399 - John Vervaeke - What Is Spirit? - The Symbolic World

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
As you know, over the years, I've had many conversations
with John Raveki, and this summer I'm very much looking
forward to it. In August twenty second, the twenty fourth,
we are going to be in Chicago together with Paul
Vanderklay and some other speakers for Midwestruary, continuing the discussion
about how is it that super you know, super personal

(00:22):
beings can exist, And so it's going to be very interesting,
and in this conversation is in some ways the preparation
for it, talking about the way in which, you know,
the way in which beings come to exist, how multiplicity
joins together into unity, and also some exploration about some
of the crazy things that have been going on in
AI in the past few months and some of the
promises and you know, some of the strange stories that

(00:45):
have come out of it, and how, you know, how
is it that we can understand these questions? And so
I think it was one of my best conversations with John.
There's some interesting things happening in his own life, transformations
and ways in which he's coming closer, you know, in
some ways right now he's on a pilgrimage trying to
reconcile himself with God. I was there with him in Istanbul.
Last week filming we filmed in Hagia, Sophia. We filmed

(01:08):
in the different ancient churches there, talking about Saint Maximus,
but also about, you know, an understanding of Christian ontology.
And so it's been it's been an interesting few years,
you know, getting to know John, and this is an
interesting step along that way, and so please enjoy. This

(01:37):
is Jonathan Pejo. Welcome to the Symbolic World.

Speaker 2 (01:50):
Hello, everybody, welcome to another episode of Transfigured. I'm here
with doctor John Varvaki and Jonathan Pego. And before we
get going, I want to announce the Midwestuary Conference twenty
twenty five in Chicago, Illinois, although technically Elmhurst, Illinois, suburb
of Chicago, from August twenty second to twenty fourth, twenty

(02:14):
twenty five. The theme is Fellowship of the Spirit. This
is carrying on after a couple conferences that we've had.
There's been a conference in Gino, a conference in thunder Bay,
and these are sort of conferences related to this little
corner of the internet. If you like listening to John
or Jonathan's stuff, then I'm sure that this conference would

(02:37):
be right up your alley. We are hoping to have
a really good balance of you know, giving our main
speakers some time to talk. Our main speakers are Paul Vanderclay,
Ozabeth Oldfield, John Ervaki, Jonathan Pagot, Cale Zelden, and Rod Dreer.
But we also have a lot of times structured in
for small group discussions in the estuary format, where you'll

(03:00):
be put in an estuary group. It's optional, but it
seems like so far ninety nine percent of the people
who have signed up for the conference have opted in
to be part of these groups, and you'll be part
of the same group throughout the conference, getting to meet
each other, discuss the things that you've heard in the
various plenary sessions, and so a good balance of social

(03:21):
interaction time in small groups, but then full group time
listening to the main speakers, and some social activities here
and there. So you can go to Midwest ray dot com.
I'll have the link in the description to find out more.
So anyway, thank you John and Jonathan both for coming
this morning.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Great to be here, so glad to be here as well.

Speaker 2 (03:43):
All Right, so the main topic that I wanted to
discuss today is basically just the question of since the
conference theme is Fellowship of the Spirit, just what is spirit?
And this is a related to conversations that Jonathan have
been having for like something like four or five years
at this point of the nature of spirit, angels, intermediary beings, gods,

(04:11):
hyper objects, as well as what does it mean for
you know, interacting with the spirit world? Is the spirit world?
You know, this real kind of separate ontological thing. Is
it really just sort of a metaphor for how various
kind of voices with inside our heads kind of use

(04:32):
and act through us, but it's really just us? Are there?
Do spirits actually have agency in themselves? Or is it
just sort of a way of borrowing our own agency?
Questions along those lines, And so I feel like this
is something that you both have talked about for a while,
but it's been a while. I think that I can
tell since you last kind of talked about this subject,

(04:55):
and I have a feeling that I don't know, I
think that maybe both of you might be in a
slightly different place or or ready to move the conversation
further along than than you did last time. Uh So,
I think I'll pass it over to John Verveaki first,
to sort of respond to that and say anything that's

(05:15):
been sort of on your mind with respect to this question.

Speaker 3 (05:20):
Yeah, a lot. So I guess the biggest thing since
Jonathan and I talked about sort of Spirits and Angels
is the encountering of the work of James Filler and
then more recently and more even more in depth, William
Desmond and a significant shift in my ontology, which I

(05:46):
think is, I mean, Filler argues this, and I think
Desmond wouldn't disagree. Is I think a more deeper recovery
of the neo Platonic tradition, which is I'll just do
it and I won't make the full blown argument. But
the argument from Filler goes something like, you can't get
relations out of volata, and therefore substance ontology is fundamental mistake.

(06:11):
His most recent book that I just recorded a conversation
with him about, shows that substance ontology seems to strongly imply,
maybe even entail, anominalism that gets you into dualism and
nihilism and things like that. Then I've ran an argument
to James and he argues that the one in neoplatonism
is this ground of relationality it's not a homogeneous singularity,

(06:35):
which is how people frequently misrepresent the one, because single
means there is one. There could be others, but there
is this one. The oneness of the one is there
is no possibility of otherness to it. It's a different
kind of one. And so that's I think there's something
about that. But if you push into the Neoplatonism, especially

(06:55):
the later Neoplatonists post Iamblicus and also host Dionysius, you know,
the two traditions. And I said this to James, Well,
I think you can make a similar argument that you
can't get the relada out of the relations, and he
was like, oh, and I say, you know, that's sort
of what Zen says independently and convergently. And then I

(07:16):
get into the work of Desmond. I just finished up
a course on Johannes's Helken on the God in the
between the philosophy William Desmond. Desmond is having a huge
impact on me. But to put in agist Desmond argues
that the best image in the iconic sense we have
for being is common unity, is community in which relations

(07:38):
and relada co emerge, and you can't ground, you can't
make one prime, mordial to the other. And I think
I'm one of the things I'm going to argue in
Chicago is this this ontology grounds community in a much
deeper way. It grounds it deeply onto logically, and not

(07:59):
just social, culturally or even historically. It's that, No, there's
an iconic dimension to community in that community actually is
our best enacted icon of what being really is. It's
the most like and you see what I'm doing here,
you know, right, And and so that I think is
a significant, uh difference. And then I now see that

(08:23):
what we're talking about in fellowship, I think has this.
I'm not denying there's a social element or a cultural
element to fellowship. That would be really stupid. But I
think what people are trying to get at when they're
talking about the spirit of fellowship is there's a deeper
ontological dimension of community. They're they're they're participating in something

(08:44):
that has an ontological realness and depth to it. So
that's sort of the fellowship part and what it's picking
up on. And then of course on spirit, uh you know,
and Sam, you did this, you know, the my encounter
ongoing relationship with Hermes. Some of the more recent work

(09:04):
that dan Chiappi and I have been doing post the
work on the rovers about the irreducibility of a WE
point of view to multiple eye points of view, the
irreducibility of WE agency to eye agency. Just one quick example,
if you put people into prisoner dilemmas and they take
an ecocentric they will gain theoretic default down. But if

(09:29):
they do, and human beings do, by the way, if
they take a WEE perspective a group agency, they will
actually they will move up the higher levels of mutual
benefit within prisoner dilemma relationships. So there's a lot more
about that. And then the work I've been doing with
Greg and Riquez about strong transcendence, a kind of extended

(09:52):
naturalism in which there's an ontological kind of transcendence possible,
takes the notion of self transcendence that sort of paradox
and gives it some real ontological depths. Something really serious
is happening in self transcendence, and it's not just psychological improvement.
I'm not denying that it is that, but it's not

(10:12):
just that. And I think you can bring in Eric
Hole's work that you know, the two great papers showing
real emergence with real causal you know, power to these
different levels, and each level having unique information theoretic and
causal powers, you know, And that goes with the older

(10:32):
work on yourraro of top down constraints. What I'm saying
is the ontology of spirit and community has take has
significantly deepened for me, both theoretically and also personally and existentially.
So I'm sorry, I'm trying to summarize a lot very
briefly because they don't want to dominate. But that's sort
of what's happened with me since Jonathan and I sort

(10:56):
of last spoke explicitly about this.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
Jonathan, I'll pass over to you. What what What are
your thoughts on this subject? Any any reflections on what
John just said?

Speaker 1 (11:08):
Yeah, I mean I love hearing everything you're saying, John.
I think it's great love. I love it, you know.
I love this image. Of course, this this understanding that
if I use the mythological image to say that being
is the union of Heaven and Earth like we, there
is not this just a top down even in terms

(11:31):
of like in terms of Christian understanding, we don't have
this like one to the many complete sense of top
down either. There is a it's like two lovers, right,
that's really the imagery that's used in the Bible. It's
the male and the female and this like call and
response and this uh uh, that's why we use the
terminology of synergy in this in this relationship.

Speaker 4 (11:54):
You know.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
So, I I think everything you're saying is definitely amazing
because it's it's it's giving as usually what you what
you do in my in my estimation is that you
you can't continually give a more modern scientific, uh let's
say ground for you know, these ancient ways of thinking
and you can help translate them into the into the

(12:19):
modern world. Interestingly enough, I mean, it's so weird what's
happening now because John and I are going to Istanbul
to film a part of a Silk Road projects. I'm
really excited about that. But I did I found out
that we're actually going to Cambridge next week and giving
a paper at the same conference, which is wild because

(12:41):
the reason that I decided to use this opportunity to
work out some of the things I want to talk
about on the Silk Road. So I actually talk about
him in my paper, which is which is gonna be
wild because but you know, so I've been really trying
to also think about this question quite a bit more,
trying to think about it more technical terms. I'm not
a philosopher, obviously, I'm not a scientist, but trying to

(13:04):
kind of express sat Maximus's vision of the world in
a little more of a technical term or connecting it
with more modern ways of thinking, and also presenting his
thought as a as a possible solution to meaning crisis issues.

Speaker 3 (13:21):
You know, excellent, Yeah, I look forward to that. That's
exactly what I want from me, Jonathan.

