Jake Orthwein On Psychedelics Consciousness Buddhism Jung Seeing Clearly Episode 6

The film sort of takes you on an arc from psychedelic experience and what’s transformed about psychedelic experience to a case for meditation. The claim is not exactly that if you got rid of all the concepts then you would be fine because then enlightenment would just be you can’t move or do anything or make sense of the world at all and that’s obviously not the condition that you want to end up in. Right. But that particular confusion does emerge from the way people first get introduced to these insights through psychedelics. I knew you were a gifted editor because you basically dropped three of the best video essays I’ve ever seen.

You were this young line, all religion is like a defense against an encounter with God. Oh wow. It’s a very interesting like phrase, right? Cuz you think like the religious structure exists to give you an encounter with God. But actually he’s like the dogmatic structure. It’s keeping those archetypal energies, you could say, present to consciousness and causing you to participate in them so as to protect you from that bare unfiltered encounter with the mysterium tremendum that all of your cognition is organized around avoiding. How do you view identity? Is that something to be just thrown to the wayside or is it something you can actually leverage to act morally, act rationally, act towards whatever goals you may have, or should we throw it all out? Hi, Jake. Are we Are we in it? We’re in it. All right, man. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. So, you just you’re dropping a movie. I am. I am. At long last after uh with great difficulty, but now it’s coming. Tell me the story behind that. Uh the film is a film about psychedelics and meditation and neuroscience and awakening and uh related topics. Uh commissioned by the waking up app, the Sam Harris meditation app and um it has a little bit of like a long genesis. Um I had made these films about Eric Weinstein’s ideas um on YouTube and somehow I actually don’t know the precise lineage somehow those got in front of Sam. maybe through Eric. I also think um I had done a podcast with uh Christopher Logran about meditation things that I think this is how I’ve reconstructed the genealogy a little bit but I think uh he was tagged in and somehow by the time it got to me through Sam’s manager Jiren uh they were like who are you weird person in Sam’s sort of politics and meditation world and that precipitated a process whereby I was sort of started pitching them things. Um, my neighbor at the time also turned out to work at the Waking Up app. So, it was it was a it was a really weird confluence of circumstances, but um, they were in a mood of sort of uh, reaching out to different types of creatives to see if they could make content um, related to the mission of the app and and I I pitched them on a film and then many other things ensued to to sort of actually get it through the door, but it’s now finally in about 8 days going to get released. So, that’s awesome. Yeah, I’ I’ve seen it. It’s It’s honestly so good. So, I I knew you were a gifted editor because your video essays, you basically dropped three of the best video essays I’ve ever seen and then just refuse to elaborate and left. Like everyone’s like, “Where’s what I’m told?” Yeah. Where’s the fourth one? Um and and you can tell very clearly that that skill carries over into the film. But like what what was the inspiration behind wanting to cover the topics you covered in in the film? So uh certainly for the last uh decade or so meditation has been a main interest of mine and I think Sam was sort of the on-ramp to to all that material for me. Um the the films are about psychedelics mostly and then sort of lead into a case for meditation. Um but uh psychedelics have been not as central as you might expect for me except in so far as they sort of kicked me off on the path. The thing that got me more interested in psychedelics retrospectively was all the interesting neuroscience that was coming out about them um particularly expressed in this uh predictive processing paradigm and then that becomes an interesting lens to understand the mind and religious phenomenology and eventually meditation also more generally. Yeah, I’m glad you brought up predictive processing because that’s one of those topics, one of those theories that a lot of people have an intuition that okay, this is this if there is ever a theory of everything, this is like one of the candidates, but nobody can explain it. Oh yeah, bad sign. Bad sign. So could you could you explain predictive processing? How is that different from like the free energy principle? How are these related to consciousness in the brain? Oh boy. Okay. So I I would I would tell people not to treat it as like a total theory of everything. Um just because uh you’ll sort of be disappointed and I think it’s more interesting than that but there is this line of critique of it that it’s sort of like overly ambitious in its scope and maybe talogical and all sorts of other things. Um so I think uh be conservative in the initial interpretation of it and then you’ll get more of what’s interesting without being too galaxy about. I’m not talking to you specifically. saying like one one can think that way. Okay. So, um cluster of different related ideas. There’s predictive processing, there’s the basian brain hypothesis, and then there’s the free energy principle. Um and then there’s one maybe one more term that often comes up here called active inference, right? And they’re not all exactly the same thing, but they’re related to each other. Um which do you want me to get into first or what what what do you understand about them? So let’s I think let’s start with the basian brain because my understanding of the basian brain is it’s kind of this was the theoretical model that we’ve come since come to learn has its failures that can’t we can’t account for you know combinatoric explosion of all the sense data we come we we come into contact with and all the possible futures we could enact right to move past that yeah so so people probably in your audience will be familiar with basian epistemology more generally uh and like probabilistic theories of how we make sense of the The basian brain hypothesis is just that if perception and our general sense making of the world is a kind of inference where we’re getting limited data from the world. So we can’t just read the data off the world directly but we need to come to broader conclusions about it. The the um basian brain hypothesis suggests that we might do that in a in a somewhat basian way where you have priors and you have evidence and you’re trying to marginally update your priors in relationship to the evidence. uh etc. So the basian brain hypothesis is just the idea that maybe the way that the brain does inference is somewhat related to B theorem or is like is according to B theorem. The reason why uh that probably multiple reasons why but one reason why traditional basian inference doesn’t work relates to a series of interests you and I have in common about John Vervey and relevance realization and cominatorial explosion that you mentioned. Uh let’s see if I can get it get it right. Um basically uh to calculate B theorem directly you would need to not only uh figure out what what caused the sensory data but consider all the possibilities of what might have caused it which is a functionally infinite list from your point of view. So immediately it becomes computationally intractable right but the math says like baze is the optimal way to do it. So the question is given that computational intractability limit how do you approximate basian inference in a way that finite beings like ourselves can actually manage and that uh gets you this picture of I guess it’s like variational basian inference or variation like I’m not sure if actually these are the same thing that is a a story uh about how the brain does imp implements something approximating basian inference that gets you into the predictive processing terrain to sort of like Okay. So, uh and tell me if this is more sort of technical than you wanted. No, no. As technical as you want. In the film, I sort of take uh I I do my best to not like do violence to the uh technical explanation but convey enough of the vibes level thing that you also sort of see its existential import. So in the language of the film, this inability to compute B theorem directly relates to the general paradox of beings like ourselves of being finite in relationship to the infinite, which is part of how I sort of narrativeize psychedelics. So yeah, the the uh that’s almost the only level at which you need to get it for the purpose of the film. Okay, so it’s it’s it’s an approximation on basis theorem. Base theorem is basically the optimal way of updating your beliefs also called priors as you come across new information in the world. Now the problem with with you know positing that the brain is is basian fundamentally or or in in in practice is it’s just there’s just too many outcomes. It’s you can’t calcate you can’t do it. You don’t have there’s not enough compute and so we have to approximate this somehow. And then the way the the theory that tries to explain how we’re approximating this this is predictive processing. No but related. Okay. So, so, so um the okay let’s let’s now do predictive processing right predictive processing is in the same sort of set of questions about perception as inference but it’s also based on a bunch of empirical observations that uh for example there are many more connections that flow in a certain uh in the sort of top down direction than in the bottom up direction in the brain suggesting that we’re not just doing this passive reading of sensory data off the world and then letting it travel up a few layers of processing to get the sort of highle picture, but rather that we’re expecting something from the world, predicting something about the world, and then updating those predictions at the margin in accordance with the sensor sensory data that we get in a kind of hierarchical way. So, you might get just the the barest bit of light data from your actual eyes, but you come to vision with a prior expectation of what you’re going to see. And then in so far as what that prediction uh would suggest the sensory data would be differs from what the actual sensory data is, then you update that prediction to try to better anticipate the sensory data you get later. Yeah. So that’s predictive processing. There are different ways that that might be implemented. It’s just an idea about what the brain is doing when it’s perceiving the world. the correction to the naive basian inference thing and a particular story about how we do predictive processing where you have a generative model uh and then you use that generative model to predict what the sensory data might have been etc. Those turn out to be the same math. Interesting. And that’s the same math as the free energy principle. And so that’s why these things all sort of get married basically and suggest something continuous about them. Yeah. 100. And so what what is the free energy principle? I hear people talk about in the context of like surprise minimization. Yes. Okay. So uh the free energy principle from a guy called Carl Fman is a theory about what any organism slash thing in the limit case like any any bounded entity uh must act as if it is doing if it’s going to remain a bound bounded entity in the face of perturbations. So or in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. So the background condition is that systems tend toward dissipation because of the second law. And if you’re going to maintain some ordered structure as against those insults, then you have to uh exert work in order to do that. That’s not going to be the natural tendency. The natural tendency is going to be toward equilibrium. And the free principle says that any system that does that, successfully does that over time will behave as if and this sort of as if bit is important. agree. It uh has a model of its environment and is attempting to minimize prediction error with respect to that model. Surprisal is like sort so surprisal is also another name for what you’re minimizing and variational free energy is another name for what you’re minimizing. Um but those all have sort of like technical information theoretic descriptions. Um but uh surprisal is just I think it’s just synonymous mathematically with average entropy where like average gap between what you expected you would get and what you actually get. Mhm. So um but the free energy principle in some sense gets built bottom up from just like almost tautological claims about what any system must exhibit and then the interesting thing is that that math ends up meshing with this other math of of that came from a more top- down perspective of like how do brains make sense of the world. So you can see this sort of deep continuity between what any system must do in order to just exist and what brains are doing when they do this elaborate cognition make sense of the world, right? Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. They’re all they’re all related and the math kind of converges. They all converge on similar descriptions in the math which is, you know, an indication that something deep is going on there. Yeah. And to me, the reason that’s like existentially interesting and not just like sort of like a a happy uh coincidence is that much more about this goes to this thing about the finite and the infinite. uh much more about our existential situation uh becomes clear when you realize that all of the sense making we’re doing including this sort of high level abstract cognition has at its root the situation of being a bounded finite thing in relationship to a world whose entropy you could never assimilate totally. Yeah. I know Peterson Jordan Peterson talks about you religious uh uh wisdom and religious experiences in this context where it’s like trying to make sense of the fact that we’re finite beings in an infinite world in a world of infinite complexity and it’s just like that’s not just theoretically true it’s practically true like you don’t actually you can’t compute all the possible paths. It’s not you don’t have the the compute to do it. So you have to make sense of that of your way in the world given that that high degree of uncertainty. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um we can go as far down the Peterson rabbit hole as you’d like. uh or or or not. You you you lead the way. Okay. Yeah. So there there is one one tension that comes up for me when I watch the film but also when I talk to Buddhists in general is Buddhists have this they’re trying to corral the troops behind getting back in contact with direct experience. It’s the words that the phrases they’ll common they’ll commonly use is uh are you know it’s already there. You just have to remember what it’s like to be in direct contact with experience or like the ego is like a conceptual scaffolding that you’ve tiled over on top of experience. And it’s like a lot of the suffering comes from from getting caught in the weeds there. But if you remove all of the conceptual scaffolding, if you see clearly, then you you all that’s left is pure awareness and all that’s left is like this underlying sense of joy and bliss underneath that. However, I also and I think you as well have a little bit of a sympathy towards this like Jordan Peterson or like Pio kind of Yian style of thinking of thinking symbolically. Yeah. Thinking narratively. For me, these feel like they’re intention because one is like an abstraction, the other is direct experience, direct contact with reality. So, how do you do you do you see this tension? Yeah. How would you resolve it? Yeah. Okay. Um I do see the tension there. There’s also like a you could say each of them is is further intention or seem would seem to be further intention with not even uh sort of narrative symbolic descriptions but like rational abstract conceptual description you know you know there’s a sort of spectrum there. Um just to go back to what the sort of central Buddhist claim actually is because as I say the film sort of takes you on an arc from uh psychedelic experience and what’s transformed about psychedelics psychedelic experience to a case for meditation and particularly like the particular non-dual variant so called of meditation that Sam is teaching in the app. The claim is not exactly that uh if you got rid of all the concepts uh then you would be fine because then enlightenment would just be you can’t move or do anything or make sense of the world at all and that’s obviously not the condition that you want to end up in. But that particular confusion does emerge from the way people first get introduced to these insights through psychedelics. So psychedelics often do precipitate the dissolution or loss of certain conceptual faculties like I don’t I can’t tell the boundary between myself my my body and the world for example like I would I would bump into I can’t move I’m just like lying still or I don’t remember who I am or things like that those things actually can go away in a transient sense on psychedelics and as you say it it seems to reveal to people when it’s not terrifying a kind of intrinsic freedom to awareness that is available to notice in the absence of those things. But if you think about it, like that can’t be what being a Buddha means. Then the Buddha wouldn’t be able to speak or remember anything or so. So so it’s it’s a subtle distinction that people often get confused about when they have their sort of central um experiences of freedom from the ego via psychedelics. The more subtle claim that the Buddh I’m loop back around to your question about narrative. Yeah. Elliptically the more subtle claim that the Buddhists are making is that there’s a particular way we reify concepts that does create this sort of piling over experience where uh it’s almost like they’re no longer transparent to the infinite or they’re no longer uh transparent to the intrinsic freedom of awareness. And when Buddhists say that concepts are empty or really phenomena everything is empty, they’re they’re pointing to the partic like the the absence of the particular characteristic that this reification imputes to phenomena that causes them to cloud over the intrinsic freedom awareness. That was a bit of a mouthful, but do you do you make them make them a little bit more particular? What is this feature that reification is the suffering come from reification? Is that the thesis? Uh yes. So, so um the technical term in in Buddhism is avida or which usually translate as ignorance. Uh what are we ignorant of? We’re ignorant of uh the fact that phenomena lack inherent existence. Uh and we do this move of reification of attributing inherent existence to phenomena. This is a whole rabbit hole we could go down. I’m very down. And that move is what turns appearances into a veil that clouds over the intrinsic freedom of awareness in a certain way. It’s not the Buddhists in the audience like the we’ll we’ll also say the empty the awareness is empty and it’s it’s tricky but um that’s what ignorance is to make it more concrete suppose you have an experience uh you’re sitting in meditation some unpleasant sensation arises the sense you have is that I am something other than that experience in relationship to that experience and then because that experience can be better or worse for this seeming subject there arises this pushand pull dynamic like craving or aversion in relationship to it all on the basis of the sense that when it arises it arises as something other than what I am. So you can imagine if you pull it out that that pin of the attribution of inherent existence to that phenomenon then there would be no basis on which for this push and pull that is the felt sort of um yeah has to do with the suffering to to arise. Mhm. Um go ahead go ahead and I’ll I’ll loop back around to your other thought. Is there is there is it because so is the suffering emerging from the resistance to what is actually the case and a desire to bring about a change? Yes. But um that’s uh easy to misinterpret. So uh it’s not that if you were to get enlightened, you would cease to be able to change circumstances in the world or cease to be motivated to change circumstanc. It has to do with this seeming but not actually real sense that you’re other than what you’re experiencing, right? And that you could change experience that has already arisen. Like that that’s the it’s very different than me being like, “Oh, my apartment is messy. I need to clean it up.” You’re like, “I just need to accept that my apartment is messy.” Right? Uh that’s not the move. It’s more an experience arises. There seems to be a separate embattled subject within experience relating to the field of experience. And the sense that you could stand in a push pull relationship to that is the misperception that it’s it’s it’s the dualist frame. It’s it’s the separateness. It’s rather than kind of identifying with the broader sphere or the broader I don’t want to say the uh theater but the broader presentation of consciousness itself, you identify as like an observer therein. Correct. Yeah, that there seems to be an observer therein other than the experience. And that’s uh that can dissolve upon inspection, right? And all there the Buddhist take is all there is is experience. Yes. I’m going to I’m going to resist the temptation to like make all the kind of uh qualifications that like a a nitpicky Buddhist would make, but that’s that’s something like what’s right. Yeah. Yeah. And then go you were going to tie it back a little bit. Okay. So um you had the sense that that the Buddhist emphasis on meditative phenomenology like direct experience that that term becomes tricky when you’re talking about emptiness because um it’s not that you’re having like a direct knowledge of the outside world. Exactly. That a point. Yeah. So but yeah the the meditative emphasis is different than this you could say like Judeo-Christian or like a really you see it across religions this sort of mythological uh narrative context in which the religious ideas get presented um I do think there’s something of a tension there and you see it in the way um over time those mythological forms that are intended to in almost like a kind participatory way evoke certain dynamics of experience end up getting Yeah. And another like an LLM um get end up getting hardened into things about which you should have beliefs as like independently existing entities and then lose their connection to the phenomenology they’re meant to evoke. And then that that that further happens in the sort of modernist fundamentalist case where it’s not even that you’re really relating to them the way one relates to narrative. You’re relating to them the way one relates to like science and then that produces monstrosities. It it feels like I feel like the wisdom of within the Judeo-Christian tradition there’s this very strong push back against idols creating idols. Yeah. It sounds like this is a sort of a a an updated version of that where it’s not like be don’t have an idol that is literally like a statue with a face. No, it’s don’t have an idol that you’re worshiping that’s a narrative or a concept you’re reifying. Yeah, the same dangers are there. I I would say like uh from the like core perspective I would want to advocate for um about non-dual awareness and emptiness and so forth virtually all expressions of religion are idolatrous in this particular sense where they’re they’re um I if you if you trace this idea of idolatry not to just like you shouldn’t make an image of the prophet or whatever like don’t make graven images what does it actually mean certain way of relating to experience that makes it no longer transparent to transcendence. Um, which is this reification point that I’m talking about. So then how do you wield symbols in a way that’s useful and truth preserving now? Now I’m intensely aware that this is not a I haven’t worked all of this out. So So yeah, but we’re we’re we’re gonna we’re gonna have the Galaxy brain highly speculative conversation. Um well f first is just understanding what narratives are and what they’re for. So there’s there’s something about the particular modernist way of relating to knowledge that’s like heavily propositional that sort of it’s interesting. It’s interesting how people partition this and they don’t do this in every sphere of life. So nobody goes and sees a movie and says the value of this is contingent upon it being propositionally true. Exactly. They have the experience. But particularly in a religious sphere, I think to defend it against the feared loss of meaning that would come if it lost its numinous import, people tend to treat them, treat mythological narratives like uh scientific propositions. um instead of reading what like reading stories the way they’re meant to be read which is that uh they carry you through you you identify often with the protagonist of the story. Mhm. And then you through being identified with them and sharing their goals in some way are taken on a journey like a sort of affective motivational journey through a particular experience that causes you to then learn something about some some uh way of acting in the world in some way. Right. It’s it’s inhabiting the character. Vervey talks about this in the sense like children in the in playing in the backyard, they’ll put on a cape and they’ll they’ll run around with their their fist in front of them and they’ll pretend they’re Superman. They will see the world as if they were Superman or or, you know, hunter gathers will, you know, undergo some ritual and and act as if they are the deer that they are hunting and try and see the world as if they were the deer themselves. It’s so it’s like it’s it’s transformation of being. It’s a transformation of how you interact with the world, of participation in the world. Yeah. And your your emotions are involved, your sort of like existential sense of your identity is involved. Uh all sorts of things beyond beliefs you could say about about how the world is independently. Um there’s there’s more to say about what’s going on with these especially deep sort of religious stories um than that, but I think that’s that’s one point I would make. So a question I have then is I like the idea of being able to leverage identity versus being like super anti-ident don’t identify with things. It’s you know it pushes you in a box. You know it can cause suffering and cause cognitive dissonance. But I think it you a better view is to view identity as something to be leveraged. Right? So I know in the context of moral philosophy in course guard talks about this when she’s trying to give like an adaptation or an update to K’s theory talks about the the way you can ground normativity is by identifying as a rational agent. And in so far as you identify as a rational agent you then see yourself as acting in justified manners. You see yourself as acting in ways which can be uh justified by by uh by reference to some principle. And then she, you know, will go into what it means to be a principal, has to be universalizable, etc., etc. And so the question I have for you is how do you view identity? Is that something to be just thrown to the wayside or is it something you can actually leverage to act morally, act rationally, act towards whatever