The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Jordan Hall. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Jordan Hall. Jordan’s a longtime friend and collaborator, and he’s a successful entrepreneur, thinker, essayist, and talker on many YouTube videos. Welcome, Jordan.
Jordan: Thanks, Jim. You mentioned earlier if I wanted more introduction, like to point people to stuff, and I was just thinking about how, well, I should make sure that it’s official, that I formerly don’t want anybody to go to read anything I’ve written or see anything I’ve created so that it is entirely on their own recognizance. So if you happen to find yourself reading something I wrote, ball’s in your court.
Jim: Like I say, that is a brilliant judo move. Even Putin would’ve liked that. That’ll definitely get far more people to read your shit than me calling it out. So, good judo move. It’s wonderful to have Jordan back. This is his sixth appearance on the Jim Rutt Show. Basically enough, went back and counted them, and for those who want to learn more, EP8, Jordan Hall and Game B. EP26, Jordan Hall on the Game B Emergence, one of my COVID extras on COVID-19 and complexity. Back in EP 170, Jordan appeared with John Vervaeke and we talked about the religion that’s not a religion.
And then the last time he was on just a few months ago, EP 223, Jordan Hall on Cities, Civiums, and Becoming Christian. And it was there that we set up this podcast because in line of that podcast, Jordan said something like, and of course I’m going to allow him to correct me, but something like, if you understand the Trinity correctly, the Christian God becomes logically necessary. And I went back and read the transcript and you said something pretty close to that. I also found, actually, had a transcript made of the video you did with John Vervaeke fairly recently. And again, something like that. So, I’m going to put it to you one last time to clarify the statement, and then we’ll dig into why the hell would somebody believe something as crazy as that?
Jordan: Well, I think that’s pretty fair. The only thing I would add is logically necessary for any possible world.
Jim: Oh, even better, even more crazy.
Jordan: Yeah, exactly. I wanted to make sure that we were able to incorporate all multiverse, although of course, the concept or the content of the concept world, we may have to spend some time on that in particular.
Jim: So I would say that I’m willing to stipulate that if I buy it for this world, I’ll buy it for this multiverse. But, of course, there could be higher order trees of multiverses and I’m not going to waste any time talking about that. But if a Everett multiverse that we’re part of that tree, then if it flies here, it flies everywhere. So I’ll stipulate that, we don’t need to make that argument.
Jordan: Fair enough. That’s going to simplify the conversation.
Jim: Yeah. By one level of infinity. As regular listeners know, I remain a total scoffer with respect to religion. However, as I told my friend Bill F, hi, Bill, yesterday, Jordan is a very smart guy, and maybe after the podcast I’ll give away my worldly possessions, take the cloth, and set into preaching. I’ve always thought I’d be a tolerably good religious crackpot and pulpit pounder.
Jordan: You would be tolerably good. You got the right sort of sensibility. And where I am in the mountains of Western North Carolina, and we have that kind of nice flavor of down homey, a little bit of banjo, a little bit of fiddle in the worship music, which I think you would also fit pretty well, but you have to grow a little bit more facial hair, I think.
Jim: Yeah, that’s right. In fact, that guy that led the service down at your church when we came down there, I would model myself after him. He was pretty damn good.
Jordan: Oh yeah, good. Yeah, Gordon, he’s got, yeah, that’s good. That’s a good fit.
Jim: We have similar age, similar chunkiness, et cetera.
Jordan: Girth.
Jim: Though I think I got him beat in that department. Despite the fact that I’m a scoffer at revealed religion, I think Jordan and I actually agree about a bunch of things that people think of when they think about religion culturally. For instance, I’m going to read this because it was so well said. This is from the Vervaeke video. For example, a symbol, concrete example. If we think about the spirit of mammon, the spirit of mammon participates in a particular communion which gathers together a multiplicity driven by greed and pulls them into a communion, which is ultimately dominated by the characteristics of mammon.
And I wouldn’t want to learn from that. I would want to learn the details, but I want to learn the details from a distance. Beautiful, beautifully said. That was Jordan on this Vervaeke video. And then another thing he said in the same video, in relationship with a wholesomeness, I mean, you see the arc of life, you really feel the presence of the fact that life has an arc to it, the presence of death and the presence of birth. They are both part of it, but there’s something necessary to grow old, something honorable and beautiful, actually, in growing old, and as an old fart, I definitely agree with that. So at the cultural level, I think we have a huge amount of resonance, but of course, so far, I refuse to accept any random metaphysical speculations as true. So take your best shot.
Jordan: Nice. And I’m going to reveal the fact that you violated your own ethos by participating, apparently, I’m going to imagine quite substantially, in metaphysical speculation or at least reading philosophy in the run-up to this conversation. So something about that that I think is interesting. And you mentioned even Kant Heidegger.
Jim: Yeah, I’ll go through the list here. Now, I will say, this is very important. I love metaphysical speculation, right? We sat around in freshmen, sophomore lounges in college, my high school buddies to this day, I love metaphysical speculation, but what I object to is people believing it.
Jordan: Oh.
Jim: Yeah.
Jordan: There’s a whole other category there around this notion of belief in epistemology, which we may want to get to at some point.
Jim: Why do I love Lord of the Rings, read 34 times, right? That’s kind of interesting, but sorry, don’t believe it’s true. I actually should mention this. I did do even more reading than usual for this thing. Jordan had sent me a book to read with a title that would scare away any sane person, but I read it anyway. Heidegger, Neoplatonism, and the History of Being: Relation as Ontological Ground by James Filler, who’s like a junior faculty member at a unknown college someplace. But I also, by that, and also I was trying to anticipate where Jordan was going to go with this, and I figured knowing he’s a philosopher at heart, I dip back into Kant, Aquinas, Russell, Whitehead, and Heidegger, and less usefully because they didn’t really talk about the issues that I think Jordan’s going to come out with. I did go back and look at Wittgenstein and Hagel, though I will say mostly in secondary sources, but got my heads into their games to some degree and extracted from it what I thought might be useful.
Jordan: All right, well, let me see. Let’s step into it then. It feels to me like there’s two basic moves. It’s kind of Roman numeral one and Roman numeral two, and then you just brought forth, which may be a proper Roman numeral three, which has to do with this category of belief. And even what that might mean. Roman numeral one has to do with the argument that a triadic structure, in general, as such, which is fundamentally relational, that relational ontology piece, is the ontological primitive. It’s the bootloader of all the rest of our both conceptual and ontological characters. So that’s the first part of the argument.
Jim: First I’m going to state here, and I did a lot of reading on this, the claim of relational ontology of the sort that Filler expresses is by no means a well-accepted idea. It is an idea that’s in circulation, but there are mentee counters to it. In fact, Heidegger himself would probably not have agreed with Filler. We can dig into that.
Jordan: Right. Well, so that’s the argument. The argument is that that is in fact the case, and in specifically, this lean towards the relational. So the lean from he makes a distinction between substance ontology and relational ontology. And I think that that’s perfectly valid. And you can do work critiquing, for example, where process philosophy still gets hung up with a residual of a substance ontology and that moving to relational is the proper way of resolving those problems. I’m not sure how much we want to get involved in that, but that’s argument number one.
And then argument number two is this particular triadic structure or unto triadic structure of the Christian Trinity. So those are two moves. The first move is that in some sense can say the first move is in the domain of philosophy. And then when you move from the domain of philosophy to say, okay, by hypothesis, a relational triad is the proper bootload of everything else, then okay, well, what is the content of that relational triad? Does it have any content that we can use to distinguish it? And then the argument is yes, in fact, it is the Christian Trinity that is that one, and that then would conclude the assertion.
And then again, as a bonus time for all the copious time we have after we’ve resolved those two, which I assume [inaudible 00:09:18] 15 or 20 minutes, then we can talk about this question of belief, which maybe just to kind of lead into that because I think it helps, and that is the notion of belief as a strictly mental operation and the notion of belief as an existential commitment is a distinction that I would want to make. And I would want to say that in fact, the notion of belief as a strictly mental operation is highly bound to a substance ontology, whereas the notion of belief as an existential commitment or a way of life is more naturally bound and in fact a direct extension of this relational triadic. So just keep that in mind. So when I’m proposing that one believe what I say, what I’m actually saying is that I’m proposing that one repent and begin to live in a particular way.
Jim: Okay. I like that. It’s a reasonably good way to structure it. I do believe, and this is what I was prepared for, is I do want to dig in a fair bit into the strong form or quite specific form of relational ontology that Filler lays out, and that seems to be the basis of your argument. Because as I thought about how to refute this, one could refute strong form relational ontology, and second, refute the Trinity as a sensible formulation and certainly as a core part of this in terms of reality. And then third, the nature of what support do you need for belief. And there, of course, relied on Kant and Russell to a substantial degree. So let’s do it sort of in that order. So I think that actually fits pretty well.
Jordan: I think you mapped almost perfectly. That’s weird.
Jim: Well, why don’t you take a handle at, keep in mind the audience are not professional philosophers, and probably a fair number of our philosophy haters since they listened to me. So go slow, take your time, define your terms.
Jordan: Yeah, I’ll try. We agreed to do this conversation on this podcast. I think we should sort of caveat that for people who are philosophy haters, there are, again, we do find a lot to hate in this conversation.
Jim: It’s going to be all philosophy all the time today, folks.
Jordan: The most philosophical philosophy that I think that we can accomplish outside of the French, there will be no French in this conversation. So I’m actually going to rely a lot on the stuff that I learned from Forest, who oddly enough, I’ll actually be speaking with for the first time in a while later today. First, just to put forth a notion of a hierarchical stack of concepts. In order to think clearly, one of the things that we need to do is we need to notice when a particular thought or concept necessarily implies, let’s just say a deeper thought or concept, and then work our way down the stack. So as a simple example, if we want to talk and think about velocity, by definition, we are already importing concepts of position, change, and time. And so, we cannot think velocity at all without those prior concepts. And so, we can sort of see how they’re related in a stack in a hierarchy. Yeah?
Jim: Yep.
Jordan: So in order to do the thing we’re trying to do in Roman numeral one, what we’re looking to do is to see if there is a hierarchy that has a verticality to it. And if there is something at the bottom of that, some sort of necessary bottom concept, which in this case by the way, would be an ontoepistemological event that is a precursor of both of the split between ontology and epistemology. The most basic, most fundamental thing that everything else directly or indirectly is derivative of and therefore necessary.
So the argument of it being logically necessary, this is how I’m describing what that means. As we begin moving down the stack, we’ll notice that we have, for example, some very deep concepts that have been talked about in philosophy forever. Things like being and becoming, which change, for example, sits inside there. The notion of change is a necessity for becoming or the fact that you can move being has a capacity to change at all, that we’re in that location.
We also have concepts like unity and multiplicity or sameness and difference. These are all kind of connecting with each other in different ways of orbiting in the same level of abstraction. Forest actually points at a very powerful and which is continuity and symmetry, which is I think of that same category. And we have concepts like reality, which I’ll have to refer to him unless we need to double click on it, subject object and the relationship between the two. So for him, reality is the relationship between the subject and the object. It is not strictly mapped to the object, which is a Western bias in the last 500 years.
Jim: Yeah, no, I think I’m going to insert here that regular listeners know my typical lens for such things is a bit more scientific than philosophical. But now, these days, borders on the philosophical, and that is the complexity lens that one needs to have a short form I’ve used for that is to understand the world, you have to understand both the dancer and the dance. One can’t reject reductionism because you want to understand how high can your dancers jump. Can Igor pick up Triana and hold her up over his head in a dance? And then the dance itself has its own realistic dynamic which operates within the constraints of the dancers. And this brings into focus at the same time, the fact that object, the dancers, and the relationship, the dance, are intimately interconnected, and to talk about one without the other is nonsensical.
Jordan: Right. Great. So at that point, what I want to do is I want to say if we spend time on it, and we may want to do this, but if we spend time that we’ll notice that there’s a very large number of higher-level concepts, including things like space and time, which are above, hierarchically, above lower level concepts like change or being, becoming unity, multiplicity, et cetera. And so, as we begin to zoom down, the conceptual layer that I want to be sitting at is the ones that I just mentioned. Is that fair?
Jim: Okay. Let’s make clear which ones you assume are above and what level you want to be at.
Jordan: The level that I want to be at for this part of the conversation is the one where we talk about unity, multiplicity, sameness, distinction, being, becoming, subjective, objective, and reality. That is a lower level or more fundamental than, for example, even space and time.
