The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Brendan Graham Dempsey. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Brendan Graham Dempsey. Brendan’s a writer, a poet, a farmer, and the director of the Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. Welcome back to the Jim Rutt Show, Brendan.
Brendan: Hey, Jim. Thank you very much. Appreciate it.
Jim: Yeah, this should be a lot of fun. Brendan appeared back in EP 172 where he talked about his book, Emergentism, A Religion of Complexity for the Meta-Modern World. So if this doesn’t give you enough Brendan, go check out EP 172.
Today we’re going to talk about his new book, A Universal Learning Process, The Evolution of Meaning. And then Book One, which we’ll talk about all those things here in a minute. But before we jump in, I got to say, I love this fucking book. I read a lot of books and I read a fair number of books of this general genre.
I’m going to explain it all down at City Hall, right? The history of the universe. We know it all if we read this book. And generally as my wife can report, as I read these books, I cuss and sometimes throw them against the wall because I inevitably find things that I think are just wrong or wrong-headed.
My wife asks me, “What book are you reading? You’re not cussing, you’re not fussing, or anything like that.” I go, “No, this guy drilled it.” I think it’s an amazingly job well done. And it’s only 94 pages, so everything about everything in 94 pages. So congratulations, Brendan, for one of the most enjoyable, most well done books of this sort. Probably the most well done book of this sort that I’ve ever read.
Brendan: Wow, high praise. Thank you so much. That means a lot coming from you, and I’m really glad to hear it. And yeah, I look forward to seeing what small bits of difference and disagreement we can milk for a extended debate conversation. But no, I really appreciate you saying that. And yeah, that was kind of the goal, and I hope that it’s concise, but not too concise.
Jim: Yeah, it’s very excellent. Now a little minor bitch. The title doesn’t really do justice to the book, I don’t think. While indeed, there is a theme of learning as a universal process across the book. It’s actually much more than that. So what’s the logic of the title?
Brendan: Yeah, well, so the real title is The Evolution of Meaning. And a universal learning process is really just really the entry, the introduction, the first chapter to that much longer work. I decided to release this project, this work, The Evolution of Meaning as a book series, because my original intention was to write maybe some kind of 1,000 page tome. And when you drop that out into the world, receptions can vary.
And so I thought this might just be more effective to serially release this work. So that one, people have more time to engage it and digest it and that sort of a thing. And two, just so that these can also to some degree service certain kinds of standalone books in their own terms.
So I think of this very much as the entry point, the introduction, the first chapter to a very large book. But in this case, it’s sort of a book that is an introduction to a book series. So the overall scope of this project is very, I would say, ambitious. And it’s really tackling the evolution of meaning. So I think that’s a better way of thinking about what this is a part of. And this is the getting our bearings orientation, putting it all in context, sort of setting the stage book in that series.
Jim: So it sounds like a better way to think about this, even though it’s not the way Kindle presents it, is The Evolution of Meaning Part One, A Universal Learning Process.
Brendan: Yeah. Well never trust Kindle or Amazon, they’ll mislead you. But no, it really was sort of a condescension just to the nature of trying to present this material in an accessible way that didn’t overload people. Or that also didn’t have to make me wait however many years before I’m done this whole large work before I put it out there for people. But yeah, so there may be some tweaking to be done in terms of how I frame and market this going forward.
Jim: Yeah. The other thing, I do have another complaint. I did have a couple of minor bitches here. The Kindle version has no table of contents. You might check on that.
Brendan: Sure.
Jim: Especially when I’m prepping for a podcast, I’m always hopping back and forth, and then I go to my PDF or I put my notes in, and I always want to use the table of contents, no table of contents. But fortunately I was able to synthesize one. Well, I’ll tell you the funny story later how I did that.
And then before we actually jump in, one last thing. This is book one of the broader story. Just if you’ve gotten there yet, what are the other pieces that you see coming?
Brendan: Well, that would be its own conversation, I suppose. Really the scope of this is to trace, well, as the name suggests, The Evolution of Meaning. And of course, what then do we mean by that? So in this work I outline a theory of meaning, which we’ll be mainly discussing. But then the real goal of the project is to track that development of that form of meaning, primarily through cultural evolution.