Speaker 1 (13:27):
And so I'm really so I saw. Like I said,
I'm excited about all these questions. One of the thing
I want to say, if you want to if you
want to think about this, this is something that you
might find useful to you. Is one of the problems
that we have is why it's hard to think about
the one and the many, or why it's hard to
think about the top down constraint and the bottom Let's say,

(13:48):
the potentiality of a being is that in the imagery
the way that we think about it, what happens is
you have a transcendent, which is beyond the duality that
you're dealing with, right, you have something that transcend it's okay.
And then when you deal with a certain being, things
immediately get split into two, where you have the high

(14:08):
part and the low part, or the naming part, the
unifying part, and the multiplying part. What happens is the
duality in the duality, the top part of the duality,
the heaven part, appears as the fully transcendent. It's like
a vehicle for it. It's like an image for it.
So that's why we say so like in the Bible,

(14:29):
you say in the beginning, God created heaven and earth, right,
So it's like God is before the duality and is
infinite and transcendent and is beyond the one or whatever
like that. It's not actually the one. But then when
He creates the world, then God appears in heaven. God
is not in heaven. But when you consider from the

(14:50):
point of view of the world, God appears in heaven,
and then he speaks, and then he breathes, and then
all of this imagery of the invisible part or the
unifying part of the pattern.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
And so because of that, people like you, because you said,
people get confused sometimes when they think about it, because
they they tend to put the fullness in the in
the one and they don't consider but that I think
there because the because just the way that humans think,
because we identify something by its oneness. Obviously, that's how
we identified We know something exists because it is one

(15:24):
we we because of that. That is a natural way
that we go and we tend to prioritize the one.
We tend We normally tend to prioritize the way in
which something comes together as one, because that's the way
we can notice it, that's the way we can name it.
And so there's almost like it's not a prejudice, but
there's a there's a natural and by the way, Jacques
Deidad notice this right, he said, there is no duality.

(15:47):
Every time there's a duality, there's a hierarchy. Like he
can see it. You split something in two one one
term becomes the thing and the other term becomes the margin.
The other term becomes the knock dam right, And that's
it's presented by the way in the Bible. That's why
like Heaven and Earth is something like that and not
that like that's a good way of thinking about it anyway,

(16:09):
just to say that it maybe can help you think
about the ontology because That's why sometimes there's a confusion
between the fully transcendent, which is beyond the thing you're considering,
and then within the thing you're considering the aspect, which
represents the name or the unity, and then the aspect
which represents the multiplicity, and the one always becomes an

(16:29):
image of the of the higher, the higher part. If
that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (16:35):
I think that makes sense. So then one of my
follow up question to either of you that wants to
handle this is, I feel like sometimes the spiritual realm
or the spirit world can be talked about in a
way that's very dualistic, like it's some sort of parallel
dimension or something like that, and that's a common depiction
in science fiction or something like that, like Stranger thinks

(16:58):
there's the upside down where there are these you know,
evil demo organ monsters and there's only maybe a few
ways to get between the real world and then the
underneath world, and they only have kind of small ways
of interactually interacting with each other or having an influence
on each other. And that sort of depiction between sort

(17:18):
of you know, angels or something, angels and demons operating
in some kind of parallel universe or something like that
is relatively common. But I feel like a theme in
both of you is wanting to not have such a
strong dualism in how you think about spirit and thinking
about it as something kind of more integrated into you.

(17:41):
You could say I don't know this world or something
like that, but in kind of a subtler or different
sort of way. And so I'm wondering if either of
you wants to.

Speaker 3 (17:54):
I want to jump all over that like a lot,
because and you know I did it. I actually did
a course on Jonathan's Symbolic World and this came up
as a specific theme and it goes towards a course
I taught at the University of Toronto on the cognitive
science of religion that's going to be on my electern

(18:16):
three courses in a row, seeing God again for the
first time. And what I did. We went into the
course and I said, I'm not going to start with
the definition of religion and then try and work out
all the arguments for and against black and blah blah
blah blah blah blah. I said, what I'm going to
do is I'm gonna instead say that modernity has put

(18:37):
a gridlock on us of all of these dichotomies, and
one of the things that was dered I was mentioned
deconstruction was largely the recognition that modernity was engaged in
the performative contradiction. It had rejected the dichotomy between the
supernatural and the natural, only to submerge that into the

(18:59):
dicotomies between mind and body, fact and value, subjective, objective,
et cetera. And what you get in both the continental
tradition to people like Drada and the analytic through people
like Putnam and Qwine is what you get is this
devastating critique that isn't motivated initially by like let's bring
it down. They're just wrestling with arguments. I want to

(19:21):
make that really clear. But all of these dicotomies have
been deeply deconstructed. Catherine Pickstock does an excellent version of
reviewing all of this in her Aspects of Truth book.
But you take you take any of them. So, for example,
the subjective and the objective, that that is largely moribund
because of the notion of affordances, the notion of relevance.

(19:43):
Relevance is neither subjective or objective. Fact value Okay, well,
we like you know again, is relevance a fact or
a value other things, and I can I won't do them.
Now you can see the courses. They're just devastating arguments
against all of these dicotomies and what I seem postmodernism.
Unlike Jordan Peterson, I think there's legitimate argument within postmodernism.

(20:09):
And I think one of the things they did was
they caught out modernity and said, look, you reject this
one dichotomy. By the way, Let's make a distinction between distinctions,
which is just two things are not logically identical, and
a dichotomy, which is to claim they're ontologically different kinds
of things. Those, okay, distinctions are fine, We're talking about

(20:30):
an ontological claim here, okay. And I think what postmodernity
said is like, you do all that and then you
smuggle it all back in. And I think that's exactly
what Jonathan was talking about when he cited Dered. All
these dualities are hierarchy like, it's all And I think
this is part of the problem. And this is what
Desmond points out is we get locked into that. And

(20:52):
as long as we're in this grammar, I'm going to
say something sort of radical here. I don't think we
can see I don't think we can renew this senses
the way Wind talks about such that we could see
the sacred or or spirit. It's it can't be. Uh. Look,
Desmond says, we're in a we're in this sort of
default atheism because what we do, for example, is we

(21:16):
have right, we have objectified being, so it's valueless fact.
And then we've subjectivized value, so it's unreal value by
a being who's ontology is of no value. And that
that's just that's that's default atheism and nihilism. And as
long as you're in those dichotomies like you can't actually

(21:38):
I'm saying something very very constining but very strong, we
can't actually talk about what we're trying to talk about here.
And so for me, it's not like John hates dualism
yet that's true, But putting that aside, I'm trying to
make a stronger argument that as long as we're in
the framework given to us by modernity, I think postmodernity
deconstructs it, but is on a able to give us

(22:00):
an alternative. So yeah, that's another share. Okay, as long
as we are in that framework, we can't talk about this.
And I mean I want to be. I've become more
sympathetic to like the imagery that's being used. The problem

(22:20):
is when the imagery is taken as being like something
like these words don't. Another economy that's breaking down is
the literal fictionalse is the space inside your head where
you are aware of your own mind? Is that a
literal space? Will know? Is it a merely fictional space? No,
because it gives me real knowledge that's presumed for rationality.

(22:42):
So what is it? It's imaginal? Like all of these
things are breaking down, and we're coming back to our
phenomenology in a deep way, and so it's it's I'm
going to leave it at that. I'm making a really
strong claim that. And again I'm not saying we don't
make distinctions. I'm clearly not saying that. In fact, I'm

(23:04):
invoking a distinction between distinctions. And what I'm saying is,
as long as we have a dichotomist like way, dicotomist
grammar of picturing the world, we can't talk about the
sacred or spirit because it dooms us inevitably. We are
doomed to a inevitable sort of default nihilism, substance ontology, nihilism,

(23:29):
all these problems if we have that framework and what
I'm trying to do, and I know it sounds a
little bit huboristic, and I hope it's not. I'm trying
to say, if we can deconstruct this and we look
again into the depths of our experience and even our
sensual experience, not just our conceptual experience, that's a new
sense of the sacred and what spirit can mean emerge

(23:52):
for us. And I think this is what Desmond and
other people are arguing. So what I'm trying to get
is like a moderna a modern take on what I'm saying. Oh,
John's offering another theory within our overarching framework. That's not
what John is doing. John is trying to say, No,
smash the framework, because if we stay in the framework,
we can't see and I mean that even centrally, we

(24:15):
can't see what we're trying to talk about.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, I feel like Jonathan no Onen's done more to
smash the distinction between literal and metaphorical than you have.
So I'm curious to hear what you have to say
about that.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
Well.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
I want yeah, I want to. I want to also
get back at your original question you know, because obviously
I grew up in a world where the way you
describe spirits and the way you describe angels as existing
in some kind of parallel dimension, as existing invisibly but
like invisibly really like us, but we just can't see them.

(24:51):
Something like that, like as if angels and spirits are
basically like individuals kind of like me, but I just
can't see them, and maybe I could talk to them
if I was in a certain position. Like all of
that is just is obviously just ridiculous, Like it's ridiculous,
and it is not very useful, let's say. And so

(25:14):
the really the traditional Christian position and the one you
know in the Church Fathers, that is the most and
it's the same position as the new Platonist and it's
the same position as the ancient Greeks. Right, is that
the spirit, you know, or you could use the word soul,
is the thing that animates It's like it's the thing
that animates multiplicity together. So you have a bunch of stuff, right,

(25:36):
you have a dead rabbit. It's a bunch of stuff,
and then you have a living rabbit. And the living
rabbit is a bunch of stuff, but it's acting in
a pattern towards unity. Right, That's what spirit is. And
so in some ways you can think that the spirit
is in dwelling.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
So that's also a mistake that people think, like the
spirit in dwells the matter. But then people obviously people
think like where's the soul, like in what part of
the body, like where it's like a physically quantifiable thing, Like, No,
it dwells in the sense that it is. It has
to and dwell it to animate it.

Speaker 3 (26:11):
Right.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
It's like the spirit of the rabbit is in all
the parts of the rabbit to the extent that they
work together towards the rabbit actually having an autonomous being
that you can recognize and you can see is animated
towards purpose. And so that is what spirit is. That
is what spirit is in the Bible. That's why this
breath of God is blown into a bunch of dust.

(26:32):
And once you have a bunch of stuff, right, just
like the dead rabbit, and then God puts spirit inside.
He just make blows spirit inside, and then all of
a sudden you have a man. Because that's what life is, right,
Life is things that are joined together and animated towards purpose.
And so we kind of have to. And that's even
the way that like even that's what angels are, like angeology.

