The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Alexander Bard. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: It’s that time again where I ask our listeners to give us a five star rating on your podcast app when you’re done listening today. The way the podcast ecosystems work is that highly-rated podcasts get more visibility, which means more listeners, which means we can continue to attract the great guests that we have on the show. Please give us a five star rating when you’re done listening today. Even better, if you have just a minute, you can write a very short review. Thanks.
This is part two of my conversation with Alexander Bard based on his book Process and Event, which he co-authored with Jan Söderqvist. Repeating from part one, Alexander is an author, lecturer, artist, songwriter, music producer, TV personality, religious and political activist, and one of the founders of the Synthiest Religious movement and has appeared widely in YouTube videos, podcasts, and such. If you can dig up some of his old musical performances, they’re hilarious.
Alexander: I was just going to say that even if you hate me, you still love Jim. Give this show a five star rating just because of Jim.
Jim: Thank you, Alexander. As always, the things we talk about, there’ll be links on the episode page at jimruttshow.com and of course links to the book.
All right. I’m not going to try to compress part one. This book is very dense and, I’d say, damn close to incompressible. I’d suggest if you want to figure out what came before, if you haven’t listened to part one, please listen to part one. Now let’s get down to it. eventological monotheism versus nomadological econology.
Alexander: What we’re doing here is we’re trying to track religious convictions, but what we’re really looking at is whether we’re convinced about a monist or dualist worldview. Fundamentally, I’m an accidental monist, meaning that everything in the universe relates to everything else, more or less. A lot less, I would say. My monism is not that important because … I think you’d agree with me, Jim, because I’ve seen the same thing in your work. You constantly emphasize the fact that when you start looking at the bigger picture of metaphysics, you realize that in cosmology, things that are far apart have hardly any effect on each other at all.
Even if we know gravity exists, it’s so dismal, it’s so small, its effect is so limited. When we talk about emergence vectors, which both you and I do, then we are also talking about that worlds take off on their own and should look at and be studied separately from other things. The point here, though, is to stress that the world is not dualist, because the problem with thinking and philosophy is that dualism ever since Plato has been a very popular idea.
Jim: Yeah. For our audience, let’s define dualism versus monism.
Alexander: Dualism is the idea fundamentally that in you, body and soul are separated. For example, if you believe in the afterlife, which Jim and I don’t. You believe you’re going to go else and live somewhere else when you die, but we just see a corpse. You’re dead, you’re over, you’re done. If you believe that your soul takes off somewhere else, that’s a dualistic worldview because you think the soul and the body are separate. You probably also think the body’s a kind of a prison for the soul, which was Plato’s idea. It’s inherited in Islamic Christianity from Plato. That’s deeply problematic because it’s frankly untrue. What I’m saying is that we live in a monastic worldview. The question then is that, so how did monism and dualism develop as different thought systems and why are they incompatible with each other?
The basic argument is that, out of the journey from polytheism … or as we call it iconology. Polytheism really is just the worship of different icons or different archetypes, and you have lots of different gods, because there are lots of different people and your society starts to make a lot of sense. If you’re going to have road models or heroes or anything like that, icons for people to look up to, we basically construct a lot of narratives about, well, this is a guy who’s a lot like you. He was heroic. He lived in the past and he’s a good role model for you. It makes sense in storytelling, we do a lot of iconology. Instead of calling it religion or calling it polytheism, we’re just saying it’s iconology.
Now the question is where does monotheism step up? What does that come out of the picture? You can be a monist and an iconologist. Hinduism, is perfect example, but when you take monism to the world of religion, you want to get rid of all the different gods. It’s the beginning of the journey towards atheism, as we would call it today. It was really to get rid of all the gods and say, well, they’re icons, they’re role models, they lived and they died. We can call them sainted life, but they’re not gods. You reduce the divine into one single principle. What’s interesting with that journey is that journey is also a journey from religion towards philosophy. With the Persians, they emphasize that. Zoroastrianism emphasizes that it’s monist, monophistic meaning that the only god that exists to be really serious about, honest about is time. Time is a god in the sense that we all have to submit to time. We’re all going to die one day and that’s the only god that exists in that kind of worldview.
Then you have other forms of monotheism like Islam and Christianity that come later and they go with dualism, and this will be called event without the process. If you stay with both the process and the event, you will be convinced eventually that the world is monist, everything is relating to everything else. It’s monotheistic in the sense that you can only have one highest principle. Unless you have a hierarchy, you can have only one highest principle. It can be yourself, if you want to; then it’s called individualism. That conviction is still a process and event; you can be the event, the world is still a process. If you try to eliminate the process and go with only the eventology, you get eventually eventological monotheism. That’s exactly what Islam and Christianity are. The problem then this is that the process has to return some way hidden and it returns as substance dualism.
It’s exactly what substance dualism returns and it plagued Western culture, Christianity and Islam dominated entirely, until Spinoza came along radically in the 17th century. He was a Jewish mystic and he basically formulated an idea, well, everything relates to everything else in the universe and anything else is dead wrong. He became the first leading western thinker who was a monist. Both Hegel and Nietzsche later, they honor Spinoza intensely by saying Spinoza introduced monism to western thinking. Then later Leibniz and Jung came along and made the monism start moving around and opened up for contemporary science. Then Hegel and Nietzsche came along and invented dialectics and invented affirmative value philosophy in the 19th century. All of that entire western philosophical revolution, which you called Enlightenment, was a response to Christianity and it’s fundamentally monist, whereas Christianity was dualist.
Jim: Yes. Spinoza is a very interesting pivotal character prior to the Enlightenment. People like Einstein as another person who references the god of Spinoza, which is essentially nature. Unfortunately, and this is something I think we both agree about, one of the things that some people extrapolate from Spinoza and other kinds of nature gods, is more relationality at long range than actually exists. One of your key fundamental points is that the universe is temporal and relational. I think we agree, if not correct me, that we believe that the relationality is graded. The words I tend to use is by causality, right? There are areas of the universe which are causally connected via explicit forces and interactions. Even if we have ones that reach across the universe like gravity, they’re exceedingly weak and they move very, very slowly. The things that we think of as emergence that are really meaningful, like life, the economy, even weather, are essentially local forms of interaction. It’s an unfortunate detractor for humans towards things like the cosmic consciousness and things like that.
Alexander: Exactly. This is the problem with Spinoza. In Spinoza, he still believes in god very firmly. Maybe he had no choice, he had to say that, this was the 17th century. For him, creator and creation are one. That’s at least a much better intellectual position than separating creator and creation, which Islam and Christianity do. Spinoza was a heretic. He was a heretic even to Judaism at the time, and he was certainly a heretic to Christianity and Islam. He was actually intensely popular with the other Enlightenment thinkers, Leibniz, Hume, everybody were friends with Spinoza. They took this genius. He came out of Holland, his family came from Portugal. They escaped from Portugal to Holland. They were Jewish family in Holland, and he was a heretic to everybody, but he was intensely popular among other philosophers. Many people often called Spinoza, the Messiah among the philosophers in a way, which he deservedly could be called.
The problem here is that he faces such an emphasis on the divine, and this is what I call the vulgar interpretation of Spinoza, is to say that god is intensely everywhere. If the universe was this box of things where everything had a dramatic effect on everything else, well that’s not how the world works, and that’s not how the different emergence vectors are relate to one another. They might have the same origin, sure. Emergences come out of other emergences, so an emergence vector produces another emergence, which has a vector, but eventually the emergence vectors drifts off from one another so intensely that we have to start talking about a world of worlds rather than one world.
In our philosophy, it’s only metaphysically we can say that there’s a world, because we as human beings fantasize about a substance versus our own subjectivity. I’m here in the world, the world is different from me, because … then the first dichotomy is itself a world. The world we invent that way is all the metaphysically world. If you look at physics or biology or anything else, they’re just worlds. These worlds are what we call emergence vectors.
Jim: You mentioned that I now use emergence vectors, and I’ll say I picked it up from you, but not until I read this book. I think I had the idea, but I didn’t have the term. I’m going to, for the audience, draw a picture that makes this picture, I think, a little bit more clear. Let’s say the universe had an origin event sometime around 13.5 billion years ago, whether it was a big bang or whether it was something else, I think it’s still unclear. Something happened where entropy was way lower and density was way higher, and then it started expanding. You can think of that as the trunk of the emergence vector and a whole series of things. A book I highly recommend on this history of emergence is Harold Morowitz’s book on emergence. He lays out 28 emergences that have happened over 13 and a half billion years.
The key thing is that almost all of them have many, many, many branches, not just one. For instance, one of the earlier … not the earliest, but an earlier branch was the universe was gravitationally pulled together into groups of what we now call galaxies. At that point, it was just gas. They were gravitationally bound to each other and are still bound to each other today. There’s many of those, at least a billion, probably more than. Then the same thing happened with galaxies, and each one of those is a separate branch. Think of a trunk with a branch that has branches, and then the branches have stars, which are another branch. 100 billion galaxies, 100 billion stars per galaxy, two or three planets per star. We get this extraordinarily bushy tree of emergences. That’s, I think, what Alexander means when he says emergence vector. At least that’s what it means to me and I’ve started using it that way.
Alexander: It makes perfect sense. Here’s the thing, then you can also describe yourself as an emergence. You were born, you were an embryo, a sperm hit an egg … half a million, at least, sperms were hitting on the egg. Only one succeeded; the other died. Death is everywhere. Death is so prevalent, it’s incredible. When an emergence happens, the sperm manages to get into the egg, it becomes an embryo and there’s no miscarriage and suddenly a child is born nine months later. It happened to be you or some other. You were a construct of the body that was born. That body has to relate to a mother, and it has to understand that mother and child are different. Well, the first mother has to understand they’re different, which is hardly the case. His mother understands mother and child are different. There comes a moment as Jacques Lacan says, in the World of Psychoanalysis, when suddenly something leaves the room and something is left in the room, what left the room was apparently mother and whatever is still in the room, is a subject.
It’s like this shocking experience of being an eye for the first time. That’s an emergence. What’s great with emergence vector theory is that we can both describe ourselves and our minds and consciousness, and we can start cultures from a birthdate. We can say that something is born, it will live for quite a while. We can live for billions of years, but finally one day probably will dissolve and die. During that period, before it dissolves and dies, it will change, meaning it will be reborn and re-die and reborn and re-die constantly. When we look at ourselves, that’s exactly the same thing. When I think about what I might want to do tomorrow, I’m actually thinking of myself as a field of possibilities. I’m only going to do that one thing at 1:22 P.M. tomorrow, as I will do at that moment.
That means all the other things in the fields are dead and I become like a particle. I become like this momentum of a subject that happens at a specific point in time, and then I can’t change that afterwards. History then becomes all these different points in time where I was located and what I thought and what I felt and what I was engaged with at that time. All the other possibilities are gone. In this way, the world shrinks on us all the time into every moment. This is how both physics and biology and consciousness operate. What’s great about the theory is that we can then have a transcendental theory on emergentism that makes sense. If you take the two extremes, your own sub-activity, your own birth, and the birth of the universe as a physical phenomenon. If you can have a theory that actually is applicable on both of them, you’ve got a really good theory of metaphysics to start from.
Jim: All right. Well, let’s move into the next point you make in this chapter where you point out that you’ve previously created a religion, quote/unquote, called Synthetism. Talk a little bit about your concepts of this new religion. I’d love to hear why you decide to call it a religion. This is something you and I argue about online fairly often. It does not strike me as a religion at all.
Alexander: Now, I know you hate religion, but you know what? I hated the religion, too. Then I decided to steal the word and own it.
Jim: I’ve seen that happen before. There’s two things I’d like you to combine here on this section. One is tell us about syntheism and also how it relates to your four dimensions of time and the syntheological quadrants.