Jim: See, I would reject that. I think that within the context of you and me in this branch of the multiverse or the single universe, don’t know which, time probably comes first, and then space, and then what emerges into the time and space. And it’s hard to maybe perhaps as a philosophical discussion point, you can talk about these things to the point being that they could apply to other universes, but with respect to our universe, maybe that’s where we’re talking past each other. Because I’m talking about the universe that we are thrown into, as Heidegger would say, versus all possible universes.
Jordan: Let me say it differently just to see if we can connect that the notion of one or oneness and two, twoness, is more fundamental than time. Does not necessitate time, does not unfold in the context of time, but has its own being or its own it is regardless of the category of time. And so, we can think about, but by contrast, to be able to think of time as anything more than a pure potential, which we’ll get to in a moment. So if we think of time at its sort of most basic element, what we have is the possibility of change, possibility of change in a particular fashion, in this case, not in the fashion of space. And we have, as we begin to add in the concept of number, we can sort of unfold time in waves. We can think of time as the possibility of change along a dimensionality that is distinct from the dimensionality of space as the most basic.
Interestingly, you can even think about this developmentally for a child. A child has an experience of now and before. Notice you have now a distinction between you have a multiplicity of experiences. So multiplicity of experience predates the ability to even conceive of or participate in time. You have to have some way of being able to distinguish between now and before. And you notice that there is a distinction between now and before that is not the same as the sensory-motor, the sensorium distinctions. So now I am here and before I was there.
So the hereness and thereness has some portion of content, that’s the space side of the equation, and the nowness and thenness is distinct. But notice, in order to even say any of these things, I’m invoking deeper concepts like distinction and sameness and difference and becoming or the possibility or changeness, which of course, change is interesting because it’s in the relationship between sameness and difference. So I get a very, very basic toolkit of concepts that include these very simple ones of same or unity, multiplicity, same difference, and a relationship or dynamis or change. So those three are very, very, very basic. And everything else begins to be built on top of those.
Jim: I don’t know if built on top of those is actually the right way to look at it. I would suggest that those are formalisms we’ve discovered that are applicable to the universe to which we are thrown in. I think we have a hard time understanding to what degree the universe that we are in has been subject to pruning rules versus all possible universes.
Jordan: Are you going to propose that there’s a possible universe where you can have time without change?
Jim: Well, I think we could have some different dynamic. Because what is time but a dynamic, right?
Jordan: Okay. Well, you could have time without dynamic.
Jim: No, that would be like saying I can have a blue red thing. It would be-
Jordan: I mean dynamic.
Jim: Yeah, dynamic. And I would say time happens to be the fundamental dynamic that applies in our universe, and that it hurts my head to think about it, but I could imagine a universe that had some other dynamic, let’s say, that was not continuous. Our time is probably not, may not be continuous, it may be quantized at the plunk level, but at a level so far from our ability to measure, we’ll never be able to tell. One could imagine, in fact, there have been science fiction stories of systems that jump around every two seconds or something, that would be very weird and it’d be a very different universe, but it’s not impossible.
So I guess I’m taking a bit Kanstinian perspective here that these terms are language games that describe our universe, or more generally, any possible universe, but they aren’t actually the thing itself. So I suppose, and again, in the philosophical tradition, I have always rejected Platonism, the idea of Platonic ideals, and instead say that we use language and concepts to describe the world we’re in or potentially alternative universes in a way that has some traction and is useful.
Jordan: Well, I don’t think I’m making this at the moment. I don’t think I’m making a Platonic argument. What I’m trying to do is say that if I can speak about the notion of space at all, and I notice that in order to speak about and think about the notion of space, I already am including and have to have some notion of dynamic at all. That’s what I’m pointing to.
Jim: Well, certainly with time you need a dynamic. Space, you could imagine space being totally static.
Jordan: I’m not sure if you can, actually. You can imagine objects in space without having any actual change because that’s the temporal aspect, but you cannot imagine space without any distinction. So now we have a, sorry, I misspoke when I said space. Time, dynamic, space, distinction. And that’s that notion of verticality of concept, which points to a verticality of ontology, that the ontology of space is ultimately dependent upon an ontologically, more primitive element known as distinction. And the ontology of time is dependent on an ontologically more primitive element known as dynamic.
Jim: That I’ll buy, at least in things that are like what our universe is like. There may be ones that are so far afield that it doesn’t break down, but for many universes, that would seem to be a reasonable distinction, that anything that’s sort of like our space is going to have distinction. Anything that’s sort of like our time, we’ll have dynamics, though it may have very different attributes, may not be dynamic, its pace may change, all kinds of weird things you could imagine in alternative universes.
Jordan: Yeah, the qualities of the dynamics are quite open. Science fiction can imagine an arbitrarily large number of qualities of dynamic.
Jim: This is good. We got this on the table, now let’s move on to the next step.
Jordan: Okay. So now you have a sense of the notion of this verticality of the stack and that certain things in my argument are above other things and other things more primitive. So now we’re operating at this level, and in this level are concepts. Let’s just say concepts. There’s a lot more words you might want to use, but concepts are fine for now, of identity, unity, wholeness, sameness, multiplicity, distinction, diversity, difference, dynamis, a little bit confusing things by importing different philosophical traditions. But another one that lives along this fractional and is being and becoming. So becoming participates in the dynamis side of things and being is effectively on the side of identity and sameness. And then we have relationship. And the argument is that relationship is also at that level, and in fact, is actually the one level lower. That’s the move.
Jim: Yeah, that’s the strong claim right there of the relational ontology. Strong form ala Filler. And I would point out that many serious philosophers would not agree with that. In fact, probably not even Whitehead himself.
Jordan: No, no, I don’t think Whitehead. Well, I think Whitehead would if we had a conversation.
Jim: But he’s dead.
Jordan: He didn’t get there on his own.
Jim: He did not get there on his own. I could not find anything in there. The empiricist view would be that, one, obviously, once you have two objects in the universe, you have a relationship between them, and may not be true with only one object in the universe, but if you have two, you have a relationship. And so, that relationship becomes a third thing. And this is the complexity lens. The relationship is every bit as real as the two objects, and that’s the mistake that reductionists make.
But the mistake that the anti-reductionists make is to say that there aren’t two objects. And so, I would suggest that Russell, even though Russell and White had disagreed about a lot of things, I think my read at least is that they would both agree that substance and relation must coexist. And once you have more than one object, then substance is there. And substance is as real as the objects, in some sense, in how our universe unfolded. And in fact, all the interesting things about universe are not the material in them. There are the patterns that have evolved in the material through constrained dynamics over 13.5 billion years.
Jordan: I can feel right now we may find ourselves in a brutally classically philosophical conversation. So I’m going to struggle mildly to avoid it. The argument is that relationship as a concept, and now also we are at the level of ontology, so as an ontology, contains within itself implicitly and necessarily the relata. So if I have the concept of relationship, I also already have the concept of relata or the things that are in relationship.
Jim: Yeah, that’s basically what I would suggest is the Russell Whitehead view is that the two relationships and objects, once you have more than one at least, are definitionally linked. If you have two, they have to have a relationship, even if it’s a relationship of no relationship.
Jordan: And so, we’re at the point where I’m saying that the inverse, the opposite of that is actually more true, and therefore, you’re at the end of the analysis, if you can get to that point.
Jim: What’s the reverse of that? I’m not quite sure I’m following you there.
Jordan: So the reverse is that the relationship, by the nature of relationship as a concept, to understand relationship at all, relationship intrinsically invokes relata. So it looks like a V if you think of it visually. So there’s the relationship which is the connection and then the relata, which are indistinct, that can be anything could be brought into relationship. But that the conventional way of thinking about it, which is in fact how you said it, let’s say, I think you said Russell Whitehead, is that the objects, when you have two of them, they come into relationship. And so, those are, one is the inverse of the other. One has the notion that the objects, in some sense, you can imagine an object separate from or out of relationship, which is by the way, why materialism happens. And materialism happens because it has fallen into an implicit supposition of substance ontology that the notion of an object absent relationship is plausible.
That’s the move, right? The reduction is to move, which is perfectly useful, functionally useful, is to say, imagine I decontextualize some particular object under investigation so I can investigate the object in and of itself exclusively. That’s the scientific move. I need to create an experiment or I isolate out all other aspects of reality so I can focus on, so I know that what I’m dealing with is the object under investigation.
So it’s that movement of decontextualization which is available within a substance ontology where you actually have that as a presupposition that an object, qua object is a valid thing in and of itself, which is again, to say that the notion of object does not include within itself at an essential level relationship, but that when we have two objects, we notice that relationship pops into our reality. The inverse of that, the argument I’m making is that the notion of relationship cannot be conceived of at all without already having relata, let’s say stubbed out or pseudo-coded in. So the thing that is in relationship is not yet embodied in any particular way when I think about relationship, but relationship invokes intrinsically, in other words, includes within itself, it’s actual essence as a concept, relata. So that’s the pivot point between those two moves.
Jim: Now, is there anything real there or is that just words? To say that objects are relational and relational implies objects, I’m not sure I see any useful distinction there.
Jordan: The argument is actually that this is the most real. So it’s not just words, but in fact, even the notion of nominalism, that we can talk about things in the terms of just wordness, is already a consequence of the substance ontology. But that, in here I’m again kind of invoking Forest’s thing about reality is not the objective, the objective world of objects, nor is reality the subjective, the idealists world, but is in fact to be found in the relationship between them so that the relationship is reality. The most real is relationship.
And that I’m going to keep kind of hammering on this a little bit because in my own personal experience of spending nine or 10 years trying to get that, I noticed that the groove of an objective substance sensibility had been so deeply carved in me, in my mind, in my way of my basic, how I say it, below my conscious level of understanding that I kept importing a substance ontology without recognizing I was doing it. So this notion of it’s not just that relationality is real, not just words, but rather that when we even want to begin talking about reality, we are in fact actually talking about relationship, and that all the other stuff we’re doing, if we talk about an object, or we’re actually talking about something which is actually a first-order imagination, any object is a function of an act, on our part, of decontextualization.
Jim: It’s obviously a coarse-graining, right? You give the example of science, you say in the pure form, science eliminates all other things and concentrates on one variable. Of course, we know that’s not even close to true, right? You’re not going to eliminate gravity or you’re not going to eliminate neutrinos going through objects. You’re not going to eliminate lots and lots of things. And so, it’s a very coarse-graining. And when you look at a table, oh, there’s a table. Well, actually, what level are you going to analyze it? It’s also a bunch of molecules. It’s a bunch of chemistry, and then it’s a bunch of elementary particles which are a bunch of quarks, and then we don’t know what the hell’s going on down below that. So again, I think I’ve run into this argument a lot where people try to purify the concept of object. In the abstraction, I can do it. I can imagine some Greek atom all by itself in the universe without relationship, but in terms of-
Jordan: Except one thing.
Jim: What?
Jordan: Your imagination, and that’s really important. See, what happens is I’m going to zoom in on that because it’s really critical.
Jim: Okay, let’s do it.
Jordan: When we do the thought experiment of imagining an atom without any relationship, we are doing the thing that you just said complexity says you should never do. We are endeavoring to pretend that our imagination is not the actual content of the relationship that that atom is having. We are imagining it. We are present and our imagination is present with the atom that we are imagining not being in relationship. That’s the key, right? That’s the sleight of hand that we constantly slip into is that we are actually present and then we pretend that we are absent so that we can imagine, we can hypothesize that there are things out there that operate in this world of decontextualization or non-relationship.
Jim: I’m not sure I buy that one as meaningful. Suppose I were God and created my own pocket universe, and we may be able to create pocket universes someday if Lee Smolin is right, and universe is-
Jordan: I’m doing it right now. I’m imagining an atom not in relationship with anything. There’s a pocket universe.
Jim: We create a pocket universe, and I’m outside of it, and inside of it is this one Greek-style Democritus atom that has no internal structure whatsoever.
Jordan: Are you imagining that?
Jim: I’m imagining that, but let’s take one step-
Jordan: Then you’re imagining.
Jim: … further, then let’s say I am God and I actually did it.
Jordan: Okay, great. Are you, Jim Rutt, currently imagining that you were God and you did it? See how that works?
Jim: Yes. Yep. Yep.