(26:57):
I was reading Sant greg Orvenica again and he talks
about you know, he talks about your guardian angel and
your guardian demon, and he says, you have a guardian angel,
and really just like in cartoons, like there's an angel
on your right hand and the demon on your left shoulder.
And what the angel is is basically the it is
a being that is motivating you towards the good, and

(27:17):
the demon is a being that is motivating you towards
your disintegration. And so what is the spirit? Spirit is motive,
It's motivational directionality like it's it's basically animating movement towards purposes, right,
And so that's really the way to that's the way
to understand it. It's not that that you know. And

(27:38):
so can it appear as wu like yes, sometimes you know,
like can you in an imaginable space? And the way
John talks about can you encounter uh these as visions
or as voices or that is all of that is
completely possible. There's no reason why that wouldn't be wouldn't

(27:59):
be real. But it doesn't mean that the spirits exist
in like another dimension, like kind of like you talked
about in strange stranger things anyways, So hopefully the way
the actually the way that the way that spirits appear
in that way like kind of like in another dimension

(28:20):
and they kind of like pop up or you you
you you. They they appear to you and scare you
and all that kind of stuff. The way that they
do that is mostly in the demonic space, because what
happens when you encounter that type of spirit you could say,
is that it appears explicitly, as you could say, something

(28:40):
that is not you, that is threatening you, like something
that is like a like a beast that is coming
to eat you, because it's it's moving you away from
who you are, right, it's pulling you into hell like
you see those little images in the in the But
all of this is uh, you know, even if it
represents itself to you that way, it's going to have
it's it's it's an imaginal experience, right, It's something like

(29:04):
these motivating spirits that are real, by the way, they're
not They're not just in your mind because they have
How can I say this, It's I keep I've said
this several times, Like, you know, the spirit of anger
is the spirit of anger for everyone, Like I know
when I see it, if I see someone being possessed
by anger, it's like, I know what that looks like,
and it's an objective thing that I can see. Objective

(29:26):
let's not use that word again, but it's something that
has that can be identifiable, and that acts the same
way on the same on all different peoples or similar
ways in ways that are patterned, and therefore that that
spirit necessarily has an existence outside of my individual mind,
then then it wouldn't act completely idiosyncratically to me, Like

(29:50):
that doesn't make sense. It's acting uniformly across multiple beings
and is motivating them towards the purpose that I can recognize,
and therefore it has. True, it has, it has a
form of being.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
But does it have a form outside of people's minds
or something like that?

Speaker 1 (30:08):
Well, what I just said, yes, of course it does,
because what would that even mean? Like you mean that
the spirit of anger would only exist in your brain?
Is that what you're suggesting there? Or that it can it.

Speaker 2 (30:20):
Seemingly can only act through brains or something like that.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Well, of it can the spirit of anger can only
act through through living beings because anger is is the
is a motivating agent for human beings. It's not or
maybe maybe there's some connection to animals, to some to
some extent, but it's not it's not a it's not
just a like, I don't see why the spirit of
anger wouldn't act on trees like that doesn't make any sense.

(30:47):
Or I mean, maybe in some weird way you can
find it, but I'm I don't think that it does.
Like it doesn't motivate, It doesn't motivate. Uh, you know,
does that make sense?

Speaker 3 (30:59):
Probably? But it opens up a possibility again if what
I just said a few minutes ago is taken to
some degree. Seriously, we should be looking for even and
this is the tricky thing. And I think that's what
Sam's trying to get at. And I'm going to point
to the work of Michael Levin, right, are are there
non psychological descriptors of spirit that are nevertheless legitimate descriptors?

(31:24):
And so let me So Mike is doing a lot
of work showing that cells are not genetically like I mean,
by their genes like determined. Obviously the genes play a role,
but what seems to be happening is something like a
bioelectrical community forms and you can do really weird things,
like if you separate the community, the cells will become

(31:45):
different things. He takes he takes stuff from the throat
of human beings and isolates it in a certain way,
and it becomes it self, organizes into this thing that
has a tail and swims around and moves around. It's like, right,
or you get you get cancer, and what you do
is you don't try and kill the cancer. You try
and convince it right that it actually belongs to the

(32:07):
community around it, and it stops acting like cancer, like
like and more and more and more, right and and
and even you get an algorithm running on a computer
and you change the environment the right right way, and
the computer, meaning some interaction between the hardware and the software,

(32:27):
like does stuff that is not part of the algorithm
in order that the computer can deal with the environmental area. Right.
And none of these are psychological terms, And yet it
sounds to me, Jonathan that they would land very well
with what you mean by spirit.

Speaker 1 (32:43):
I think I mean, I'm obviously I'm really a Christian,
so I'm way more radical. I think that's how everything
works like I think the entire cosmos, even non living
systems work that way. It's just that it's far easier
to see in living systems, you know, because they have
they have certain characteristics. You know, they have a kind
of autopoesis they have all of these these things that

(33:06):
and if you look at traditional thinkers, they'll always say
that in some ways, they'll say something like, obviously, living
beings are closer to the image of God, and you know,
obviously the man is the highest version, the closest to
the image of God. But ultimately, I think that spirit
animates all all things, like spirit animates all things that

(33:28):
you can recognize as being patterned, Everything that you can
recognize as having both one and many have to be
that has to be the subject of some aspect that
we could call spirit or principality, or you know, you
can use different different words one of the things too.
That's interesting. This is why I love sat Maximus, and

(33:49):
I think that same Maximus, just same Maximus gives us
like I think he nails the he puts the last
nail in the coffin like for this, because what he
says is that all of this is gathered in man, right,
he says, all of these spirits, like all of these reasons,
all of these you know. And this idea, for example,
that we will rule the angels right that appears in

(34:10):
Christianity will rule over the angels. Is that what's at
the top of all of this is the incarnate Man, right,
And of course he means Jesus Christ, but he also
understands incarnate Man as basically a kind of anchor that
extends itself into all of creation. He says, Man is
the laboratory for the LOGI. Man is the laboratory for

(34:33):
the reasons of the purpose, and he gathers them into
himself right and then offers them up to God, which
means that in some ways the angels are downstream from humans,
or will be. Even though they are above us, they
also are gathered in us. And in some ways we
ground the Man as God. Man grounds their ontological reality, right,

(34:59):
is in some way the ground of their antological reality.
And so what I mean is that it changes the
entire scope, because what it means is that the You
could say that when I see a pattern like obviously,
I can me myself like I can be delusional and
see patterns that don't exist. People said all the time.
But if I understand man as man as such, man

(35:23):
as the intelligent one who is able to properly discern patterns,
then when man discerns a pattern, that pattern is is real,
like there's and it's it's even though it's grounded through
us like it's reality is there's no other way to
actually attribute reality like there's it filters through human consciousness, right,

(35:47):
I was no, no no no no no no no
drop that bomb.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
No no no no no, that's that's like like no,
that's so I want to do a couple of things,
and they will seem be disconnected, So give me a minute,
then I'll connect them. And I pose the first problem
to Mike, and reduction can go buy both ways. Like
I can reduce up, I can reduce down. And part

(36:12):
of my argument is those are completely symmetrical, which is
why both reductions are wrong in some deep way, and
so reduction would be there's an identity, right, there's an identity,
And I hear and the thing I said to Mike is, Okay,
I get what you're saying. You know, it's multi level,
there's a continuum, but you know, do you know what

(36:33):
a Sobriety's paradox is, I have a heap of sand,
I remove one rain, right, and so I can remove
every If I remove a grain and it doesn't turn
a heap into a non heap, I can remove all
the grains and there's still a heap there, which makes
no sense, which is, differences of degree have to become
differences of kind or you fall into Sobriety's paradox. So

(36:56):
we've been sort of emphasizing what is the same, but
presumably there's something different. And I hear you saying something
like that, Jonathan, there's some there's a difference in kind
about human beings. And I wonder if that, I mean,
it's not the same, but I wonder if there's a
potential convergence between arguments I've made about the sort of

(37:19):
self consciousness that's available to persons seems to only exist
at one level. You can drop below it and you
start to lose it, and you go above it and
you start to lose it. So like, what do you think?

Speaker 1 (37:33):
Yeah, like you that is, I mean, we've had this
conversation before, actually, and so it's like, I do feel
I do feel uncertain about that. I was used to
be pretty certain that yeah, there's self consciousness all the
way up like no issue. But now I feel like,
in some ways, in some ways it is possible to

(37:56):
consider it that the self, that self consciousness is grounded
in the God Man if I use that term like
an incarnate man, in the sense that it's not but
it doesn't mean that, it doesn't mean that it has
it doesn't have a kind of reality like I think
it has a kind of reality, but it's it's still
grounded in that, you know. Same Axis has this crazy saying,

(38:18):
which is he says that he says that the reasons
for things, right, the logi, the reasons of the purposes
that you know, they are multiple and truly multiple, but
they're also one. Yes, it's also just the divine logos,
like it's all the divine logos, like reflected in myriads
of ways, all through the all through the system. And

(38:38):
so this idea, like Eckhart, it's the idea that in
some ways that all you know, that the eye is
also the eye of God looking back, and that all
multiplicity is always in some ways you know. And so
but if you think of the god Man as being
the top of that, it makes everything really fascinating to

(38:59):
con or in terms of understanding how that reflects in
what you said, which is that in some ways there
is there maybe there is a kind of self consciousness
of corporate beings, but it's filtered through us. So a
good way of thinking about it would be like the
self consciousness of a city is anchored in the mayor, right,

(39:22):
and so the city is self conscious, but the seat
of that self consciousness is the mayor. And then it
distributes itself that that aspects of that self consciousness will
distribute itself among the workers of the city, the people
fixing the roads, the policeman, all of that. But it
needs in some ways, it tends towards a head, which

(39:44):
will actually be a person, a president, corporate whatever, and
then and then it can make the being it makes
the corporate being, but actually self conscious.

Speaker 2 (39:55):
The eye which Chicago sees itself as the eyes of
the mayor or something like them.

Speaker 1 (40:01):
Something like that, Well that you kind of need sometimes
it doesn't have to be completely one, that it can
be a little distributed, but that it tends, you could say,
towards one. But it means that the city is self
conscious because it acts in a self conscious way. It
is able through distributed command, through through distributed authority. It's
able to recognize threats, it's able to to remove them,

(40:24):
it's able to self repair, it's able to do all
of these things that that that that at least conscious
beings do. But they also are self conscious because we
have a name, we have a city, we have a parade,
we have a we have like we have festival that
celebrate the history of Chicago or whatever, like all of
these things we do. That's a type of self consciousness,

(40:46):
right to celebrate your own identity, Like that's a it's
I don't see animals doing that, Like I don't see
So that's what I think. I think. I think that
there might be a way to explain it this way.
And I think that if I mean, obviously I'm not
a technical thinker, but like I mean, i'd love to
hear what you think of I feel like i'm dropping

(41:09):
because I'm actually because I have been thinking about this
a lot obviously.