Alexander: Yeah. Okay. The pointer is that theology is interesting, but I just thought that any concept of god was becoming ridiculous, because we discovered that the universe doesn’t need a god. If there’s a god, that is the universe itself and it’s a god that doesn’t care about us. I believe that time and god are the same thing, essentially, because time is the most primary thing I could ever think of and I can’t think outside of time, so I’m submitted to time and I will die one day. That’s submitting to an honest god. I don’t think time cares about me, though. I think other human beings might care about me and I think I have to care about myself, and that’s my religious conviction. Now, the funny thing is that theology is still interesting, because if you dream about the future … if you dream about creating an amazing technology, because there’s something that I think Jim Rutt would probably love, which is conquering outer space. Probably something Jim Rutt has been thrilled about since he was a kid.
Jim: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Alexander: Okay. That’s a religious vision. Why is it a religious vision? You have no other name to put on what would conquer outer space than to put the word god on it and you have the right to. If you decide that god is not needed to create the world, and it’s not an old chap sitting on a cloud being bored with human beings all the time, and it’s not a Jesus who likes your shit on Facebook when nobody else likes it. None of that bullshit. Get rid of all that bullshit. If you do that and you want to reconquer theology and theological departments have resources to … we should be watchful for that. Those are resources we could use and do a better job what theologists do. That the right thing to do is just to turn the whole thing around. Now, a French philosopher named Quentin Meillassoux, a friend of mine, wrote a book called Après la Finitude in 2006 where he just argued that god is really the only word we have for the ultimate dream.
You’re putting the ultimate dream out there. What will my grandchildren even dream about? Could I even dream today what my grandchildren would dream about in two generations? Where would we go then? With that direction to where you’d go is you put a point somewhere high up there into the future and it’s like you throw this cable out there and then you pull yourself into it. We call that [inaudible 00:16:50]. That is necessary for human beings to have visions. Every man out there is turned on by those ideas, because it gives us direction to what we can, for example, develop technologies. Just at the negative direction sense that we have to save the planet, we have to lock up the bomb. Those are also conditions we have to meet and we have to do those things, those emissions. What if we have more an imaginative mission of where we could go, say conquering other planets and living other places.
Now, if we allow ourselves to dream, and we should, then we could put the word god on that. You put the word god on that, that means we are literally creating god. Hey, wait a second. What have we done over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years that we call civilization? Well, we have hardly changed. We’re genetically about the same as we were 8,000 years ago. What has changed is our technological environment. We have invented technologies. The great thing about inventing technologies, once we’ve invented them, we can recreate them very easily and very cheaply, and they go down towards lower costs.
If we describe human beings now as not as homo sapiens any longer, but as homo technologicals, and what human beings fundamentally do is invent new technologies, then we could allow ourselves to say, well, what if technology would be described theologically? That’d be a good theology for us today, because then we get a direction towards the technological development. Then we’d just say, well, it appears that the technologies we’ve developed over the last 5,000 to 10,000 years point to one direction. They point towards one day creating god and that’s what we call syntheology and syntheism.
Jim: Have you ever read the very fun science fiction story called The Last Question by Isaac Asimov? It’s, I don’t know, eight or nine pages long. I actually read it to my high school girlfriend over the phone when people did silly things like that. If you haven’t read it, I’d highly recommend it.
Alexander: Yeah, I do. You were earlier on Asimov than I was. I can tell you what, there’s not a single philosopher out there hasn’t read Isaac Asimov, especially when we fantasize about the future, through Futurology. Asimov is a must-read.
Jim: Yeah. I particularly point people to the last question. I’m not going to give away the punchline, but it’s highly tied into this discussion. Talk a little bit about how your syntheological quadrants interact with your four dimensions of time. We very briefly defined your four dimensions of time. We talked about them in more depth in the last episode.
If people want to learn more, make sure you listen to the last episode.
Alexander: Well, the quadrant in this case used to be triad. What we’ve done by inventing syntheology, with Quentin Meillassoux, who I should honor him for that, is invented the fourth category of metaphysics because metaphysics basically in theology dealt with nothingness or negation, which we call atheos, the god who exists through his non-existence. You could always be an atheo-ist rather than an atheist. You can always say, but I believe in a god who does not exist. It’s a perfectly intellectual position to take. This is the fun thing with philosophy. Hegel was definitely an atheo-ist. He was definitely interested in negation as principle and built his entire dialectical method on that principle.
You can also then have Spinoza’s god, which is basically all of the universe. Everything relates to everything else. There’s no creator or god outside of this. The only applicable god we could have is the universe itself. Everything is god and everything is within god. That’s called pantheos and that position is called pantheism. Then you have a third position, and that’s the position that says that, well, it’s not really whether something exists or does not exist. The fundamental philosophical question should not be, why is there something rather than nothing? It’s rather like Henri Bergson said. No, the interesting question for philosophers is really, why is there so much of everything. Now you and I, we are not that interested in the idea of a world. We think the universe is overrated. We’re far more interested in the differences within this universe, because what’s interesting in the worlds that exist in the universe, we’re not interested in humanity as a concept. We’re interested in humans.
I think every one of 8 billion humans is more interesting than humanity, as a whole. I think wholes are overrated. The position to go against that whole is important, which is Spinoza’s position, is to go and stay with Nietzsche. With Nietzsche comes the idea that difference is much more interesting than unity. The one is overrated from Plato all the way up to Spinoza, the one, as a concept. Like, everything belongs to the one or as part of the one is overrated. Fundamentally and psychoanalytically, I would say that the obsession with the one is usually the obsession with our mother and her womb. By the time we grow up, we should get away from that womb and love our liberty and our freedom. Love the fact we no longer tied and stuck inside a womb, even if it was nice. Not wanting to return to it and to live as free agents in the world and affect the world through our actions and our thoughts.
That idea is Nietzsche; that’s affirmation Nietzsche. Nietzsche is really interested in difference. The question we had was that, but what is really the proper word, metaphysically, for difference, if we have atheos and we have pantheos already. Then we came up with the idea, why don’t we give that third divinity or that third concept, the word enthios, which is the god within. Exactly what I look inside myself, I see nothing of plurality. I see that my mind makes up the idea that I have a self that connects all these different notes to one another. When I look at my brain and when I look at my body, when I look at what I do in my life, there are so many different things going on simultaneously that it’s really absurd to say that this is one thing. It’s only by cultural habits that we called ourselves, you and I, and talk about human beings as soul entities. When in reality, we change so rapidly all the time that ourselves are not the same.
You’re obviously not the same person you were a year ago. You’re only said you’re the same person due to conventions like your passport or whatever. In reality, you’re totally different from what you were a year ago. The fact that we changed all the time means that there’s no better place to look for difference than inside ourselves. There’s no more complexity in the universe than the world, than the human brain. We just said, okay, the enthios, the god within, is a good Greek term for difference. Now you have negation, you have wholeness, and you have difference. Classical metaphysics deals with these three categories. Classical theology deals with these three categories. Metaphysical theology, we’ve dealt with that.
Now, when you say let’s add a fourth one, we can, as human beings co-create the world with nature. We call that culture. Since we are making culture all the time and that culture is becoming more and more advanced and actually more and more interesting, then we can start celebrating the fact that we’re homo technologicals and celebrating the fact that we create amazing technologies and just refer to that as a fourth category. A category to come, which is syntheos.
Suddenly you have atheos and you have pantheos, and you have entheos, and you have syntheos, and you have a much more complete metaphysics than classical metaphysics that suits us much, much better. Of course, once you discover this is a quadrant, then, as we talked about in the first episode, we talked about time as being four different things. Time is hyper time and space-time, when we talk to natural sciences. Then when we talk to our inner worlds as human beings, we talk about circular time, linear time. You can, of course, then play around with these four theological concepts and you can play around with the four categories of time you discovered that they suit each other pretty well.
There, we have a much more complete understanding of metaphysics, which is the work we’ve done, because we felt that metaphysics without leaving room for technology and technology’s potential, metaphysics was incomplete.
Jim: I would also point out that Alexander is using metaphysics in his own way, which includes a bunch of things I would not use in metaphysics, such as cultural evolution and language and things of that sort. I use metaphysics more like Aristotle or Kant might use it, which are things that we don’t know the real answer to, but we make some assumptions about that are beyond what we actually know.
Alexander: That’s true. That’s the classical understanding of the word metaphysics. Again, like the word god, I’m stealing it here and I think the fact that we have two different interpretations is a good thing. Like any theological discussion, a good thing too. Metaphysics is the only word we have that connects all the different philosophical disciplines. Now, what we’re doing though in our work is that we’re also adding to metaphysics the term narratology, that we discussed the first episode. We think we can make it a given that human beings who create philosophy for other human beings, it’s a completely human endeavor to create philosophy. Because we’re storytellers and storytelling is fundamental to us, we can assume that metaphysics itself is narratological. We could also say that metaphysics, it can be vaguely out there as anything that connects ontology, epistemology, and ethics and whatever we do philosophy into one thing. We have a philosophical discipline that we call it metaphysics. That’s the way I use the term metaphysics, but applied metaphysics in our work becomes narratology.
Jim: Great. Now let’s move on to the next section, which has a number of interesting terms, which at first gives you a giggle, but then once you read it, you say, okay, he’s putting some real meat on him. That is the phallus, the two-headed phallus. What the hell is a two-headed phallus? It looks like one in the pink and two in the stink, one of those kinds of things.
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. Your freak porn penis.
Jim: Exactly. You’ve got libido mortido and the bard absolute. This is really quite an interesting section talking about basically the idea of the two-headed phallus, the dialectics of will to transcendence and will to intelligence. Let’s hear about all that.
Alexander: Well, the moment we start going towards truth, in our search for truth … so we’re moving from religion to philosophy to speak, Jim Rutt here. The moment we start doing that, the search for oneness becomes an obsession. Here’s the point. The problem with oneness itself is that oneness will ultimately lead to tyranny. It will lead to one dogmatic conviction. It will lead to one leader. Historically, that has always been a massive tragedy. Somebody must have figured this out … it turns out the Persians figured this out already during the Bronze Age. Well, actually the Indians did too, since probably they’re Indo-Iranian origin. The Indo-Iranians, some 4,000 years ago, figured out that we can’t have one leader, because again, one leader becomes an idiot, because he won’t listen to anybody. He becomes Sheik Hasina from Bangladesh yesterday was fired by her population because she didn’t visit to anybody longer to get tired of.
The patient threw out. She was a tyrant. To get rid of tyrants, the problem is, can you immunize the system against tyranny before the tyrant shows this ugly face? Then they came up with the idea that, yes, you can, because leadership must be at least two and responsible two a third. This is the brilliance of power-sharing. Power-sharing is not an American innovation. It’s not even a French innovation. It wasn’t the French who taught Americans. Certainly Freemasons were involved in it. Actually the idea of power-sharing or splitting power as a design from the very beginning is a Persian-Indian idea. What the Persians did was that they said, let’s split the phallus in two, meaning that least two different types of leaders were looking at here and there must never be the same person. This is laid out very firmly in Zoroastrianism. It’s laid out very firmly in Brahmanism in India. This is an integral part of deep …
Alexander: … is laid a very firmly in Brahmanism in India. So this is an integral part of deep Easter spirituality. Split the male leadership in two, and then you can have one leader for the women because that’s who you’re responsible to anyway. So you’ve got a matriarch on the feminine side and you get two male leaders and they’re the priest and the chief as archetypes. Who’s the priest? The priest is the smartest, wisest guy in the room, usually older, been around, seen things, not driven by personal motivation longer, really there to serve. But he can take you down in two seconds when you go off and you start being a lunatic, right? He will ground you instantly. He’s smart about us and he’s got a tough psyche. So he’s a master of the mind and he’s wise and he’s smart. That’s the priest.