goals you may have or or should we throw it all out? Okay, these are these are tricky questions. You’re like sort of throwing me the full Yeah, it’s great. Um, okay. So I guess I guess part of what you’re reacting to is a certain understanding of Buddhism meditation and so forth where they’re saying like identity identification is bad maybe also like Paul Graham type keep your identity small type concerns or that so I don’t think that the notself insight that the Buddhists are pointing to would prevent this kind of identification as a rational agent in a relative sense um that you’re describing. So there’s a very common um kind of failure mode in western interpretations of Buddhism where like the the Buddhist means something very narrow and specific by the self that they’re negating and then that tends to get applied this is actually related to the sort of psychedelics case uh to the far more capacious western notions or psychological notions or whatever else of of a self of an identity um and then assume They assume that the Buddhist saying get rid of that. So for example like uh you know would the enlightened person remember like again like remember their name or like be able to take on any given role in like a like in a household or in a culture or in a societ like all these other senses of ident or like just not be schizophrenic like have an integrated personality in some to some to some extent. None of those things are directly being negated by the Buddhist claim that there’s there’s no self. It’s like it’s a much narrower and subtler claim. That’s actually kind of surprising because it feels from the posture of identification that uh that like that you would lose those things if you did this sort of letting go gesture that the Buddhist or like somebody who’s telling you how to go through a psychedelic trip might advise. It feels like you’re going to lose everything. you’re going to fall apart and that’s sort of what keeps this this thing in place. But it’s not actually true. Like think about the people you know who uh whatever are are to whatever degree advanced on the contemplative path. Maybe they’re weird side effects, but they tend not to like for example bump into things all the time because they can’t tell the boundaries of their body or whatever else. So as a general point, I would just say like like there’s this translation issue, right? Um actually Michael Taft and I did a podcast just just trying to tease these two things out. just like what do the Buddhists mean by self and what’s the western conception of self? Um and they’re different. Maybe maybe reass identification. Am I getting at what you’re asking? Yeah. I I think I think in the water supply there’s there’s there’s a lot of misconceptions around what what involves you know the rejection of the self. I think you pointed out that a lot of the confusion around that comes from a misunderstanding about what what people what Buddhists mean when they talk about the self. Yep. And it seems to be it’s really this this this confusion about seeing yourself as separate from the sphere of consciousness itself. The dualist move that would be one way that you experience it. Okay. So there’s this global claim about phenomena which is that they are empty. They lack inherent existence. The sort of technical term for this is like spaba is which means like own being. And then the there is no sabava things are empty of that kind of thing apply to the person is saying that the person has no so it’s like the the same thing that the Buddhists are saying about you they’re saying about the table like all phenomena basically. Okay. Uh and but the the way that that gets experienced is as this loss of a sense of uh being a subject in relationship to experience in the head often that kind of thing. Um, yeah, one thing that I’ve always been confused about and potentially take issue with with the boost account of I guess phenomenology is this idea that there are no no existence of objects. It’s not quite inherent existence. Okay. But but so let me just unpack the the seeming of those claims and and the issue I would take with that potential scarecrow is it seems like the Buddhism does not let you make inferences about patterns in awareness. Like if I see an apple from one vantage point and I see from another vantage point and I see persist over time, I feel like I’m pretty justified in concluding that there is an apple. Right? Okay. Okay. But Buddhism would say, “No, there is no inherent existence.” What what does inherent existence mean? If not, there is an apple. Okay. Okay. So, let me let me take something that I don’t think you would necessarily disagree with. This idea of emptiness, particularly when you’re sort of getting out of the realm of just like the next instruction that you would give somebody when they’re meditating and into this sort of like how can we philosophically systematize this? It’s got a whole bunch of different levels, right, and ways that applies, but here’s one. So um you see the color of this particular bottle, right? Yes. You’re having experience with the color. Yep. The color seems to be a property of the bottle, right? Okay. Color if you do this sort of uh sort of physics based analysis isn’t a thing that exists out there as what you perceive it to be. There’s some interaction between what you’re bringing to bear and uh what you’re getting from the physics of things, if you want to use that that story. um that in that interaction the phenomenology of color is produced. But it’s not true to say that even when you do the sort of like wavelengths of light thing, it’s not true to say that there’s a direct correspondence between the exact physical wavelength of light and the experienced color. Okay? But that’s not immediately evident to you in direct experience. The way you experience it is the color inheres in the perception which is in the object which exists that way as I perceive it out there from its own side. Right? That’s the emptiness negation. And then it turns out that every property that you’d want to ascribe has a bit of that characteristic. I I’ll take it from another angle so you can sort of see. You know this you know this Thomas Nagel book the view from nowhere. Okay. What’s he critiquing in that? the idea that there can be such a thing as a view from nowhere. I mean like Nagel has like he’s more rational, sympathetic in some ways, but like um the idea of a view from nowhere suggests that there’s sort of like an a perspectival take on situation or reality. Mhm. But if you break it down into like perceptual phenomena, for example, does it make sense to say that there’s something that there’s some way that something inherently looks? It’s not quite the right concept, right? Looking implies vision, which implies a certain kind of organism that has a visual faculty and vision is bound up with like the the affordances of that particular organism and so forth like what particular kind of thing you are determines how you’re going to see the world. So the idea that that that something looks a particular way from its own side independent of the kind of thing you are is a misperception. Does that make sense? Right. Okay. Right. It’s pausing separate existence to to That’s this idea like there’s no inherent existence. Oh, inherent means like cybr. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Stand alone likeaba own being like from its own side. Okay. But the thing is the the radical part of that claim is that that goes all we tend to stop that analysis at various places or just like bracket it most of the time but it actually goes all the way down. So like cups lack inherent existence, colors lack inherent existence, all the things that you want to like like we tend to do this reductive move and go okay yes this highle concept maybe doesn’t inherently exist but there’s some fundamental level and the radical thing would be to say no it runs all the way down and that leaves you in this interesting position where from a relative perspective you can say all these different things and there’s there’s uh I am not and I don’t think the Buddhist claim is that you have to be impartial among them right you don’t have to be like anybody’s claim about the color of this bottle is as good as anybody else’s. I don’t think that’s right. But you can’t do this claim of this particular phenomenology is the way it inherently is from its own side. And that removes this a certain kind of existential foundation. So taking subjectivity seriously, it’s it’s underscoring the claim that like all that there really is is experience. Uh, it’s not saying all there is is experience because that would be to make some things that exist like saying like that that that would get you into this direct experience trap of you go yeah the bare phenomenology that discloses how the thing actually is. I have direct knowledge. It’s it’s like a weirder claim than that. It’s subtler claim. Yeah. Uh like so for example like it’s actually saying your experience of this cup isn’t how it inherently is. Um, so it’s not saying, you see, you see what I’m saying? Like it doesn’t forbid, at least like not all schools would forbid the idea of there being an external world, but it’s just saying in so far as you’re having an experience of it mediated. It’s just recognizing that it’s all an emergence in your own experience. And it it may or may not generalize. It may or may not be instantiated external to you or it you don’t know it is or it’s not at all. Yes. Yeah. I’ll I’ll uh let’s see. Let’s let’s uh let’s see if it comes back around. It’s a it’s like a it’s a weird claim to talk about divorced from a particular kind of experience that you might have in in meditation. Um and then it’s like less weird after that. But um here’s an here’s an example and feel free to pivot me if it becomes more than more than your interest level. But like okay, you’re having a pain in your knee. The pain seems to exist on its own side. You’re sitting there meditating for a second. You have a pain in your knee. You are subject to that pain. So it feels it’s over there. You’re over here some incredible way and it’s happening to you and it exists as a as an object of your experience. But then you go what if I were just like embrace this a little bit more. Not only does that change your relationship to the it will change the way the experience rises. That’s kind of interesting. Change something on your side. Not positing it as separate to you. Well, it it it just um taking on a different way of looking in like Robert Bea um changes how it appears. So that’s interesting. There’s and then imagine you do that with like a thousand like a this is what Robert Bea does in seeing this book seeing that freeze is he just gives you a whole bunch of different ways of looking. So try try looking at this way, try looking at this way and then do practice that over time. You will notice that there’s no stable characteristic that survives across all of those different ways of looking which doesn’t mean that you just get to decide what you experience like I want I mean in limited cases you can’t but like uh if you just go I want perfect bliss to arise right now in in exactly this place in exactly this way you don’t have that kind of freedom exactly but nor is it ever the case that the way the phenomena arises will survive all possible ways of looking and exist and present the same way. And that is like the meta insight that can emerge from doing that a bunch of different ways is that phenomena are empty. That they don’t exist from their own side. Does that make sense? That was great. Okay, that was great. Yeah, that’s just that’s like Robba 101. That’s like that’s his big way of pitching emptiness. The plaintist in me wants to say something like given that you don’t have absolute freedom to m you know make phenomenology how you want there’s still when you take a vantage point there’s still going to be some like structural relation between all the phenomenon and like you take a different vantage point there’s still structural so it seems like there would be there’s like an implication that there is an underlying structure behind it but Buddhists don’t like to talk about that or uh they just have a different project right so the Buddhist project is not the same as the scientific project okay uh the scientific project. One way of describing it, this is sort of like a Buddhist way of describing it, but it would be like you’re trying to shear away the particularities of any given perspective to arrive at some account of what’s out there on its own, like objectively, so to speak, um, in a way that’s as context and purpose and person and perceiver independent as possible. Right? Okay. The Buddhists are just trying to free you from suffering. Like that’s that’s that’s their game. Um, and they’re not totally non-over overlapping um, projects. Like I’m not saying the Buddhist view has nothing to say about the scientific project, but you’re not trying to do the same thing, right? On the on the point of the Buddhist project trying to alleviate suffering, this is more of a normative question or a moral question. But is is that all that actually matters? I like I’m loving the extremely direct solve moral philosophy now questions. Uh, no, I wouldn’t say that. I don’t think it’s all that actually matters. It’s um it’s it’s really tricky too because um even the Buddhist sort of like trying to get to the end of duka thing most uh really advanced meditators will say there’s a certain point at which uh you sort of solve the suffering problem such an extent that it ceases to be relevant and other things are concerning you and so like it’s almost like your your sense of what suffering was changes um and like uh particularly sort late