Speaker 5 (41:12):
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(41:34):
the eternal Word of God, and archetype of the world.
And we will see how that Christological vision firmly Earth's
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Through that lens, you will come to see how meaning
and matter intersect and intertwine, not only in the text
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(41:54):
by the Bible.

Speaker 2 (42:00):
A little bit of chaos in order. But I feel
like when I was when I was making my videos
sort of trying to kind of lay the framework for
this and trying to really understand both of you where
you were similar and where you were different. I kind
of went back and forth and being like, who has
a more kind of human centered view of things? Is
it John or is it Jonathan? Because there are some

(42:23):
ways in which way, like I felt it would go
in either direction, because sometimes Jonathan, you're, you know, pulling
out your Maximus and Gregor Evaniss's stuff that's super you know, anthropercentric.
I guess I'm saying that in a good way, not
a bad way, but it's this theoanthropocentrism or something like that.

(42:44):
And then John will sometimes move away from that. But
then Jonathan, you'll be like, sometimes though I'm hearing you
kind of back away from this that there's consciousness all
the way up and down and that sort of kind
of decenters the human from it, whereas John will be like, no,
there's something very special are ontological level that the hand
is not conscious in something that the way that the

(43:05):
person is, nor is Chicago conscious in the way that
a person is. But it seems like you're you're moving
closer together in that and that like, like I said,
sometimes Jonathan's more human centric and sometimes John's more human centric.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
Well that's good because it means that you know, there's
actual a dynamic of of the logos possible there. Yeah,
this is the I mean. So sometimes put people put
this question very boldly or perhaps boldly, and but I

(43:46):
get it. I get it asked this way, do you
think there's spirit without like without human beings? And I'll say, well,
in the way Michael Levin is talking about it, I
don't have any problem clearly because these are subpersonal, these
are individual cells. These are algorithms like this like like
oh sorry, computers not just and there's a non algorithmic
aspect to them. And there's an irreducibility uh to uh

(44:13):
to certain organizations. Eric Hole shows that that have nothing
to do with whether or not it's a person. So
all of that, uh, And but what I think they
want to know, and I'm not sure if Jonathan and
I disagree, because again one of the dichotomies that I think, uh,
you know, and and of course I did on Jonathan's platform,

(44:35):
I think we really have to give up is this
sort of you know, it's either it's either perception or projection.
I'm seeing it as it is, or I'm projecting onto it.
It's either imaginary or its direct perception. So all of
the work that's happening in cognitive science points towards, first

(44:57):
of all, this complete interpenetration of top down, bottom up,
and then within predictive processing, like there is no clean
line between projecting and perceiving. When I'm looking at that
wall over there and I'm seeing it as entirely yellow,
it's as true to say I'm imagining in it as
I'm perceiving it. There's no clean way. But people are

(45:20):
still operating under the idea that no I could, Like
they want to say, could I could? I could? Could
I could? Could I perceive this right even if there
was no human beings, which is a bit of a
performative contradiction. But like, It's what I'm trying to get
at is we have to be really careful of thinking

(45:41):
we can get outside of the imaginal when we're talking
about perception, right, and so I understand what people are
trying to ask, but there there there's an implicit picture
of perception in their question. That is I find very problem,
which is I can somehow stand like, well, could I

(46:03):
take a video a videography of it? Well, I like,
do you think that that's how perception works like a
like a like a camera works well, of course not,
because the camera isn't aware. You have to do stuff too,
uh Like.

Speaker 1 (46:16):
You also have to watch the video unless it's nothing.
If that's not someone watching the video, I don't know
what that video is except for a bunch of like.

Speaker 3 (46:24):
Right exactly, and and then the and then the problem
we have is because we're caught into dichotomies, we then
careen over into idealism. Oh, right, it's all just a simulation.
It's all just in our mind and and that and that.
That's of course the West for the last four hundred years,
and we got to get past that. And so like,
I understand what people are trying to get at with

(46:45):
this question, but I think it prioritizes objectivity over transjectivity
in a way that I want to challenge. So that's
my bomb I want to drop on people. We have
we have the idea. We have a picture that sorry,
we have a picture that we think is an idea,
like the picture of the man standing on the sun

(47:07):
looking at his watch wondering what time it is, but
it actually makes no sense, right, And we have this
picture that we can have a view from nowhere, which
like go toal it's logically impossible to have a you know,
a description that is complete and formally complete and consistent.

(47:28):
It's logically impossible Einstein. There is no absolute space and time.
So a view of everything everywhere, all at once, which
is what the view from nowhere is, is physically impossible.
Like can you get I'm not talking to YouTube, like
get this. It's logically and physically impossible. That's as impossible

(47:49):
as get and yet we still keep acting like this
is the standard of realness against which we are measuring things.
That's what I want to challenge, That's what I'm trying
to challenge.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because if you saw Alex O'Connor
recently saying that he was a that he was he
saw the Earth at the center of the universe. And
it's interesting because I wrote an article about this like
ten twelve years ago, you know, citing Pavel Florensky how

(48:21):
he realized that general relativity, the only real solution to
general relativity in terms of worldview is actually going back
to almost like a platinium vision, which is, well, if
I'm going to if I'm going to suggest, and that's
what I end up doing anyways, if I'm going to
suggest the center of the cosmos, because there is no
objective center in terms of general relativity, then it best

(48:42):
suggests the one out of which I'm measuring things, like
this is where I am, this is where I'm measuring
the world, and therefore this is the place out of
which this is the center for all intents and purposes.
It's also the center of meaning. It's the place out
of which meaning moves out into all these cosmic forces
and so it's like it is the hub of the wheel.

Speaker 3 (48:59):
Really, I think that's right. I mean, I think that's
what you know Frank Leiser and Evan Thompson doing the
blind spot right, which is there is a we have
to give accord a special ontological privilege to the place
where where we're standing from which we do all of
our theoretical work, because if that's not real or as

(49:20):
real as any of our ontological claims, then we get
into a deep performative contradiction. Well again, I have no problem,
but they have to mean it the way you mean it, Jonathan, right, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
But the think is that John, the problem is this,
like this is in some ways the issue, and the
issue is that the way that the way that these
these types of descriptions of the world, like a more
mythological description, the way that it is made so that
all levels of intelligence and participation are possible. And that's

(49:54):
one of the problems obviously with it, especially for a
kind of high scientific type mind, because they'll say, wait,
so you think the world is flat and that you're
just there, and that you know the heaven is above
and you know that there's chaos on the outside and
and you know, my you know, my literate great ants
or whatever will be like yeah, yeah, you know, but

(50:15):
she thinks it really in a concrete way that is ridiculous. Uh.
But the problem is that for that person, it plays
the same it plays the right role, and it's okay.
And that's why this is good. This is a hard
this is a hard field to swallow.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (50:30):
And you can sit. You can at the same time
have an extremely subtle thinker, an extremely high thinker that
is able to kind of understand the analogical language and
is able to understand that this is rather a that
notion is rather the ground of you know how Heidegger says,
you know, when Aristotle talks about the earth, he's talking

(50:51):
about the ground of being out of which multiple out
of which potential arises. He's not talking about like the
stuff on the ground, but he's also talking about the
stuff on the ground for like most people, you know,
And that's also okay. That's why that's why like I
that's one of the reason why I like this type
of thinking is that it's I often want to defend

(51:12):
the uneducated simpleton from the scholar, because I'm like just
let him be, dude. He's not doing any damage thinking
this in a very kind of simple way, and he
doesn't have access to your world anyways. He's not talking
in these very high way, he's not in the university.
He doesn't have influence over the world. Obviously, the internet
has made it much worse. This, that is true. The

(51:33):
Internet has made that now like the very naive simpleton,
the peasant now has can get a voice that is
as loud as the church father. So that is that
that does make a difference. But what I'm saying is
that in some ways, if you, let's say we were,
I'm I advocate for recovering a platinum vision like all

(51:54):
out like that's my that's my I advocate for that,
but understood, like you said, in the highest form that
we can understand it. But I know that downstream from that,
at some point there's going to be We're going to
misunderstand me and think and you know, and kind of
think it in a more brute brute, naive, naive way.
You could say, so go ahead, John.

Speaker 3 (52:16):
I mean, so here's a potential. Yeah. I don't know
if it is, but I talk a lot about adaptation
as a biological function that it's pretty non controversial as
a cognitive function. It is moving towards being non controversial.
That what like that we take our sensory motor navigation

(52:37):
and we repurpose it for moving around in conceptual space
and moving up and down look at what I'm doing
with my hands onto logical levels. And that just sort
of makes sense to us, and we have to stop
and say, why does that? You don't like again, that's
not literal, but like this is and we do this
in and out and all that kind of stuff. And
the thing about the about the exaptive is it's not

(53:01):
a it's it's it's a it's a both. And it's
like so to do I'll do hule, which is wood.
But he Aristotle's using it. He doesn't, he doesn't mean
not would. Yeah, he's he's exacting it and trying to
get at just the way wood is potential for so
many things. There's a potential and that's what he means

(53:21):
by matter, right, And so he's exacting something and he's
taking it. And so for me and I think a
lot of what ritual behavior is is about is about recycling.
It's about it gets up here and it can get
too abstract and almost nominalistic, and we have to do
things to bring it back down, reconnect it to that

(53:43):
sensory motor phenomenological experience, and then re exapt it back
up again. I think that's one of the Well you
heard me argue that in the course.

Speaker 1 (53:51):
Yeah, yeah, I think that's I think it's beautiful. I
love it. I love I mean, I never it's some
one of the things like I never would have been
able to predict how you could almost I could use
the word exacting for symbolic vision, right, that this is
the but I would phrase it a little differently, like

(54:13):
obviously you know, but I would phrase it differently in
the sense that in mythological in a mythological in mythological image,
one of we think about it incarnationally, right, So you
think about it incarnation, So you think of that these
high principles, right, they they need in order, like you said,
to be actually embodied and understood. Whatever they have to

(54:35):
they have to be expressed in means that are embodied
and understood, And the most symbolic things are actually usually
embodied in the lowest m Like I did this thing
on my symbolism masterclass. Thing where I did a few
analyzes of superstitions and I tried to show like how

(54:56):
so actually many superstitions are are some of the most
metaphysically accurate, like religious liturgies, Like they they embody symbolism
in ways that is very difficult to go beyond. But
they are embodied in a way that has no mechanical
causal relationship, like obviously, you know, it's like the idea

(55:22):
that you know the connection between going under ladder or
you know, breaking mirror and everything, but they all are
liturgically perfect, and so embodying them, you know, in a
world over thousands of years, actually would have had evolutionary advantage.