The other character is the chief. He’s just strong, muscles and he wants to get out there, and he leads warriors and he leads hunters. So because we have to protect and provide for the women, ultimately we have to report to the matriarch. The reporting to the matriarch has to be done by the chief. Now this structure, the two-headed phallus, where the matriarch is complementary, representing the people, is repeated constantly in anthropology and religion. For example, in the original version of the Exodus out of Egypt, there was Moses, he was considered an Egyptian prince and he led his chosen people who were probably just, they were religious sect to deviated from the norm in Egypt and decided to leave and go somewhere else and settle somewhere else like the pilgrims that crossed the Atlantic to go to America. Same thing, right?
But afterwards, when the whole thing was rewritten, influenced by Persian philosophy, which is after Babylon at the building of the second temple, suddenly Moses was replaced with three siblings. It was Moses, Aaron and Miriam. And Miriam is older than her two brothers, clearly a matriarch. And Moses takes the role of the priest, the law, he sees the burning bush, he goes back with the Ten Commandments and he dies before they enter the promised land, typically priestly characteristics. And then instead, Aaron, the other guy who was a junior priest, became the chief. He led the Hebrews into the promised land and he won the territory, etc.
So you have these characters that return constant religion anthropology, and this is really important today, we’re going towards AI-designed political system, things like that, that you are working with, for example, game B communities is very, very important to stress that in the world of religion anthropology, there’s been a strong emphasis for thousands of years on how to avoid tyranny. And by splitting these two, like having the smartest guy in the room, the strongest guy in the be two separate guys who must never be the same person because whoever aspires to be both the smartest and the strongest at the same time, very unlikely, is the tyrant.
And is there any possibility of having a benevolent tyrant at any given time in history? Well, of course the Persians or later the Jews thought of that. And in Persian thinking, that’s called the Saoshyant later inherited by the Jews called the Moshiach. It is possible at the end of an empire or whatever, an end of a structure when it’s falling apart, to have a savior steps in who is a priest, who’s also chief and who can temporarily fix things and then step out of the picture.
Jim: Yeah, someone like Marcus Aurelius in the mid-Roman Empire. Right?
Alexander: Exactly. Exactly.
Jim: He consolidated, but then it fell apart after him again. Right?
Alexander: Exactly. So we are transcendental emergentists, we are allowed to narrative logic and write history to suit what we’re trying to understand here. Marcus Aurelius is perfect social character. Now we look back on history, he was also a Stoic philosopher, he was learned and he had the characteristic of both the priest to the chief. And he was a good guy, right? So it’s possible, but the vast majority of tyrants are more like Xi Jinping in China or whatever the Kims are called in North Korea or whatever. The vast majority of tyrants are just terrible. They’re bad views, they’re tragic. So we want to avoid that.
And religions that state you must never unite these two are therefore a good starting point. And of course the US Constitution today is the same thing. You separate the President, you separate the Congress, you separate them from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is there for a feminine construction. It’s like an old [inaudible 00:32:02] Tchaikovsky says, well, you have the law that you wrote and you decide you’ve got to follow the law and I hold you responsible for it. And if you don’t follow the laws you written, then I’ll go after you. That’s Supreme Court. The president of course in America takes on the chiefly role, strongest guy in the room. And of course the Congress is at least supposed to be the smartest guy in the room because they dictate the law.
Jim: That seemed to be a problem of Montesquieu’s three parts is the legislature has very seldom been the smartest guy in the room. Right?
Alexander: But you know what? The US Constitution has held up a lot better than the other alternatives the last 200 years. That’s why I love America. And I insist when Americans are bitching about the politicians and said, “Well, it’s not like anybody else can come up with something better, stay with it.” And of course, you can then go to something we all know about, which is like the three fundamental entities in Hinduism is Shiva, Vishnu and Shakti. And here’s the fun thing about those characters that we can add here is that Shiva clearly takes on the chiefly role and Vishnu takes on the priestly role and the matriarch is Shakti. But the great thing about Hinduism is that Shakti can flip in two seconds and be Kali. So Kali and Shakti are like the dark and the light side of the feminine, which I think is genius among the Hindus because I think women are like that to be honest.
And that’s exciting about and that’s why they’re sexy because they can flip and go dark in an instant. But men cannot do that because they have to lead. And that’s the thing. Why is there two men and one woman? Because the men have to lead. And it’s a leadership where tyranny must be avoided. You can have a tyrant at the back end of a neurological movement. A moving tribe can have Miriam alone at the end, or Shakti alone at the end, or Kali for that matter. You can have one woman at the end because she’s got to be the end station. Like if you walk behind her, you’re dead, if you walk before, you’re still alive. But the leadership must split. And this is the concept of the two-headed phallus. This was practiced by [inaudible 00:33:53] himself. He was himself a priest. He had a king called Vishtaspa, and they created the first Persian Empire 1700 before Christ, the first empire known on the planet by simply applying the two-headed phallus onto the rule of that empire.
Jim: I love it. I’m going to give you an idea that floated around the early game B days. It has never actually gotten fixed, but it continues to float, which is in a big polity like a nation state, but maybe a smaller polity as well, there ought to be something called the Congress of Grandmothers that the only people allowed to vote for the members of the Congress are grandmothers. And the only people allowed to be members of the Congress are grandmothers. And the Congress of Grandmothers would have only two powers. One is to declare war. Only the Congress of Grandmothers could declare war. And the second is only the Congress of Grandmothers could authorize deficit financing for the government for one year.
Because think about grandmothers in many ways are the ones who are passed their own game but are concerned about the future of the lineages and the civilization. And so those two questions, war or not war, and usually the answer is not war, but sometimes it has to be war. And then the other thing is, are we going to steal money from the future to spend today on our own indulgences struck us as natural things to be dealt with only by the Congress of Grandmothers? I’d love to know what you think about that idea.
Alexander: Have you checked in with the Congress of Grandmothers if they like Bitcoin? I bet they do.
Jim: I doubt many of them even understand what it is, but…
Alexander: Oh, no, no, no. Once you explained it to them and they’d get it, they’d love it. I think so. It’s a great idea because there is something about old age and wisdom, which is integral to culture and is very much lacking in today’s society and we have to return to it. Libraries seem to have replaced older people, but libraries are not good enough because they don’t live and old people do live. So the old age and wisdom are there. Now, just to emphasize important this concept is fast in our philosophy, is that two-headed phallus is not a universal concept. Plato hated it. Confucius hated it. I’m deeply critical of Plato’s ideas on politics because he was basically his philosopher king is the tyrant.
Jim: He indeed is the philosopher of totalitarianism.
Alexander: Yeah. And exact and Confucius is the same thing. Confucius is the Chinese Plato. And the problem is even if Confucius was more in line with thinking movement and flux and things like that, he had those elements too with so did Plato. Plato did do dialectics. But if you asked the set down of Plato and Confucius and asked them about political system, they idealized their idea of the tyrant. There had to be only one king at the top because anything else will be inferior to that supreme idea of the tyrant. So what we’re doing in our work by researching and finding the two-headed phallus, understanding why it’s a brilliant idea and reproposing it as fundamental to political design, including game B is you just discovered as well. The great thing about doing that is we’re totally opposed to Plato and Confucius. And today Plato and Confucius are problematic because Plato is the idol of Putin, and Confucius is idol of Xi Jinping. We have the problem returning constantly and anybody today who wants a surveillance police state is too fond of Plato or Confucius.
Jim: And we’ll talk about that in our next session. But before we wrap up this one, let’s talk briefly if either of us are capable of being brief on the concepts of libido and mortido. Now, libido is a term most of us have heard, and in fact you use it the same way I do. Not just about sexual energy, but about other kinds of energy as well. But mortido is a little bit of, I think a less common terms. Give your meanings of both of those and how they fit into your thinking about the two-headed phallus and the interrelationships between the will to transcendence and the will to intelligence.
Alexander: So mortido is just a proper Latin name for the death drive. So libido and mortido are complementary. What we do in our philosophy is that you got to start from the assumption that something comes in existence and hasn’t asked for it. No emergence ever asked for being an emergence. You didn’t ask for being born. I didn’t ask for being born. We’re not really responsible to anybody if we’re honest about it because it didn’t ask for living in the first place. We must assume that death drive is fundamental. We must assume that the first reaction when we’re born and it’s horrible to be born as Jacques Lacan says, the one reason we can’t remember our birth is because it was terrible, it was a trauma. It’s called the great trauma psychoanalysis. So that’s why we can’t remember it. But we are born, nevertheless, we’re here. So the first reaction when you’re born must be an instant, “Oh God, I don’t want this. I want to die.”
And that’s perfectly acceptable as an intellectual position, my first reaction must be I want to go back into the womb and coexist with mother and not be my own separate entity. So there’s a shock to the fact that we’re a separate entity from the mother body and we tried to go back in. And then of course we lured by nature because the first we automatically do and we pre-program to do is start to crawl out of the pussy all the way up to the tit and start sucking the mother tit. And that’s called mamilla in our work, psychoanalysis. So we can separate mamilla from the matrix so we get out of the matrix and suck the mamilla. For the mother that means now child and mother are separated because what’s sucking the mamilla is clearly different entity from herself, okay? But for the child, the sucking of mamilla is back into the womb.
So it takes a few months and a gradual process for the child to figure out that the child and the mother are two different entities. And every time you suck the mamilla, you’re stuck with that non-separation without wholeness. And that’s exactly why alcoholics love to drink all the time because they’re back with their mother’s tit in their mouth.
Jim: Or smoking.
Alexander: Smoking, sucking.
Jim: Suck, suck, suck.
Alexander: Yeah. Suck, suck, suck, suck. When you start sucking things like cigarettes or alcohol, whatever, you’re an abuser. You [inaudible 00:39:35] yourself, what you’re really doing is you dream about the mamilla. And that’s why all these people to talk about the one and unification and oneness and all that, yeah, they’re all too lazy to actually understand they’re separate from the rest of the world and they’re not really confident about themselves. They want to go back into that oneness thing. And nobody does this more than an alcoholic, they’re totally into the oneness thing because they suck mamilla.
So eventually we have to get away from mamilla. And that separation mamilla is that the child itself must move from loving that mamilla to hating it. And that’s the first time in our life I realized that we’re not very cool doing something rather like, oh God, did I do that yesterday? No, I can’t ever have done that. I must separate myself from that. Never ever do it again. It’s called objectification. It’s when we turn an object that we love into an object that we hate, and this is psychoanalysis. So the mamilla must be objectified. And that’s how we learned how to hate things that are no longer good for us that we must separate from. So it’s great for emergence vector theory to think these things too, because once a new emergence occurs, it really has nothing to do with what it came from. It’s irreducible to what it came from. It’s a separate entity altogether.
So you might learn to push yourself away from whatever existed before. Get out that emergence vector, become its own emergence vector, and this is how everything operates in the universe metaphysically. So this is what we wanted to lay out in our work and make that very clear. And you have the matrix, you have mamilla, and then you have the phallus. And the phallus here is nothing but negation. If the matrix is where you came from, your first reaction was the mortido, then you must instantly deny that you want to die. And that denial flips very quickly. It’s usually matriarch. A midwife holds you up, you’re terrified, you’re totally shocked, you’re traumatized like hell, and she looks at you and she smiles with a warm smile and says, “Welcome to the world.” And suddenly the mortido flips into libido, conviction that you want to live.
So this flip from mortido to libido is fundamentally Freud. And that means the mortido lies there unconsciously, underneath all the time giving energy to a libido on top of it. And the trick is that you can’t get through it. Well, you have to be incredibly depressed and suicidal, and then suddenly the mortido becomes obvious to you that you really just want to die and making that one act, your entire libido goes into making that one act, which is called the suicide act. You can kill yourself. So that can happen. You can fall down into the mortido and then becomes suicidal. But the point with life is to live in the denial of the mortido. The mortido is there, the death drive is there, and on top of that is the libido. And the difference between the two is simple.