and radical non-dual Buddhist views like Zchan which is um some extent the context that Sam Harris is coming out of. Um don’t really talk about suffering at all. Uh it’s weird. It’s it’s very it’s like uh you can at least I think you can translate them uh or at least like see how they’re continuous with earlier forms of Buddhism where it’s all about suffering and the end of suffering but they’re coming from a particular particular view where that’s not as relevant as it once was. but also because you solved it naturally. That’s fascinating because one of the approaches that I like to grounding normativity is what I would call veilance realism which is to say that within perception there just is this this things do appear as good or bad or or better or worse or things which you have a reason to bring about and things which you have a reason to avoid. Yeah. Right. There’s like normativity is inherent to perception itself. The downstream consequence of that is that veil if veilance is all that you know normativity is grounded in then veilance is all that really matters and veilance is kind of like somewhat synonymous with like well-being or flourishing or like complex forms of pleasure. So my my my intuition was always that if you take Buddhist if you create like a Buddhist ethics you end up with a sort of utilitarian ethics. Yeah. Yeah. Oh man, you’re like you’re like scratching at a thing that I it’s very like earth shaking from my point of view because there there’s a very tricky paradox there where I totally know what you mean. That that point of view on things is consistent with how I was viewing the meditative project is like like it’s the Buddhist emphasis on suffering and the end of suffering is kind of like veence realist consequentialism in some ways and and similar types of minds especially in modern context gravitate towards I think they’re different and it’s it’s it’s weird and interesting why. So take this emptiness claim veance realism in this really ultimate sense and emptiness can’t quite go together right and uh I think this is a if I could uh sit down Sam Harris and like have a long conversation with him about a particular thing this would be one of the things the moral landscape yeah the moral the moral landscape is basically I’m very sympathetic to this kind of case I really like it right so um it’s basically a veilance realist consequentialist story about what matters morally. What matters like that it’s sort of got a an ontology that reduces to two types of things. Ontologically objective things and ontologically subjective things, namely conscious states. Conscious states can be intrinsically better or worse some way, right? And then our job is to navigate in the space of possible conscious states um toward what’s better. I don’t want to totally negate that. like I think that’s like right in some deep way or like like I I share a ton of those in but this emptiness thing does sort of unpick it gradually and then the question is where does that leave you in relationship to all of sort of consequentialist ethics. The uh one way I would start to mess with it is um that onto that initial ontology of things are either subjective or objective. The subjective the onlogically subjective stuff is conscious states and the onlogically objective stuff is like the physics of things. I don’t think that holds up either. Uh or at least like uh that creates a bunch of problems. It’s one of the things I think that the hard problem emerges out of is that move and that particular way of dividing things comes out of a particular modernist uh posture that like reifies those two ontologies as being substantial and I don’t I don’t think that survives the emptiness plane. There are a few different ways I can pick this up. Uh tell me which one’s more more interesting to you. Um, if I say like meaning is neither subjective nor objective, but interactive. Is that the transjective? Well, yeah. I I I want to hold on to this interactive idea because it gives you an intuition. Um, does that make sense? Like is that like is do I need to argue for that or is that is that true? Okay. What falls under the bucket of meanings to you? Um, I mean I’m I’m pretty very pill. So, so I I kind of just adopt his definition which is meaning is a sense of connectedness to something that is external to you that is bigger than you and something you deem as morally important. Okay. So, I would call that like existential meaning. Okay. I’m using when I say meaning is neither subjective nor objective but interactive includes that kind of thing but I’m using it way moreiously to include all your ways of making sense of the world. Oh, okay. Um so like perceptions are kind of meaning like a meaningful like like to make sense of something. Yeah. It’s like uh ways of taking the world to be intelligible or something. Okay. Yeah. Like uh you don’t see a door hinge. You see like the a tool that you can use to open all of that. Right. So and and there’s this sort of story of how these higher level meanings would emerge out of really lower level meanings which are um just implications for action. So you can think about a very simple organism who has a that has a reflex arc where in some way the world bumps into them and just based on the way that they’re structured that causes them to act like an amoeba or something like that that like has like following certain gradients and the things that are literally bumping up against membrane that kind of thing. Or if I hit your knee with the hammer the stimulus like in a do in a doctor’s office the stimulus of the sensation will cause you to kick in a way that doesn’t get mediated through anything. It’s just a reflex arc, right? You could say the meaning of that sensation to you is the action it produces in some narrow way. But then if you move that through complex hierarchical cognition, there’s all this mediation in between the mere perception and the mere action that makes meaning a more complicated story. Um but uh the ways in which you find the world intelligible goes to the Vervey point. um uh are at least some of them are related to the kinds of actions you might take. Sove I’ve used this analogy in so many places I’m a little bit uh sheepish about it now but like if you take this cup uh and uh think about what what must be true of it for you to give it the ontology of cup this this relates to the emptiness claim it’s that it’s gra part of that is that it’s graspable to you which is not inherent to the cup from its own side that has to do with the kind of thing that you are and what is graspable for you that leads that ontology to be a relevant way for you to make sense of the world and Um, you can see how that that like emptiness is sort of implied in that to some extent, right? Right. Like say it’s objectively a cup. Well, hold on a second. If you weren’t the kind of thing that could grasp cups, it wouldn’t be a cup for you. Or if someone’s breaking in your house, that’s now a weapon. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. It’s not right to say that that’s subjective either. So, take an affordance style representation. Something is graspable. It’s not true that it’s objectively graspable in the sense of objective being from its own side. Nor is it true to say that it’s subjectively graspable because you couldn’t just decide what’s graspable and what isn’t, right? It’s not arbitrary. So, it exists in this weird middle ground that we don’t have nice accounts for in a kind of modernist ontology of being neither subjective nor objective and interactive. Now, imagine that all meanings including things like veilance fall within that weird category. M you can’t give them substantial existence by just saying they intrinsically are better or worse because they are they are made of a substance that I’ve attributed solid existence to namely consciousness or matter. Does that make sense? Yeah. Okay. So so this but this doesn’t eliminate veilance. It what it just says it’s not an objective quality out in the world or out in your head. It’s it’s about a participation between you know it’s it’s not an objective quality nor is it a subjective quality. Right. It’s it’s it’s it exists within the participatory dance between, you know, don’t cruy me for this. Subject and object. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I won’t. And when when I’m like uh being nitpicky, I don’t It’s not that I don’t know what you mean or that you’re like describing it badly. It’s just like it’s weird. It’s really like And uh I’m mindful of certain uh nitpicky people in the audience, right? Um but uh yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. Okay. Okay. But then this doesn’t this doesn’t eliminate veilance realism consequentialism. It’s just being honest about the fact that it’s not like an objective quantity on the world. Yeah. Veance. But it does um remove your ability to I guess like be a certain kind of moral realist. Um, and I I’m I am a certain kind of moral realist, but but it it like there’s a particular variant of trying to answer this question of moral realism that inherits the foundationalist project that I think like emptiness and other things like the John Higer and so forth negate is is the issue with foundationalism or is the issue with like objectivity like this robust realism? I think they’re related. I think they’re related. So there’s realism as the claim that like there is a world. Okay, just like in the most vague terms. I’m not going to specify anything about it, but there is a there’s something uh the way I like to think about it, this is from this guy Brian Campbell Smith. There’s something in deference to which our objectifications uh exist, right? So it’s like you know when word and world he says when word and world part company trust the world like there’s some sense of like I’m accountable to something when I objectify that whatever that is to which I’m accountable I’m leaving it vague because any specific way you account for it isn’t it this is related to your idolatry thing earlier right and that way of describing it makes it way more compatible with translatable into religious intuitions than it would seem initially. the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. Uh it is related to that giving that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So, so to go to go to your like interest in in analytic philosophy, moral realism and so forth. Part of this question about like moral this way of framing the issue of moral realism versus moral anti-realism. Part of the reason that comes up is you have a world picture where um the only thing that can is like reasonably allowed to push back is the physics of things because the world we inhabit or that to which we exist in difference becomes just physics, right? And so it makes sense for the person to say like you’re wrong about the physics of things which is taken to have an inherent nature that pushes back if you’re wrong about it. Mhm. But the morality isn’t out there in the physics of things pushing back. So in what sense can you make right or wrong claims about moral? So like it like that particular dilemma of like moral realism versus moral anti-realism emerges from the fact that like morality can’t be quote unquote objective in the way that we think physics is. But uh it doesn’t seem right to say that you just get to decide arbitrarily, right? So in in deference to what does do moral judgments exist? The reason why I think you can stop me if I was going to say this is reminding me of the earlier point about as you make all these frame shifts you know the Buddhists want to say as you make these frame shifts there’s no inherent existence to these objects you can just you can take them to be different things and various frames and there’s no like fixed point uh along which you can kind of you know that is that that that is maintained as you shift between all these like coordinate transformations. Um, and the point I was making earlier was the the plaintist in me wants to go, okay, but as you make a frame shift, there’s still a structure that emerges. You take you take a different frame, there’s now another another structure that emerge. You take another frame shift, there’s still a structure. Now, structures may be all different, but there is still a structure there. And so I think the you seem unreasonable to make inferences that there are like inherent structures. I’m prior to our our perception of these objects. And so I think when you you can take this in the moral domain and say there may be inherent structures to let’s say the nature of and this is a contean point agency in the world or or consciousness and and veilance uh or or something to this effect or or how you participate in a in a society. This is like a McIntyre uh sort of point. um there still are structures underlying that and there and what you know just because you can shift frames and and there’s no like kind of fixed points there doesn’t mean there’s no inherent structures. So there still is some sort of objective uh prior to structure prior to uh uh perceiving things they just it can just shift and and change as you as you move around. Okay. The the part of this intuition that I share is what I what I want to call like the difference. Okay. So like um and the the non-arbitiness basically like like it’s not that you can just go and say anything right about the the world and how it is and have it be equally good um or equally worthy. Um so the the function that a claim like there’s inherent structure is playing or the role it’s playing is well hold on we can’t just be willy-nilly here. like there’s something out there that our perceptions are responsive to or something like or like attempting to mirror or and I think that’s