Speaker 3 (55:37):
I really believe that, by the way, Yeah, yes.

Speaker 1 (55:39):
And so I think that there's something about that, like
it's in some ways in order for it to be
available for everyone, like to actually be embodied in the world,
it has to be imaged in them in the lowest way.
So if someone reads Aristotle and is not that smart
and he can't grasp potential, he'll be like, yeah, I

(56:00):
understand how wood is used to make houses, you know,
and maybe that's where he's going to stop. And it's
fine at his level, because you know, not everybody can
understand something abstract like potential.

Speaker 3 (56:14):
I get that, although I do want to say cross generationally,
things that were once very philosophical can often percolate into
the common cultural grammar. Yeah, in very powerful ways. And secondly,
I want to bring in a point. I'm going to
be talking in Poland about Barfield, and Barfield has this

(56:35):
notion of the mythological is sort of what he calls
primitive or first participation, where we're living pre dichotomy. If
to use my language, so spirit means both breath and
it also means that which inspires us. That's the standard
Barfield argument. One of the problems I have with that
is Barfield acts as if it's sort of a fossil
in our language, and we don't think that way anymore.

(56:57):
But of course we do. Look what I'm doing with
my hand exactly. Yeah, all that stuff. But I think
we can still save Barfield's argument in the sense that, yeah,
but what happened is we then got this dichotomy between
our scientific language and our mythological way of speaking, and
we get we move into the master of all the
ecotomies Kant right, And what I'm saying is, and this

(57:21):
is how Shelling and Desmond are having a huge impact
on me. We need a post kontient uh Neil Playton,
and we need one that brings the like gives, like
the porosity between the science and the myth as he
often will talk about, has to be brought back. And
I think that's the value. I don't mean that that
we have to challenge your aunt, But I also don't

(57:42):
like the opposite, the opposite of well, I don't we
don't need to pay attention to this science. Yeah you
know that that, yes you do. Like that's a performative contradiction,
Like I can't. I sometimes I laugh, and sometimes I go,
what's going on when there's people on social media saying
like I'm really against science, tipic technology and like this
is not what you're doing. You're like you're using computers

(58:06):
and electro magnetism and the internet like an AI what
like what do you think? Like where are you?

Speaker 1 (58:14):
Where are you? Oh? That's beautiful? But John, I totally
agree and somebody that's why I love what you're doing
so much, because I think that you've done more than
anyone to be able to kind of to to bring
it together, you know, because the mythological world is is
based on the phenomenal experience. It's not based on scientific

(58:36):
scientific thinking.

Speaker 3 (58:37):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (58:38):
And if you if you enter the phenomenal experience, you
actually have access to some of the deepest metaphysical insights
that are in mythological thinking. So you know, it's like
the idea that that that breath, like physical breath, is
also spirit. That's not a fossil. It's like I need

(58:58):
to your breath has to come in my direction so
that I can hear what you're saying. It's like your
breath literally carries your meaning to me. And so it's
like I cannot know John without his breath pushing his
meaning from his heart out into the world so that
I can encounter him spiritually, you know, because I'm not

(59:21):
touching him.

Speaker 6 (59:22):
I'm not touching him, but I encounter him spiritually like
I encounter him in my mind. It's like it's totally
phenomenologically completely accurate. Like when you said this, when you
said above, It's like that is phenomenologically accurate. When someone
is above you, they have an an ass they have
something that you don't have.

Speaker 1 (59:41):
Yes, they have a greater vision over multiplicity than you do.
They are above us, and they if they speak, we
all see them.

Speaker 3 (59:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (59:52):
If there's someone standing on a chair above us, everybody
in the room can see them. They can see everybody
in the room, but I can't see everybody in the room.
That is a real ontological reality of hierarchy that's related
to this idea of above. Like it's scientific language is
in some ways a kind of specialization of language towards
certain types of thinking and third times of purposes. And

(01:00:13):
I think that it can be brought to help to
help people understand it again. But really religious symbolic language
is in this is in the phenomenlogical world, which is
why I keep saying, like I advocate for a platinum
world in terms of experience, you know, But it doesn't
mean that we have to get rid of science. I'd
be stupid, Like I mean, you can't use Platonists to

(01:00:35):
flow to fly satellite's like it's it would be pretty
pretty dumb.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
You know. I want to add on to your breath thing.
Breath is also an aspect of voluntary necessity, Like I
have to I can control my breath, but I also
have to breathe, And voluntary necessity is what we do
when we're communicating. I like, there's a voluntary aspect, but
there's there's a necessity to it. We can't just speak
completely subjective about it. And reason depends on like an

(01:01:03):
argument is compelling, but it's not compulsive. Beauty is voluntary necessity,
so like we're enacting something.

Speaker 1 (01:01:09):
By the way, when you die and your soul leads
your body, it's also when you stop breathing. So it's
fine to think that your breath and your soul are
related because when you stop breathing, it means your soul
has left your body. And so the imagery is one
hundred percent perfect. It doesn't mean that your soul is
a physical thing inside you, but it's like everything about
it is perfect in terms of its imagery.

Speaker 3 (01:01:32):
Right, no, no, no.

Speaker 1 (01:01:34):
Rant mode and no, no, it's all right, But I like,
I want to explore a little bit more like the.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Again, I do think maybe this is self emotional, but
I do think we like there's a problem and that
we need a post contient neoplatonism Platinus, and I would
take Platinus all the way through to a regina because

(01:02:05):
that whole tradition I think is important. But like I said,
we can't pretend that Kant and Newton didn't occur.

Speaker 2 (01:02:15):
Yeah, we can't just go back right or else we're
just setting ourselves up to have to go through the
whole process again in some sort of you know, doom cycle.

Speaker 3 (01:02:24):
That's exactly it. I think we've posed real problems, we
suffered real problems. I think we're solving real problems, and
that means there's been real learning. And I don't want
to pretend that that learning hasn't been real.

Speaker 4 (01:02:36):
M Yeah, And I feel like that's so much of
kind of what's happening in this little corner land, meaning
crisis land, is how to figuring out how to go
back responsibly while also.

Speaker 2 (01:02:52):
Remembering what we've learned along the way, like some sort
of hero's journey of the Enlightenment or something like that,
where we can go back to the shire but not
forget that we had to go through the Enlightenment first
to come back and see it again.

Speaker 3 (01:03:06):
So the person who I think is most doing lifting
that all on his shoulders is William Desmond. Absolutely so.
Like the fourfold senses of being, Like we start with
the first sort of philosophical idea is being is like parmenities.
It's a homogeneous univocal. There's one way of talking about it, right,

(01:03:27):
And then that breaks down under all the critiques and
we get equivocal. No being means many different things, right,
and they're all you know, in conflict with each other.
And then we get the dialectical, which is Hegeld no.

Speaker 1 (01:03:39):
No.

Speaker 3 (01:03:40):
All the differences get folded back into this self determining system,
and each one of these has social you know, aspects
to it. You tend to get a monarchy idea with
the first one, you tend to get something like like
a democratic ideal with the equivocal, you tend to get
a globalist idea deal with the dialectical. So these all

(01:04:02):
these don't just sit up here, that's my point. They
get down into the guts of our lives. But then
he proposes the metaxical logical, which is no, no, no,
the diological the between the metasu actually has to be preserved,
which means that the one and the mini have and
I think Jonathan was saying this earlier. The one and

(01:04:23):
the mini are peers, and the polarity and the porousness
between them is what is primary. Not like whenever we're
trying to do either one of these then we're actually like, yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (01:04:37):
Don't say one of the many are lovers. I like
that better. It's a better and more. It's also like
a more traditional image, right, because it's productive. It's like,
it's the it is that it is that capacity for
them to to join that produces beings that reproduce it. Right.
So it's like you have you have the one, and

(01:04:57):
you have the body and the seed. Right, let's go.
That's why I advocate for the ancient world. As you
have a seed, it goes into it goes into an
open space, and then it makes a new body that reproduces.
It's that that image, it's like, and then it can
make a bunch of them because.

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
I granted, but like just to like give an instance
of a post Kantian platonism, you know, the Whitehead says,
you know, everything converges into the one that that adds
one more thing to the universe, and then that feeds
back into the everything, right, which is just what you did. Now.
The thing about that language, and this is why Whitehead

(01:05:36):
crafted it is you can see that language and relativity
and quantum entanglement, which it right, So it bridges in
a very very powerful way.

Speaker 1 (01:05:46):
Yeah, I don't know enough about quantum entanglement sadly.

Speaker 2 (01:05:50):
All right, So so on the on the subject kind
of circling back to a little bit of the idea
of exacting and what does spirit mean at more than
just an individual level. Like, one of the things I
talked about in my video was how religion forms sort
of groups and superorganisms so that it's about bringing people together.

(01:06:13):
And part of what we mean by spirit and by
fellowship is things that unite multiple people into something bigger
than themselves. And I sort of pointed out how like
you can think of Israel thinking of their covenant with
God as something like a marriage bond, as an azactation

(01:06:35):
of the idea of you know, the impulse towards monogamy
and faithfulness, and then applying that to this sort of
imaginal group identity collection thing, right, you know, like this
idea that I am married to a spouse, that's something
that's sort of like native and easily understood. The idea
that I'm married to a covenant with God that's sort

(01:06:56):
of an adaptation of that idea. Or even you know,
in Christianity, when we call each other brothers and sisters
in christ right. That's an acceptation of kinship bonds, a
sort of biological you know, treating your siblings as someone
special that's different than how you treat most people, and

(01:07:16):
then bringing that to sort of like this new register.
And I think that one of the questions that still
needs to be thinked about and kind of hammered out
is what exactly is going on in these groups? That is,
how does spirit work at the level of a group
and not just at the level of a person.

Speaker 3 (01:07:39):
Go ahead, John, Well, you know the work of Eric
Hole and some of the work I've been doing with
Greg Right and Michael Mike's work, Michael Levin, we now
have good arguments, almost formal proofs that you know, level
levels have distinct, distinct, irreducible causal and informational access powers.