Mortido is in itself not really wanting to die. It’s more like living your life without life. It’s more like a death life. It’s more like a lifeless life. That’s what mortido is like. So whenever you get depressed, you fall into mortido because you’re just sitting there and even too depressed to even kill yourself. You’re just so depressed that you can’t do anything and that’s mortido. But on top of that, you can have a libido. The libido is basically like I do in the morning. I get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, and I’m just like, Jim Rutt, want to get out of the world, do shit, and have fun things and do things and I’m happy-go-lucky bastard. I’m full of libido. And this is what libido fundamentally is in Latin compared to mortido. So libido is funnily enough, a denial function, but it works and we should embrace it and love the fact that it’s a denial.
And then when you look at the matrix of a mamilla, you can finish off the thing by saying what is then the third element here? Well then the whole thing with the two-headed phallus and the one matrix is reversed because when it comes to sexual organs in our fantasy world, two are on the female body, the matrix [inaudible 00:43:09] only one on the male body and that’s the phallus. So it’s kind of evens up here, as you could tell between men and women. So we have to argue about that. The triad now is reflected and the phallus is then the negation of the other two. So if you have nowhere else to look in the world for something to inspire you because you get out of the matrix, you don’t want to get sucked in and you start hating mamilla and you want to get away from it and you want to eat your own food and you want to stand there and say, “I can walk by myself, I can eat by myself. I want to be my own being.” There’s a libido, full effect. You want to do that.
Where do you look then for God? Where do you look then for inspiration? Where do you look them for direction? You look at the phallus, the phallus out of negation because the phallus is not matrix, it’s not mamilla, it’s something entirely different. And in Freud, this is called the Oedipus or the Electra complex. The Electra complex is basically the girl who wants to have a thing inside of her, but she can’t have it because she’s too tiny, too small. Her mother gets it. She hates her mother for it. The Oedipus complex is basically I want to have what he has over there, but he’s way too big. And mine is so small because I’m only one years old. So I hate him for having that. But I want to have that one day.
And this was called phallic direction. The child wants to be a grown-up, and this is what all the child is about, preparation for being an adult. That’s why kids love playing grown-ups and have little dolls, toys and things around them and play the grown-ups and mimic and mimic and mimic the grown-ups. And they have to mimic the grown-ups for 15 to 20 years before they’re ready to be adults. And that’s what we call the phallic direction. And then you have all three on the map.
Jim: Is it a little problematic from a gender perspective to call that transition towards adulthood phallic when it’s say it also applies to women equally?
Alexander: Here’s the trick. It’s true. And I don’t care whether I’m politically incorrect in my word use or not. This is what psychoanalysis actually does. And to be honest about it, the real discovery in psychoanalysis in the late 20th century was done by woman that was Julia Kristeva who discovered how objectification works because Freud and Lacan and the men out there hadn’t realized, they thought the mother pushed away the child, and she was the one who said as a woman, “No, there’s no way a mother can ever push away a child, will never happen. The child has to get away from the mother herself.” So that was a great discovery in the 1980s when Julia Kristeva wrote the Powers of Horror. So actually men and women, both female and male psychoanalysts, are absolutely convinced this is the right terminology, this is the way we have to look at the world, and it’s really, it’s an equal world. It’s just the men and women have different roles.
So I don’t have a problem with the gender perspective at all. This is what the child fantasized about because sexuality is this weird thing that grownups do. It’s kind of gross, but it seems to be intense and powerful. And that’s why children have fantasized about until they finally one day where they’re 12 years old, discover what it really is and it obsesses them. They have to be ready for that. So the terminology actually is the correct one. I actually think that we should have more yin and yang and more of sexual cosmology in our way of understanding ourselves, rather less. So I’m not a prude American or British guy. I’m much more Scandinavian when it comes to my word use and it comes sexuality.
Jim: All right. Well, I’m glad we got it straight from the fountainhead there. Let’s move on now to another big concept in your book and one that I think pretty important, and that is the Gnostic delusion that is plagued mankind for a long time.
Alexander: Yes. So in the world of philosophy, the Axial Age has been considered a golden age, eight times before Christ, the Hebrews of the Venetians simplified the alphabet, made it more efficient, it was easier to write, and none of that revolution came the golden age, the philosophers who thought a lot and started writing down their ideas. We are basically say the Axial Age, the period with a lot of shit was produced, not necessarily much quality. I personally think the greatest ideas and were philosophy shit is they were developed in the Bronze Age because they were the serious philosophical question of trying to think difference in unity when it comes to larger unit than the [inaudible 00:47:01]. We discussed the [inaudible 00:47:02] in the first episode. This is like this original nomadic tribe you can prove through paleontology really existed. We can also prove through data science that it still exists a pattern in our thinking, we’re therefore Darwinian forms not clicked on as far as we’re talking about. We talk about forms that were developed among human beings, homo sapiens over millions of years, and finally were solidified from 40,000 years ago.
So these Darwinian forms they repeated as a [inaudible 00:47:27]. I think those questions are the interesting ones. I still think keeping peace rather than go to war is the most important philosophical question. I still think that ideas like nation, city, empire, anything bigger than tribe is interesting because tribe comes automatically with human beings. They don’t have a problem with it. And we talked about that first episode, we can refer back to that, but the [inaudible 00:47:49] is there. I think that thinking from the Bronze Age is much more profound and much more important than all the sort of juicy shit that Plato and Confucius, the other guys came up with 500 before Christ or whatever.
Not great work was done, but I think the Axial Age is overrated. The problem was that we produced so much philosophy because we became affluent. Farming started to kick in big time. We had tons of food, kids survived, populations grew in size very quickly, and therefore a lot more culture was produced. And all of Eurasia from Western Europe all the way to Japan, we had this Axial Age period. It’s just that a lot of stuff was produced, but it became more and more self-obsessed. It became more and more naval-gazing, I think philosophy would be interested in society, but philosophy suddenly became more naval-gazers. And what happened was that a lot of shit was being produced and suddenly really terrible ideas came along like Gnosticism. And the funny thing Gnosticism is that it goes back to the two-headed phallus. It’s like if you accept the two-headed phallus, you accept, you could either be very, very smart, be very, very strong, but imagine that you either have a mind but you hate strength or you’re very strong, but you hate thinking. Then you get the two distortions that we call agnostic delusion.
So imagine that you have a throat and you love everything above your throat, but you hate everything beneath your throat. So you are like a total autistic nerd or whatever. You love what’s going on in your mind, but you hate your body, right? And then you hate everybody else’s bodies too. Then you become a pillar saint or you have the throat here and you hate what’s above the throat because you have no intelligence, no sense of humor. You hate that people joke about you, you hate that people seem to be funnier and smarter than you are. So you just want to be strong, strong, strong and kill anybody cracks a joke about you and you become a boy pharaoh, as we call it. These two characters are the curse on humanity for the past 2,800 years.
And the problem, for example, with Christianity was that a pillar saint happened to end up on the cross. And the problem with Islam was that a boy pharaoh found a religion with no sense of humor and killed anybody unless they converted to his religion. And you can go all the way and look at Hitler and Stalin. You’ve got boy pharaohs coming up in history and you’ve got pillar saints coming up. I’m a big critic of, for example, of Gandhi. I think Gandhi is incredibly overrated. If you look at what Gandhi really wanted to do with India, he wanted to make it and stay dirt poor forever. He was a horrible man. He was a Gnostic. He was a pillar saint. He thought spiritual values stood above the physical. I mean, Gandhi was literally shot by a guy because he was convinced that a bullet couldn’t hurt him.
That was the case with Gandhi if you study his life. So these characters, the Gnostic pillar saints and their reversed, the boy pharaoh is the reverse Gnostic, are the problem mankind. So if we want to look at leadership going forward, we have to realize we need the two-headed phallus. But that’s a priest who loves and admires the chief, that’s the chief who loves and admires the priest. This is Moses and Aaron, this is Shiva and Vishnu. That must be the case. Now, if one of them says that you only need me, you don’t need the other guy, you get the madness and the madness it really exploded in the first centuries in Anno Domini. That was like Mani in Persia came along in the third century and created the massive world religion that it just exploded. Manichaeism was the biggest religion in the world, even in Mani’s lifetime. And finally, the Zoroastrians in Persia went after him and killed him.
They thought Mani was the absolute curse in humanity because he hated this world. He was like a massive suicide cult leader who was waiting for some comet to pass by earth so we could all kill ourselves [inaudible 00:51:33] of the comet. That’s what a Gnostic pillar saint believes, and that’s what Gnostic pillar saint preaches. But the boy pharaoh is no better because the boy pharaoh hates guys like you, me, he love to think and formulate ideas and wants to kill us.
And the ultimate boy pharaoh [inaudible 00:51:46] was Pol Pot in Cambodia in the 1970s who hated anybody who wore glasses. Why? Because people who wore glasses like Jim Rutt are smarter than the rest of us. So let’s kill anybody who wears glasses and Pol Pot did. He killed 2 million of his own countrymen. Absolute madness. And we will end up in these two ditches if we don’t watch out. So the leadership must not only be complimentary, there must also be a love of respect between the priest or chief in the fundamental sense in our leadership. Because otherwise we’ll walk into this Gnostic delusion.
Jim: It also sounds like it had some applicability to us as people. Let’s try hard not to be people who live from the neck up and ignore the body or the people who live just in the body. Gym rats, “I never read a book. I just go to the gym,” right? And this is, you think about Aristotle’s ideas of virtues that are balanced between the bodily and the mental and living in the world with other people and establishing our personal relationships, having a good sex life, but also having a good intellectual life. I think these things can apply at the personal level in addition to thinking about leadership.
Alexander: But Aristotle was incredibly inspired by the Persians, again and again, I have to repeat that, I mean, Aristotle taught Alexander the Great to take over Persia by the minute he killed the Persians. And he did. He said, “As soon as the Persians go to war with each other, take over Persia and become the new Persian emperor.” And that’s what Alexander the Great did. He was tutored by Aristotle. So yeah, absolutely. We call that to be embodied. But I say you could also call it a minded. You need to be both embodied and minded. You are both your body and soul, and the day your body dies, your soul dies with it.
Jim: When I heard you give your definition of boy pharaoh, the contemporary person that came to mind was Trump. He’s constrained by the US Constitution, but if he wasn’t, man, he’d be your classic boy pharaoh.
Alexander: Yeah. He’s the boy pharaoh. He is, but he’s so transparent about it and we’ve looked through him and there is the Congress and the Supreme Court at least keep him in his place. So it doesn’t have to be disaster because it would be disaster if we got to decide everything. I agree with that. Now, I’d say the real boy pharaoh these days is Xi Jinping. I don’t know if you read Xi Thoughts. It’s a terrible little book. It’s incredibly boring, but it only takes two hours to read because it’s written by a very simplistic mind. It’s on a par with Mein Kampf and the Quran among books that I don’t hold very high regards of. So it’s not a very good book at all, but it’s worth reading because that guy actually dictates everything in a country of 1.4 billion people called China. It’s not even Confucius. I mean, it’s simplified vulgar Confucianism with an eleven-year-old’s imagination. That’s the boy pharaoh. Well, the boy pharaoh tries to be an intellectual, he writes like an eleven-year-old.
Jim: Very much like Mein Kampf, a reasonably bright eleven-year-old, working out all of his anger. I’ll read a book and I’ll send a note to the Chinese Embassy and see if I can get Xi on my podcast. That would be hilarious. But it is going to happen, of course. Okay. Now, in the contemporary world of people that listeners, figure about half of our listeners are Americans, the other half are scattered around Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. Who’s in the contemporary world a good example of a pillar saint?