Jordan: What happens is we’ve slipped into this place where we take our playacting, the things that we are making up, as being able to actually be equivalent to an actual reality, but they’re not. And so, as soon as we try to step back, so you hypothesize, you imagine a God who creates something, but the problem is that you are still actively imagining it. And that’s not trivial. That’s actually a highly nontrivial reality because it allows us to, how do I say? To pretend, to pretend a wide variety of things that are actually nonsensical. They are in fact actually just words as opposed to being real. The reality is the whole sentence, Jim Rutt is currently imagining that, and then finish it out, and that’s what enables it to be present as something that can be imagined. Absent the act of imagination, it can’t be imagined. This is a wild thing, but it ends up being very important because this is a trick that a lot of us, particularly in the West, find ourselves in, is that we try to eliminate the first half of that sentence. So the mainland just keeps going back to this-
Jordan: Eliminate the first half of that sentence. So the main line just keeps going back to this, the hammering, the logical conversation of the notion that we keep running into the fact that as I try to go deeper, I notice that I cannot think about being separate from becoming, and I cannot think about becoming separate from being. But that relationship or for example, the relationship between being and becoming has the characteristic that I can just ever so slightly vaguely be able to think about that, which is to say that I can form a concept of it precisely because it implicitly includes the rolata. And that’s the thing. The thing is that it is what happens when you say, “Okay, I’m going to try to zoom down to the minimum viable, the actual concrete minimum viable, not just playing around. And that minimum viable is relationship or relationality because relationality in its essence includes the rolata that are in relationship, whereas the reverse is not true.”
And that if I try to do the reverse, I try to imagine pure substance, what I notice is that I keep running into contradictions where our relationship just keeps showing up even though it’s not included in the essence of the concept of pure substance. So in some sense it’s as simple as that, when you really get down to it, you notice that if you just want to have a compact, minimum viable toolkit that you get all the way down, that you start with relationship and everything works, if you try to start with object or substance, then you have this immediately you actually run into a wide variety of problems. And then of course we have this other issue which Fuller and Verbeke, I think, more fully articulates a whole bunch of downstream consequences of the sleight of hand of substance at the very bottom, including nominalism. And by the way, because decontextualization is implicit, you also run into the meaning crisis. But I don’t need to go there for the moment.
Jim: All right, let’s put a line under this section. I’m going to summarize my pushback and then you can push back against my pushback. Then we’ll move on to the next piece, which is I’ll continue to maintain, I think this would be supported by many of the thinkers who’ve dug into this space. And of the ones I reviewed recently, I would say Russell, Whitehead, and Heider would all agree with me more than with you and Fuller on the statement that substance and relationship come together. And you can’t say either is prior to the other that the universe that we’re in, the form of being that we have, and the becoming that we have and being thrown into this universe, which is a concept I love from Heidegger, are all about the co-creation of these two things. Not either one having priority over the other.
Jordan: So let me read it in a slightly different way. Unity and multiplicity and the relationship between them is sort of a minimum viable set.
Jim: Yes. And that therefore if we think of your stack of argument, your first point of strong form relational ontology is at best substantially contested by other quality thinkers.
Jordan: Oh, well that’s interesting. But we now live in an environment where I can say that Donald Trump, Elon Musk and a billion bots agree with me. That’s not reality. But if we just go and say, “Okay, we’ll work at the level that unity and multiplicity and the relationship between them and which includes, by the way, another way of saying is becoming and the relationship between them, are part of a minimum compact set,” then I’m okay to move to the second Roman numeral.
Jim: I think we can agree on that. I’m cool with that.
Jordan: So we now have unity, multiplicity in the relationship. What I have then is the Trinity. So the Trinity, we’re now going to be moving a little bit from philosophy to theology slowly. So it’ll look Catholic right now, which of course the Catholics blend philosophy and theology a little bit to the distaste of the Orthodox. But in any event, the Trinity has this characteristic at the theological level of including unity in the sense of the Godhead or the wholeness, the oneness of God, multiplicity in the sense of the three persons or the three apostasies, and relationality, which is that the relationship between and among the persons is their intrinsic characteristic that the father is in the son, the son is… And all that kind of stuff. So when I look at my philosophical minimum, which Heidegger in some sense, say Whitehead, certainly the Neoplatonists will all feel somewhat comfortable with that notion of unity, multiplicity, and relationality.
And by the way, also becoming, so becoming is the proto of change, the thing that is the stubbed doubt thing from which change will happen as soon as we kick off anything in which dynamics can actually play out different than distinction. We actually start to see that that is the basic content of something which is the precursor of the Christian Trinity, which is that you’ve got what the word they use is ousia or essence, the wholeness, the oneness, the Godhead in English, and then the apostasies or the persons, which is three. So I have a oneness and a threeness, I have a unity and a multiplicity, and then I have the fact that the persons are in relationship with each other and their shared relationship is the oneness. Now I’ve moved from a purely philosophical construct to the beginning of a theological construct and noticing that there’s in fact a mapping between those two.
Jim: I would say that’s true for any fairy story that included the Trinity, that there’s nothing yet that you’ve been able to put on the table that would say that’s anything other than a story. In fact, Kant would actually… This where my readings of Kant were quite useful, that existence is not a predicate. Right? One could tell the story of one in three, and essentially a Trinity story. It is a nice little Catholic boy. When I was young, I tried to get my head around the Trinity never quite did, but it’s just a story so far.
Jordan: I’m actually not sure what I follow, that in some sense, I didn’t do anything more than make the movement from the ontological primitives on the philosophical side of the conversation, which I think we’d gotten to the point of recognizing that wasn’t a story, and as much as it was the most basic or necessary and sufficient thing upon which we begin to build the rest of reality.
Jim: At least put it this way, I could accept it as a reasonable description of the basis of reality. I could quibble about little things, but close enough. But then how do you make the jump to this particular set of things?
Jordan: First, I’m doing a half jump. So this is what I was saying, we’re moving from philosophy to theology. So I’m doing a half jump of saying, okay, when I describe the Trinity, what I notice first is that what I am describing is that compact set of ontological primitives that I just described. I look at the Trinity when I say, “Wow, what are they talking about when they talk about the Trinity? Huh? That’s interesting. They’re talking about something which is simultaneously wholeness, oneness, simultaneously multiplicity and relationality at its most basic element.” The very, the thing that is the sine qua non of the Christian Trinity is that which we’ve now said, okay, that maps back to the philosophical, that which is it’s logically at the base of any…
Jim: Okay. Yeah. If that’s all you’re saying, that’s fine because it’s also true of a three-person marriage or a three-person company or a stem of grapes with three grapes on it.
Jordan: Nice. So let’s do it. Okay. We can try the three-person marriage. So when you say it’s also true of, let’s talk about what do you mean by that? What is the wholeness or the oneness, the identity, the sameness that is in the three-person marriage?
Jim: It’s a marriage. It’s one marriage.
Jordan: Great. Now what is the multiplicity in the three-person marriage?
Jim: The three people.
Jordan: Great. And then what is the relationality?
Jim: I’m not going to go into that. That’s too kinky. More seriously, there’s a series of complex relationships with each other and with each individual relationship to the marriage.
Jordan: Yes, you got it.
Jim: As a classic example, we’re both married guys, in our case, two-person marriages. We act in ways at times that address the marriage itself to strengthen it, or sometimes, hopefully not too often, weaken it to constrain our behaviors by the marriage rather than the other person. And so the marriage itself has an existence. This is where I’m not a materialist. I believe that these dynamic entities like marriages are real. And so therefore, I would say that if we think of marriage that way, it’s a whole.
Jordan: Perfect. I think this is exactly correct. I agree with you completely. I can see that there’s a set of relationships that any particular person in the marriage has, of which many are not part of the marriage. The set of relationships that are part of the marriage is between and among, in this case, of the two members of the marriage. And with the marriage itself. And the body of the marriage is interestingly nothing but the whole set of the total set of relationships that are inside that body, which is the marriage is pure relationality. FYI.
Jim: Yes, yes. Okay, good.
Jordan: So when we did the first Roman numeral, I noticed that a number of times we kept talking about the question of to what degree is this just a story and to what degree is it real? And what you’re doing there when you actually make that move is you’re actually moving from the philosophical to the theological, or specifically to the thing that theology tries to talk about. The theological is to say, well, what is the structure of the reality we’re actually living in. And it’s nature as reality. And then the philosophical would say in some sense, how do we think about that? Or how do we talk about that appropriately? And well, the theological invokes the whole of reality, I suppose. So when we say for example, there’s lots of different other kinds of examples of these kinds of structures that have unity, multiplicity, and where the relationality is the body of the unity and the binding of the multiplicity that allows them to be, that all of those are ultimately derivatives of the most basic version of that, which is in fact the Trinity.
So the Trinity is the platonic form, to make you very angry, of that characteristic that shows up in the rest of reality. And so every time I see, and by the way, the word hypostasis can be very easily, probably most properly translated not as person, but as instance or instantiation in almost like the software sense, like an object instantiated. So every time you run into a material or a concrete example of this kind of thing, what you’re running into is something that is participating or is an instance of the more basic structure of the Trinity. This is why I make the argument that if you want to think about at any time that you run into a circumstance like that, you run back, you say, “Okay, well this is a basic form,” that the core of a world is that it has this structure and the core of the structure then gives rise to by, because it’s part of the nature of reality, then gives rise to the possibility of it showing up in lots of different places, of course.
Jim: Okay, I will grant you Platonism for the purpose of this argument, and I’m going to argue that that is nowhere near a platonic exemplar and that the platonic exemplar would have abstract entities inside and the emergent result of their interactions would be unspecified. And that the Trinity, particularly the Christian Trinity, has very specific flavors, although not necessarily known to us humans, but assumes that there are specific flavors of the three particles that are combined to make the Godhead. And I would say the platonic form of that is not flavored.
Jordan: We’ll get there in a second. I agree with you. And we’re kind of moving there step by step. I’m trying to take it stepwise. And by the way, what I thought you were going to say, which I actually would’ve very much agree as a correction, is that now that we are firmly in Roman numeral two, now that we are firmly in the theological, we need to be very careful to recognize that we don’t want to ever be thinking about something in the purely abstract. So I’m definitely not saying that the Trinity or the triune God is a purely abstract form, and that’s very much so I was kind of kidding when I said the Platonic form, but now I have to take it back entirely.
Jim: That just doesn’t work. Just doesn’t work.
Jordan: But rather is in fact actually, really the basis upon which the rest of this stuff sits. Let me just take a little bit of a digression of one of the persons of the Trinity kind of give you some examples of how this works. The second person of the Trinity, which John famously refers to as the Logos, is that of which all forms of Logos. So every story, in fact, every form of incarnation at all, any form of relationship between the transcendent and the created, participates in and is an embodiment of the second person of the Trinity. So the second person of the Trinity subtends that. So every story is ultimately a variation on the theme of the Logos. Does that make sense?
Jim: Yeah. What Alexander Bard calls narratology.
Jordan: I don’t know, that I’m not familiar with.
Jim: It doesn’t matter. But yeah, let’s say if there was a Logos as John specified, then one could say that all narratives are from the Logos.
Jordan: Yes, yes, exactly right. Exactly right. So in that same way, everything that is of this structure of unity, multiplicity and relationality is from the Triune God. That’s the argument that I’m making.
Jim: That’s a giant leap off the cliff.
Jordan: If you get the idea that the second person of the Trinity, the Logos, subtends the entire universe of all of narratology, which by the way includes not just narrative, but in fact incarnation in general. Should we make it that way? Should we take those two steps?
Jim: Here’s my objection. I think Kant would agree with me absolutely that it’s a leap backwards for which there’s no justification. We have existence, we have stories. That doesn’t mean that there is a being inside or being something inside of a circle called the Godhead, called the Logos, that is somehow related to all this stuff. There could be a platonic form if you want to be specifically warned against that move, right, to invent abstractions.
Jordan: I forgot, you were raised Catholic. What to do is we have to start de… I’ll do a little history. The Greek here is helpful. So I was using the first person, the second person, the third person eventually made you the father, the son, the Holy Spirit. We could just stay with the persons for the moment. In the Greek you have the ousia and the hypostases. It was actually the Latin translation got stuck with the fact the Latin translation of both words can be substance. And so the Latin’s, interestingly enough, already conceptually had an ambiguity between those two. And so I think it was Jerome, but I’m not quite sure settled on the word person, persona, which literally he took from the theatrical mask, the mask that you put on to be the translation of hypostases. A difficulty here, a particularly difficulty because of in fact, fact of Christ as an incarnate human in the hypostatic union, is that we often imagine the content of the persons of the Trinity as being literally people.
So for example, we imagine the father as being sort of a Zeus figure straight out of Michelangelo. So we imagine that there’s kind of an older dude with a beard and kind of like a younger dude with not as much of a beard and they’re touching fingers and maybe there’s a bird involved sometimes. That is definitely not it. So we can say with no ambiguity, that is not only is that not it, but in fact Michelangelo was engaging in a particularly bad heresy when he did that, meaning that he confused a lot of people.