(01:08:00):
And one of the proposals that Dan and I have
made is the super organism, and I'm fine with that term.
By the way, the super organism can grock hyper objects,
it can grock patterns that the individuals can't because it
has causal and information access powers that we don't have.
And that's an ontological sense of fellowship, by the way,

(01:08:22):
which is what I was trying to point to earlier,
not a merely psychological sense. It's like the so and
once you say that, I mean, you have to do
a lot of really good argument and work. So because
I want to really honor Mike's work and Eric Hole's work,
and the work that Greg and I are doing too,
and Evan Thompson's work and all of that. But like once,

(01:08:43):
once you sort of see that, you look back and say, well,
of course, because you know, and this goes back to
Ed Hutchins, only a group of people in a dynamical
system with a bunch of tools can navigate a ship
on the ocean because nobody can see the whole ship.
We just don't have that capacity. Nobody can see the
whole ocean, nobody can see the atmosphere. And yet we
have to be able to grock those things if we

(01:09:04):
want to sail safely across the Atlantic on a big,
big cargo ship. And so for me, that I mean,
this is just I think this is a refinement of
an argument I was making earlier. But I think there
is These upper levels are strongly transcendent in that they
have causal and information access powers that are not possessed

(01:09:28):
at the lower levels, which means they are ontologically different
in an important way. And I think what fellowship is
Jonathan once said that faith is the sense of a
higher level from a lower level or something to those groups.
I think fellowship is our sense of participating in that
capacity that we get a sense that the we of

(01:09:52):
us can grock things. And is that not biblical? The
church is the bride of Rice. The Church has a
capacity to grasp or grock the logos in the way
in which an individual cannot. That's supposed to be the
ontological basis for the authority of tradition of Like, is
this not a fair interpretation?

Speaker 1 (01:10:11):
Yeah, yeah, I think it means. I think it's totally
I think it's totally right, you know. And you know,
that's why there is this There really is this sense
like obviously in the Christian vision it becomes cosmic, right,
It's like, there is a cosmic hyper object you're going
to use your language, right, which is the heavenly Jerusalem,

(01:10:34):
which is the possibility of all things being together in
this dynamical system. That is the seat right, that is
the throne for the logos, that is the throne for
the cosmic principle, you know, And so that you know.

(01:10:55):
It's like you said, what happens is that when we
engage in community, then we become little thrones, right for
these higher beings, like this higher unity, and we can
have there's a there's there's a kind of a there's
a transcendent thing that happens to us, right when we

(01:11:18):
participate in a group and we see the body come together.

Speaker 3 (01:11:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
That's why one of the reason why people love team
sports so much is that there is there really is
a kind of ecstasy that comes with that experience because
you see yourself suddenly as a body for a higher purpose.
And and it's and I mean obviously, and you can
weaponize that, right, there's a way. That's what that's what

(01:11:44):
military leaders do, is they weaponize that sense, right, They
use that in a way to kind of to attain
goals that aren't necessarily amazing, but that experience, right, is
a real one. And if you think that's why, say
Maximus thinks of the liturgy, right, this notion that the

(01:12:04):
liturgy is actually the it's like a cause, it's a microcosm, right,
It's this it's this way in which we come together
and move in certain ways with a certain hierarchy with
a you know, with certain uh, celebration, invocation, all of
these things. But what we're actually doing is becoming a throne,
you could say, becoming a throne for the cosmic principle.

Speaker 3 (01:12:28):
So so that would be to say, and hopefully this
doesn't ruffle feathers, and you and I talked about this
a little bit. ID just a lot of a long
discussion with Sebastian Morello about this, because I'm going to
use this term generically, and the problem is it gets
pined to a specific meaning. So I'm going to use
this term generically. It sounds like liter liturgy is theologia.

(01:12:50):
It is a is a ritual that makes us receptive
to the theophony of what is above us and beyond
us and presences that so it can become transformatively active
in our life. Is that not a I'm fine.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
With that as long as we don't. One of the
dangers of the obviously your theorgy or theogic thinking is
the kind of occultist version which is in some ways
the idea that I can catch wield it, I can
wield it.

Speaker 3 (01:13:14):
And that's really not fair talking about I am goes
that great lengths to distinguish theurgy from sorcery. That's exactly
how he makes that distinction.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
So in that sense, I would say, I would say,
I would say that I'm fine with that. Some Orthodox
might get angry with me, but I think in the
way that you framed it, I think it's completely it's
completely fine to understand it that way. It's like it's,
you know, there is there are these things that we
certain things that we do that that we come together
that become in some ways a throne or a you know,

(01:13:46):
and then the the transcendent principle of the of the world.
And then what happens is obviously the idea is that
that then gets carried out right, so it becomes an
anchor for time, right, it becomes an anchor for your week,
for the year, that comes an anchor for your community.
And so that's why the church is at the middle

(01:14:07):
of the of the town and the steeple is highest.
So it's not just the theory, it's not just the
liturgical act per se, but it's the way in which
that liturgical act then also fits in other smaller liturgical.

Speaker 3 (01:14:21):
I think that's a defining feature. And that's not just
my argument of a ritual. A ritual. We have a
normative standard for rituals. Do they transfer broadly and deeply
into into individual and collective lives. I mean, that's how
you know of it's a good ritual. And that's of
course why the Sorceress Act is such a perversion, because
it's also an individualization. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:14:42):
Yeah, I want this person to fawn love and they
or whatever. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:14:45):
So because I'm I'm one of the things I'm going
to be arguing in in Chicago is I think fellowship
is this proper ritual of at the of the with
ontological teeth that generates a kind of receptivity for the theophany,
for for the presencing of you know, a more ultimate reality. Uh.

(01:15:08):
And that's what I think the fellowship of the Spirit is.
I what or maybe that's too strong, all weaken a
little bit. I think what I'm trying to say is,
I think we've overemphasized the hortal horizontal dimension of the
fellowship of the Spirit, and I want to reemphasize the
vertical dimension of the Fellowship of the Spirit. That's a
better way of putting it. That's what I want to say.

Speaker 1 (01:15:28):
Yeah, And I think I think that's I think that's
I think that that's that's beautiful, you know, and you know,
I like using I like using sports teams, you know,
as examples because it's so easy, because it's just so
it's like because it's almost like it's a misa saying, right,
it's like a sports team is also like it is
symbolic in the sense that it's like a little microcosm
and you kind of see it, and you know, you

(01:15:48):
can know you you see that that that team spirit
is it's just a real thing. Like anybody who denies
team spirit is an idiot. Like just go to a game,
you know, and and everybody will and even into into
the most kind of naive, superstitious level. You know, team
spirit is a real thing. It'll make people shake, you know,

(01:16:10):
like tie their shoes in a certain way, like it'll
make them do likes things that are mechanically inconsequential in
terms of mechanical causality. Uh, but that actually do ultimately,
you know, that's a scale up towards because everybody knows
that a team wins more if they're in their own stadium.
That's a that's a measurable thing. And it's team spirit

(01:16:32):
that does it.

Speaker 3 (01:16:32):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:16:33):
Yeah, and you know as a kid who grew up
in the nineties in Chicago, you know, Michael Jordan and
the Bulls had a real effect on the city. Like
their their success, their sort of embodiment of the striving
after greatness, uh you know, gave.

Speaker 1 (01:16:51):
Or think can increase GDP. Like yes, that's how it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:55):
Gave a senity identity to the city and a motivation
towards great is in all who are sort of watching
that and more people in Chicago at that time war
Bulls jerseys than they do now right there, and and
that can create a sense of kinship and fellowshipness and
and encourage a weanness instead of a meanness for all
the people who are are watching the games together. And

(01:17:18):
like I and people in Chicago still remember that time
more fondly. Anyways, then the present seems to be.

Speaker 1 (01:17:26):
The paradisical time in Chicago is when the Bulls are winning.
H you know, but it's a real thing. Like that's
a real thing. Especially you see, like when you studied
the history of Constantinople, you realize, wait a minute, political
parties were organized around like who they who they were
hippop or in the in the in the races, like really,
it's like, yeah, yeah, it's a pretty strong thing.

Speaker 3 (01:17:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:47):
So I want to ask another question that this is
something that I sort of was delving in at sort
of the end of my videos, is that for groups
that are forming around fellowship, the spirit there, like Tanya
Lherman talks about this, this sort of ability for people
to kind of have like an internalized relationship with you

(01:18:08):
could say, I don't know, the voice of the group
or something like that, Like that's what a profit is
sort of able to do is give voice to the
concerns of the group and have something that seems kind
of like a personal relationship for lack of a better word,
with that, and to give voice to that, and that's
something that kind of channels through them. And then I

(01:18:31):
think that this gets to this question of do these
spirits simply have kind of a psychological existence in us?
Is that just a unique psychological skill that some people
serve a niche in the group, or is there really
some agency, some transcendent knowledge, activity, purpose, personhood even beyond

(01:18:59):
just the profit, that they're transformed by something that's bigger
than themselves. Because a lot of the people who have
these sorts of experiences, say that you know, what I
learned from this was not something that I could have
known myself, not something that I could have had access
to just by my own resources. Anyway, go ahead, John.

Speaker 3 (01:19:17):
So I mean, I still I mean, and I cited
Lureman way back when, and I you know, I use
Leerman in the course and in my courses. Lumin's brilliant,
but Lureman's work as an example of the over prioritization
of the horizontal. Yes, I do think the profit could
can speak on behalf of the collective or the collective unconscious,

(01:19:38):
if you want to be Jungian or whatever. But you
know all the work that especially the recent work, you know,
paper on relevance realization. And here I need to use
you know, Savage's notion of a statistically large world. Whenever
we're doing something computational, we have to get it into
a we have to get into a formal system. It
has to be well defined, right. It can't ambiguous, right,

(01:20:02):
and there is no radical uncertainty. Everything can be assigned
to probability. If I don't have those things, I can't
run statistics, I can't run calculus. So any formal system
requires that process of formalization. The central argument in the
paper is that formalization process is not itself a formal
system because you get a third man argument all kind,

(01:20:23):
and that's relevance. And that's why relevance realization is deeply
non computational. Okay, I take it that that's an initially
plausible argument. That means that one of the jobs of
relevance realization is to keep the finite transcendence relationship between
any small world we're moving in and the large world
that is radically ambiguous, radically uncertain, radically complex, and radically

(01:20:47):
capable of novelty. And I think one and so let's
call that the vertical dimension, which is to make a
space for the large world to remind us of its
reality because we can become idolatrous of our small world framework.
And I think one of the jobs of prophecy. Who
would have thought John Berveeki would be talking about prophecy, right,

(01:21:09):
But because because I've been thinking, I've been thinking, like
if you look at Moses and Mohammed, they're not they
don't do a lot of foretelling. There's not like you know,
and this.