Alexander: Oh God, they’re everywhere. When Jordan Peters has gone off the hook, certainly the pillar saint comes forward, right? This guy who thinks that his mind is so fucking superior to everybody else. And when somebody actually goes up against him and actually has good arguments and he can’t understand him, he says that, “I don’t understand your argument. So you are a charlatan.” That’s a typical pillar saint position. Jacques Lacan was a charlatan. Michel Foucault was a charlatan. No, Jordan, you haven’t read their books. And furthermore, you didn’t even understand them. You were just too stupid to understand those books. That’s the truth, right?
So the pillar saint has this sort of compensatory narcissistic obsession with the mind and speaks highly about themselves. And like I said, Jordan Peters’ worst moment was when he started crying by listening to his own voice. That to me is typical pillar of saint behavior. Smacks of badness all the time. Or like we write in process event, we give you a perfect example. I’m a big fan of Osho, who was clearly a very embodied and a minded weirdo. Funny Indian Nietzsche. His Nietzsche classes, by the way, are formidable. They’re formative, a test, you can meditate his Nietzsche classes. That’s how good they are. So Osho has one class on YouTube where he talks about Gandhi…
Alexander: … has one class on YouTube where he talks about Gandhi and he ends up misunderstanding Mahatma Gandhi, another one of those guys that I hate, the pillar saints of the world. And he says to Gandhi that, “The problem with Mahatma Gandhi was that his poverty was very expensive,” because Mahatma Gandhi of course only rode third class when he traveled on the Indian train system, but he insisted on having his own coach.
Jim: That’s funny. Of course Osho had a fleet of Rolls Royces and all that sort of stuff.
Alexander: Yeah, but he did because just to show off people, because I can have this sort of stuff, it don’t affect me, which is tantric. So, Osho had a sense of humor and I would say that the typical trait of pillar saints and boy pharaohs is that they lack a sense of humor because it’s a form of intelligence they lack. They can’t see themselves as two different things at the same time.
And they’re also very pretentious, especially the pillar saints. They tend to be very pretentious. They speak very highly about themselves. So, we need to sort this out because when we look at leadership going forward, we don’t want these guys, we don’t want these guys to lead us. And historically speaking, the pillar saint has been the instigator of religious dogma and the boy pharaoh has been the instigator of political tyranny.
Jim: All right, so we just wrapped up with a critique of the Gnostic delusion, totalitarian wannabe dictators on one side and crackpot religious founders on the other. Now let’s switch to some of the things you guys have done about the alternatives in paradigmatics, membranics and archetypology.
Alexander: Yeah, so here’s the trick. So if you go back to the Bronze Age and say what philosophy should have done, and sometimes we fill in gaps and sometimes we come up with novel ideas in this case, but you and I both agree that it would be great if we could have, for example, a model that works both for technology and biology at the same time. And how could that be a form, the simplest form without going to Platonist about anything?
And what turns out then if you take Darwinian forms instead of Platonist forms is that a fundamental form would be a membrane. Because a membrane has an outside and inside. As soon as the system needs a kind of inside and outside and the inside is different from the outside, it needs a membrane. And as soon as the membrane [inaudible 00:58:10] sort of memory, the first thing we’ll do with the memory is try to memorize events that occur for the membrane so it can learn. So, it can learn from past mistakes.
It might even be a membrane which is born like a live form or a program in a computer which is born, pre-programmed to understand what it should let in, which is nutrition or what it should force out, which is basically shit. And if you then get plants and animals, you get the perfect combo because what is nutrition for plants is shit for animals. And what is shit for plants is then nutrition for the animals. So, they can exchange these things as much as they like in between them. Therefore, plants and animals are often located next to each other and you get a perfect system that can circulate.
Membranics is a great model in general because we can also think of AI and machines as having insides and outsides and you can design things to understand that are insides and outsides to things. And you can understand that systems, for example, say that, “I need more electricity or the battery’s about to go out,” or something like that, which is a sign that I need more nutrition, I need more nutrition in and I’ve got shit that needs to get out. So if example, your coffee machine is loaded with those pods and you can’t make any more coffee in it signals that take the fucking pods out, take the shit out and throw it away.
So, membranics is a great way of thinking, fundamentally Darwinian forms. Now we start applying that on humans and human society. We discovered that we have accumulated memory and that’s called the geneplex. Our body is a memory. We’re born with a massive memory. That’s great, so we don’t have to start to learn everything. We’re not born complete, utter idiots. Rather than we’re born to learn how to use the memory we have, so the memory we have is then adapting to the outside world. Therefore, human beings consist of a geneplex. And the proper name for the geneplex is archetypeology because it consists fundamentally of archetypes that have developed over long periods of time, like millions of years.
We share things with other mammals, we share things with apes. Eventually we even share a few things with other human beings, believe it or not. And that’s what we call the geneplex. Now, on top of that, we also have to be adapted to new environments all the time because our environments do change and adaptability in new environments, which has made, for example, possible for human beings to live across the entire planet, both the Arctic and the tropics at the same time, although we’re the same human beings, what has made that possibly our adaptability. And adaptability is really, good word for adaptability is the memeplex.
These are the memes, these are the ideas that can quickly change. So then we have a system that changes very, very slowly. Everything changes in our philosophy, nothing is ever fixed, but we must different between that which changes very, very gradually or glacially, which is the geneplex of human beings, and that which changes very quickly, which is the memeplex. And the perfect way to understand the memeplex is to understand it as the technological environment within which human beings live today.
Jim: I would extend that a little bit to also include culture more broadly in addition to technology. The whole cultural frame is actually the memeplex.
Alexander: Exactly. So, nature for example, human beings, the nature in you is tied to the geneplex, therefore it’s tied to the archetypology. So, when we talk about your archetype as human being, we talk about your nature. Your natural state of things, your natural being, the naturally sort of man or woman you are. For example, that’s your archetype, your personality type basically is the archetype. But then the paradigm comes on top of that. And in our philosophy, what’s great with paradigmatics is that it’s both taking emergence vector theory onto human history. So, we know there are a few massive emergencies that have occurred throughout the history of the universe.
So, from our human understanding today, we create a narrative that says that the birth of physics, possibly even sub physics before that, physics could be two things after all, and then chemistry and then biology on our planet and eventually even the mind and consciousness and the cultural output it has can be considered different emergences with vectors. So, that makes sense as the largest emergence vectors we could think of. And then we don’t have to reduce everything to some first cause. We don’t have to reduce it up to some final goal. We could rather look at these things separately as their own vectors and keep them that way.
What’s great about doing that universal is that it gives us an understanding where we’re located and our understanding ourselves from our own anthropocentric worldview, which is like, okay, from an anthropocentric world it makes sense that consciousness is the last emergence vector where the first emergence vector probably was physics. This tricky though. Once you’ve done the universal history, we could do a human history, which is of course much more local, limited only to certain planet and really only is only the last 30 or 40,000 years. We call that civilization. Then instead we start looking at civilization in our current society, starting from where we are now, we always start where we are now in history, in our philosophy, starting where we are now, we live in an information, a communications and a network society.
Information, communication, network are definitions of society we live in. They seem to stick because those definitions seem to rhyme well what actually is going on? Our society is different from the past in the sense that it’s much more an information, a communication, network society than before. But we can also understand previous societies as prototypes of an information, a communication and network society. If the previous societies during civilization prototypes, it makes sense to think of communication technologies and information technology are fundamental to human beings.
All right, oh, then we discover language as first category because we speak and we talk and we think in a way animals don’t because we have language. Then we have spoken language as first category. We then invent written language and develop it some 5,000 years ago, further on is being developed all the time. On top of written language we get printed language, which lowers the cost of language distribution intensely. And eventually through the telegraph we also get instant communication in the 19th century and that entire paradigm of the printing press all the way up to electronics like television and telegraph is one paradigm.
And then we’ve got a new paradigm that arrived, when all the computers of the world got connected one another. Meaning a reality, all human beings on the planet are connected one another, real time meaning space basically disappeared. Time is all there is and suddenly we’re all connected one another. Anywhere in the world, you can talk to anybody in the world at no cost. That is the internet society. So we see four paradigms in human history. What’s great about doing paradigms as the parallel to doing emergence vectors in the universal history is that it makes sense. It’s a good narrative. And once we see the paradigms changed a lot more often, they’re tied to the memeplex and we see the archetypes change very gradually, very slowly, not much in the last 10,000 years.
Then they’re the archetypology. So what’s great with archetypology is we can explain gradual slow change as archetypological and we can explain more explosive sudden changes to paradigmatic. So for example, when I talk to somebody who they are and what they’re going to do with their life, they’re sitting in psychoanalysis, I said, “Well, the first thing we need to figure out is what your archetype is. And probably your archetype served the purpose of 5,000 years ago because you’re an evolutionary winner because you’re sitting here in front of me, otherwise you wouldn’t even exist. But we don’t know if that archetype is a relevant role for the sociol today.
So, we can tell what is a relevant role. So, you better found out which is the paradigmatic expression that could for example be your profession or your career of the archetype that you are. And the point with this is by using archetype, biology’s first category to stop fighting ourselves, stop fighting our biology. Stop all these Rossoian and Robespierian and woke ideas of trying to change human beings from what they are. All attempts in human history, again, the Gnostic delusion. It’s always the Gnostics who want to change us. Want to fundamentally change, said, “You’re not good enough. You have to change, you have to be changed.” Like if you were some kind of a doll, that one could change or modify, whatever.
We’re not, we’re born with a very strong geneplex. We shouldn’t fight it. We should accept it, we should try to use it. We can’t really fight it because we fight ourselves. We’re the enemies ourselves, we go wrong. So, this is again an attack against the Gnostic pillar by saying, “No, I’m not going to fight how I function. I’m not going to fight who I am. I’m going to completely accept who I am and the way I was born and start from there. That’s my archetype.”
Then I can through ideas I change more rapidly because of the paradigm I live in, tried to find a nice new paradigmatic expression of who I am. For example, if I’m an artist, I won’t make the same art in the internet age that I would’ve made during feudalism. I would certainly make a very different art because I live in a different world that inspires me and that I will comment on as an artist and that’s why my paradigmatic expression is tied to the memeplex.
Jim: Yeah. Also, just to give an example, I think it’s really important to realize that the paradigmatics, the geneplex, what you’d call the archetypology and in the membranics are all closely interrelated. So, imagine that you are an artistic temperament in 800 B.C. and you are really good at memorizing and speaking and facial expressions to bring characters to life. So, you’re like Homer and you are a really successful artist of the late Bronze… Actually after the Bronze Age collapse, right at the time of the reemergence of civilization.
Let’s say that you are in Italy in the 12th century where that’s much less important because we now have some books and we have more stylized troops of theater, et cetera. But a really high expressive form art is chisel and marble, but you’re totally useless at chisel and marble. The idea of you being a leading artist in the humanistic revival right at and before the Renaissance is actually not really appropriate for your archetypal sort. So, there’s some kind of sorting that has to go down that combines where the world is in its trajectory line with the paradigmatics of that place in the trajectory and who you are as a person, your archetypology in your terms. Does that make sense?
Alexander: That makes sense. This is without us writing in the book, this of course fundamental to ethics, but that comes naturally from it. And we’re not ethicists. If somebody is an ethicist that wants to pick up all these ideas, they’re welcome to. What the great thing is with this is that we can, for example, understand phenomena like nationalism and respect them because people get very insecure and they hate the fact that on the security of the border that’s protected and that works. So, the border has to work because otherwise people get incredibly insecure because it should work. They’re programmed to have a functioning border because they have a body which has a skin which protect them from the outside world and occasionally virus or bacteria sneaks in and they get sick and hopefully they don’t die, but they try to fight off that through purification rituals and eventually through medicine.