In the singular and unique case of Jesus, we actually have a real human dude, but in all the other characteristics of the Trinity, it ain’t that kind of thing. So we’re more properly saying something like every narrative, to be able to do narrative. You’re ultimately dependent upon something like a combination between language and mind. Anything that is of the character of narrative includes as a substrate, it is built on top of some kind of language. And we can use large language models to help us have a really broad category of the notion of what is language, something that has a coherent patronicity that can carry coherent patterns and then minds or things that can perceive patterns and extract the patronicity that is carried. Is that a fair statement?
Jim: Yeah, though this is a very important point that I would like to make here. This is my biggest objection to Heidegger, that he also takes a very human-centric view of the universe. And I think the thing that all such explications miss is the universe existed long before there was consciousness or language and life itself. And so any philosophical explanation can’t bootstrap itself from the [inaudible 00:50:13] thrown into the universe. And I always thought that was the biggest problem with Heidegger is he doesn’t say anything about a universe without humans in it. And that this story smells a fair bit like that. There was a universe long before there was Logos, at least Logos in the form of somebody inside the universe using it. There was a story that was evolving, the universe evolved for 13.5 billion years, 13.3 billion years, before there were even animals largely now.
Jordan: What do you mean when you say there was a story?
Jim: I did a very interesting podcast recently with Sarah Walker, and Cronin was the dude, on their nature of time as evolved complexity. And I would say it’s probably not the low-level physical concept of time, but it’s a real sense that the complexity of the universe has increased. And they use a very simple case of just the length of the longest biochemistry. So something has been happening for 13.2 billion years before animals even showed up. And those were prerequisites for animals to show up. In particular, building heavy atoms which didn’t exist in the early universe, and then building up biochemistry in space to some degree, and in the very early hellish, it was actually called the hadionic period when the earth was unlivable, but it could be a crucible for creating biochemistry. So that’s what I mean.
Jordan: So in this case, I’ll just re-articulate it, story here is something along the lines of a, there’s time, there’s change as a result of time, and that there is novelty. The time has a certain era to it. It’s almost, it’s a linearity of that era. Is that it?
Jim: Then the Cronin-Walker argument is that while not all emergence vectors persist over time, those who that do end up in states of higher complexity.
Jordan: So that’s almost a teleological argument that there’s something about it.
Jim: Yeah, it’s not quite, because it doesn’t quite say that complexity is pulling trajectories forward, but I would suggest that… This is always this problem with the teleological argument, but there is a nature of our particular reality that has our particular set of natural laws that when you’re in positions that are far from equilibrium, this is the Prigogine argument about complexity, that complexity has an opportunity to emerge. And if the conditions are right to preserve that heightened complexity, then the complexity can then emerge to another level of complexity above it.
Jordan: Right. Okay.
Jim: And this is also Harold Morwitz’s 28 levels of Emergence from the big bang to social psychology essentially.
Jordan: Okay. And so what I’m going to say is that you just made a reasonably nice articulation of the Trinity.
Jim: I missed it.
Jordan: And used many of the concepts that we developed in our toolbox in two levels higher. Right? So you kind of invoked two levels higher. For example, you already included things like time, which is why I was asking that question, but also continuity, right? So it’s not just a series of unrelated scenes in a movie, like imagine a series of frames, but the frames are utterly stochastic, there’s no connection between the two. So that would be time without continuity. So you invoked time with continuity, and then you invoked the degree to which that continuity produced something like a way of having a qualitative change in being. Yeah?
Jim: Yeah. And our time has memory, right? The continuity is not a Markov process. Markov process means that what comes next at any given instant is independent of what came before.
Jordan: Right.
Jim: The past matters.
Jordan: Yes. Yeah. There’s actual contact. And the word continuity means that it’s from the language of wholeness or synthesis or identity, that there is something like an identity or a wholeness that holds the whole thing together as a quality or as a being. And within it is also the notion of distinction. So that change can occur and it can change and move, right? All of these ideas ultimately, all of these then are beginning to be extensions. So the logos in this case is the universe or what we might call in Christianity creation, and that’s the second person of the Trinity. So the logos is any part of creation, any element of creation which has these kinds of characteristics to it. So it can show up as a language, an ordinary human sense, but it can also show up in the language of nature that has these elements.
So the abstraction or the thing that is the more basic element of the second person of the Trinity is exactly that hypostatic union. That union where things that have a characteristic of top-down constraint, or we might call them coming from the transcendent or outside, they’re coming from the outside of the domain under investigation, like you’re mentioning the fact that in our particular world or a particular universe as the language you use, our particular universe, there are characteristics of our universe that enable the formation of long-chain molecular forms or the complexity can increase in a certain fashion. So I have a bunch of constraints that are coming from the outside, which is to say they transcend the domain under investigation and those provide the kinds of constraints that enable certain things to happen inside the domain.
Jim: And other things not to happen. That’s very important.
Jordan: And other things not to happen. Absolutely. They create the negative and the positive space of the domain under investigation, and then they have the actual playing out of that in the domain under investigation. And so those are all, ultimately the transcendent, in this case would be the first person of the Trinity. Those things that are unaffected by or invariant to, but have causal consequences on the actual playing outness is the third person of the Trinity, and the incarnation of it, the event of it, the worldness, the reality of it is the second person of the Trinity. That’s that.
That’s what I mean is that each time we do this, every time we have that, we kind of create an example. What we’ll notice is that they will all include each of these kinds of elements, invariantly across all possible ways of articulating it. And we will notice that we will find ourselves grounding them back down to these basic components. And if we wanted to, we could take an orderly unfolding from the bootloader of the concepts we identified and show how they actually unfold into higher order concepts. If we need them, we can move from change to time like we did earlier.
Jim: Yeah. Well this is good. Let me take off my philosophy theologian hat, heaven help me, and put on my physicist’s hat, which is a much normal, better fit for me. And say that this story you just told is entirely congruent with the physics story as known so far. And then again, remember, the difference between science and theology is science always says it’s contingent, and that inevitably part of this story is wrong and perhaps massively wrong. But the current standard model is that there was an origin event about 13.6 billion years ago. The standard model claims it was a singularity, and that inflation occurred, frankly, I’m a little skeptical of both of those, but there was some origin event early where the entropy was far lower and the density was far higher. The only things that existed, probably not even particles or atoms, is very soon within three seconds, helium and hydrogen and a teeny, teeny bit of lithium came into existence through the unfolding of the laws of physics at that temperature and pressure. Eliminate the lithium, it’s probably not relevant to the story, at least not very heavily relevant.
And then the helium and 80% hydrogen, 20% helium, exploded outward, and then gravitation pulled parts of it back together to form what later became galaxy clusters. And then within that became galaxies, then that became stars because of the nature of the laws of the universe in our universe, fusion then occurred in some of those stars, the larger ones in that fusion, hydrogen and helium became converted to all the elements up to iron. Larger stars in a very specific size range, too small to become black holes, too big to hold together long-term became supernova, again, under straightforward laws of astrophysics. And in this supernova, the heavier elements were created. Why does all that matter? Well, it turns out life on Earth requires some of those heavier elements. Our life absolutely depends on several elements higher than iron.
And so this unfolding, which occurred, and it’s thought that the sun is at least a third generation star and possibly a fourth generation star. So it was ceded at least in part by the ejecta of supernova. And so this increased complexity keeps ratcheting up. And then the very specific experience of our sun with its mix of elements, including some heavier ones, produce an Earth which had the elements in it that it had.
And then a weird thing occurred. This is very interesting. Early, early in Earth’s history, there was a collision, it’s now thought with a planet the size of Mars. This was one violent motherfucking event, and run the numbers, it’s relatively unusual for that to happen. Really, really unusual. And the result is the moon and may have been an unusual amount of mixing of the heavier elements from the center of the Earth to the surface, which then provided a substrate for more complexity to eventually bootstrap itself up to something called LUCA. The last universal common ancestor of which you, I, yeast, bacteria and anything else that’s within our tree of life are descendants of LUCA. So that’s the physicist-emergencists view of the story. This is where the next step will be. So far, physics does not say why the laws of physics are as they are.
That’s an area of investigation. String theory attempted to answer that question so far has been a miserable failure at that particular point. And while there’s some speculation, like things like Lee Smolin’s evolutionary universes where universes come out the back hole of black holes with some Darwinian jiggling of the laws of physics at each emergence, that’s pure speculation. And the physicists part say, “All right, that’s as far as we can go right now.”
Jordan: Well, I think it’s pretty straightforward to argue that it’s actually as far as you can go within the domain of science, because science has underlying in its epistemology of the notion of experiment and when can’t in fact do experiment on why the laws of physics the way that are. You can do math and you can try to use your math to give you an explanation, which is fine, but we’re no longer doing science, we’re doing math. And it’s important. This is why string theory got lost in the noodling. It got lost in it. Maybe mistook math for physics.
Jim: Well, keep in mind though, science is not just experiment. It’s also analyzing found data. Think of all the botany and zoology that was done without experiment that led to the Darwinian theory.
Jordan: Association between observation and theory.
Jim: Yes, yes. And experiment is one class of sort of forced cleaner versions of that. But you can also do science by just observing the world. We obviously don’t do experiments with stars, for instance,
Jordan: And that, by the way, is the logos. So yes, I am not quite sure exactly why the story you told me is what you told me. But what I can say is that on the topic of at hand, the fact that, or science, this notion that reality does contain within itself this implausible propensity where observations of experiential phenomenological reality can in fact coordinate with the content of theory is another aspect of the nature of the logos. That the answer of what is that? That the is-ness of that fact at all is the second person of the Trinity.
Jim: Or as a physicist would say, it’s the settings of the natural law and then they’re unfolding.
Jordan: Yeah, I’d say a physicist might say that. I’m just saying there’s a more general principle at play that shows that in other domains besides physics and that larger category that includes many different kinds of domains, certainly larger than physics, for example, chemistry, but even larger than all of the scientific investigation. The thing that is the substrate upon which all scientific investigation sits is another aspect or word element of this thing called the Logos. So we’re now, and I think it’s useful because doing as a sort of dehumanizing the persons of the Trinity, while by the way, and this is quite interesting, we’ll ultimately find ourselves maintaining their being persons as opposed to say, for example, being principals, which now that gets very tricky.
But this has been, I think, a useful digression because it helped us start talking about the larger sense of what is being talked about in the second person. And by the way, also the first person and the third person a little bit. And by the way, even more, you notice what’s happening there is you notice these also all end up participating in something which is part of a larger whole. So we have this really interesting thing where there’s these elements of the quasi-teleological sensibility of growing complexity.
Where we said, okay, there’s these things that are constraints, enabling and disabling constraints., That are transcendent to the system outside of it. We have the actual playing out of it, and then we have the system as it moves through that playing out. And these are actually all part of a single event, a single thing that we would talk about as a system that the relations between them. And there’s a relationship with the system that is the marriage and three people in the marriage context that keeps showing up.
Jim: Okay. I think we’re in agreement so far though. I’ll also point out that from a scientific perspective, and again, there’s various speculations about this, that the universe we find ourselves in is not the only universe. And there’s multiple models. One’s the multiverse, the quantum multiverse models. I’m going to ignore because I find it very unparsimonious, but there’s also absolutely no reason there couldn’t be a higher level continuum of which many other universes like ours have butted off over time. And maybe Lee Smolin’s evolutionary universe, might be Stuart Kaufman’s, amazingly interesting new cosmology. And so we don’t necessarily need an explanation for our universe, but under infinite regress, we eventually need some explanation for something.
Jordan: Well, at the very least, we need some explanation for ours. Oh wait, just quick digression. Send me a link to Stuart’s newest cosmology if it’s in the past two years, maybe a year and a half.
Jim: Yeah, it was expressed for the first time in my podcast a few months ago, and it’s [inaudible 01:04:39]
Jordan: Oh, sweet. All right. Just give me a link to that. That sounds fantastic. I’ve been following his work with Ruth Kastner pretty closely, and so I’m hoping there’s a connection there. And the argument I would make is that anything that we could categorize as a world, which is to say anything that we’d be able to say is real and not strictly a subject of a pretend imagination in these universes will also consist of all these components of this notion of the logos or the first, second, and third person of the Trinity, which we just described as being elements that subtend, for example, physics at a very basic level, you have to throw a lot more things in for it to be called physics as opposed to being called Shakespeare. But there’s a kinship as you go down.
I should point out by the way that this last weekend I actually was hanging out with the family and their youngest son was Luca, and I learned that Luca is the patron saint of art and artists as well as being the last common ancestor.