So the first couple of books in the series are going to kind of set things up. This one sets up the theory and the basic way of thinking about meaning and evolution. The next two kind of zoom in on the symbolic learning process that happens specifically at the level of human culture, and the linguistically mediated meanings that show up at that level. And it does it first, looking at the individual maps that we have for that, and then at the collective ways that we can think about sociological learning.
And then it unites those into sort of an integration of individual collective processes that are in a dynamic feedback loop. So all that sort of some theoretical under laboring that has to happen in the first three books or so. Before then moving into giving a big picture overview of what the various kind of phases or stages of human meanings have looked like over the course of our human evolutionary history.
And then the rest of the, the bulk of the work will have a book a piece on each of those meaning systems. Moving from Neolithic hunter-gatherer forger societies, on into early agricultural states, on into the axial age modernity, post-modernity, and then meta-modernity. Kind of bringing all that I can to bear on articulating clearly what meaning sort of looks like at those various moments in the process.
And then the last portion of the book is going to focus on conclusions or implications or some analysis at that point. Of what do we make of all this? And is there a deeper story here? And kind of do some early gestures towards some kind of philosophical, existential, maybe even theological work.
So that’s the whole scope of this Evolution of Meaning series, which again, will probably be like 10 books long and maybe around 100 to 150 pages per chapter/book in this case. So something like that, that’s sort of the scope of it.
Jim: Well, that sounds exceedingly interesting. And unless you start to write sucky books, I’d like to in advance invite you to send me the proofs when they get within a couple of months of pub. And see if we can schedule a pub day or pub week podcast. Because my other authors, more commercially-minded perhaps, say that if you can get a bump, even 50 or 100 books on Amazon in the first week, it’ll kick the algorithm into gear looking for buyers.
Brendan: Well, yeah, let’s definitely do that. And Amazon and the algorithm need a good kick.
Jim: Right in the balls mostly. But so if I could kick Amazon’s algorithm and the balls, I’m happy to do it, especially for things that I think are good.
Brendan: Well, thank you. Yeah.
Jim: Now, you did mention theology, and one of the things I was going to say before we hopped in, it’s one of the things I definitely noticed and liked of course, was there was essentially no religion in this book. The word religion appeared twice, both times in passing. And the first occurrence wasn’t until page 73 out of 94. In contrast, in Emergentism, religion appeared 124 times. So maybe just a brief word about why you didn’t mention the R word this time.
Brendan: Yeah. Well, again, in part because… Well, I think the biggest reason is these are two very different books. The Emergentism book is really meant for a kind of popular audience to try to give a very, very big-picture take on very similar kinds of ideas. But again, not really bringing in… I mean, for example, that book, the notes were just a kind of small supplementary thing that I added online. Whereas this book around a third of this whole book is end notes.
So there’s 94 pages of text, but probably 50 pages of notes or something like that. And so this book is in a very different register. It’s really trying to harness, bring together, assemble as much of the kind of scientific and academic literature on the topics that pertain to this inquiry as possible. And try to be very thorough, very comprehensive in terms of attending to all of that.
So the Emergentism book was just aimed at a different kind of audience. And it was a much more sort of a looser kind of way of talking about these things that hopefully was accessible and appealing and certainly very meaningful, but aimed at a different audience.
But at the other reason is because this is just the beginning. I hate to disappoint you, but there will be some movement into questions of religion, as I think there has to be if you’re going to assess human meaning-making over the cultural record. And religion is such an important part of that.
But in terms of being able to descriptively talk about religious evolution versus more speculatively or philosophically engage it, in the way that I was doing in Emergentism, that kind of second move is only going to happen in the concluding chapters of this new work, as sort of a gesture in that direction.
But on the whole, the main purpose for writing this whole project is to kind of make a case or present an argument as thoroughly as possible rather than making grand statements and gestures. And so I will move into that kind of material, but I want to maintain the same level of rigor and integrity and whatnot as I do so. So it will, even though I will move into that content, also continue to be a very different kind of work as I do that.
Jim: Yeah. But I’m looking forward to that actually, because building a very firm foundation here, which I can see how you can use as you ratchet up to higher levels. And I like the idea of the historical analysis and obviously religion’s been a huge force ain human cultural evolution for as long as we can dig back into the historical record. And so I’d love to see the strong bottom-up foundation brought to that analysis. That should be a lot of fun.