And all they need to do is to get the things out of the system so they get nutrition in and shit out and not shit in and nutrition out. So, any system that we build, what’s great in membranics is that any system that will be like a city and the city limit. If you build a fort to protect yourself inside a fort. If you build a laboratory, you don’t want things to sneak out of the laboratory. You have a walls and a container around the laboratory. If you build a nuclear power plant, you certainly need a fucking membrane around because otherwise you get radiation everywhere.
So, what’s great about membranics is that it’s better for philosophy to build with this fundamental idea of insides and outsides to systems and that the inside of the system can be as complex as you like as long as it’s contained within the membrane. And the same way the outside can be whatever you want as long as the outside does not invade the membrane and crush the membrane because then the whole system falls apart. And this is how everything we look at systematically in the world can therefore you can apply membranics on it.
And then the question is, so inside membranics you build the memory bank, so then have an inside and outside. You can do ethics on that, basically. How do you maintain a membrane, make it function for as long as possible? Well, it turns out that the best way for the membrane is to be pre-programmed or born with a geneplex or a program. And then on top of that, be adaptable enough to learn as things go along and learn from previous mistakes and not repeat those mistakes, which exactly what paradigmatics does.
So, with archetypology, paradigmatics tied to membranics, you have a fully functioning idea of systems and you can apply ethics on them and the ethics can start from the idea that here’s a sociant or here’s a human being, whatever you want to start from, and how does the system survive for as long as possible, as prosperously as possible.
Jim: Let’s dig into this because I think a lot of our game B thinking has been centered more on membranics, but now let’s take your concepts and extend them because a key concept in our game B membranics is that the membranes are nested but not nested strictly hierarchically, but they interpenetrate each other, et cetera, so that for instance, a person could be a member of three membranes, a membrane can be a member of three other membranes or five. Doesn’t really matter, but these membranes also create the larger structures we need to accomplish the things that human race still needs to do.
To give couple of examples of the idea of embedded membranes, doesn’t quite get the strange embeddings, but we think about the human body or the human in the world, organelles, mitochondria, et cetera, inside the cell. Both of which have their own membranes and the cells have tissues. So, the tissues are like sections of the liver and they have membranes and the liver itself has membranes and the systems of nutrition, which the liver is part of, they’re not quite as membranic, but they have interfaces and then you have the whole organism, the human, and then the human is embedded in ecosystem and we can think of each of those as membranes.
Alexander: You could put a pacemaker inside that body that has its own membrane as well as a pacemaker.
Jim: And the battery inside the pacemaker does too.
Alexander: That’s exactly why it works. Yeah, exactly.
Jim: And then the key thing is, and this is where we can actually get to something like engineering, even though social engineering’s got a bad term for good reasons because we’re dealing with complex systems where you really don’t know what the outcome will be when you do an intervention. Is that every membrane is a semi-permeable membrane, to your point. If you are a cell, you want food in, shit out. And if you’re a human, you want oxygen in CO2 out, food in, shit out, to keep it very, very simple.
This provides a very interesting design space because you can think about the way that membranes form and how they operate et cetera, but then also their interrelationships and the fact that they have a definitional membrane that’s by definition semi-permeable, which is set by the membrane itself. Now this is where I want to go. Well, you can take archetypology and paradigmatics, they make good sense, thinking of the human as a single membrane. What is the equivalent of archetypology and paradigmatics for a much bigger membrane, let’s say a city state or a nation state?
Alexander: Well, I think it has to do with the time access again. So for example, you need a history. You need a history, where did this start? Who had the idea? Who started it, what did they do? They probably went through some trying periods and then finally took off and was successful and therefore there’s a story to it. And that’s much more the archetypology of things because you’d like to stay with that. If you do management theory and leadership theory for example, which I work with, then you call it the source. So, what’s the source for example of a company? Who founded the company? What was the original idea of the company? What is the spirit of the company or the soul of the company, is often tied to that.
And that’s what you reduce with archetypology because archetypology is history and in a certain way, history repeats itself, which will be called process. Now on top of that, things can take off in a new direction. The company can decide to do things they never did before, but it probably is something that has the soul of the spirit maintained from the source where it came from, and that’s the paradigmatics. So, the adaptability of any system is the paradigmatic part, whereas what you are born with, what’s the core value, what you can always return to, feel safe with is the archetypology for example of a corporation.
We can apply these things on any system, especially on human systems, we can apply it. So, a society should [inaudible 01:14:31] archetypology, an archetype is a flag. The flag comes out of history, it has a history. The flag has been used. The Danish flag I think is the oldest flag in the world being used today. It’s like 1200 years old. And the story about the Danish flag is something that makes Danish people cry when they hear that story because it’s about them, it’s about their ancestors. That’s archetype for you.
Jim: Now, how would you say that relates to the idea of the operating system within the membrane?
Alexander: Yes.
Jim: Because again, if we think of the cell, it has an operating system defined by its DNA, right? And the nature of its organelles. A nation state, to go to the other extreme, let’s say like the United States has a body of law, a body of administration, a cult-
Alexander: And it has a constitution. The constitution is even the archetype of the law.
Jim: And then it has a culture on top of that and all those say from as time progresses, tick by tick, those things change only slowly in the same way the geneplex changes slowly and there’s a whole series of membranes within the nation state. But then to your point, there’s a whole series of adaptations to when new things happen, the great recession occurs, or Iran and Israel start throwing nukes at each other.
Our operating system is the series of parts that we might say is congruent with your concept of archetypology, but what we then do to be adaptive in near real time would be what you’d call your paradigmatics. Of course, near real time or even extended time here, say up to a human lifetime. Many of us think in those kinds of terms.
Alexander: And the balance is necessary here again, like we talked about being embodied or reminded. Again, you don’t want to fall into the Gnostic delusion. If you apply the Gnostic delusion or archetypology or paradigmatics, like in archetypology without paradigmatics is staunch arch conservatism, don’t change anything and it’s often romantic about the past. I want to recycle the past and you get stuck with Hindu caste systems and shit like that precisely because you got into archetypology only, you refuse to recognize paradigmatics.
Now if you go paradigmatics only and refuse to recognize archetypology, you get absolute anarchistic madness, change for the sake of change. This is like when communism in Russia went absolutely wrong with Trotsky and later with Mao during the Cultural Revolution, it was like change for the sake of change, revolution for the sake of revolution, everything must die. Oh, by the way, the kids must kill their parents. That is paradigmatics without archetypology.
So, you must have both. While we put them in [inaudible 01:16:54] event in the chapters after having laid out the Gnostic delusion and after having laid out the two philosophies that the complementary role of archetypology and paradigmatics as what happens within the membrane in its relation to the outside world is now being explained fully philosophically from having first understood the Gnostic delusion is the danger.
Jim: So, we want grounding with some level of viscosity from our archetypology. We want those contained in a series of interpenetrating membranes and we want that operating system to be able to deal pragmatically with the world and modify itself based on learning. Is that a reasonable summary?
Alexander: I give an example of what I do my work as an analyst, I’m very successful working with transitions as they call it. With people who want to change, not alter, but change their sex. And I always insist in my work, I’m adamant about this, you can’t change from man to woman to woman to man. You change from man to trans woman and you change from woman to trans man, own the new categories. We had two sexes. They were called man and woman. We invented two new ones.
The first cyborgs are trans men and trans woman. They should own it. So when Jordan Peterson wrote to me on Twitter responding to Twitter, he said, “Trans woman is not woman.” I just responded. “Woman is not trans woman, so fuck you.” It’s just a lack of imagination because the great thing is that trans men and trans woman are paradigmatic categories built onto archetypologies, which are man and woman. That makes perfect sense. We can offer people more options.
Jim: I’ve said that many times that trans woman and trans man, that’s what somebody wants to be, there’s nothing wrong with that, but to confuse it with man and woman is fairly serious category actually. And I like your approach, which is let’s just talk about we have trans men, we have trans women, we have non-trans men, we have non-trans women. So, we have four things to choose from. What’s wrong with that?
Alexander: Some of my analyst’s sons have gone through this. No one guys says, “I’m a trans man because man was too boring.” That’s the right attitude. That’s the right attitude. It’s very [inaudible 01:19:04] I think.
Jim: Yeah, very interesting. I actually had a chance to talk with someone who sat in this category for four hours back this spring. The gender-fluid folks take that to the extreme. They can talk about twice the fun. They can have four times the fun because they can go any which way.
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. We are not necessarily doing ethics in [inaudible 01:19:20]. We can’t do everything in this book, but by laying out metaphysics, what we do in this book, we’re laying out membranics and archetypology and paradigmatics as a fundamental understanding of change over time in the interest of the membrane. You can do ethics based on that. You can basically say if you embrace both paradigmatics and archetypology, then we look at the long-term sustainability and interest of the membrane itself and the membranic system within it.
And that’s you would do with game B. I mean, you would basically say here, you got these different communes. It’s game B communities. They can experiment and if they implode, if the member implodes to them, they weren’t successful enough, but at least some other guys succeeded and they can then multiply to different new game B communities. I think it’s a great way of looking at the world.
Jim: Right, now we’re going to probably take our deepest formal philosophical dive. We’re going to talk about the dialectics of the Hegelian negation and the Nietzschean oscillation. That’s a whole bunch of words, which to your typical listener is going to probably say, “What the fuck is all that?” So Alexander, why don’t you take that sentence, I’ll try to say it again. The dialectics of the Hegelian negation and Nietzschean oscillation, and turn that into something that normal humans might understand.
Alexander: Okay, so we had Spinoza, we talked about him before this episode, and he had this almost fixed deterministic universe where everything’s connected to everything else, and it’s called monism. Fine, he did the job. Now this is a very dull, very deterministic universe, and obviously that’s not how the world actually works. So, out of Spinoza’s, his children came Hegel and Nietzsche, these two Germans from the 19th century, and Hegel came first. And what Hegel did was that he took the dialectical method that was developed by the Greeks originally and said, every type of thinking, to be intelligent and to think is to think dialectically.
It might even be that the world operates dialectically for all we care, but at least we cannot understand the world in any other way except through dialectics. That means that every word we ever use also has its own contradiction built into it. So, the world is constantly moving, even language is constantly moving. It’s never fixed. So, the words move all the time and will live with temporary solutions, temporary platforms on which to build the worldview on which we can build philosophy, for example, and this is what Hegel calls his absolute.
So, Hegel did the job. What he uniquely did was that he realized that thinking must start with negation. He would start with thinking what’s not there? For example, Jim [inaudible 01:21:44] is an Atheist, why should he comment on theists at all? Why should theists have the first word? Why’d he never think start with negation. Why is it the first God? So, Jim [inaudible 01:21:55] can believe in his God, is the non-God. That’s the perfect example to use Hegelian negation. For example, somebody addresses a problem that doesn’t exist, the best way to kill it in argumentation, say, “The problem does not exist. I negate it.”
Negation is the first principle in Hegel, and he uses this in dialectical method and it works wonderfully because by using negation as the first category, it says that if something is there and it’s in the state of change, whenever it changes category, whenever it goes from one concept to the other concept, what first happens is something is probably lost in the first concept. There’s a crack in the concept. There’s something doesn’t make sense. There’s a contradiction, suddenly becomes obvious in the concept, and therefore the concept has to be developed into a new concept. So, it could go from an abstraction to a concretion.
So, the first thing that happens is negation placed into the abstraction, which is the old category, and that abstraction can become a concretion. That’s Hegelian dialectics. Then Nietzsche comes along some 40, 50 years later and Nietzsche says that, “Well, what’s interesting with the world is that it’s all in flux. Heraclitus was the great of the Greeks, not Plato, and the fact that everything is a flux is fundamental to reality. Therefore, values are a in flux too. Therefore, my values that I have are values that I create by myself, and if there are no values out there, all the better because I’m free to create my own values and put them on the world,” which is called affirmation.