fine. I think I think that’s right. It’s tricky to say of any particular way that you conceptualize the world, but that that is getting at what it’s like inherently because it’s my eye that’s not it’s not that it’s wrong in a way that could be right. It’s kind of a category error because again it’s like saying there’s a way that the world objectively looks right or or or sounds or any pick the sensory faculties like is there a way that a table objectively feels from its own side well no hold on feeling is doing this kind of thing you know it’s it’s not that kind of thing and I think abstract concepts are emergent from not my idea but like um that kind of concrete interaction so for example when forming an object representation part of what you’re doing is forming a sense of what it would look like visually from multiple different vantage points that’s like involved in your object. Like when you reduce the properties that seem to be uh there in your sense of objects, they all come down to things like well if I reach for it I could grab it or if I saw you see what I mean like it’s got that kind of like tactile interactive property not and it’s wrong to call those kinds of things what the world is like from its own side without without your Yeah. There’s no so it’s not the claim isn’t more so and I’m all of this by the way like I think a very robust science survives every claim I’m making right and I hate when people pretend it doesn’t. So like I’m not I’m not making some like from to my from my point of view radical relativist claim that makes like projects like science or even projects like a certain kind of moral universalism make sense. I actually think I can like particularly in the moral case we’ll get back to the veilance realism thing and all of that like there’s a way this redeems a bunch of that stuff right but but uh yeah I’m not I’m not making a anti-science point well I mean it is very consistent with science because even we’ve known this since relativity that okay there are still objectively true claims that you can make uh within a physical system it just depends on your vantage point and the measurements will be different depending on your vantage point whether you’re moving close to speed of light whether you’re near a large mass of of of energy or mass or you know grav gravitational well. Uh but there’s still correct measurements and predictions you can make within that vantage point. It still depends on the vantage point. Yeah. But but but there’s still correct. And so where I’m kind of gesturing at with with this is within certain vantage points, you know, what what appears as better and worse may change and there’s perhaps no fix point, but there’s still an objective or that’s that’s a bad word, but there’s still a fact of the matter, right? It’s like is there is there a fact about Okay, so think think about this idea that um there’s an objective veilance system. What does that what does that mean? It’s it’s the claim but it’s it’s paying deference to the fact that it depends on your vantage point first but within a vantage point and within like maybe even a certain frame of looking at the world things do present themselves as positive valance. Yeah, that’s true. Or well, uh yeah. Yeah, I I that that’s right that like uh it doesn’t it doesn’t give a kind of ultimate existence veilance that is um I mean like one of the things that the consequentialist intuition works again I share this intuition like I’m I’m basically consequentialist like I’m I like to like joke that I’m like a closet like just like hardcore utilitarian. Yeah. I know like everyone’s pushed to that if you actually think about it long enough. I’m not just EA adjacent, I’m actually like EA sympathetic, you know, like that that kind of thing. But maybe you can help me make sense of it. But part of the consequentialist intuition is to look at other ways of doing moral reasoning. Mhm. And like for example, divine command ethics or like that and say, “Hold on, this predicated on stuff that isn’t real, right? That makes your moral claims kind of shaky.” and then say what’s real once we get down to brass tax. Well, experience is real and physics is real. And I don’t think that that uh like for for a bunch of purposes that’s really helpful. And I’m not saying we should just like revert to divine command ethics, but I don’t think that uh like reified two-fold ontology of what gets to count as real is right. You don’t think physics and experience is like your ontology is not real. It’s not that’s not the correct ontology. Why? Because it’s dualist or it produces a bunch of problems to say there are two inherently existing substances the interaction between which we have no sense of. Okay, let me I’m going to give you a a parable that I I like like give to like as an intuition pump for this kind of thing. Um, and it’s like there’s no anthropological realness to this, but but I like it. Imagine you live in like a sort of tribe uh in like you’re an archaic person living in a tribe. You have a totem pole at the center of town. I don’t know why it’s to whatever. Okay. And you’ve only ever grown up in that community. And from your point of view, the totem pole is inherently sacred. The sacredness is a property of the totem pole in the same way that green feels like it’s a property of this cup. Okay? and everybody around you treats the totem pole as sacred. And when you experience the totem pole, you experience its sacredness. Okay? Then you have an encounter with somebody from another tribe for whom the totem pole is not experienced as sacred. First thing you do probably like kill each other or like fight, right? Like like [ __ ] you. It’s it’s it’s sacred. Okay. But eventually over time you’re forced to differentiate your sense of sacredness from inhering in the object which it seemed to initially like you go okay hold on sacredness isn’t the kind of thing that’s out there in the totem pole there’s something about it because because if it were out there in the totem pole the other guy from the other tribe would experience it so it’s got to live somewhere else and like somebody like Charles Taylor will like notice a macro historical trend of like the meaning retreating from the objects and kind of going into subjective when this these kinds of encounters between cultures occur. And you can think of like something like that encounter is what’s going on in science where you go like hold on this we can’t triangulate this particular perception across two different observers. So whatever whatever can’t be triangulated across for example different times running the experiment or different observers or whatever can’t be there right right on its own side. and and then imagine stretching that kind of process over a bunch of instances and a bunch of time. That’s what I think gets you this sense of there are two ontologies. The purely subjective interesting to which you can have no access and I can only have a certain kind of direct access and the purely objective which just exists from its own side in exactly that way. But like sacredness is like that for and I would say nothing is like that. uh like color is not like that etc. because these things exist in relation. Uh yeah, like this this Chapman refrain of meaning is neither subjective nor objective but interactive, right? That’s kind of thing I would want to say. Okay, so let me Is this making any sense? No, it’s making perfect sense. I I just I wanted Is it also answering your question or am I taking No, no, this is good. I I do want to see if I can if we can find some common ground on like this veilance realist project uh accounting for emptiness before we move on which is you know the there’s still facts of the matter as to what is positive valance within a certain frame and you can shift frames and you can shift you know perspectives and you can move from one head to another and and the the veilance structure may be different but within each frame uh well actually this is a good question is the one constant within all these frames that like how do I put this positive veilance is good or yeah well this is where it’s hard to it’s hard to poke at this because this is this bedrock concept that you can’t really define without being circular and also okay so um there’s a term in a meditation context called vda which is translated usually as feeling tone which is something like veilance it’s like uh is experience positive negative or neutral right right like when you’re doing kind of meditative deconstruction ruction. One of the things you’re seeing the emptiness of is vda right um so like you can notice for example that like change your relationship it’s veance in that sense changes but uh why are you up to this whole awakening project in the first place like what’s why why would you want to awaken basically there’s some difficult to categorize sense in which being awake is better and and certainly like it doesn’t feel weird to describe in terms of like it’s a better experience, better veilance might say than the other condition. So it’s it’s weird like the the relationship of the awakening project to veilance realism is weird because in some way the the progress has to do with um seeing as empty a bunch of things that you were taking to have inherently existing veilance. But then doing that more and more produces a better and better experience. So I have not worked this out at all like at all. Yeah. I think what I’m trying to find is maybe one fixed point which I would call like a an intuitive or a non-natural fact uh or an intuition about value which is that like positive veilance is good or that or that positive veilance gives you reason to bring about more of of it. Like these are these are like kind of baseline statements that even as you that that that appears to be frame and variant. Even though the things which appear as positive veilance may shift the p the fact that positive veilance does present itself as giving you a reason to you know bring about more of it remains. I I in like 90% of cases agree with this. Oh god. Okay. No fixed points. Well, I I’m I’m like accurately representing here that I like I haven’t figured this out because I noticed that like it I have different intuitions that clash here. So, like I’m like basically just a consequentialist and that doesn’t square with other things that I think about ontology. And so, I haven’t worked this this out yet at all. Um let me let me take you down one more rabbit hole and see if it just sort of shakes this up more to see what you’ll see what I’m like struggling with a little bit. Um, okay. There’s this guy I love called Brian Campwell Smith who recently died, analytic philosopher. Um, uh, but interestingly and I think like relevantly for his ideas, his father was a very famous theologian named Wilfrid Camp Will Smith. And Brian, um, got his PhD in computer science, but then became a philosopher, try to figure out what the hell is actually going on with computation when he realized that like it was not as settled as everybody thought it was. Um, so there’s like a computer science education, very technical, became a philosopher, father’s a theologian, and all of these things are relevant to, I think, understanding where he ended up, a bunch of his ideas. Um, Brian was very concerned with uh what in like philosophy of mind jargon is called intentionality, which is this like it’s not intending to do X or Y. It’s not like a kind of agency thing. It’s directedness the sense in which or like aboutness or the sense we have that like I was saying before our thoughts are accountable to something because they’re about those things or in in in relationship to those things right he thought that this was like constitutive of minds they’re intentionally direct in interpreting a bunch of kind of insults to the rationalist tradition and philosophy that happened in the 20th century he’s noticing that like one of the things that the rationalist frame left out and particularly the one that got picked up in computer science um the version of it that got picked up in computer science was this capacity for intentional directedness. So early logic, I’m going to get this wrong. We’ve now gone very far field, but I think I think you’re the one to do it. If you think about like all men are mortal, Socrates a man, therefore, Socrates mortal is about what way of manipulating propositions you can uh what rules for manipulate manipulating propositions are truth preserving. Right. Not just within the formal system of the symbols, but in relationship to the things the symbols are about. Right. There’s like a world that’s posited. Exactly. This corresponds to. Exactly. Exactly. Um and like that the manipulation that you’re doing on the symbol side be truth preserving uh is accountable to the world not to anything internal to the symbol manipulation. Does that make sense? Mhm. So logic had this kind of intentional directness. But then Brian would say when it got picked up in computer science, it sort of lost that and the semantics got reinterpreted as like like what happens when you run the program and things like it got interpreted to like things that are intrinsic to the formal symbol manipulation. And he’s like they lost the intentional directedness of this original conception of logic. And um all right, let me see if I can do this quick enough to bring it back around to what you’re actually asking about. There’s a similarity there to this sense in which moral realism versus anti-realism is about this question of like whether our moral claims are indifference to anything or intentionally directed toward anything. And what Brian eventually argued was that even bare truth claims for a whole bunch of reasons having to do with uh like Vickenstein like later