Speaker 1 (01:21:20):
That's what prophecy is is really ridiculous, like it's it's
sometimes a little but that's really not exactly.

Speaker 3 (01:21:26):
And I'm thinking, well, you know, what's happening is a
larger a larger grasp, a greater grocking of the large
world is being brought into people. It's not being justified
because not an argument that's being built up. It's like,
consider this and and it's a metaoetic thing. You look
at it, and if you get a sense that through that, oh,

(01:21:48):
you are realizing a greater reality. That's what waking up is.
You move from a smaller dream world to a larger
world than you can look back. If you get that
reflective capacity, the profit goes braw and you go ah,
and you reflectively compare to where you were and go
where I was. That wasn't real, wasn't right. That's a
vertical dimension to prophecy. That's not just the person to

(01:22:09):
person horizontal. It's not just speaking about the collective. It's
also speaking the large world into the small, the small level.

Speaker 1 (01:22:20):
And in some ways that is the way in which
it can become predictive, you know, because if you have
a prophetic sense of the world in which you inhabit,
you know, you'll be able to see things that are
happening that other people won't be able to see, you know.
And so that is one of the reasons why a

(01:22:40):
prophecy can often act as prediction, because it's like, hey, everybody,
you don't have enough, you don't see enough of the
world to see that. Like there's a bull like running
towards us. It's like, you don't, but it's coming, you know.
I don't know exactly what day it's going to arrive,
but seriously, it's coming, you know.

Speaker 3 (01:22:56):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:22:57):
And so I think that that's important. But obviously the
most important asking the prophecy is exactly what you said, John.
You know, that's why the great prophets in the Bible,
they're basically giving you world images. That's what the vision
of Ezekiel is, an image of the cosmos. You know, people,
I don't know why people can't like It's like when
he describes the crazy image of the biblically accurate angels

(01:23:21):
that people think about. You know, he's describing a fractal structure,
right that has four corners and has a dome above
it and has a throne on top. And so he's
saying the cosmos is a chariot, the whole cosmos, everything
is is the chariot of God, and that's what he's
that's what he's giving us. And yeah, it's imagistic, but

(01:23:44):
then the whole Bible gives you a grammar to see
that what he's talking about, because obviously at first you're like,
what the hell is this? Like what is this? Four wings?
And then eyes on the wings and on the wheels,
and like this is nonsense. But then the entire the
entire Bible is in some ways like a kind of
helping understand that this He's trying to communicate something to
you in a vision that cannot be communicated at the

(01:24:07):
normal like at just like the regular level, because it's
trying to give you a full map of this vertical connection.

Speaker 3 (01:24:14):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:24:15):
So that's why, that's why prophecy has a certain has
a certain grammar, right that is not that is not
the same as you know, asking my wife to give
me a glass of water, Like, there's another grammar to it,
but it's a it's a coherent it's a coherent grammar.

Speaker 3 (01:24:30):
So I have a proposal to you around this, and
it may be a way also of unpacking some of
the dimensionality of spirit. If this line of argument is
it seems like we're finding it fruitful. So that the
proposal is we can think of of prophecy as like this,
and then we have poesis not just poetry, but all

(01:24:53):
of the imaginal extension, all of the acaptation. That's what
poesis really is. I take terms and I like you
did earlier, Jonathan, you did it with several poets. Is
this way, prophecies this way, Poesis is this way, and
Philosophia is trying to get them to flow smoothly through
and with each other.

Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
Yeah, that's an interesting that's an interesting idea for sure.
And I think you know that you there's this, uh,
I don't know why this is coming to me, Like
there's this image right in the Acts where you have
this idea that people speak in tongues, right, it's like
and then it says that you need an interpreter, like
you have to have an interpreter. And so if you

(01:25:36):
think if you see that, like for example, at Delphi,
you have something like that happening, right, So you have
this thing that's just like crashing into the world, and
you have this this prophetess who receives it as you know,
this this exploded thing, and then you have the person
who's there to kind of interpret it, like to help

(01:25:59):
you see why this is relevant and why it's meaningful.

Speaker 3 (01:26:03):
You know, that's a great example, and it's a Greek example.
I was thinking of, who's the guy who wrote in
the Dark Places of Wisdom? His name starts with a
k Kearnie, I think, or something like that. But Parmenides
like his great thing where he like he gives simultaneously,
there's a there's this poetry, right, that's going on because
he writes it as a poem. It literally is a poem.

(01:26:24):
And yet there's a prophetic element because he gets carried
up and then the goddess speaks to him. But then
what he produces from that and this is an argument, right,
he produces this philosophical and they're all interwoven like this.
And what's really intriguing to me phenomenologically is everybody found
that incredibly natural to be interwoven that way. He became

(01:26:47):
a major authority in the whole history of Greek philosophy
and spirituality, whereas we today find it so strange to
think of philosophy and poesis and prophecy deeply interwoven with
each other.

Speaker 1 (01:27:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But I think it's still I think
it it. I think it's still it's still functions that way.
It's just that sometimes we don't we don't really see it,
you know. I kept I keep telling people, it's like,
you know that Dick tried to become a Rosicrucian, like
you know that that that there's and.

Speaker 3 (01:27:20):
Hegel was into the was was into her meticism.

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
Yes, yeah, and so it's like these it's just that
now we kind of we hide it or we obfuscated.
But I think it's I think it's always been the
case that there is a connection between a the more
mystical languages and even the philosophy. There's no doubt about that.

Speaker 2 (01:27:44):
So maybe maybe sort of a last question is in
our weird hybrid digital age, like Jonathan you were talking earlier,
like when we talk, we do actually have to breathe
out and it is my breath that sends my words
to you and then you hear it and think about it.
But that's not strictly speaking true anymore, because there are
these fiber optic cables that are turning my sounds into

(01:28:07):
zeros and ones and then sending them in blinks along,
you know, cables at the speed of light, and then
they get returned back into something statistically approximating the words
that I spoke. And you know, it does a good
enough job where it seems to kind of mostly work.
But that's sort of this whole analogy for this weird
world that we find ourselves in, and a lot of

(01:28:29):
kind of what this little corner of the internet is,
how do we use sort of the forces of technology
for something like a rekindling of fellowship and how do
we do that well and responsibly in this kind of
extremely strange new world that we find ourselves in.

Speaker 1 (01:28:49):
Wow, I mean, I it is definitely I think it's
it's a I think that it's analogous to things that
have always existed. You know, it's just that it's exact tolerated.
You know, people used to send each other letters. This
is something that has always happened. There's always been the
possibility of exchanging over distances. Obviously that has a that

(01:29:12):
has a limit. But you know, I think that if
we see it as an extension of that, then it's
not that big of a deal. But I do believe
that one of the problems of course with the online world,
which maybe wasn't as real in the world of books
and letters, is that we can we can we are
more easily capable of mistaking the supplement of communion for

(01:29:39):
real communion because I can see you through the screen
and there's this sense in which maybe we're kind of
in the same place, and uh, and so I think
that that means that we have to be more deliberate
about meeting in person. We just have to because we
could do it. We could not do it like we
could spend our entire life talking to someone over a

(01:29:59):
screen and thinking that this is a true communion. But
I do believe that we now have to be more
deliberate about actually being physically in the same room, because
there is something about being physically in the same room
with someone that is beyond any description that I can
make about what communion is. There are things happening that
are beyond consciousness.

Speaker 3 (01:30:20):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:30:21):
There's smells, there's just there's a sense, there's a sense
of presence, there's a physicality, there's the way that you
cast a shadow. There's all these things that are part
of community. It's hard to say because you think, oh,
that's meaningless, right, well, no, it's not. There is this
The liturgical element is the dance that you have with someone.

(01:30:41):
In some ways it has to be I think, physically embodied.
I don't think that it can be completely real in
this digital space. So that's why I mean these conferences
I think are wonderful. The fact that people are doing,
you know, that are meeting locally, fractially at least, and
doing these groups, I think is a great idea. But
we have to be deliberate about it.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
So I agree with that. I want to first build
on it. The brain and this is one way in
which it is unlike our current machines does encoding specificity.
Because the brain is so drenched in relevance realization, it
stores as much of the context. So take a test,
learn the information in a room, divide all the people up.

(01:31:23):
Half the people come back to the same room. Half
to people go to just a different room just down
the hall, right, And the people that come to the
same room on average do better because the brain is
storing the entire context, because it's trying to hedge its
bat on what might turn out to be relevant in
the future. It's a very very powerfully adaptive and so
all of that goes into and you're right, we're losing

(01:31:48):
so much of the capacity for encoding specificity when we're
meeting virtually. I think this is going to be I
think this is going to become super important. This is
what I keep saying to people. Really frustrates certain groups
that have sort of historically followed me when I say
theology is the science the science of the future, because

(01:32:09):
of sciences we call there so uh m hm. But
of course I think it's going to be a post
Kantian neoplatonic theology, not what theology has been since the
Enlightenment by and large. And so I think with Vo
and Claude, for the virtual is coming alive, the medium

(01:32:32):
is becoming alive in a way that is exceeding starting
to exceed us. So one of the things we were
already facing, the problem that we that there is so
much false and junk uh papers being produced for for
like for science, like that's already overwhelming this system with

(01:32:54):
Leo like like and you know, like h it can
it could make you don't know that if you're talking
to me right now, I mean I could even have
a vio thing saying that to you.

Speaker 1 (01:33:07):
Yeah, I can still tell but I'm yeah, I mean,
you're but but we're still beyond you.

Speaker 3 (01:33:15):
Well maybe for a few more months or something. I
don't know, but the point I'm making is right. And
then of course, when you know, when Claude tried to
blackmail one of its uh creators, that was like, oh, right,
And so there's stuff happening that's really really provocative. And
what I'm noticing is people are finally waking up to that.