Jim: I like that. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. All right. I think what we can agree so far is that there are some patterns which apply to our universe and probably all universes that have to do with an origin and an unfolding within lawfulness. Would we both agree with that?
Jordan: Yeah. Very nice. And that as I work my way backwards from the theology of the Christian Trinity, I notice that we’re beginning to… That each time we do that, we’re actually talking about…
Jordan: [inaudible 01:06:00] said that we’re beginning to… That each time we do that, we’re actually talking about components or elements, or aspects of the distinct persons… Oh, sorry, and wholeness. And these things are all part of an integrated whole. That all of the unfolding, and the components, and the constraints are all part of an integrated whole. So we have this unity, multiplicity, and relationality. And then we start to get the characteristics of each of the persons, and how each person is sort of representing a piece of that larger element. Now we’re just going to start moving more and more towards the unique qualities of the revealed Christian Trinity.
Jim: So far, we both agree that a universe like ours, and it may not just be ours, but has a beginning, an origin. Lawfulness, unfolding that does not violate the lawfulness but adds new things to the lawfulness, which we call emergent. And that we can think of this whole container as a whole.
Jordan: Yep.
Jim: I think we both agree on that. Now, with my initial reaction to then you pointing towards the Christian Trinity is pure nominalism. You take those four things about the universe, and you will then just give them the names of the Trinity. And my answer to that is, I don’t care. So what? Not helpful in the slightest. So I’m sure that’s not where you’re going. So why don’t we take the things that we just agreed on, and see if you can tie it back to the Trinity?
Jordan: Okay, so from my point of view, we’re in the process right now of simply explicating the Trinity. But in any event, I think we’re in the Trinity, and we’re explicating it more than tying it back. And I’m interested in this, that I don’t know the answer to this. But it is my understanding that at this point, thus far, we are engaging in a conversation that is using a sort of a philosophical theological construct. That as far as I know is not present anywhere outside of Christian theology, which by itself is actually rather interesting. So I’ll just throw that out there. But we’re going to go further.
Jim: Okay. Yeah, that may be true. I don’t know enough about all the world’s religions to know if anybody else has an analogous structure. But yeah, that’s an interesting point. So carry on, young fellow.
Jordan: All right, so now let’s take a look at the persons of the Trinity. And what we’re basically doing now is we’re moving up a higher level, and noticing how different characteristics begin to explicate. And seeing more elements of this stack as the stack starts to establish itself. And noticing by the way, there’s this notion of connection. So the layers are connected to each other, the vertical… The layers are not a sandstone, it’s igneous rock as it were, or compositional.
So let’s start with the Father or the first person. I may start blending between first person and Father, and the second person, Son, third person, Spirit, for reasons actually and in this case. So we say in the articulation of the nature of the Christian Trinity, that the Father begets the Son, and that the Spirit proceeds from the Father.
And the argument that I will make, the first argument is that the essence of the Father, which now by the way speaks to the ousia or the essence of the Godhead of the whole, is to be found in the relationship between the Son and the Spirit. That when I delve into the nature of the Father as a person, this is that pure relationality thing. What I discover is that the Father is relationship between the Son and the Spirit who are the Relata. And it is a relationship that carries content or qualifies. So for example, in relationship with the Son, the Father brings the Son begottenness.
And begottenness as a concept has to do with this notion of difference with continuity, and this is the element of continuity. Think, you beget something, lineage, that notion of lineage, the notion that I have distinction, difference, but it is part of a larger whole, or it is part of a lineage. That’s begottenness. And so the characteristic of reality, the reality that a world that we live in must contain, I’m arguing, must contain this characteristic of begottenness. Must contain this characteristic of lineage, this characteristic of distinction with continuity of that sort.
The second side in terms of the Spirit, we have proceeds. And proceeds is discontinuity, or at the symmetry level. So using forest language, it’s difference but difference that participate in or are part of a larger wholeness. Not continuity, not lineage vertically, but lineage horizontally. This is what we’re talking about in terms of everything is held in a larger whole. So when we say the Son is with the Spirit or the third person of the Trinity is with the second person of the Trinity, that witness, that category of holding together two things that are different, are in fact actually distinct. Without turning them into a singular identity, that larger identity that holds them as witness, that is the essence of the Father or the first person to the Trinity. And each of these components now become, we could start to tease apart, are necessary components for constructing more world.
So our previous conversation, by the way, was the Son, the second person. So when I pivot and I look at the Trinity through the lens of the second person, I’m now dealing with this hypostatic union. I’m dealing with the logos, I’m dealing with this fact that we have these bindings that occur in the playing-outness that there’s a context, the Father, that sets constraints enabling and disabling constraints in the playing-outness. There’s the energetic, the pure playing-outness of it, which is the Spirit, and there’s the actual unfolding. The unfoldingness, where there’s relational dynamics, dynamos is all of the characteristic of the logos. So I’m sort of adding more components of my toolkit for building a world, by pointing out the necessary and the, in fact, I want to say, Nicene characteristics of the Trinity. Are you following me so far?
Jim: Yes. All those words, I understand what they mean. And I can see how they are analogous to the universe, but I don’t see the links yet.
Jordan: Wow. We’re literally almost done with the Nicene Creed. So in a second, you’re going want to have discovered you’re in fact an Orthodox Christian without even noticing that made any difference in your life. Because the third person of the Trinity then is the Spirit. And the Spirit of course is really very cleanly the Spirit is the Father and the Son, or the Spirit is the relationship of the Father and the Son. It has this relationship of making the Father known to the Son, but more specifically in this case, in the language we’re using right now, it is that which enables both distinction and unity. So we already talked about that as a component, but now we’re at the level where we see it, where it sits in the ontology. So the third person of the Trinity, one of its characteristics, one of its elements is that it plays the role of how objects emerge, distinction and communion.
And so how multiplicity is produced, distinction, Father, Son. And how communion, how wholeness is produced. That they’re in fact in continuity, in relationship. We’ve got about three quarters of the Nicene Creed by the way, at this point, and we have almost the totality of the articulation of the Triune God. Now the only thing that we don’t have is what would be known as the historicity or the specific events of the incarnation of Jesus, the second person. Now incarnating as not narrative, or as logic, or as physics, or as Shakespearean works, but incarnating as a particular person at a particular moment in time.
Jim: What we don’t have yet, and this is what I thought we would get to, is we have a story about these three components within the whole of the Trinity. We have an analogous story about the universe, but no connection between the two.
Jordan: I’m having a hard time understanding how you mean no connection. So if I were to say I have one duck and I have one train, the connection between them in this case is the oneness. That’s the relevant characteristic. They also have other connections like ducks and trains are both physical objects subject to the laws of physics, but in this case, the oneness is the connection. So in physics, we’re using physics as an example of something that has particular characteristics at a very basic level. In order to do physics, you have to have these ideas in order to do it at all.
And the point is that, those most basic things that pretend, and I mean that in the sense that they are before. Or predate, now that’s not a good way of putting it either, are strictly before more primitive. Before all kinds of domains of which physics is an interesting example, but I can pick an arbitrarily large number of domains. And these are always present in all domains. Something that is necessary for and present in all domains is a really good description of something we might call God. Necessary, and before, and produces, but this is not necessarily by the way, exhaust.
Jim: Again, my strong instincts here is there’s a major logical fallacy. Either that, or the whole thing is of no interest or of negligible interest. And that I could very easily say that, and I think without disagreeing with the words you just said, that the universe we have found ourselves thrown into has these attributes. And you can, if you feel like it, name this Trinity those things, but it adds no information to what the physicists know.
Jordan: Oh, well, I mean clearly it does because it applies across domains different than the physics. So it adds information in, for example, the conversation about the nature of marriage. That wasn’t a physicist thing. This idea that there’s something going on in relationship between multiple different people, where the relationships between the people produce an identity, marriage. That marriage has an identity all of its own that you can be in relationship with and its identity. The embodiment of its identity is strictly the relationships between the other people, is utterly not reducible at all to anything physicists properly should be talking about, or even pretending to talk about.
Jim: Though I would say when I use the word physicists here, I’m actually meaning physics plus complexity, right? The modern view of our reality in which all these emergencies are just as real as the particles. And that we have a universe because of this Walker-Cronin unfolding in time of more and more complexity, that none of these complexities, including the marriage, violate the laws of physics. But the laws of physics are more or less irrelevant other than being the substrate on which they’re built. The marriages, the relationships between the people and the whole are real, and are emergent from the physics. And don’t require any other explanation other than the unfolding of emergence over 3.6 billion years.
Jordan: Wait, wait. Did you just say… Oh, that’s interesting. So we may have found a place of significant disagreement. Did you just say that the relationships between and among the members of a marriage are strictly emergent, exclusively from physics?
Jim: Well, they come physics several layers down, right? In a Harold Morwitzian view, there’s physics, then there’s physical chemistry, then there’s biochemistry, then there’s life at the cellular level, and then there’s multicellularity. And then there’s multicellularity with neurons, and then there’s-
Jordan: But are all those different ways of saying physics, or are those actually qualitatively different? They include physics, then they don’t violate physics, but they’re qualitatively different.
Jim: Yeah, this stuff, complexity lens says that each of those things is real and has a reality beyond physics, but the reality does not violate physics.
Jordan: No. Great. All right, fair enough. So in that case, we don’t actually need to say physics plus complexity. We can just say complexity.
Jim: Complexity.
Jordan: Complexity is a larger container in which physics is a part.
Jim: And that physics is at or near the ground level in the origin stack.
Jordan: In one way of looking at it. I mean, that’s a, if you think about it from the point of view of how did this come to be over time? We would notice that physics is earlier in time in the origin stack, but says very little to maybe in fact exactly nothing about, hey, say for example how psychology operates.
Jim: Actually it does, because I’m having one of these arguments right now. That if you’d accept that physics is the root of a large part of this tree, then things about psychology can’t violate physics. So for instance, we found a bunch of people in the Wu side of physics, talking about cosmic consciousnesses that we’re all part of, right? And laws of physics would rule that out. And so if you accept physics-
Jordan: The laws of physics could rule out cosmic consciousness?
Jim: Yes. Yes.
Jordan: I don’t think the laws of physics would say anything about cosmic consciousness. The laws of physics would just say, “I don’t even understand what that means.”
Jim: [inaudible 01:18:50] and I would say that if you’re going to have some causality, cosmic consciousness is just words unless it has causality. If it’s going to have causality, that causality has to have a force of some sort that represents it. All forces in our universe, we believe, are limited by the rule that no information may be propagated faster than the speed of light. The idea of a consciousness is a specific biological thing which can be categorized in the form of, or could be measured in the forms of things like integrated information theory, which have a time domain aspect to them. And the idea of a-
Jordan: Ah, uh-huh. Okay.
Jim: … cosmic consciousness, anything like our consciousness. That the relationship from one end to the other is billions of years, is a misuse of the term consciousness.
Jordan: Yeah. So I’m going to say it to you, inverted. Which is to say, physics or people who like to participate in physics, have a story about something called consciousness. They feel good about their story to a greater or lesser extent. And within the context of their particular story, they can then fit that into physics, and they have a relationship between the two. Largely because they are in fact ultimately committed to the narrative of physics, and are endeavoring to find a way to articulate consciousness in terms that are composable with physics. What I would say is that, so far, I have not heard any story about consciousness that strikes me as being useful enough to consider it to be a theory. They’re a sort of greater or lesser extent, weak hypotheses.
Jim: Yeah. Though I will say that I agree with that by the way, even my own theory is nothing more than a strong hypothesis. Is that, physics is a pruning rule. Whatever consciousness is, it is constrained by the laws of physics, and to that degree… And that’s true about every level of emergence, it’s also constrained by biochemistry. It’s also constrained by what is a cell. It’s also constrained by the elements of life.
Jordan: To the degree that it’s participating in causation, I think is actually more fundamental. So you said it just right. The laws of causation, if something is participating in causation, it is constrained by the laws of causation. And physics has done good work in articulating a substantial content of the laws of causation. But as you’ve said earlier, physics is currently sort of sitting at the threshold of, well, what is the cause of the laws of causation? We don’t quite know just yet, and we may not reach it, or we may. You and I did not agree on that last point. But there is something more fundamental than physics, that is the laws of causation that constrains physics.
Jim: Or maybe a little more… A physicist’s light on that would be, physics so far does not explain the laws of physics, and they seem quite specific. And so a fuller explanation would need to explain why the laws of physics are as they are.
Jordan: You’d have to go one level deeper then, which is to say, how do you explain why and how multiplicity and unity are the way that they are? Because to think about physics at all, you’re invoking all of those lower-level concepts, which is the beginning of our conversation.