Vickenstein type arguments we can get into it. Um, even bare truth claims imply a kind of intentional directedness which is normative such that you can’t just get truth and reference without including this kind of intentionally directed normative commitment to like the transcendent in some way. Yeah. And then he kind of uses that as like a pry bar to say actually we need to like the the apparent case where we’ve got truth and reference figured out for the physics of things but the the moral domain and normativity and mattering and all this stuff that’s not figured out. That’s not true. It’s like the the truth claims of rationalist science depend upon normativity in a way that you can’t escape. And that opens the door back up to like mattering in general. Um, right. And this is this is this is a project I’ve been working on uh I guess more in private as well which is I don’t truth for me doesn’t make sense without reference to some underlying like you know world of the some some underlying structure I would say. Okay. Right. And when it comes to science, right, there’s a there’s a there’s a a a stance in the philosophy of science called structural realism, which basically posits that okay, we we can’t know things inherently. This is a contine point. We don’t know what an electron is in and of itself intrinsically. Yeah. But we can know how it behaves in relation to other things, other measurables. Right? So we have this like structural relation that we can tease apart through experiment. and the truth claims of science are true in virtue of this structure. Mhm. And so if you take that to the moral domain and you know with a little bit of acknowledgement to like this intentionality uh thing you’re describing is if if normativity if there are norm true normative claims they’re going to be true in virtue of some structure. It’s like what could this structure possibly be? Right. Indeed. What what could it possibly be? It’s not it’s not like out in the world you know. Yeah. And and it seems like what you’re saying is it’s also not just inherent to consciousness itself. It has to be a relational a participatory uh uh feature. It has to be inherent to a participation between a subject and an object. The structure that normative claims are true in virtue of have to be something inherent to the inter the the the web of connections between the subject and the object. And this is where I think maybe a contian perspective makes more sense because it talks about grounding normativity and agency and agency doesn’t make sense if you don’t have you know as you described earlier like this this boundary between uh the subject and the object or the subject and the world right so it’s that the structure is somewhere you know draw a big circle around that picture some marov blanket here the world out there and it’s like in here in this interconnected I’m not bringing the free energy principle back yeah and somewhere between in this in this picture is a structure that normativity is true in virtue of. That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I think something like that is right. I’m I’m not familiar enough with the the sort of contian lineage to like have a real opinion about it, but but but that kind of thing I think is right. Like I I I don’t think in so far as what you just said is something like um hashes out as morality is not arbitrary and there’s something to which our moral claims are indifference to. to use the language I was using before. Uh I think that’s right. I think that’s definitely right and important. I think we can agree about that. I think I think we’re getting close. We haven’t none of us have figured it out, but we’re The only reason I’m pushing on this is not because like I I find the the um like consequentialist intuition for example or intuition like obviously wrong or something like that. But I noticed that in order to like take things from Yung or from like religious mythology or whatever else, uh, a lot of like translation like inferial distance has to be covered such that I’m like trying to find the bridging languages that makes them translatable into each other and not like intrinsically clashing. Okay. You had a fever dream about this. Yeah. Well, yeah, sort of. uh build the bridge between yung and and analytic philosophy or or or I don’t know I don’t know that I can I can do it cleanly but I introduced part of it which is this this Brian Campwell Smith thing um for people who want to like follow up on this I’m sure I’ll tweet about it um Brian has these two papers one called or one is a paper one is a talk um the paper’s called God approximately and the talk is called difference humility awe um we’ll come back to those but Brian is working within an analytic tradition so he’s not like he’s palatable to people that cast of mind. Um, Jung, okay. Uh, haven’t read a ton of Yung find him hard to read. We were talking about this earlier. Um, the understanding I’m about to present comes mainly from this guy Edward Edinger, who’s Jung’s main kind of American interpreter, one of his interpreters, uh, in this book called Ego and Archetype. Um, okay. So, Jung’s Jung had this idea that the ego individuates in relationship to something he called the self. I think somewhat misleadingly called the self but um which is this kind of regulative center totality in relationship to which individuation occurs and the the self is what the god image is sort of about in yian uh in a yungian account which is why like um well yeah I mean I’ll leave it at that so the self is the thing that the god image is supposed to make it possible for you to interface with some way but um the self has all these sort of connotations It’s it contains all the opposites union language and uh it’s um it contains the ego. So it’s like vaster than the ego but it’s the thing that like it it also contains the shadow. It contains like the opposite side of everything that you’ve made the positive characteristics ego. On a union account, we start existence. Think about the baby like uh with inflated participatory identification with the self where you haven’t developed a sense of yourself as an individuated finite thing yet. You’re but you’re not like it’s not like you have like a explicit sense that you are God or totality or something like that. It’s just that you like haven’t made it conscious yet. And then this is very similar to many other developmental accounts, but like in relationship to which in relationship to the what psychoanalysts would call like the necessary failure of the mother. So the ways in which once you’re born, the mother ceases to instantaneously meet all your needs the moment you they arise. That’s part of what you develop a sense of a separate self and relationship to is that you’re not uh the totality and therefore you have limits and therefore your desires can be thwarted. And that’s how you start to build a sense of yourself as a separate thing. Okay, that’s a kind of initial let down of what Jung would call inflation, which is the identification of the ego, the finite individual self with the self, the thing in relationship to which it individuates the totality. And so you think you’re that and then you get let down and then sort of cramp of self-consciousness uh and then you discover the limits and then that keeps happening over time. But that initial wound of that first, oh, I’m not God. In some way that the infant experiences carries with you through the rest of life. You only talk about this, the fall, right, from from the Garden of Eden. This sort of alienation from God. And then um like functional a functioning psyche, he would say, would have has an ego self access. So you you retain the sense of connection to transcendent totality. Um, but we tend to oscillate in practice between extremes of inflation like appropriating to yourself the divine will like like uh I’m I’m immortal or what like there they’re more and more subtle manifestations of this or extremes of alienation where you lose the sense of self access and you’re like I’m cut off from the divine. So again, think about like the Eden myth. Adam and Eve are in the garden walking with God. They’re connected to God. their needs are effortlessly met. They eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, right? Attempting to become as gods, right? And then that inflation and then that leads them to be cast out of the garden which precipitates this this period of alienation from God and it’s got to later be redeemed by Christ in the Christian account. Right? So that’s the kind of thing he has in mind. Okay? So, so from from inflation to the let down of inflation to the experience of alienation and then the restoration of the ego self-axis in Yungian language. Okay. Jung would say that a healthy ego self- access is nec is like is core central necessary to like a functioning psyche. It’s almost like synonymous with a functioning psyche. That’s kind of the same thing as this intentional directedness difference thing that we’ve been getting at in another lexicon. So like it’s it’s essential that to the you say the experience of meaning in this existential sense that we’re talking about here that you feel like uh your ways of finding the world intelligible exist in deference to and in right relationship to which in right right relationship to this thing that transcends them to which they’re accountable. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. to loop everything back around to this film uh and to to Peterson and predictive processing and so forth. Okay, in the film I’m I have this predictive processing story uh that all the interesting or much of the interesting psychedelic neuroscience is expressed in terms of and then because I’m doing this trading back and forth between psychedelic/religious phenomenology and the neuroscience, I’m using the way that uh Peterson does this kind of uh bridging between these two things as my translation key in some way. Right? But one thing that’s interestingly parallel is that on a predictive processing account, you could you can imagine some way in which all of cognition is kind of organized around this encounter with anomaly, right? So like the the the friction error, the gap between what you expected you would get and what you get and then different magnitudes of that and different depths of that experience the encounter with anomaly and all of the sort of hierarchy of cognition is organized around resolving containing limiting the extent of that possible encounter with anomaly. This is like the complexity management thing we’re doing reducing valve. Yeah. There uh I use Huxley’s analogy of like reducing consciousness or reducing valve to talk about this kind of thing. Um and then on psychedelics when you uh relax the precision waiting or lower the confidence with which you’re holding your priors this religious sense of the mysterium tremendum uh floods back in such that reality suddenly like numminous sacred but also like potentially threatening right reemerges because your ability to kind of contain it with these conceptual structures estimates that idea that shows up in predictive processing as everything is organized around minimizing prediction error in a kind of hierarchical way and then if you relax the presenter predict predictions the mysterium tremendum comes flooding back in is very similar maybe the same as what Jung is talking about when he talks about uh the ego self access the the the importance of the ego self access being functional and you heard this young line all religion is like a defense against the encounter with God Oh wow. It’s a very interesting like phrase, right? Because you think like the religious structure exists to give you an encounter with God. But actually he’s like the dogmatic structure is protecting you against it’s keeping those archetypal energies you could say present to consciousness and causing you to participate in them so as to protect you from that bare unfiltered encounter with the mysterium tremendum that all of your cognition is organized around avoiding. Right? But if you if you don’t have that participatory engagement with those kinds of things, you also lose the ego self access he would say or like the connection to God and that’s dysfunctional also. So you’re like you’re engaged in this sort of titrated exposure thing. You get I don’t know where I want to land this plane, but you get where I’m going. Like this is this is the connected. like it’s connected to this difference idea in the sense that there’s something to which we’re accountable because that’s the source of this encounter with the limitations of your predictions. Yeah. It’s connected to this um your processing story and it’s connected to this sort of yian account of the sacred um Okay, that was great. That was great. One of the things I really wanted to ask you was so your background you you’ve had a new atheist phase or are still my enduring new atheist phase still in your new atheist phase but there’s a common trajectory for people who are like really online going from like this you know maybe they’re they grew up religious and then they you know go through a new atheist phase and they become rationalists and then they become you know they take psychedelics and then they get into meditation and then they become like neo Buddhists and then they become orthodox Christians and they become orthodox right Yeah, that trend is definitely real, but the the the abstraction of that trend is this move from like rationalism to postrationalism. Yeah. And what one one question I want to ask you is like how do what are the necessary moves you have to make to to make that transition. Okay. Uh I should I should I should have caveed this with the u the meditation stuff in some sense too. I