So the book really starts off with what is meaning, why meaning matters to people, why meaning is important, et cetera. So why don’t you start with that little, but let’s not get to the punch line on what you exactly think meaning is, which I think is the best part of the book.
Brendan: Okay.
Jim: We’ll do that as separate little concentrated chunk.
Brendan: Sure. Yeah, I mean framing this is the question of when we look out and we are thinking about the state of the world today, and we’re thinking about what people are grappling with, especially around issues of mental health and a crisis on that front. Obviously your audience will be familiar with the work of say John Vervaeke and his talk about the meaning crisis.
There’s a lot of concern and interest, a kind of urgent interest in the issue of meaning, I don’t think accidentally, that’s really come to the fore over the past. It seems to have almost accelerated in recent memory though. So I don’t want to put a sense of where this started.
Obviously our claim of the book is that meaning has been a driving aspect of human culture from the beginning, but there’s a kind of intensity to these questions right now. And when we see certain kinds of breakdown in terms of people’s well-being. And we look at that also at the collective level of grappling with issues of meaning or meaninglessness in our sort of society and in our kind of cultural frames that we’re operating in, there seems to be this recognition that meaning is really important, whatever that means.
And so I think that that can be a kind of helpful way into this, is sort of trying to then talk about, well, what do we actually mean by meaning? Why is it registering to us as something very essential? And if we can get our heads around that in a way that seems to have some kind of theoretical rigor to it, then these may be more amorphous notions of a meaning crisis or a collective crisis of malaise or despair or nihilism, et cetera. Can begin to come into relief a little bit. And we can actually start to move the dial a little bit on those issues.
So I don’t know, that’d be one way into why meaning, and that’s sort of what then the book tries to tackle.
Jim: Yeah, that’s good. And it’s funny because obviously I talk to a lot of people about the meaning crisis, et cetera. And sometimes I go meaning crisis, kind of poo-poo it a little bit. And I give an example, I say, “Meaning crisis. Well, I know when the sky gets light in the east, it means that the sun’s going to come up in an hour.” And this actually ties in for the first time, your definitions of meaning tie very closely to this kind of snarky Rutt-ism.
And I say then sometimes I’ll say further if people want to go further on, I say, “The animalized study for cognitive science of consciousness often is the white-tailed deer.” And it’s a crepuscular creature, which means it does, most of its eating just before the sun goes down and just before the sun comes up or right around the time sun comes up.
So for a white-tailed deer, the sky getting light in the east is very meaningful. It means it’s time to get out of bed and get yourself positioned for eating. And you have about an hour because you really want to be out of there soon after the sun comes up and you become more visible to predators and what-such.
So it’s a perfectly reasonable form of meaning. Though when people talk about the meaning crisis, they generally, they don’t say that. They don’t mean that because certainly the sky’s going to get light in the east. But nonetheless, your definition of meaning is so much closer to my little snarky example than it is to the handkerchief-wringing meaning crisis stuff. So why don’t you start talking about what you are pointing to when you say meaning?
Brendan: Yeah. Well, so let’s see how we can do this in a way that doesn’t get us too far out in front of our skis, I guess. So I guess I would say the way that I’m approaching this is when we talk about meaning, we’re talking about a kind of knowledge or information of a particular sort. And that is specifically the sort of information that causally impacts or causally bears on the viability of an organism in context.
And that’s sort of a rough kind of way into this, and it’s a way of thinking about what we mean by meaning, that also allows for there to be successive layerings and emergent kind of versions of this, so that it doesn’t become crudely reductionistic. I’ll probably wind up coming back to that a number of times because I don’t want to give people the wrong impression by what I’m talking about here.
But simply put, yeah, meaning is the way that an organism, or let’s say more broadly in any entity in its context, in its environment, in its field, sort of leverages the mutual information linking it to that environment in such a way as causally bears on its well-being, its continued persistence, its growth and its flourishing.
Which is a very broad way of thinking about it, but it’s a sufficiently broad way of thinking about it that then we can then do the work that this whole series is aimed to. Which is trying to expand and track the evolution of that basic conception through the various levels that it undergoes in terms of its transformation from the simplest of entities in the universe to the most complex.