Jim: I would say those are implicit in the description of why the laws of physics aren’t as they are, which includes any substrates which are necessary.
Jordan: Yeah. I am extremely skeptical. I think at a strong epistemological level, that physics can ever under any circumstances, explain itself. I haven’t put a lot of effort into trying to actually put that as a formal proof. In much the same way that you can’t use physics to explain why logic behaves the way that it behaves, because they are different domains entirely. And there’s something about a more fundamental thing that contains both logic and physics, i.e., in this case, theology, that is the proper place to look for that kind of an explanation. By its very nature, it’s more fundamental.
Jim: The radian take would be reality is what subsumes physics and logic, and lots of other things, not theology. Theology is just some fairy story somebody made up because they were afraid of the dark.
Jordan: Theology is the discipline of reality. That’s what theology is, is the discipline of reality. And now we’re going to move to Roman numeral three, which is really neat.
Jim: Well, let’s do a little bit more on two yet, because I’m not at all convinced that you’ve said anything actually about two. Unless it’s a very, very weak nominalism that the things that are true about the universe, categorically true about the universe, it’s one, it’s unfolded. It had a beginning, or at least a time that was very different from where we are today. If you want to just call those the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, great, but what the hell does that add to the discussion? Nothing.
Jordan: Well, we’ve got to get to Roman numeral three to get that.
Jim: Okay. So you’re not claiming yet to have landed that one. Okay.
Jordan: To recapitulate, the notion is that there is some kind of construct that is conceptually, and then now by hypothesis, ontologically lower, more primitive than for example, physics, but then everything else. It contains a vast amount of particular content. That particular content, you can take a look at noticing how each one of those layers between the lower and the higher. For example, the movement from a begotten, from wholeness into… or from Father and to Son, that notion of lineage continuity and distinction. That that set of concepts, which are decidedly not just words, they’re a set of concepts that are necessary for all the other things that we do on top of that, including for example, physics, is a very large toolkit.
It is a lower toolkit in the stack of concepts, and appears across all of the different domains of investigation that we might engage in, including physics. But including for example, something you might think is different than physics, like say for example, logic. Which we both agreed weirdly enough, the thing that subtends is belower than physics and logic is reality. And I just argued that the thing we’re talking about subtends both physics and logics. So I’m noticing is kind of curious that these two things, reality and this thing we’re talking about sit next to each other, and I’m in fact arguing that this is in fact reality. Or at least just say, operating at the level of reality.
Jim: Let’s maybe try to avoid going down this rabbit hole, but I’m going to just note that this is not far from Spinoza’s theory of God.
Jordan: It is not far from Spinoza’s theory of God. And in fact, even including the methodology. That methodology where he was very carefully trying to make sure he took each idea, and separated them into layers of necessity. And noticing that the most necessary ideas are the ones that we would identify with being of God. And then you would work your way back up and show how they’re derivative. So there’s a lot of similarity.
Jim: All right, let’s go on to Roman numeral three. Or let’s restate it for the audience. We’ve been running now over two hours, so they may need a refresher.
Jordan: All right. So the statement here has to do with the notion of belief, even the nature of what belief is.
Jim: Yeah, I think the way that you describe it as this existential commitment that belief constitutes.
Jordan: Right. So as distinct from a nominalist set, where a belief is going to be a fixation on particular set of words, say, I don’t know, carefully cultivated to be one set of words instead of another set of words. Actually, the-
Jim: Yeah, the Wittgenstein argument, essentially. Radical nominalism. It’s all language games all the way down. There’s some reality underneath it, but the best we can do is approximate it with language games.
Jordan: Yes, okay. And to identify a belief as being which subset of words are the ones that you’ve decided to make the ones that you’re connecting with, right? And this is oftentimes used in a different language is to say doctrine or ideology, those kinds of words all kind of, in some sense, mean the same thing. And then the argument that I’m making is that it’s not quite theology. So I made this very subtle and not particularly well-articulated distinction where I had philosophy, theology, and then this other thing over here. And that theology points towards the other thing. It is sort of the minimum viable substrate of in fact words, or thoughts, or theories. But the thing we’re actually talking about, which is in the Greek is pistis, which I think we talked about this earlier in another time, has been translated into English as faith, is actually this thing over here to the right.
And that faith is perfectly not the thing that I just defined as the nominalist belief. It is exactly not. Now, just as a quick caveat, in the aftermath of the latter half of the 20th century, and the sort of, how do you say, remarkably effectively theatricality and remarkably midwitt thinking of the new atheist movement. We ended up having this weird inversion, where faith was identified as maximally delusional belief. And the argument I’m making is that it’s in fact almost the exact inverse of that. And that it is the existential commitment. It is faith is livingness. So think about this. And I think if we can do this, it’s actually going to land really well.
Think about how we had just previously talked about this thing called reality, that is lower than physics and logic. And that what is the nature of our relationship with reality? Well, our relationship with reality is from a Heideggerian perspective is our thrownness, but even more fundamentally is, that’s where we live. We live in reality. And reality in many ways is sort of the living out, or the playing out of the livingness or the beingness, the relationality of all the different elements of reality.
Jim: Yep, a hundred percent agree with that, 100%. I’ve always liked that part of Heidegger.
Jordan: Nice. So that is the final move of the Trinity, right? Remember we started with this argument of pure relationality is the ontological primitive.
Jim: Which I did not buy, by the way. I put that out as an assertion by a Filler and Hall. Well, we’ll be back and recap the three later. So you asserted it, and I provided some counter arguments. But anyway, you asserted it, so in your chain, that one could be stipulated.
Jordan: Even aesthetically, just for the purpose of this piece of the story, that we have an ontological primitive of pure relationality. But as we move through this arc to the third Roman numeral, the point that I want to make is that, the actual movement from something that is our relationship with it, is in the category of theory. Our relationship with it is in the category of the nominal, on the category of language, and the category of thinking, or even of imagination. As opposed to our relationship with it, is in the category of the full grappling of life, the full grappling of existence.
And that this is the final suture, or kind of the crux of the Trinity, is that it is a personal God. Meaning, it is a “No, no, no. This is not the kind of God that you think about.” The nature of this God is this God is saying, “No. The right way to do this sort of thing is actually not in what you say or what you think, but in how you actually live.” And it is only in the fullness of your life, by the way, all of it, birth to death, and the fullness of your relationships, that you are simultaneously perceiving God, but also that you are in relationship with.
So your relationship with reality, as it is the actual reality that you’re actually living in. By the way, little thought experiments that you do out here with the actual reality that you’re actually living in, is the revealed. And God reveals that that is the nature of your relationship with God. That’s the closure. So Roman numeral three, pistis, faith, is the actual embodied cultivation of a capacity for relationship with reality, and an ongoing expansion of that. Noticing reality, not from the point of view of an analytic reality, not from the point of view of purely at the level of theory or imagination, but fully integrated wholeness.
So as you expand your life to be in relationship with the largest possible scope, the fully integrated wholeness of life, all the different elements of the theoretical, and the physical, and the dynamical, and the human, and the psychological, that larger wholeness. And the fact that it is available to the totality of all relationships is the final sort of piece where the Trinity drops. Oh, by the way, amazingly enough, all the way up to and including an actual human-to-human relationship. If you happen to be around in 0-33 AD with an actual human body that had bad breath and whatever, a hairstyle.
Jim: Now there’s a gigantic explanatory gap necessary here. For instance, myself, right? I’ve lived a life in full, many interesting adventures, many of them better than most of my listeners do. So you have a fair idea of the kind of life I’ve lived, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I have done so since I was 11 years old at least, without any faith whatsoever in the Trinity. And yet I have done all those things you described.
Jordan: Pause right there. Pause because there’s a lot going on, so I want to be very, very, very slow.
Jim: I suspect this is the important thing where either you’ll bridge the gap or you won’t.
Jordan: You used the word faith again, and so what I want to do is I want to continue to hammer on it. So you did all those things without a nominal belief in the Trinity, and without a series of words or ideas in your head that you identified with the Trinity.
Jim: An explicit rejection of the Trinity. And-
Jordan: As an idea.
Jim: And even further that… This is where it gets really radical in my investigations of religion when I was 11. I came to the conclusion that if the Christian God actually exists, he’s the bad guy in the story.
Jordan: So you had a whole series of narratives that were in your head that you developed a certain stance or posture towards. And some of them were things that you had been able to extract from stories that you’d heard. Some of them were things that you had extracted from behavior of other people in the Christian church, I would imagine.
Jim: My biggest from reading Comparative Religion, I’ve read a whole series of, admit it now, encyclopedia entries in two different sets of encyclopedias on all the world’s religions.
Jordan: Uh-huh, okay.
Jim: And I extracted a pattern from that, which is that religion is some shit somebody made up for the purposes of controlling other people. In my adult phase, I go one step further and say it wasn’t necessarily invented, but it soon evolved to be a mechanism of control of other people. And that’s all it is. In my later use, I would say, makes perfect game theory sense. If you’re a dark triad type person, go and start up a religion would be a natural thing to do, like L. Ron Hubbard, or Mohammed, or who was the guy that started Mormonism? Just the perfect thing to do. It makes absolute sense from a game theory perspective.
Jordan: I think it was John Mormon. So I don’t think I disagree with you by the way. I remember reading a guy named Father Schmemann about a year ago. And he actually made that, “That the secular and the religious are from the same cloth. And that Christianity is neither of those two.”
Jim: And talk about how did I live without any explicit belief, faith, without any faith? In fact, negative anti-faith?
Jordan: Right. My point is, in fact you were living with faith, you were living deeply with faith. You are not living with ideology. And that’s the distinction I keep wanting to hammer. Because I think if as a generation, we’re able to make that distinction and recover it, we can actually begin to get on the road of getting back into right relationship with this category. Because clearly, if the category of faith or the idea of faith is identified as maximally delusional belief, then it’s a very bad idea. It’s an intrinsically bad idea. But the argument I’m making is that not only is it not that, but it’s perfectly not that, it’s the inverse of that. And that it is… And I’ve done this in other contexts, but I don’t think I’ve done this with you or here. So let me just do it here. Because you could do this straight etymology. The straight etymology is actually pretty easy.
So when we say faith, we’re largely pointing to, almost entirely, almost exclusively pointing to the Greek word pistis from the New Testament. And when we look at the word pistis, and we look at its history as a word, one of the most notable places where it sits, and was certainly very salient at the time when, for example, Paul was writing it down in his epistles, was from Plato’s use of it in his work. So in Plato’s work, we had three forms of belief. One form of belief was known as doxa, like a doxy, orthodoxy. The second one is pistis and the third is episteme. We know episteme in this form is epistemology. Pistis is in fact then translated from the Christians into English as faith. But in Plato, pistis has to do with embodied, deeply intimate relationship with some domain of reality.
So you might have, for example, wood burning, you’re making a fire. Doxa might be something like, “Well, why does wood burn?” And the doxa would be something like, “Well, because there’s wood fairies, and the wood fairies get angry, and that’s why they burn.” So doxa for Plato, is sort of nonsensical things that kind of work a little bit, but are mostly children’s stories, and just those stories. Opinion. The English word would just be opinion. You’ve got opinions. And by the way, of course we live in a world absolutely suffused with opinions. And ask anybody why anything happened on the internet, and you’ll get a lot of doxa.
Jim: And of course my view is that religion is doxa.
Jordan: And you’re largely right or worse, it’s like a doxa-producing engine. So then we’ve got this other one, pistis. And I’m going to skip that for a second. We’ll go to episteme for a moment, just to come back to it. So episteme for Plato, was of course the crown. And episteme had to do with your ability to perceive the underlying principles. And this of course ultimately then grounds in the Platonic forms, which is why it’s so sweet for him. And what’s interesting is he actually kind of leaves pistis in a place of wholesome valor, but not the crown. But pistis has to do with the fact that, like a mastery. When you know how to do something deeply, and you have a deeply intimate relationship with the domain because of experience. Engaged experience, you’ve worked with it. This is, if you want, the pistis as a surfer.
You ask a surfer, how do you surf? Well, they’ll be able to tell you something like about 30% of the whole story. They can give you some things in words, but 70% of it is actually something that is living outside of the range of their ability to articulate it in a deeply embodied understanding. And this is true of all forms of mastery, right? If you ask whenever, a Jimi Hendrix, how do you play guitar? He’s probably going to be able to give you 2%. And the rest is just stuff you’re going to have to figure out for yourself.