I’ll I’ll also caveat it with this where um although I love speaking about it abstractly. I I’m wary of putting myself in any kind of guru position or something like that because I do feel like I’m constantly learning new things in relationship to this kind of question definitely on the meditation front like but even on this rationalism postrationalism thing which I think about a lot um where I’m like oh there was a way in which I was still confused about that. So caveat mtor but you said what is the necessary thing to make the rationalism to postrat? What are the what are the steps required? What are the insights required to move from rationalism to postrationalism? Postrat is kind of like a it’s kind of like a meme or like it’s a kind of like a a loose cluster emergent from Twitter of that is basically like it’s like people who have some amount of technical background who also think woo is cool like like it’s it’s it’s much looser. So it like um postrat is like less of a specific set of claims than for example like the David Chapman meta rationality stuff that is like attempting to formalize a particular set of arguments. Um I’m not saying that like postrat is bad. Um, but uh, so I I could tell you what sorts of things are involved in David’s arguments for how to get to meta rationality or I can we could talk about like what gives people post rat intuitions or like something like that or like what causes that to show up as a social theme. Let’s do the the former. I I want to what what’s the road map to get people from like keeping stage four to five? Okay. Okay. So um for people who don’t have that meme in their heads Robert Keegan developmental psychologist uh in the broadly like pagedian lineage uh so Jean PJ sort of uh posited these stages of co mostly cognitive development in infants that um he sort of thought were universal that have a certain structure to them and then later people like Lawrence Coberg and others generalized that to other domains than just the cogn cognitive. So Colberg was in moral development but still in this sort of pagetian tradition often called constructive developmental um and David Chapman I think is probably mostly responsible for popularizing it within our scene because he does two things. One is that he’s uh in his in the cells of the eggplant book, I think it’s now just called the meta rationality book, um is attempting to shepherd people across the the transition from uh stage four in Keegan’s terms rationalism to stage five metrationality. um but also in his meaningless book in one portion of it uses that to sort of give an account of uh the last few hundred years of human history because there’s an interesting way in which uh you can map the stages that an individual progresses through onto the stages that the culture has progressed through over time. So there are a whole bunch of arguments about like anttogyny recapitulates fogyny which is sort of about like this developmental stages recapitulate evolutionary history to some extent but you could also say I think uh more accurately in in in this case that developmental stages recapitulate cultural history because there’s a structural relationship where you have to have understood one to get to the next one. Okay, let me give the version of the argument that exists in David’s meta rationality book. So the first thing he does is somewhat counterintuitive which is he sort of assumes you’re coming in as a kind of rationalist but he has to refactor your understanding of what it is to be a rationalist. This is actually sort of what we were doing earlier in the conversation in order for the shift to metarationality to make sense. So in some way you have to relativize your understanding of what you were doing with rationality and why it worked to a different understanding for the shift to metrationality to be possible. And one thing he calls this in the book is the the ethnomthological flip. Very unfelicitous name for it. Um ethnomethodology is this tradition in sociology that involves very closely observing people to see what they actually do to resolve breakdowns in understanding and and to resolve sort of meaning problems instead of having an abstract theory about it. So like like how do people enact social norms concretely in their behavior instead of just imagining that they represent social norms abstractly in their heads for example. The flip is this flip from considering okay so first he makes this distinction between what he calls everyday reasonleness and formal rationality where everyday reasonleness is sort of this like uh uh I’m going to the kitchen. Hey are you going to the kitchen to go make some breakfast. Okay so you just gave an account of your behavior there. you are accountable to me in some sense that when I ask you why you’re doing that you can give some you know shallow justification for it shallow just in the sense of not being many step um but it’s not like you like wrote out the logic in a series of axioms on a whiteboard or whatever in order to derive the action that you’re going to go make some breakfast or right so there’s everyday reasonleness has this shallow accountability to to social justification and it functions in a context dependent way but it’s not a it’s not derived from premises in a tower of justifications. Okay. The temptation from a certain view of rationalism and you could see this in something like uh the heristics and biases tradition that Daniel Conorman popularized um uh or was responsible for I should say with Terski um in in cognitive psychology. um you can see in a bunch of places is to posit a paradigm of reason that is the formal thing and then to notice all the ways in which what what Chapman would call everyday reasonableness departs from those thing that that standard and consider those to be biases or defective approximations or otherwise like attempts to get at the formal thing but they just like they don’t have the compute or they don’t have the time or or like whatever but It’s all justif or it’s all judged by reference to formal rationality. Okay, that’s the that’s the stance that most people within the rationalist frame have about everyday reasonleness. The flip is to see it the other way, which is that formal rationality is a specialized application of everyday reasonleness, not the other way around. So when you see somebody make a sort of snap context dependent judgment about something they’re not failing to be a perfectly rational utility maximizer rather when they’re being a perfectly rational utility maximizer they’re using the machinery that adapted to this like in haidigarian language it’s like coping everyday coping or like uh her drive is language and doing a bunch of things to it that allow it to be more context and purpose independent. Does that make sense? So far what? Yeah. No rationality, basian inference, you know, aim aximatizing. Yeah. Uh kind of like shielding of a of a uh a closed world which doesn’t isn’t actually your relationship to the world and pretending that that’s true because you can pretend that it’s true within certain kinds of domains and then you get a bunch of power out of it. So that’s the flipping the understanding of what rationality even is that is the precondition for making the shift to meta rationality, right? Rationality is is a subset. It fits within. It is a hat you put on in certain contexts. It works exceptionally well when you’re trying to build a rocket to get to the moon. However, if you’re trying to figure out, you know, how to uh resolve an argument with your significant other, you probably don’t want to be breaking out calculus. Maybe not. Maybe not. Yeah, I would I would guess not. I would be impressed to see how somebody would even try to do that. Right. Um Yeah. Ex Exactly. And uh Go ahead. No, no, I was going to finish up. So with that flip in understanding accomplished, that formal rationality ceases to be this context and this this um sort of perfect view from nowhere vantage point. Then you can start to see how the relationship between your formalisms and the world are not themselves uh taken care of by the formalism. that there’s some sort of reflective relation relating of the formalism to the world that rational rationality on its own doesn’t have the tools for. For example, like even just like perception um like being in the world, bumping into it is necessary for ma making sure that your formalisms about reality are maintaining a kind of contact reality. This relates to the the intentionality thing too when because when Smith says that logic lost its relation its differential relationship to the world, it’s because it became formal symbol manipulation absent the sense of what those symbols were supposed to syntax semantics. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Meta rationality is is not just this reflective relating of your formalisms to the world, but taking multiple formulisms formalisms and knowing how to rel reflectively relate them to each other and to to reasonleness, this lower lower thing so to speak, such that you become a kind of wizard of rational systems of various kinds. uh and uh therefore have to be meta to them in the sense of not taking any one to be the perfectly from nowhere view of the world. Yeah. The the the the meta system isn’t really a system itself. It’s really just intuition at the end of the day. Well, Chapman hates this word intuition. He hates intuition. Well, he hates the word intuition. He doesn’t hate the phenomenon of intuition specifically because a lot of like sort of everything gets stuffed in the intuition bucket and he wants to say we could be more precise about what specific because okay like you’re going to go to the psychic down the street and the psychic like I have an intuition about you. they’re not doing meta rationality, you know, like it uh it’s a it is a concrete set of skills in a certain way or like like it depends on certain things. For example, you can’t be metrational without being able to be rational. This is one of the like critiques you can make of post scene is a lot of people just skip actually getting good at something, right? Uh uh or at least getting rid of formal rationality. This is true of me to some like I’m like not like a super technical person. Um but yeah, so so intuition is fine except for that it covers a wide range of things and there are more specific things being claimed about what you’re doing with rationality. It’s just you’re doing something other than mere calculative formalism. Yeah, that that tracks complete. I I do want to tie this back to the film. Okay. In the context of of the film, Jordan Peterson comes up a couple times and he he talks a lot about, you know, these different archetypes, you know, the great mother, the great father, order and chaos. Yeah. But there’s also a Buddhist undertone. And we talked earlier about, you know, a potential tension between symbolic and and narrative thinking versus like direct experience, which seems to kind of be underneath all of that. And so my question is, how do you make sense of these bigger or or more abstract phenomenon that that Peterson’s pointing at in the context of, you know, the free energy principle and and and predictive processing and all these things. What what is he pointing at with with order and chaos and and and you know the archetypes of the great mother and and the great father? What what he what is he talking about? Okay. Okay. So, um there’s how I use them in the film and then there’s like what he’s what he’s up to or like understands he’s up to himself in Maps of Meaning within a sort of broader like Yungian lineage. I would say like mo most most influenced by Jung. He’s trying to give a grammar for the interpretation of what wisdom about how to act was contained in religious anthology is this view that basically like we lost that wisdom and then that produced the nihilistic kind of crises of of the 20th century to some I’m I’m vastly abbreviating the story but that’s the idea. So he’s trying but but but the myths themselves aren’t very easy to interpret to modern years. Uh, and so he’s trying to give you a way of of understanding them. And this great father, great mother, divine son thing is is um almost like more abstract even than archetypes in in a certain sense. I mean, it is archetypal, but it’s like it’s uh that like that narrow an account of it doesn’t show up in any one tradition, but seeing how he unpacks that makes a bunch of different traditions intelligible. So for example uh in Mesopotamian mythology you have Tyiamat who’s this sort of like water chaos goddess uh that you slay to make the world and that’s the instantiation of this great mother archetype in that particular case right um or and then there’s also Marduk who’s the equivalent of the sort of divine son in in that context like the individual that encounters chaotic potential and takes order makes makes the order that makes the world. Okay. So, um it’s it’s a it’s a kind of grammar for the interpretation of myth that makes it intelligible to to modern years in a certain way. Um great mother is associated with the unknown, unexplored territory, chaos, nature. These are sort of like a set of associations. Great father associated with the known explored territory culture and the divine son so-called is the like mediator between those two things that also has a positive and negative. So yesterday each of those has a positive negative v variant. So the great father can be tyrannical but it can also be protective in the way the culture can be both tyrannical and protective. The great mother can be devouring sense of like destructive or it can be creative and generative and it’s sort of both. And then the divine son is the sort of individual mediator which can be