What’s great with Nietzsche and Hegel is that they’re actually provided us with two categories that when you put them in a dialectical relationship with them, so when you start playing Hegel with Nietzsche, you discover that the first dialectics would be exactly dialectics between negation and oscillation. There would be movement, abstraction. The movement would then lack something or something would die within the movement, or something would suddenly be lost in the movement. It becomes obvious there’s a loss within the movement, which is like the first object. The first object of a movement is not the movement itself because it’s just moving around.
What happens to the movement, the oscillation, that suddenly something is lost in there. That’s like a fixed point because something is lost. There’s a nothingness to it, and that nothingness and the relationship between that is the first category. What we human beings then do is that we take the negation and put something there-
Alexander: … it’s that we take the negation and put something there, which is a novelty. We put something there and that’s called the negation of the negation of Hegel. So we are basically laying out and saying that we can now merge Hegel and Nietzsche one another. We can understand and we’re two thinkers of the same thing, the thinking about a modest universe where everything is moving all the time, and the only way to grasp that universe and understand it and create a phenomenology, a way we can understand the world, and epistemology, how we can create knowledge on that world and know something about it, and ontology about how we define that world, to do those things, to do philosophy on the world, we have to use dialectics.
And that’s what both guys do. It’s just that one of them is really obsessed with the oscillation of the world, the other guy is obsessed with the negation. So then we formally say, “Okay, Hegel and Nietzsche are onto the same thing.” We cannot put the point to 19th century German philosophy and we have a platform on which western philosophy could credibly be built. So we can say the West did achieve this, Hegel and Nietzsche achieved it, and this is a great starting point for philosophy as we go forward.
Jim: Okay, a couple things before we move on. At first, when I saw the expression, “Negation of the negation,” I said, “What kind of horse shit is that?” But then as I read further and thought about it a little bit, did some side research, I said, “All right, that’s actually a reasonable concept.” If you have a negation, then you say the negation of the negation can be a way to address the negation without accepting the alternative, essentially. Is that about right?
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. Your old self-identity. The first thing that happens is that you’re not mother. Like we said before this episode, Jacques Lacan says, “You’re lying there. The mother walks out of the room, she’s about to change your diapers and you’re shitting like hell, you’re lying there, but she’s busy with something like the coffee in the kitchen or whatever. She walks out of the room. Mother leaves the room. Something is left in the room which is not mother.” The shocking experience of being non-mother is a negation.
Jim: And the negation of negation is self, right?
Alexander: Then the negation is how you invent yourself on top of the… what is the non-mother? “Well, non-mother is this and this and this, and this says you’re similar to mother and this is totally opposed to mother just thinks totally different from what mother did. Oh, mother likes milk. I don’t like milk. Mother likes tea. I like coffee.” So you define yourself as the negation of the negation. This is how identity works. And it’s brilliant because what Hegel understood is that we build identity that way. We build identity first by something is missing.
And this actually how phenomenology operates, too. We have a worldview that automatically passes by. We don’t react to anything until there’s suddenly something ambivalent about it. There’s a little detail that doesn’t really fit in. So we spend a little energy on observing. There was a detail missing there. There was something wrong, there was a negation to it. And then when a second ambivalence occurs in the same system, we start observing that and spend a lot more energy on it, especially if the two negations seem to rhyme with one another. They seem to be the same thing wrong with the system and our understanding of it and there two ambivalences now to the system.
And if third ambivalence occurs, you usually kill the whole idea of the system. We kill our worldview entirely and we’d rather do guesswork around the three exceptions than build from the original worldview, at least the creative person does. And then we can fill in the gaps with guesswork. And finally we then find out and replace the guesswork with rationality, rational arguments to fill the worldview. And it turns out, yeah, there were three mistakes in the old worldview and they reminded me the worldview was probably only temporary and needed to be replaced, and therefore I replaced it. And that’s how phenomenology operates. So Hegel was onto this already 200 years ago. He was a genius. And the negation of the negation is a very good way to describe how identity production occurs. So an associate, for example, your game B community to define itself a good starting point, say, “Well, what are you not?” “Well, we’re not game A.” “Good. That’s a good start. You’re game B. You’re not game A.” But what then is a game B? That’s a negation of the negation.
Jim: … of the negation. But of course, let’s make it very clear that negation of negation is the definition of a process. It’s neither good nor bad. I was thinking of good examples, but I also thought of a bad example while you were talking, which is, “I’m not a Jew, therefore I’ll be a Nazi and kill the Jews.” Right? So we should keep in mind that that’s not necessarily a value-related expression, but rather a process-related expression, which is a good-
Alexander: Only in Hegel, the dialectical process is just how we think.
Jim: Not good or bad.
Alexander: It doesn’t value it all, whether it’s good or bad. Exactly. Not good or bad at all. Something died and you have to live with the death of it, and that’s the negation of it. And if you deny that it died and try to make the negation of the negation by saying, “No, it’s still around only it died,” whatever, then you’re going the wrong way. And of course Gnostic pillars since think dialectically, too. You’re absolutely right.
Jim: Okay. Now, why is this musty old German philosophy relevant to our work of building a better society today?
Alexander: I would say that the best philosophy we had over the past 200 years have been the German philosophers of the 19th century. This was a golden age. I would even say that if you want to do the narratology on it, you could say that what Hegel did for Logos, Freud did for Pathos, and Goethe did for Mythos. This was a golden age in general in Germany was incredibly creative. There’s a lot of great fluffy stuff coming out of Germany in the 19th century. We don’t know why. They probably inspired each other, but it was a really golden nature in that sense. It’s probably also the pure joy of having the printing press and being able to publish books in large duplicate numbers, was probably part of it. It was the French who discovered the massive use of the printing press. The French invented the tabloid as a daily newspaper.
They invented encyclopedias as a book of all knowledge. So they invented a lot of different book forms in the 18th century, but it was really in Germany in the 19th century took off. This is a golden age. I think the 20th century to a large extent was wasted. It got too academic. I’m critical of philosophy because philosophy stopped doing the work on humans and human society, which I think is the most important philosophical mission of all. I think psychoanalysis and anthropology did a better job in the 20th century. So I’m a big fan of philosophy in the 19th century, but from the 20th century, I take psychoanalysis and anthropology with me, and also I think computer science and cybernetics and all kinds of things that were invented were great. So my heroes besides Hegel and Nietzsche, if I have a third category here, it would be the American pragmatists, especially Peirce, who was an absolute genius.
If anybody was both Hegel and Nietzsche at the same time, it was Charles Sanders Peirce, American 19th century philosopher, and he inspired William James, who in turn invented psychology, which I think was quite an achievement, philosophers invent sciences, and eventually John Dew and the other American pragmatists. I’m a huge fan of American pragmatism and I am, in essence, a pragmatist myself. I think both Hegel and Nietzsche were sort of precursors to pragmatism. So I think German 19th century philosophy are much more inclined to go into American philosophy when it come to the 20th century, and a few heroes of mine, for example, Deleuze and Foucault in France inspired me because Deleuze and Foucault did think humans and they did think human society and they did think animal society and all kinds of shit. So Deleuze and Foucault are also huge heroes of mine from the 20th century.
Jim: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s funny. I’d written down… I was going to ask you what about Peirce and James? And Peirce in particular is extremely interesting. I read quite a bit of him about 15, 20 years ago, and in him, I found the fact that he had a precognition of both special relativity and fission from first principles, which is… what the hell? How did he do that?
Alexander: But you find that in Hegel and Nietzsche, too. The great thing is Hegel inspired Peirce a lot. He held Hegel in the highest possible regard, a bit pissed off with him like the son with his father. And so with Nietzsche, as well. Hegel was an absolute genius in the sense because Hegel could think of a world where everything was movable entities and the entities themselves even moved within themselves, too, all the way down.
So that was Hegel’s worldview and therefore he could think these things. And I think without the Hegelian turn, early 19th century would never had general relativity, special relativity, no Einstein, none of these things. But Peirce was a genius. He could think these things, too. And especially what’s interesting to Peirce is that he could really understand how humans think outside of dialectics with induction, deduction, and abduction, which is very, very useful as a complementary way of thinking with Hegelian dialectics.
Jim: All right, this will be the last thing we talk about today, which is in some sense the metaphysical core of your book is the idea of transcendental emergentism. And we talked a little bit about emergentism as this bushy branching tree of emergence vectors. Let’s spend some time and flesh out you guys’ idea of the transcendental.
Alexander: Well, the problem is reductionism. We want to kill it once and for all. We’d like to start right here and now with our philosophy, “And shit happens.” And the question is, “What is shit and what does it mean that shit happens?” Now if we start from here rather than some origin, which I think is just obsession with your mother and your mother’s womb and your birth, if you’re too obsessed with that, you go to origins all the time. We’re allowed to go to origins. We shouldn’t start philosophy from the origins. We just start philosophy from here and now because we’re talking about ourselves in the time we live and we should also not go all the way forward into the future as well too much because we should stay here. So the equivalent of that, if philosophy is the two absurdities, the two ditches that philosophers fall into.
Either they become pillar saints and in that case, they’re obsessed with consciousness and they find consciousness in everything. And my attitude towards those philosophers basically to give them a rock and say, “Well, you can talk to the rock in that case, because apparently the rock is consciousness. I don’t have any more conscious than the rock, then you can talk to the rock because I’m not interested in talking to you any longer because you think the rock is consciousness. I find it idiotic. So here’s your rock, talk to it, have a pet rock, whatever, but don’t talk to me.”
So I think consciousness is incredibly unique even among humans, to be honest about it. So we should not reduce the world to, “Everything is consciousness,” because then the word makes no sense. We should also not to reduce the world all the way down to some smallest atom. One of the problems with string theory was that superstring theory and string theory reduced everything down to some fundamental principle was a string, and then everything was supposed to be a string.
But for physics, that seemed to work for a while until it just developed into billions of different theories, which did not explain at all why the universe works the way it does and it more or less collapsed some 10 years ago. And that’s exactly because everybody was trying to go towards that form, like an original form, that could explain everything else that comes later as if everything was deterministically set by that form. I think both those traps, ditches, are wrong. We’re not even close to any of them at all to begin with. It’s better to start here and now. So that’s not the reductionism. Then we have to think about human beings as narratological creatures. We’re storytellers. What is the most important story for us?
Jim: How to get laid?
Alexander: Get laid. Yeah, exactly. How to get… okay, there’s the before and after getting laid. So really the most important story for us is what is it like before it to get laid and what is it like after getting laid? Okay, so how to get laid has a deeper question, which is what is it like to get laid? So if that’s the case, then there’s a before and after. So then we have to think when you get laid and finally each reach your goal and get laid, then there’s an after and a before. So something emerges. What emerges is Jim who got laid, and emergence is there. Right there, right? Emergence is a much better word to start from than reduction.
So we get rid of the stupidity of the pillar saints all want to go to consciousness of consciousness and everything or the [inaudible 01:35:34] all want to go with some fucking origin or something because, “Everything is this one thing. There’s the theory of everything and it starts with this one thing and everything is one thing here.” And then you go, “Well, there’s difference in the world so that one thing has to be different things to begin with and there are differences already, and suddenly your model no longer works because you can’t reduce everything to this one thing or you can’t reduce the universe to oneness.” You can’t. Difference is everywhere. The question is what kind of differences do we are, and do we have some kind of a qualitative way of differentiate between the differences?
That’s what philosophy is supposed to do. So emergentism becomes obvious. Then the problem with human beings is that once you said, “Well, we’ll go with emergence instead of reducing everything to some first or low or high principle.” So emergence is just there, consciousness is one emergence, physical reality with atoms is one emergence, biology is another emergence or whatever. We had lots of different emergences. We can always discuss what those emergences are. But the problem is that soon as you have that, you have an emergence theory, people jump onto general principles for that emergence theory. And we are fine with principles because they could be general.