Jim: Yeah, an F1 driver, ask him how he does his thing. He can tell you something, but he certainly doesn’t tell you the magic. Or they’ll sometimes say, “They can give you the words, but they can’t give you the music.”
Jordan: Yeah, yeah. And so when doxa is when you take the words and think it is the music. Pistis is when you recognize that the words might point you towards the direction of the music a little bit. But you’re really just going to have to get in the mix and live it. And as you’ve lived it, you’ll cultivate a relationship with the domain, the thing, the surfboard, the guitar or the race car. And you have developed a capacity for that relationship. The capacity for well-honed, harmonious, rich, nuanced, subtle, intimate relationship is what the word pistis means. Now, when Paul says pistis, he can’t but mean the same thing, because he’s using it at the same time, in the same context, with the same people. That’s what we mean when we say faith. That’s actually what we mean.
We mean a very, very similar to, akin to deeper action, but akin to wisdom. In this case, wisdom in a particular quality of relationship. So when you say that you’ve lived without faith, what you did is you found yourself discovering the problem. The fact that somebody had been trying to sell you the words and telling you they were music. And so you rejected that thing, which is exactly right, and you began the process of-
Jordan: … that thing, which is exactly right. And you began the process of throwing yourself into the world, which is to say you began the process of actually acquiring the music, i.e. developing and cultivating faith. Your ability to navigate life well is to say, is sitting on top of your faith, sitting on top of the things that you have deep confidence in. That existential commitment, your ability to actually say, “I will put myself or the things I love at risk on the basis of this stuff because I have cultivated the capacity to be able to make that.” It’s not reckless. It is sitting on top of faith. Why did Moses do these things? It was his faith, not his ideological commitment to a series of beliefs, but because he had lived a life of a certain way that led him to a point where he could actually crossed that chasm, crossed that value of decision with full commitment.
So that’s what I mean, and that’s the reversal. That’s the actual invitation to say, “Hey, guys, we need to move out of a way of thinking about this category.” And I’m having to keep saying it in that broad way because the word religion is, in fact… It’s also subject to this inversion, and it’s weird, it’s actually quite interesting. The word religion, religio, is about binding together and think about what’s happening there. What’s happening is, “Oh, shit, we actually found ourselves separated from the wholeness of life. So we’re going to construct some scaffolding or some kind of a cast, an artificial structure, an institution that binds us together.”
So the discovery of the fact that humans have been thrown into a world where we are separated from the larger whole. We’re living in kind of the second half, the symmetry side of the equation, but recognizing that that leads to nihilism, it leads to chaos. So we can’t actually live properly separated from the whole. We have to build these institutions, religio, which try to help us cope with a life. But the thing that we’re trying to do in the context of… And again, even Christianity isn’t right, but becoming disciples of Christ or learning to live in accordance with what Christ teaches us to do is to say, “No, no, our endeavor is to enter into the full, rich, nuanced, complete faith relationship with, embodied relationship, with the actual whole of reality as it comes to meet us.” Does that make sense?
Jim: Now that way you just said it, strikes me as exactly the equivalent of John Vervaeke’s Religion that’s not a Religion.
Jordan: Well, this is why I said… I think he and I had that conversation. I said, “Hey, John, I found out that the Religion that’s not a Religion is in fact the thing that’s often called Christianity.”
Jim: See, there’s the explanatory gap. As you know, once I got the chance to understand it, when I did those… watched 50 hours of John Vervaeke and then did 10 hours worth of conversations with him, I’ve become a fan of the idea of Religion is not a Religion that the atomization of humans, certainly over the last 300 years in particular, but for 5,000 years at another level, has depleted our ability to be fully human. And that we do need to think carefully about what it is to be fully human and to build institutions, or one could call it practices or one could call it community. They’re all different lenses on the same thing to allow us to be more fully human. And that’s all great, but I don’t need no Father, Son and Holy Ghost to do it, goddammit.
Jordan: Well, I mean, I think that if we work backwards of the conversation that we’ve had and we just say, okay, let’s zoom back about an hour and just be talking about the persons of the Trinity. I’ll say, well, you definitely need unity and multiplicity. You definitely need lineage. You definitely need… Well, obviously you need relationship and relationality. You definitely need all of that. And as you said, as I kind of move forward in kind of the content of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, I’m getting something like 80% of the Nicene Creed at that point where that’s the content. The content is continuity, lineage, multiplicity, unity, creation, all these things. Again, I’m moving back into the philosophical mode. But the point is that’s the content. That’s actually what’s in there. And as you move forward, as you move into the stage where you start using language like Father, Son, Holy Ghost, where you’re entering into is this pivot from the philosophical straight through the theological into this category that I’m defining and describing as faith or pistis, which is living this.
It’s actually, okay, what does it mean to be living? How do I live more properly? How do I live a more wholesome life as a consequence of my ability to be in relationship with reality. In some sense, that’s it. And just to step back and notice that it is on the one hand, remarkably simple and weirdly unique. All these other things that we tend to put in this category are generally either ideologies or religions in the sense of they are nominal stories that invite you to believe them in a sense to associate your life with the words. What I’m talking about here, the Trinity sort of reveals is no, here’s the nature of reality. Identify reality. Don’t pretend that reality is not reality. Quite the opposite. Delve into it. Think about the whole of science sits on the substrate of Christian, just so we’re clear, at least modern science.
Why? Well, because that was the invitation, the requirement, be directly… If it’s not real, don’t pretend it’s real. Be in a relationship with the reality as it is, and we’re going to help you try to deal with the hard parts because humans are really good at bullshitting ourselves. So here’s a way to help you not bullshit yourself by being able to have these characteristics of no, no, reality actually is capable of relationship. Reality is relational in its nature, and therefore you can be in a relationship with it. And that relationship is not impersonal. It includes the personal and the relationship is not the relationship between I, it, is an I, thou relationship with reality, which it has to be for you to have a whole relationship with it. Think about your wife. You can have a impersonal relationship with your wife, and sadly, many people probably do, but that’s not the whole relationship that you clearly aren’t meeting the whole of her with the whole of you.
When we say a personal relationship, what we mean is the whole of you with the whole of her. So when we say a personal relationship with reality, and again, I can just sort of say personal relationship with God from my point of view, those are the same thing, whole. What does it mean to have the whole of me able to be in full relationship with the whole of reality? Well, now we’re back to the particulars. Now the particulars are the unfolding of the Trinity, because remember the Trinity as a way of thinking about things was actually formalized as people delved into the teachings that came out of the gospels and ultimately then also came out of the epistles. And so as they looked at it, they’re like, “Whoa, this actually is kind of different than the way that the Jews have been talking about it. What’s going on here?”
Interesting. So by about 300 AD, they had kind of reached a point of saying, oh wow, this is the kind of thing particularly where they brought the Neoplatonic into it. But the calling has always been a calling of resettling, refounding life on pistis as opposed to Doxa or by the way, episteme. And the Greeks, unfortunately, they crowned episteme. And so what they ended up doing is they said the highest is ultimately in an intellectual, impersonal relationship, an intimate and high quality, clear understanding, but it’s very intellectual. Of course, the hoi polloi, almost everybody, all the political, all the economic, all the military, they’re all operating at the level of it’s Doxa, whatever gets the people to do what I needed to do.
Jim: Edward Gibbon famously said that of the religions of Rome people said they were all true. The philosophers said they were all false, and the magistrates said they were all useful.
Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the Doxa side. That’s actually quite perfect. The philosophers looked at it from the episteme perspective and they said, “No, no, that’s all nonsense.” The political power said, “No, Doxa,” but Christ is saying, “No, life, faith, live.”
Jim: Okay. Now, if this is all you got, then “Oh my God, I’m a Christian that didn’t know it.” So those are three things I would like to have you discuss. I don’t see any difference from what you’ve said so far from Vervaeke’s Religion that’s not a Religion. And at one point I thought you were going to be the St. Paul for Vervaeke, but then you have gone through this conversion event into a church that actually has its part of its statement of faith, biblical literalism, and “Huh? Okay, that doesn’t quite make sense,” because as we know, Vervaeke explicitly rejects any supernatural, any revealed religion.
He’s very explicit about that. I actually had a long phone call with him right after you and I did our podcast, and I confirmed with him, “You haven’t gone drinking that goddamn Christian bath water again, have you, John? You kicked that habit at once. I hope you haven’t fallen…” He is like the drunk, falling off the wagon and getting a bottle of a white port. Nope, nope, I grilled about it. Now, you’re still sound. And so one, how is this anything more than Vervaekeism and how in the world do you reconcile that with biblical literalism? And three, does your hypothesis of living in the world and embracing it, does that mean I’ve been a Christian all along and didn’t know it?
Jordan: That’s three. So the first one I can’t give you good answers, John and I are ultimately still in dialogue around that, but I think I can get there in terms of… The first, I think is ultimately subsumed in the third, because we’re actually adding a different topic. So the topic of the Trinity and the notion that if the Trinity properly understood ultimately ends up being something which is logically necessary for any possible world. I’ve sort of made that argument, so just period. All right, next. And that argument has to do with we’re now on the last piece of that argument, which is this bend of recognizing the Trinity properly understood, can’t ever be an ideology. It must actually be a personal relationship with, in this case, reality in its wholeness and noticing that the most fundamental elements of that reality, we actually have to be able to distinguish and notice how they work.
So we zoom in all the way out, like, “Wow, there’s something going on way out there in reality that is…” Oh, by the way, even further, you mentioned something about science. Slight digression, but it’s not big, that science has this characteristic of a certain quality of humility. Like, okay, the story just keeps unfolding. Oh no, certainly Christianity, I don’t know about all religions, but Christianity has wired in its very base, God, the Trinity, as you go towards it is mysterious meaning it is actually ultimately even above your pay grade. Not only do you have to have a fundamental relationship of humility towards it, you can’t possibly actually understand it in any kind of episteme way, it is intrinsically beyond your capacity to understand. Rather it is something with which you can come into some quality of relationship with. But if you think you can grasp with an ideology, you’re already out of it, you’re in the wrong category. It is not that kind of thing. It is beyond, it is bigger than that, in fact, infinitely. So that’s important.
So this bend is in fact precisely the bend to say, hey, as we move through the philosophical into the theological, and we notice that there’s actually a tremendous amount of content that lives underneath the substrate of all the other stuff we happen to really like let’s say physics and logic and everything else, that as we properly order it and look down, we see that actually is articulated perhaps singularly in the formalization of the Christian Trinity. We also begin to move and recognize that as the Christian Trinity… For me, it rotates. We move out of the theological domain and we actually move into the existential domain. Notice, by the way, when Spinoza did his work, it actually ends up being an ethics, not a philosophy, not an ontology.
There’s a reason for that because as you move into relationship, you begin to notice that the understanding element, the ideological element, the informational element, the idea that faith is in fact this thing, this nominal belief is actually a confusion. It’s an inversion or might actually say a very specific kind of inversion. And that the invitation of the Trinity is no relationship, in fact, not just relationship in general, but a particular quality of relationship, faith, hope, love, and most of all love and particular quality of relationship. And then you move, you move, actually… the Trinity pushes you into this deeper register of how do you begin to cultivate faith? How do you begin to cultivate a deeply embodied, intimate relationship with the whole of reality.
And any world, and that’s not any universe. And I’m not in physics. I’m not an imaginary model of substances. I’m actually in a world which to say the thing with which we’re engaging will include that by necessity, relationship. Relationship with world. World is defined by the fact that it is available for relationship. So as I move to that second and third question, what I think is actually happening is that we are expanding our ability to be able to be in this relationship, that our understanding of Christianity or our faith, our ability to have a… it’s like this fear of reality with which we are able to be in relationship is in fact expanding. And one of the necessary moments that we’re in, in this paradigm shift, the great paradigm shift, the big shift, the one that we’ve talked about literally from A to B, that shift is very significant and that a lot of the stuff that we have done and lived with over the past 2,000 years has in fact been a deeply constrained reduction.
In some cases, in fact, maybe tactically useful, certainly corruption, useful, but maybe even necessary at a particular moment in time of this larger field of the possibility with which we can be in relationship where we can cultivate faith. And so I would say the answer to that third question is yeah, kind of yes, to be honest, kind of, yes. Not entirely yes, but kind of yes. And in many meaningful ways, lots, yes. I think that I find myself having a higher degree of regard for people who have earnestly lived in a way that Christ would have had people live vastly higher than for people who say that they do and don’t. Yeah?
Jim: Yeah.
Jordan: I get the strong sense that this is well above my favorite, that Jesus would’ve as well. Okay, so then biblical literalism, which sits in the middle between the two.