like the hero or the like satanic figure. It’s also got this sort of balent character. Um, and his metamthological kind of ethic that he lands on in the book is that uh you want to neither pathologically identify with the great father nor with the great mother in embodying the hero who sits on the border between order and chaos and continually renews the culture by dynamic confrontation with potential. Okay, that’s the that’s the idea. uh that turns out to be a very easy mythological language to graft onto this predictive processing story of you have top down priors, you have bottom-up sensory data. Bottom up sensory data is in some way how the world gets gets in your experience. You can’t just get the bottom up sensory data on its own overwhelm you die or just get underet also. But um uh nor can you have rigid trapped priors that try to shield the world out. Your life necessarily exists in a kind of literal sense. I mean talk about in the film how this is almost constitcutive of life in this dance between these two things and then what sort of ethic emerges from that. In the film tell me if this am I answering your question? Yeah. Okay. So in the film I take the sort of um mythological motif of death and rebirth experiences um that are often mapped onto psychedelic states but also various rights and rituals. In the film, I talk about the mysteries of Elusus, which you know, like every story ever, basically have the structure of being a descent into chaos and then a reemergence, ideally with more robust, more complex order, right? And the purpose of the emergence of chaos is to emerge with a sort of redeemed order in some way. And I talk about uh how in the best case psychedelic trips can be like that where you have this sent into chaos and then you emerge with some less neurotic, more functional, more complex, more integrated ego. The limit case of that that Peterson will discuss is that although you might undergo such a death and rebirth multiple times and in each case of reemerging with a particular ego and not necessarily in a psychedelic trip just imagine like the micro insults of encounter with anomaly that you happen happen all the time that can happen at different scales. The temptation is always to say, “Now I’ve figured it out. Now I am the understanding that will last forever and that will is like permanently enduring.” And that doesn’t work because you’re a finite thing in relationship to the infinite. And it will you will never arrive at understanding that accomplishes that in a final way. Okay. Um so if say say you’ve got some order here and some order here and you have a descent into chaos that gets you this higher order. If this this this already collapsed, right? Went led to your descent into chaos. This can collapse too. No matter how high up the chain you get, then what’s the ethic that you should try to embody? And Peterson would say it’s the ongoing willingness to die and be reborn uh in the service of more and more good and habitable order and so right. So, it’s this kind of posture of voluntary self-sacrifice, voluntary confrontation with the unknown, not merely like letting yourself be devoured by the great mother, but like voluntarily encountering potential, allowing yourself to be kind of micro unmade or macro unmade to whatever extent is necessary in relationship to it so as to continually revivify the order of your culture and of your own mind. Okay. To go back all the way to your question about like how what does all this have to do with meditation? I think there’s a non-arbitrary similarity between that and the uh uh Buddhist injunction to get off the wheel of death and rebirth. Um because Buddhists will notice that you have these uh in in their cosmology there’s sort of the karmic experience of continually dying and being reborn and maybe you have a better rebirth sometime you have a a worse rebirth another time but uh at the end of the day to the extent that you have not awakened you’re bound to the wheel and therefore hostage to the cycle of samsara that could lead you to be in worse or better rebirth or whatever but it doesn’t really matter. sort of cyclical in their picture. It’s not so much of a like historical progress narrative. Uh an awakening consists in realizing that non-dual awareness is neither born nor does it die. So never comes into in inherent or independent existence. Therefore never takes on this limited finite identity. Therefore is not bound to the wheel of samsara. And I think in many uh in many ways the phenomenology of that is parallel to this posture of voluntary self-sacrifice that Peterson talks about. Does that make sense? So I want I want to talk about so self-sacrifice I want to draw a thread between self-sacrifice identity and then like scale-free hierarchies. Okay, skillfree hierarchies there seems to be like a fractal organizational structure within the mind but it goes all the way down to you know perhaps subm modules within the minds and even above if you want to get kind of woo with like superorganisms and cultures that we form a part of right how does birth and death and rebirth and all that how does that how’s that consistent with this idea that we form these agents that are in this nested structure how is it a stable structure if each you know link in this chain link fence is constantly being disintegrated and and reborn. How do you have any sort of stability in that context? Okay. So to to step back a little bit to like in what way do I use the skillfree hierarchy idea in the film and then I think I’ll get to your your question. So Robin Card Harris who’s like sort of the foremost psychedelic neuroscientist certainly one of the most foremost psychedelic neuroscientists whom I interview in the film has this thing called the entropic brain hypothesis which essentially consists in the observation that if you measure the entropy or unpredictability of neural signals it will correlate to the richness of content of conscious experience when you ask people what their experience is like. And this is based in part on the the observation that if somebody takes psychedelics and you measure what their brain is like, it becomes more entropic uh more unpredictable neural signals and they will say, “Holy [ __ ] my experience is totally crazy.” Right? So like not that not that wild an idea that like these two things would go together in some way. There’s this idea of criticality. Criticality is an idea that comes out of physics and complexity science and other places. Um and it’s about um this condition that systems of all sorts will uh transiently inhabit when they’re undergoing like a kind of phase transition. So an analogy that’s often given is imagine you’re dropping single grains of sand into a sand pile and it builds and builds and builds and for the longest time the sand pile is sort of getting just just getting taller and at a certain point the sort of top heaviness of it will cause it to have a an avalanche kind of cascade and the sand pile will change its form but it’s still kind of a sand pile, right? So it’s you could say in the relevant language here it’s sensitive to perturbations the grains grains of sand that you’re dropping while also being um uh maintaining its form. And criticality is this sort of optimal balance between being sensitive to perturbations from the outside and maintaining your form such that you can imagine two extremes of you you perturb something and it just ceases to be what it is or you you’re rigid and you’re not getting any feedback from the world. It’s thought that a lot of living systems inhabit something like this critical point for reasons we’ve been discussing which is they need to model their environments. They need to be in dynamic interchange with their environments, but they can’t simply enter into thermodynamic equilibrium with their environments where they just become soup. Right? So there’s this dance that they have to do of harvesting or taking in some of the entropy in the world, assimilating it into a model and then and then continuing to interact with the world without losing in a relative sense their their form. one uh criticality is considered sort of optimal for information processing and one of the reasons why is that uh when brains get closer to the critical point they exhibit scale-free hierarchies or fractal hierarchies. So scale free just means it it the same sort of pattern or the same rule of organization appears at multiple different scales and these are very good for information passing. If you think about a sort of like like the typical fractal image of the sort of tree or something like that, if you want information from down here to be able to reach up here, um then what you want is for like if it can get resolved down here, it should, but there’s a way that it could continually get passed up the chain if it needed to to make it to the topmost thing. So like it would be bad if every micro perturbation could disrupt your deepest model, right? But it would be bad also if there was no way for things to get beyond a certain level. So you see what I mean? Like there’s this sort of like um there’s like an opponent processing. There’s like there’s like an information processing advantage where you want to resolve things at the lowest level that you can but you want it to be possible to resolve at the highest level you need to if that’s necessary otherwise you become out of touch with in some way. So there’s a deep relationship between this like efficiency of information processing thing and this structure of of scalefree hierarchy. and they it emerges at the critical point. Robin argues uh Robin Carard Harris that um the ordinary waking consciousness of modern humans is slightly subcritical and that psychedelic states bring you closer to criticality which is like awfully close to this like being on the border between order and chaos in a in a metaphorical way that that Peterson is talking about. That’s part of the way I use it in the film. But another way I use it specifically related to this fractal idea is that um another of Robin’s papers about the function of psychedelics is called reebus and the anarctic brain anarctic like anarchy because they have the effect of collapsing these sort of hierarchies. Um, so if if you know the the overly subcritical ego is uh you know like information from the world can’t reach your deepest models and you’re sort of cut off then the psychedelic condition is everything is connected to everything else and it’s it’s sort of structuralist and anarchctic but at least there’s communication happening. It’s like a flood. You know the walls are being broken down but it’s also not very uh structured in a functional way. And that’s true in the mind and it’s true of the culture in which for example in the 1960s psychedelics came into vogue that it had this effect of on on the culture. So there’s this analogy between internal psychological hierarchy and political hierarchy where you can literally see you have a bunch of people in a kind of rigid 1950s culture psychedelics and then you uh uh the political consequences unfold. Plato was right. Well, okay. So So tell tell me why you think that. Well, you one of the things that that that’s interesting about Plato is it’s very hermetic in this like you know as above so below as you know as within so without. He he I’m not a Plato scholar so I’m sure someone’s going to get mad watching this but he basically tries to argue for what justice is by he starts within the soul and he he talks about the state and these finds some sort of a correspondence between like a well ststructured soul and a well structured society. So it’s like there is this like fractal correspondence between how the brain is structured and how the external world is structured. I think I think that’s totally right. I think I think uh no notes. Uh the one interesting thing just to relate it to this death and rebirth thing that we’re talking about um there’s a great diagram in in maps of meaning that I sort of had in mind when structuring the film which is that the sort of individual heroic explorer may undergo this descent into chaos and then they bring the boon you know in like hero’s journey language back to the culture but then they’re not always received well by the culture because they’re contaminated by this confrontation with the unknown. And so the presence of such a person might precipitate a descent into chaos on the part of the culture from which it has to then emerge. Oh wow. So there’s this sort of like role by which individuals renew the culture, but there might be an intermediate step of the culture itself becoming chaotic. And like you have some like a figure like a Timothy Liry who I don’t think like was as responsible a hero you could say as he as he might have been. But like the FBI like you know like he got arrested like he was he was a a vastly destabilizing force on the culture that he inhabited partly because he had had this encounter in his own mind and and you know like I mean this this kind of thing that’s going on in the Christ story for example is like like how does a culture treat a figure who’s bringing this kind of not not necessarily well right but it might take a long time for them to assimilate the insight that the the hero contaminate ated by conflict with the unknown or contact with the unknown rings. Hey Jake, where can we find the the movie? Uh it’ll be out on April 20th. Uh you can follow me on Twitter uh or go to my YouTube channel, Frame Problems, or to Waking Up’s YouTube channel. It’ll be in all those places. Uh and and Waking Up will send stuff out about it, but you can find online in eight days. Awesome. I’ll I’ll throw the links all in the description. Thank you so much. Thank you, man. I appreciate it.