it it it has it both as a positive it can produce say for example uh Innovation right it can produce a way of orienting towards towards productive environment to produce more food for example yeah um it can solve more problems strategically that's a better way of putting it that's the advantage of diversity let's say yeah it can solve more problems strategically and it can deploy more focused power on a particular problem domain so by

the way it goes very high at the level of purpose but is not able to actually go aside the level of values because the values have a very hard diming integrating right a coherent well integrated top toot where 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 the problem you think that's a necessary First Step probably about a third step I'm guessing you look at like you move from Moses to Saul and then ultimately across you kind of

see it happening over time like there's a period of time where um it can be held together by something like a shared apre or a felt sense of a deep moment of of being together like think about the Romans on the hills with the Kelts coming to destroy them and they manag to come together and they produce something and the Republic is actually able to achieve a certain level of being a republic for a while but it goes through a degenerative cycle but it still has to ultimately the only toolit it can go to is

something like a uh a golden calf something like a way to hold an aggregate together because it has still become an aggregate because we have not yet figured out how to turn these kinds of large Cosmopolitan ATS scale groups of people into a well- integrated hole well so one of the large iCal likely Pathways of devolution you talked about the golden calf is like sequential appeal to sequential hedonistic demands sure but you can make peace with the toddler that way you just give the toddler what he wants every time he asks red circus is an

Empire yeah Empire is think about how Empire works I go out I conquer my neighbor so I'm able to actually bring booty back to my people so they have a sequential satisfaction of lower self-d demands which keeps them relatively stable for some amount of time but not for a very long time because it is structurally fundamentally unstable as you said so it will undergo collapse which is where we are yeah okay 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

John and correct me if I'm wrong is we've been investigating the propositionalization of an ethos that would unite iteratively and relatively permanently and and we investigating the possibility that that must by necessity be predicated on something other than that hedonic immediate honic gratification and it's also not predicated on power okay so you know one of the things you see in the old on one second y I think it's that was very powerful and very important so in case you know other people besides us are participating in this conversation put a bookmark on that yeah okay

yeah yeah that's that yeah there's a lot of there's a lot of exploration summarized very quickly in that statement y there's an immense emphasis in the Old Testament on the value of hospitality right like it's a cardinal moral virtue now I investigated that a little bit in we who wrestle with God anthropologically I 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 now you can steal his Wares but you don't get any more like stuff and so that's a drag

but worse than that you don't know who he's associated with like the primates that we're related to are very good at remembering who each little primate they could pound flat is related to right because you pound the little primate flat and then his three more powerful relatives come along and you're dead so they they see the little guy in its Social Web okay so the stranger is there and you could be very inhospitable but then his Army Comes Marching In and you're all dead right PL you don't get to trade plus you're all dead yeah

so that's a bad idea so now you have to be hospitable and that gets the trade going and so I'm wondering then I was thinking about Hospitality like it's a local thing right because that's what you do at a at a banquet or at a party make people welcome that's what you do if you run a small business if you have even the least amount of sense you make people welcome then you could think if that's scaled ah well then the whole world would be a hospitable place and the problem would be solved right so

it's obviously a scalable virtue and maybe it's also the foundation of that societal trust that constitutes I think the only real natural resource could you speculate do you think on the relationship between hospitality and play like we we talked about can throw an Insight too okay okay I will I'll throw an Insight too uh so uh I think this goes back to uh there seems to be evidence uh the dating is questionable somewhere between 120,000 70,000 BC uh we're facing it looks like a the possible uh end of the species like it's under tremendous pressure

it's bottlenecking um and it looks like the Innovation that we happed 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 so that what seems to have happened is human beings figured out if they could create larger networks of information gathering and good distribution they could they could deal with uh what look like there's it probably there might be there might have been challenges to the food supply we don't know now the problem

with that though the problem with that is okay how do you do that how do you actually like you can't make it theological well we need to set up trade networks and so one of the proposals which I find very powerful and interesting is that you need individuals who are capable of being Lial and willing to undergo significant self- transformation and move between worlds and so you get the proposal of the invention notice I'm doing it this way of shamanism that what the shaman is good at is the shaman is good at actually mediating uh