So that’s a very quick summary version, and then of course there’s a lot to unpack from all of that.
Jim: Yeah, I actually really like that because it was able to ground meaning in that exact sense back before life, even as you point out. Meaning is anything that is supportive of the maintenance of some homeostatic cycle that has negentropy.
So maybe before we move on, you kind of do it in passing, but you come back to dissipative systems a few times. It might be worth telling the audience about Prigogine’s theory of dissipative systems. And how far from equilibrium cycles essentially may just be nothing more than a more efficient way to burn energy.
Brendan: Yeah. So this as an introduction to this big project exploring meaning and value, attempts a kind of first principles approach to the topic, which others are also attempting and it’s a very important project for various reasons. For me, the best way to do that is basically trying to find a way of situating meaning within as much as we can get at it, the fabric of reality, you could say.
Philosophers talk about carving nature at its joints. And when we try to understand these kinds of processes unfolding through cosmic complexification, we’re looking for those joint points, we’re looking for those key thresholds and emergences. But we’re also looking for what can be tracked all the way down.
And so for me, the best way of beginning to get a first principle sense of what we mean by meaning is linking the concept to notions of energy and information. And ultimately the second law of thermodynamics, which famously has been sort of acknowledged as being one of those deep kind of, if there’s an unbreakable law of physics, it’s often credited to the second law of thermodynamics.
And the basic notion is that we live in an entropic universe and that gradients will dissipate and differences will homogenize. And this is this deep tendency to natural processes, that as best as we can tell, is more or less something we can treat as a first principle.
And if that’s sort of a fundamental aspect of the physical cosmos that we inhabit, of course the big question is, well, how do we then see order and complexity emerge in a cosmos sort of geared towards uniformity, homogeneity, and a lack of differentiation? And so you get this really important recognition that for there to be differentiated entities, you need energy that needs to do that differentiating.
Otherwise basically the opposite will occur and things will sort of lead towards equilibrium where there’s all just this, everything’s jumbled up. There’s no differences that are kind of recognizable and everything is homogenous. So if you don’t want homogeneity, then you need some kind of energy to come into that system and create differences to separate things and keep them distinct and inform them.
So all form requires some energy by means of which those forms can take shape. And so this is one of the profound insights that we get from sort of non-equilibrium thermodynamics and the kind of dissipative structures and dissipative systems that were kind of explored and discovered. And Prigogine was really key for that insight.
And so one of the things that we learn is that this process can occur, that it does occur sort of spontaneously. That the very second law of thermodynamics that tends towards the dissipation of gradients can itself generate order in order to basically more effectively, more efficiently dissipate those energy gradients.
So you get this emergent order as a very consequence of the tendency to disorder and homogenization and equilibrium. And so from that kind of starting place, you get this really profound process that can potentially ratchet itself up and build order on order and complexity on complexity.
And so people might be thinking, “Well, what does this all have to do with meaning, et cetera?” So for me, being able to communicate notions of basically the enduring state of existence for an entity in an environment. If that’s going to continue, then there needs to be a kind of energetic exchange that is informing that entity in context.
And that’s going to create an informational relationship where there is going to then be correlated information between entity and environment in such a way that some of that bears directly on the continued existence of that entity in that context. And that’s what we would call meaning.
And so the work of folks like Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert, Carlo Rovelli, have done some really important work using information theory and far from equilibrium thermodynamics. To begin to fill in this account of information and energy by talking about semantic information and meaningful information.
And I’m really just using a lot of that as a construct to be able to, in a sense, ratchet myself up theoretically based on that. Into appreciating all the different, more complex and sophisticated kinds of meaning that emerge through cosmic evolution based on that kind of core premise and process.
Jim: Yeah, I really love your use of in-form as a signature and kind of gloss on information. Because a lot of my own thinking, and many other people in the complexity world, not everybody, do think that constraint has a whole lot to do with far from equilibrium entities.
Basically information, when actually instantiated as physical processes, constrain the system. All my atoms don’t just go flying off. They’re all stuck together. And in further, things like top-down causality, I decided to go to the store to get a candy bar. The probability of a carbon atom in my ass deciding to go to the store five miles up the road is essentially zero on its own. But the fact that it’s stuck in my ass means that when I want a candy bar, that carbon molecule is going along for the ride. And those are huge constraints on what you’d otherwise expect to be the values, right?