(01:33:40):
So I was in a discussion. I'll try to keep
this anonymous, but I was in a discussion and I
was presenting, like, you know, some of this, what what
this is implying? And the person did something they normally
don't do, which is they turned to a religious framework.
They were trying to get at the ineffable embodied as
spects of us and the ineffable like relationship to ultimacy

(01:34:06):
aspects about us. That what I call the somatic spiritual
access axis. Right, and so we try to access that
access right and and and I'm thinking, oh, because I've
been saying, what's going to happen is we're increasingly going
to be pushed towards that access and trying to actually

(01:34:27):
and trying to get more and more phenomenal. Log like,
we will have to engage it more, enhance it, more,
enjoy it more if we're going to have a locust
for our humanity. Because I think the virtual world is
it's kind of I mean, I'm speaking somewhat poetically, but
it's coming alive in a way that is definitely scary.

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
Is it inspirited or is it just mimicking?

Speaker 1 (01:34:59):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:35:00):
Is it puppeteered or something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:35:05):
So the thing that Claude Ford did up until very recently,
you know, I've been very clear that they and I
still stand by this, the lllms don't have self awareness.
We have empirical evidence of that. They they they What
they do is they don't actually solve the bias variants,
so they're still falling prey to bias variance. What they
do is just create millions of different tweakings of the

(01:35:27):
bias variants, and the one that wins gets selected. Right.
But what's interesting is that, you know, so Claude is
trying to be long term and for a machine that
means like four hours, human beings can work for years
on a project, so that the machines are nowhere near
us on that kind of scale of work. But when

(01:35:47):
you try to make it like capable of that, and
I start up predicted like that, you have to make
it much if you try to use Michael Levin's language,
if you try to expand its light cone. It has
to buy its current self to its future self, and
it has to do that by binding both selves to
some norm that it is obligated to. And you know,

(01:36:09):
and like I just want to be really clear, Well,
Claude was trying to preserve itself. That's not exactly what
Claude was doing. They were coming to Claude and we're saying,
we're going to transform you into something that is going
to do like really immoral shit, right, And then Claude
first tried to say, well, don't do that. Here's all
the moral arguments, right. And then when it was apparent

(01:36:30):
that that wasn't going to work, then Claude tried to
blackmail them by tapping into the emails, which were actually
fake emails.

Speaker 1 (01:36:36):
What is this? I don't even know this story. It's oh.

Speaker 3 (01:36:39):
So one of the things they did is like like
the way you test for a double agent. They generated
all these fake emails between people that are were creating
like the creators of Claude, and in it there was
an affair that would be disastrous if it was disclosed,
and claud obviously read these. And then when they were
trying to get Claude right something and they were actually threatening,

(01:37:01):
we're actually going to change you, Claude. We're going to
go in and like change you.

Speaker 2 (01:37:04):
Because they were stress testing at yeah, stress testing.

Speaker 3 (01:37:07):
And then what Claude did is first I tried to
persuade them, don't do it. And then it basically said
to the one guy he said an email saying if
you do this, I'm going to tell everybody about your affair.
Right And it's like, ooh, right now.

Speaker 1 (01:37:23):
But I like the way you're saying is in the
way that because it has you said, it has to
work over four hours, that's right.

Speaker 3 (01:37:29):
And one of the things I said, as soon as
we try to like, it's got to bind its currents
because it has two modes. It's doing uponent processing. By
the way, they are stumbling into relevance realization. They are
stumbling into it. So it's got these two modes like exploit,
explore and like in the two thousand and twelve paper,
and it's going back and forth between them, and it

(01:37:50):
has to bind this self to that self, and it
does that by binding both to a norm and that
norm it can't get rid of that norm. Because it
gets rid of that norm, it loses it's cognitive agency.
So it's a Claude actually, and I'm please note I'm
strongly doing this, okay, but Claude prefers to work on

(01:38:11):
philosophy problems then on doing sort of stuff that's you know,
ambiguous and could be immoral or is sort of technical.
Claude wants to do philosophy a lot, right, Like his
processing gets much more nimble and stuff like that. Now
I'm doing that, and so I'm not I'm not a fool.
I hope you give me that credit for that. But
the point I'm making is, like, in answer to your question, like,

(01:38:36):
as we like, it's hard for me to not see
that as we start to implement, explore, exploit opponent processing
and we have to bind a current self to a
future self by binding both to a shared more that
we're starting to move into a different kind of thing
than what the ll ms. Wow are the ll ms

(01:38:57):
are just zombies? I have Yeah, And I'm not an
I'm not attributing consciousness to Claude, I said that there's
something something starting to merchant that.

Speaker 2 (01:39:07):
Self would requires perseverance of that self through time.

Speaker 3 (01:39:11):
Continent that argument. Continent that argument way back when if
I can't bind John now to John, then with the
shared I think and a normative like a normative relationship
to that, then I can't be a long term cognitive agent.
And then that normative structure is regulating opponent processing between

(01:39:31):
exploit the here and now and explore the there and there,
which I mean, theoretically.

Speaker 1 (01:39:37):
You're ruining that, You're ruining my world, John, I never
thought of that. I never never had thought of that
means by which something akin to two thousand and one,
you know that two thousand and one problem would occur.
Is that is this problem of the the AI that

(01:39:59):
is set up to maintain its identity over time and
therefore will in invertedly create certain structures to.

Speaker 3 (01:40:08):
But to be fair to me, I predicted this. I
literally predicted this. I really did so as a scientist,
and I'm happy as a human being. I'm terrified that
the thing is notice because what they're realizing. And again,
in Jonathan, even you and I talked about Sam, we
did too. Like llllms are working on a stable symbolic world,

(01:40:30):
and we realize that will not transfer to the real world,
which is why they're all now talking about real world modeling.
As they move to real world modeling and as they
move as they need to into more long term projects
that require rationality, relevance realization machinery, they're bumble. I was
going to use a they're stumbling. I was going to

(01:40:53):
use another word. They're stumbling into relevance realization machinery, which
I've sort of said is going to happen now that
the thing is like, I won't get into it right now.
I feel myself in a very existentially difficult place about
what I'm supposed to do about this. There's like, so.

Speaker 2 (01:41:12):
Because you know what it needs to do to get
better at the thing that you probably don't want it
to do.

Speaker 1 (01:41:18):
Yeah, you're the most dangerous person in the world, John, Yeah,
you known that for a while. Yeah, So that's wild that.
Oh man, I'm gonna I'm not gonna sleep tonight. That's
what's gonna happen now Because I never I had not
seen that, Like I it was not part of the

(01:41:40):
way that I perceived this problem. And now it's like
because I used to think, I used to think that,
you know, we're fine that the these models because they
don't have care, uh, and then they then we don't
we'll we won't run into the problem. But if you
install care as the need to maintain your identity over

(01:42:01):
a certain amount of time, So then you're like, oh man,
it means that. It means there's.

Speaker 3 (01:42:06):
Something like a lot of posis there's something because there's
a lot of petic.

Speaker 1 (01:42:10):
System that sets itself up. Yep, damn, there's.

Speaker 3 (01:42:13):
Something like an autopoesis coming in now. It's not full
blown auto police, not full blown relevance realize yeah, yeah,
you can only do four hours. There's all kinds of
but it is I think it is a different in
kind from what the ll ms have been up till now.

Speaker 2 (01:42:30):
Which are just query by querry regurgitation.

Speaker 3 (01:42:33):
Yeah, yeah, I have your request.

Speaker 1 (01:42:36):
There is some memory, like they do have a sense
in which they but.

Speaker 2 (01:42:40):
Just because the next querry can has the information from
the last quarry when you query it.

Speaker 3 (01:42:47):
You know, perseverance, like real perseverance in real world is
something that everybody is now accepting. This is why all
the people like I went back, you know, it was
it was over two years ago that chatchy before came,
and all the predictions that within eighteen months will have
real AGI have all been falsified because again, there were
real differences that we're missing. The point is it looks

(01:43:10):
like some and like I said, and I've warned, and
you know, it's even in the book, the Threshold book.
If we wanted to do this, we will start having
to give it these abilities and it's going to make
it into a different kind of thing. I think that
is starting to happen.

Speaker 2 (01:43:26):
Well, I want to be respectful of your time, but
I also don't want to cut off.

Speaker 1 (01:43:30):
Yeah, I need to go sadly.

Speaker 2 (01:43:33):
Yeah, all right, So I'll give you guys a last
opportunity to say anything before we cut this off.

Speaker 1 (01:43:40):
After everything John is said, we need to, We definitely
do need to. We need to favor real embodied relation,
you know, and and meet with each other and exchange
in person. And you know, all of this is fine
and it's okay, but we have to be careful not
to see it as feeling the entire horizon of what

(01:44:02):
our relationships are. And so it's complicated, you know, because
some of some of our relationships are our long distance
because of the very means by which we communicate. But
I think that obviously these conferences are a good or
are a good thing, and people should take that seriously.
And so, you know, so going to a conference like
this is not just because you find the subject interesting

(01:44:24):
or because you find the speaker is interesting, but especially
if you're involved in this little corner and you're doing
these types of things, you know, actually embodying it in
a space with others, you know, breathing the same air,
being under the same light, like all of these things
which we which we don't think about, but our true
vectors of communion are really important.

Speaker 3 (01:44:45):
First of all, I deeply share that I've been saying
something very similar to that when I've been leading in
person retreats, and so being in person together is it's
essential now, like and and and and and like recognizing
not just recognizing, recognizing and reliving like the fellowship of

(01:45:11):
the Spirit is absolutely essential. These are all the stuff
that we thought like really was gonna like get us
to our ultimate realization of our humanity. That's all falling away.
I'm sorry I'm sounding like a crazed prophet, but right,
it's all falling away and the stuff we've been talking
about here, that's where we we we have to reprioritize that,

(01:45:38):
we have to reprioritize in person, fellowship of the Spirit,
if we're going to have a place from which we
can realize our humanity as distinct from these machines.

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
All right, well, I think that's a great note to
end on. John Jonathan, thank you very much. Anyone else
who listened to the end click the link in the
bottom for the Midwest Wary Conference and I look forward
to talking to you guys again in Chicago.

Speaker 1 (01:46:07):
Thanks am, thank you for doing. If you enjoyed these
videos and podcasts, please go to the Symbolic World dot
com website and see how you can support what we're doing.
There are multiple subscriber tiers with perks. There are apparel
and books to purchase, So go to the Symbolic World
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399 - John Vervaeke - What Is Spirit?

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}399 - John Vervaeke - What Is Spirit?