between different perspectives and different groups and he and what the shaman starts to do is you start to create right well he is a border dweller that's right he's a border dweller psyop yeah yeah and he can move between communities and he can negotiate and he can also he can also deal with any any of ways in which the Foreigner has introduced social disharmony to the group because that's one of his his or her skills too right but what the shaman has to do right is is the shaman has to somehow translate their capacity for

like this cognitive flexibility into something that can be learned by other people and the proposal is that we get the invention of important sets of rituals that you get the invention of a 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 and then and then you you but you have you so you have outward facing rituals like that and then you have inward

facing rituals of initiation like okay we have to tighten our identity so we like in order to be willing to interact with them we have to know clearly better who we are and so you get the initiation rituals you have like uh interaction rituals and then in in connection with that you have rituals that have to do with enhancing the cognitive flexibility that makes that kind of ritual possible now here's the connection ritual is play it is a profound kind of play because what I'm doing in ritual is I'm engaging the imaginal so the corban's

distinction between the imaginary and the imaginal so the imaginary is when I picture things in my mind and I'm taking myself away from reality the imaginal is when I like when a child is playing at being Superman they're not picturing Superman they're what's it like to look at the world like Superman what is it like to try out this identity that's what a ritual is a ritual is a way of what's it like play to Serious play what's it like to look at what's it like to look at this person as as although they're a

stranger they're trustworthy what's it like to be a person that can be can enter into recognition with you and so I think there right and then identity starts to become identity with the ability to do that exactly that's identity with the hero I think rather than with the with the tyrannical father let's say so so I I think I think there's I I think Hospitality right is is a a name for a set of rituals that were were were invented and discovered to deal with this problem of how do we expand our networks yeah well

it's got to be something like let's say you're being hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger you're treating them kindly so you're treating them as if they're kin that's right right 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 propos you're acting out the proposition when you're hospitable that there's a core identity that shares right and so that's got to be a Transcendent identity because the obvious identity markers are radically different so while while it is the case that

there is something happening at the level of the horizontal you have more Goods you have more ideas and by the way we could just take note of the 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 so if we think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah how critical the hospitality protocol was oh yeah lot lot is when to go willing to go to Great Lengths not to violate the protocol of hospitality that tells us pay that's right ultimate length

and so the vertical Dimension right 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 and that's like that's the key unlock that enables everything yeah yeah well that's it's so cool that that Hospitality has that imaginal element it's right I'm going to I'm going to treat this stranger as though they're welcome well on there's

that question on what basis well it's something like shared Humanity so it it is the acting out of the concept of shared Humanity before that's propositional ased it all or or even not because the for uh for Abraham they weren't humans right they're Angels right 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 that's that's a pointer because we we've already made the case that when you're hospitable to someone who's truly a stranger you're you're you're

removing from consideration all the obvious differences yeah but 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 Ang in Disguise something like that yeah well that's certainly that's what Christ says in the gospel you do proper Hospitality as an ascendant coming well then you could also 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 even 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 because 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 like that's a very bad so 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 they're a

lot better at it than you so all right well we should wrap up this part of the discussion I think on The Daily wire side I'm going to start by talking to John and Jordan about how they met and how their relationship developed and then you know we'll continue along the same lines I'm I want to find out too what they jointly think they're up to and so if you want to join us on the daily wire side for half an hour for that please you're more than welcome to do that and uh thank you

gentlemen it was lovely meeting you I very much appreciated that John it's always great to see you and I always feel that we get somewhere that Hospitality discussion that was particularly useful but there was lots in that that I felt moved you know moved things ahead talked about that in uh in the book uh Awakening from the meaning crisis oh yes yes and when did this come out this is Awakening from the meaning crisis when was this published October came out right right so for everybody who's watching and listening you know you could read this

John Veri and Christopher Mastro Petro Awakening from the meaning Crisis book one so anyways gentlemen thank you very much and for all you watching and listening thank you very much for your time and attention much appreciated [Music]