We’re not fine with laws because laws cannot be general. A law will not exist before whatever it’s a law of. A law will coexist whatever is there. So for example, you have a law of nature. It has developed as a law in parallel to whatever it’s concerned with. That’s a fundamental idea we have in our philosophy, that it doesn’t make any point to speak about laws prior to something because if laws are prior to something which they will affect, then the question is where do those laws exist?
And then you fall into dualism instantly. So it’s better to say that laws are repeated habits where there seems to be a strong inclination towards repeating them because it’s very energy or cost-efficient to repeat them within the system. So that is a principle rather low. There are no meta-laws. If the laws are only local, we cannot have global laws. We will phrase that it would say there is no meta-law except that there is no meta-law. The negation again. What there are though is that it can be principles and we cannot have any principles if we can always discuss them. And when we start discussing these principles for different emergences, we discover that we do define emergences as such from the emergences we know of. So that’s emergentism. That means emergentism has to be transcendental. What we provocatively say is that if a new emergence would occur in history, something radically new would happen, they would have to redefine within emergentism due to the new emergence because that would also affect what we mean with-
Jim: Okay, we’ll come back to that then dig it a little deeper. But first I want to play the good complexity scientist and push back on a couple of three things. Two things, at least. One is out in the liminal web world, get a constant barrage of anti-reductionism and my response to that is, “Wait a minute. To understand complexity, you have to start with reductionism and understand the pieces.” In fact, I coined this little saying, which I think is still a really excellent way of describing complex systems.
It’s understanding both the dancer and the dance. And when you have a dance, say a ballet, you need to know what are the capabilities of the dancers? How high can they jump? Can the guy dancers pick the girl dancers up or not? You probably don’t have big fat girl dancers at the ballet, right?
Alexander: You just described dialectics. Yes, they’re in a dialectic relationship. That’s the point.
Jim: I don’t know exactly what people mean, but when people say anti-reductionist, “Man, you can’t be anti-reductionist,” there is things that at each level in emergence, that’s the theory of complex emergence, is that emergence is a pattern made by the lower level elements that’s not predictable nor usually reversible and is in addition to the elements of the lower level, like the distinction. A dance is its own thing. It has dancers in it, but the dance in itself is a real object in the universe.
Alexander: So exactly, and this is the point with an emergence vector. An emergence vector starts with an emergence, has an origin, a birth, and from the fact that something has happened, it happened to be stable enough to be maintained, you get an emergence vector. The emergence vector is reduced to the emergence, and if it starts going off in new directions which are irreversible and not reducible to the emergence, we can start talking about another emergence. The question then is do we have a lot of emergences in the universe? It doesn’t help us much to understand history as a whole. So what we say with emergence, we use the word here metaphysically speaking, is that we use rarely for things and what we call the other things that do happen that could be reducible to what happened before, there is events. So the history is full of events.
There’s loads of events all the time. I am myself a new event every day. I’m not the same person that I was yesterday, but I don’t run around saying, “I emerged, I emerged, I emerged,” all the time. I’m basically saying, “Well, I did emerge when I was born. I was very different from what I am now because I’ve gone through a lot of events since I was born and that has affected me.” But basically the implex I was born with, the DNA I was born with, the parents I had, the sort of pre-programmed height of my body and all those things and foot size and whatever part of the implex really emerged when I was born. So I’d say my birth is my emergence even though things do emerge as I go along, but I call them events. This is problematic with the vocabulary, but we call transcendental emergentism is to focus on emergence as a first category rather than reduction, and therefore, we can study each emergence vector like you do too.
We can study each emergence vector as its own domain, which is beautiful. “Wow, nice.” I can do biology without having to refer to physics all the time. I can really go into biology, understand the complexity of biology, see the beauty of biology. Plant, animal biology… I could do all those things with biology and I like guys like Greg and Rick because they try to do the same thing with psychology, which got stuck some hundred years ago and go back to William James’s roots in the 19th century and try to really make a proper science out of it. I think it’s worth it because it’s its own emergence vector. It should be studied as its own domain.
The thing with our philosophy is that to we try to teach people to live in worlds rather than our world, and we try to get them out of that longing for unity with their mother again, to get out of that and accept separation as a beautiful thing and accept the independence of the separation as a beautiful thing and then start looking at the world as different domains that have really not that much to do with one another. And the very few things we can say in general about emergence vectors, we should be very careful about. All we can say is something is born, it’s along the time axis, it develops a vector.
That vector can often be studied. Within the vector, we can see certain patterns that turn out to be laws of that vector. We call them laws of nature. We can even have laws of culture, for example, in national system or a game B community. “This is a law you have to follow because it’s a law of the community. It’s a law of culture.” So we can have those things in emergence vectors, but by having it, transcendental emergentism have really gone full scale into radical atheism, understanding the world from its differences and have different categories that make sense to people, and the whole system itself is weirdly enough also moving. It’s transcendental because if new emergences occur, we could be pretty damn sure the entire emergence vector theory has to be altered as well.
Jim: Well the other thing… and this is key, this is the work of Stuart Kaufman and Brian Arthur, both of whom have talked about this on our podcast, is once there is one emergence, you’ve now opened up an adjacent possible front next to that emergence, but before that occurred, for instance, to use the example, before there’s ballet, you can’t have a ballet festival. But once ballet gets invented, then another emergence, if you want to call it that, is a festival of ballets, right? And that’s kind of a lame example, but I think that’s also a huge thing to think about. And-
Alexander: Especially when it comes to paradigms. Human beings like to think we can imagine anything. We don’t. What happens is that we get a new technology and then we get the new technology, then we start inventing. Nobody would’ve invented a tabloid newspaper, invented a [inaudible 01:43:36] paper, before the printing press because it would’ve been too hard to write a book every day or to write a book that contained all the books of the world. But suddenly it was possible because the cost efficiency of the printing press made it possible to think even creating those things.
The great thing with new technologies, that new technologies breed new technology simply because it kickstarts human imagination and creativity simply because we know have new technology and we have a new technology like a smartphone, we can just go and say, “What can I do with this shit? Oh, I can make apps. Okay.” You wouldn’t have thought of the apps unless the platform had been there first. So even when we come to paradigmatic thinking of human creativity, we discover that emergence vector theory makes a lot of sense to understand creativity.
Jim: Yeah. And I will call out again Brian Arthur, who talks about specifically with respect to technology in his very interesting book… let’s see, what’s the name of the book?
Alexander: I love Brian and Stuart. They’re amazing. Stuart taught me a lot of things. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves. And he talks a whole lot about the adjacent possible and how an awful lot of what we think of as technology is really recombination of previous technologies and a little bit of innovation from time to time where actually new technologies get invented, which is quite interesting.
Alexander: It’s our process event. It’s fundamentally a process, but a little deviation to the process is the possibility of the event, and that’s what creativity is.
Jim: The other thing I wanted to push back on a little bit was actually clarify. I think maybe we have no difference, but you talked about laws as habits and I would absolutely agree with you that laws are approximate and flexible in the social domain and even in the biological domain, when we try to lay laws on biology, they’re not precise if only because the combinatoric space of both the cultural realm and the biological is just way too high, the complexity factors are way too high to say anything very lawful that’s absolutely hard and fast.
However, it may well be that the fundamental laws of physics are hard and fast and that they are necessary in our universe. An example I give, which I used a different version of this in our mailing list, is that the fact that type Ia supernova appear to be identical in how they evolve in their explosions, how long it lasts, the spectra of them, even though they’re billions of light years away and they happened billions of years ago, seems to be a strong indication that things like the mass of the fundamental particles, the strength of the fundamental physics forces like the weak and the strong force, the way electromagnetism propagates, et cetera, must have either identical or if there’s any variation over a few billion years, it’s got to be absolutely tiny, or these quite complex reactions like a type I supernova would not be identical over space and time.
Alexander: Well, we don’t know. I’m a kind of fan of MOND, but it’s a very speculative theory right now, because it would explain the way dark energy and inflation and a few other terrible ideas. But I agree. I would say physics is an emergence vector which seems to be incredibly stable over time, incredibly stable and at large scale. That’s specific for the physics emergence vector and I’m highly respectful of that. And it could also be that we know as physics, which is the universe, physical universe we live in, if that universe is born of another universe, for example, if you actually happened to live inside a black hole, that means it was born out of a previous or an even larger universe or whatever you want to call it. And that universe would certainly take a lot of information into our current universe, which could explain away inflation.
And in that case, the stability of the system is that the emergence here is that it’s only partly reducible to previous universe, but to a large extent, the current universe, physically insulated, is not irreducible to previous universes. That’s called cosmological Darwinism. Lee Smolin has written about it. I find it a very fascinating idea. If that is the case, that also could explain why physics seems to be so really, really stern and hard as an emergence vector. But I will still insist that over eons of time and enormatism we call it in our philosophy, we never talk about infinities, we about enormities. If it’s an enormity on some time, gradual change would probably appear. And the guy I took this from I should remind you of is Charles Sanders Peirce, because Charles Sanders Peirce insisted that laws are only patterns that over enough time we start to look as only habits. So the shift from laws to habits is taken strength from Peirce’s handbooks. You should know that.
Jim: Yeah. I’ll make a note that I talked to Brian Arthur about his theories of technological evolution in EP 138, and I talked to Lee Smolin about all kinds of things, including his evolutionary universe theory that Alexander alerted to, back in EP 5. He was one of my first guests on the show.
Alexander: I love them both to death. Stuart helped me a lot with the Synthesis book and he’s been a big fan of that book when that came out, which was the fourth book I wrote with John. So he’s an old friend and he’s a great, great biologist and he really gets complexity and the philosophy of complexity.
Jim: Indeed. In fact, I’ve had him on a bunch recently. I’m going to have them on again soon on the nature of consciousness. That should be fun.
Alexander: Wow. Okay. Okay. We’re moving in the same direction here.
Jim: That’s good. So anything else you want to say about transcendental emergentism and maybe a little bit on why it’s central to the work?
Alexander: It is central to the work because we came to the point in our sixth book that we had to deal with metaphysics, we had to deal with the sort of basic storytelling. We wanted to do narratology. A processed event is really about the kind of stories human beings tell about themselves. When did they work, when did they don’t work? So we had to get to that. And the most honorable, the most fantastic comment that I got about transcendental emergentism when the whole theory was presented was that it was underwhelming. This would all be somebody who would expected something to explain everything, but in reality, this was just like taking the carpet from underneath on just about every axiom you had about how the world operates. And that was the point. The point of philosophy is to remove axioms, it’s to remove things you take for granted because you really can’t take them for granted.
What it offers though, it’s topological, I would say, in the sense that it offers you a metaphysics, which says it’s an end story for now, but it’s an end story for now that completely accept flux at all levels because it’s built on the dialectics of negation, oscillation as fundamental to our understanding of reality. And actually, we even claim this is how reality works. Negation, oscillation is the fundamental dialectics of both reality and the way we think about the world. And because that is the case, we have to have a metaphysics we start from, build everything else from, which accepts flux as the fundamental principle at all levels. Why? Because flux is less energy-demanding than anything stable ever could be.
Jim: All right, Alexander and I agreed before the show started that there’s so much meat in this book that we’re going to do a part three, so come back and check out part three. I want to thank Alexander again for an amazingly interesting and deep conversation.
Alexander: I can only agree strongly on that one, Jim. I love having this conversation with you and we should then remind people that the third episode is going to be on the applications of the metaphysics we just discussed and laid out here.
Jim: Indeed.
Alexander: That’s the rest of the book.
Jim: And we will see you guys then.