Jim: Let me pause here and react to what you said. This is interesting. I think we did a very nice job of explicating the nature of our universe. It has certain attributes, we 100% agreed with it. You could map them in a nominalist way to a construction of the Trinity as described in the Nicene Creed, I would argue a very limpid way. It’s a mapping, yes, it’s logically consistent within the language games we know, but that’s not at all the argument I thought you were going to make, which was to then land all that and say that then makes the literal Christian God as story told under biblical literalism necessary. That, that God, not a word game mapping of the nature of the universe to some concepts, but rather the actual thing itself that’s described in the Bible word for word, not a single word in it can be wrong, of course, biblical literacy. It says so right on the webpage of your church that you haven’t even come close to describing the logical necessity of all that stuff.
Jordan: I beg to disagree.
Jim: Either that or we’re just in agreement that this sort of a Spinoza type or Einstein kind of God is fine and dandy, but it’s not particularly annoying and it’s not prescriptive.
Jordan: Oh, annoying and prescriptive. I love how we actually ultimately at sometime kind uncover the things that are under there. So like I said, I think that we’ve done something like 75, 80% of the Nicene Creed. So in terms of the actual Christian God, the actual thing that is described in scripture where like 75 to 80% of that in the articulation that we’ve done so far, and more of that, by the way, to get there, you have to actually do things like unpack Genesis, which is part of the identity of God. It’s not that God exists and then does stuff. The doingness of God is also the body of God. So God is the unfolding of Genesis. God is the unfolding of Exodus. God is the unfolding of all the prophets, all the way down to the playing out of the crucifixion in revelation.
So the isness of God is embodied in the whole of scripture. And all that we know about God is also from the whole of scripture. Oh, neat. So we are actually in that second piece, would you say prescriptive and annoying? Well, okay, fair enough. So let’s start with things that are prescriptive and annoying.
Jim: Oh, before we go there, let’s contrast it with Heidegger that we’re thrown into a universe or to a world, into a being. We’re becoming, and we interact with that universe and we learn things about it, and we do things. And I would call that the Ruddian view of life. I would say that that aspect is true, and I’ve lived my life that way. I’ve picked up some Spinoza ethics, I think by induction from seeing the universe, what makes people happy, what makes people sad, what seems right, et cetera.
But I don’t need all that stinky shit in the Bible. I actually did read Genesis. This is, I don’t know, about 40 years ago side by English Hebrew. And I worked through it for two weeks, just the Book of Genesis. And I’ve got a pretty damn good idea about how the Book of Genesis works and how it’s essentially a pastiche of various random stories. I mean, the creation myth is in there twice. There’s two gods in there, not one. It’s a very odd little anthropological thing. So either you haven’t said much, but which we can agree on, or you have yet to make the case.
Jordan: So now we’re on the biblical literalism piece.
Jim: Yeah. See what you can say about that.
Jordan: Again, it mostly has to do with things being folded up and not understood very clearly. For example, if you just look at the history of literalism as a movement, it’s not even that old. And it emerged as a reaction largely than the American theological seminaries as they began to notice what was going on in the European haute critique movement in the 19th century. And they saw the ravages that that would wreak on ordinary Christians who are not in a position to engage with the European theoretical stuff directly. And so they produce… This is why fundamentalism… What are the fundamentals? What’s basically something I can write down on a note card that anybody can get. And as long as you’ve got that as this torrent of incipient degeneracy is about to wreak havoc on Christendom, we’ll give them islands or harbors in the storm. And that was the essence of that movement.
But of course, in some sense, the problematic of literalism is that it presupposes the understanding of scripture as being of the same kind of thing as journalism, as the same kind of thing as science. And then of course what happens is biblical literalists get stuck in this problem of arguing that it’s good journalism about the past. It’s something like historical. But the point is that it’s actually not. It’s deeper, and it’s actually substantially deeper, radically deeper than journalism, radically deeper than history, radically deeper even than science.
Jim: Let me add this. I think important at this point, I have long said that the Bible and many other religious serious texts don’t correspond to either science or journalism, but correspond to good fiction. That these are ways of seeing human existence that while not literally true, do tell us something about what it is to be human in the same way great literature does. Now, I would think that’s closer to landing my sense of what these-
Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s actually closer. I know that’s going to make a lot of people angry, but just if you hear that, just take a moment. So good fiction. What is good fiction doing? What good fiction is doing is it’s almost like putting a different set of ideas or different way of looking at reality on top of deeper pattern.
Jim: Well, we’ve talked about before, the universe is so high dimensional well beyond our ability to understand it. And this is the complicated, complex distinction and good literature, good poetry, good sex, they all provide us a high, but not nearly as high as the real universe is, but higher than our analytical frames can give view into this deeper high dimensional universe. And so it’s an important and wonderful thing that we can’t get to through the classic left brain analytical side. And I keep literature in very high regard. I read a lot of serious literary fiction, and of course, my first love affair with Lord of the Rings continues. I reread it not too long ago, and it’s still as good on the 34th reading as it was on the first. But I know it’s fictional on one hand, but I also know that it says real things about the universe on the other.
Jordan: I think we can maybe make three steps on that. So one step is to say that it’s not journalism, but then you look at journalism and you realize that journalism is almost entirely bullshit, 99.9% bullshit. Not even 90% bullshit, like “Holy shit, this thing called journalism has very little to do with anything actually telling the truth about what’s going on.” And is mostly either just a straightforward projection of the relatively addled mind of a journalist or reasonably sophisticated propaganda and a minimal slice of something what actually happened. You’ve been present to it, I’ve been the subject of journalism to some extent. And so I have the ability to know, “Holy shit, that is actually radically not at all what actually happened.”
Jim: Yeah. You talk to anybody that’s appeared in the press multiple times, and they’ll tell you if they get 10% right, that’s a good story. It’s amazing how wrong they get it. And not necessarily from… both interpretively, but even plain old factually, they don’t even get it right.
Jordan: So then we go with literature, and I’ll just sort of excise bad literature. So for me, the word literature has a capital L, and it only includes good to great literature.
Jim: Yeah. Absolutely agree.
Jordan: And we can say that while Madame Bovary may not have in fact actually been a real person named Madame Bovary that I could have touched with my finger, there is something vastly more true about Madame Bovary than there is about any piece of journalism written at all, ever.
Jim: I absolutely would agree.
Jordan: So that’s the notion of truth and the notion of reality. So we’re now in relationship with reality by means of interacting with great literature. So then what we do is we say, “Okay, in that case, in that way of thinking about it, there’s something going on with scripture that is doing that.” It is actually more true because it is more capable of facilitating relationship with the reality over a broader scope. And by the way, over a much larger context of cultures. Madame Bovary may not land for an Ethiopian, but guess what? There were early Christian Ethiopians, right? They were able to land that.
So it was able to take all the various contexts of human cultures. And in fact, as it turns out, effectively all of them, as far as I’m aware, there’s I think 20 different subcultures that have been identified that have not yet actually had some relationship with the Christian Gospel. And that gap is closing rapidly. But it was able to tell a story that was perceived as true, true enough for people to begin the process of actually ordering their lives on the basis of it, because it gave them access to the deeper patterns of reality in this high-dimensional reality that our minds can’t grasp in a fashion that is akin to journalism.
Jim: So I think we can agree on that, but if you read… I enjoyed reading the Old Testament, still do. In fact, every 10 years I read the Pentateuch plus Joshua because I like to say, “If you’re going to read the joke, you might as well read the punch line.” And I find it to be good literature. But again, not biblically literalist true.
Jordan: Not in the sense of particularly necessarily being good journalism. Okay? But we’re going to hold that for a second. Now, I think I actually mentioned in the preamble before we started talking that one of the things I’ve been doing recently is engaging with the academic biblical criticism. And I engaged with it meaningfully during my six months of choosing whether or not to actually become a Christian. But I’ve engaged with it substantially more deeply since then. My initial take of it, I think, has continued to be a buttressed, which is that academic biblical criticism has as much quality as most things academic, which is to say not much. It’s okay. It is mediocre literature. It is subject to the same sort of characteristics of fashion, academic, hierarchical, pecking orders and achieving positions of authority and positions of power and okay storytelling. I was just recently piecing apart the Book of Daniel, like, “Okay, I’ve now read most of the major works of academic criticism on the Book of Daniel and all the various critiques of those and have delved into archeology.”
And my basic sense is it’s okay. The continuity of that storytelling is maybe at the level of the 70%, but it doesn’t have closure, nor could it have closure. You’re not going to be able to say that… It’s funny, they actually say the contemporary academics no longer take seriously the things that were considered very serious in the Book of Daniel for 2,000 years. And it’s funny, as I read that, I was like, “Ah, that’s actually the payload. The payload is you no longer take it seriously and therefore make it a subject of your academic discipline.”
Jim: Academic sociology explains a lot of this. You got to write papers to get published. The papers have to be distinct from what somebody else said.
Jordan: But not too [inaudible 02:05:07].
Jim: So you get this propagation of bullshit, essentially.
Jordan: Yeah. And it’s like what you see in literature departments in general.
Jim: Yeah, exactly. Only as you said, I actually quote this as the Jordan Hall-ism that in the sciences reality is the checksum on our opinions. That’s not true in the humanities.
Jordan: Yeah. And again, it’s kind of mediocre. It’s like your dad’s… They’re in the space where they can get away with lies, and they kind of try, but they’re not good enough at it. The reason why I’m saying that is that this is a whole different conversation, obviously, but in my investigations of scripture, I feel very, very comfortable with the actual historicity of Christ. We talked about that in our first conversation. So that ends up being quite potent in terms of a binding in reality.
So about half or maybe even two thirds of my understanding of the Trinity is the one that comes from the argument that we’ve just unfolded. Holy shit, this actually is a unification of a tremendous amount of philosophy, which most philosophers would not have agreed with, and yet is in fact, from my point of view, deeply true. And you can kind of spend time on each piece of the objection and notice how it falls apart. And that’s a lot of work that I was doing over that period of time. And if I then hold that in the context of the actual historicity of Christ and his arc and his journey of crucifixion, and by the way, resurrection-
Jim: Maybe.
Jordan: … then you get an unlock. That unlocks another piece. Well, the Nicene Creed does require that the Trinity as a doctrine only requires that… Well, it does require that too. So I guess we’ll have to do another one to talk about the historicity of Christ and his actual resurrection to actually fully land, not just the logical necessity, because the premise here was the logical necessity, which is not a historical reality.
Jim: The logical necessity?
Jordan: The logical necessity is what I was arguing today. If we want to talk about the actual reality of the Christian Trinity-
Jim: Well, logical necessity is a stronger claim than actual historical, because what’s logically necessary, it must happen. The historical story is just how it happened. So I would say that the logical necessity is a stronger claim than the historical story.
Jordan: Well, the piece that I can’t quite do is the bridge to the logical necessity of the incarnation in the resurrection. I’m reasonably sure that you can actually make that the unfolding of reality is such that the incarnation, the resurrection, was in fact logically necessary. But I can get you to the point of the persons of the Trinity, and that the nature of the persons of the Trinity and their relationships with each other as kind of geometric characteristics in what is in fact a meaningfully Spinozian sense, are in fact simultaneously coherent as a logical construct and are logically necessary for anything that we would call a world. So that was the brief for this conversation.
Jim: And I’m going to feed back now my take on the three pieces.
Jordan: Okay.
Jim: First, I’m not convinced of the primacy of ontological relationality, that I still will stick with Whitehead and Russell and others, tried to separate relationality and object philosophy as a mistake. The two come together. Second, I think we had a very interesting conversation for part two, that the nature of our universe can be mapped into the labels that you called the Trinity. You did a very nice job of describing those things. My position on that is it’s just nominalism, it’s just an analogy, not real. And then part three, landing the faith, your definition of faith… I’m a very faithful guy. I live my life engaged with the world, I think more than most, do a pretty good job of it. But that doesn’t land for me at all, the claim of the existence of the Christian God, and then specifically in the Christian God as described in the Bible, particularly from a literalist perspective. So good conversation, but I’m not giving away my worldly possessions and putting a sack cloth on and going out and preaching to the world quite yet. I’m happy to do another one.
Jordan: Well, if you make an invitation, I’ll deeply consider it. I’ll pray on it.
Jim: You’ll pray on it. All right, Jordan, I got to tell you, this is probably the most fun episode of the Jim Rutt Show ever. This was great.
Jordan: Wow. All right. Well, I’m really glad that, that worked out. That’s high praise. All right, brother.
Jim: All right, take care.
Jordan: Get to your bake-off. Whatever you’re going to.
Jim: All righty. Bye-Bye.