Brendan: I don’t even know why you invite me to explain these things when you do such a much more eloquent job yourself articulating the same. Yes. So no, that’s exactly right.
Jim: Okay. One other thing, hugely important, again, you did a brilliant job on this. So much better than any I can remember, is the distinction between Shannon information and semantic information. It was goddamn unfortunate that Shannon called his thing information theory because… Anyway, I’m not going to steal your thunder. Why don’t you do that?
Brendan: I’ll try my best. Though I will say, I mean, this is some really deep stuff that it is, it’s hard to wrap your head around. And there’s a lot of ways that it’s not too hard to run afoul with these terms because they overlap, they’re used differently, and yet they relate to each other.
I try to be very careful in the book relating these together because it is very easy for there to be these slippages. So I can try to express that here, but I think that it’ll just be kind of an off the cuff version of this. And again, I just try to be very, very careful in the book itself and the language that I use.
But essentially the way that I think about it is Shannon gives us a sense of information that doesn’t really say what information is for, what it means. It’s really just a kind of objective measure of accuracy, you could say. The example I give in the book is if I send you, Jim, an email with a billion random numbers, as long as you get that information, quote/unquote that I sent you, and it matches what I sent, then you have quote/unquote received information.
And just in a Shannon sense, that kind of ticks that box. Of course, the thing is, if you have an email with a billion random numbers in it, that’s totally useless to you and you don’t have any actual need. And you would say that that’s not information for anything, and it’s not something therefore that you would value. It has no meaning to you.
And so we use a word like information in Shannon sense. But the way that we use that term more colloquially tends to suggest more about information about, information for. And that’s the semantic quality of information that’s missing from classic Shannon information theory.
And that’s really then the question, that even apparently Shannon and Weaver and other folks were trying to answer, which is like, “Well, so how do we start accounting for meaningful information?” The meaning of information itself, how do we even do that using this kind of way that we framed it? And they weren’t really successful in doing that.
I think it’s only been relatively recently by some of those folks that I named Artemy Kolchinsky and David Wolpert and others, who have really for the first time been able to use kind of classic Shannon information theory on its own terms, but be able to bring in the semantic aspect to it. And be able to finally address how do we use this incredibly powerful language for talking about information in terms of bits and whatnot, and quantifiable and accuracy and all that, how do we use that language but to get at the about-ness of information? What can information be about?
And here’s the important part too, not just what can it be about in some way that we can use it to be about something, because we can do that all sorts of ways. I can use information theory, let’s say to, and then I can impute from above a kind of meaning to it and use it that way. But that’s not the question here. It’s sort of like intrinsically, what can information be about? Which is a harder question to get at.
And what Wolpert and Kolchinsky and this kind of new approach that comes out of the kind of complexity far from equilibrium thermodynamics take on this question, is that information can be about an informational entity in context, in its continued existence. When we think about entities in context and we think about them as being distinct from their environments and therefore having a kind of informational identity, you could say, that needs to convey itself through time, then there’s an intrinsic, you could say, for-ness or about-ness of information to that entity relative to its environment.
And so that was sort of the insight that came that allowed us to use information theory to have an intrinsic semantic aspect to it. And that is what then constitutes genuinely meaningful information. Is the information that an entity has in a sense about itself, but also about its context in the correlation between the two, that bears on its continued existence. And so that’s where you get the real sense of meaning in information in a really groundbreaking way that had never really been articulated before.
Jim: Yeah, I love it because it’s essentially relational and when you get towards complexity, I always find that thinking about things as relations rather than as static objects is an important part of the thinking.
Brendan: Yes.
Jim: And I’m going to have to go back and read that paper. That one slipped in on me, and maybe I have to have Wolpert on. I know Wolpert pretty well. He’s a quite interesting character. So yeah, that’s very well said.
And the other thing you said, I don’t know if this part of the book, but you described this kind of semantic information as relating the entity to its field. And go back to my little homie example, the white tailed deer. The deer is in his field, literally in a field behind my house. When the light starts in the east, he gets up, goes and starts munching, and guess what? He’s preserving his negentropy by providing himself energy to be able to stay far from equilibrium, IE not be dead. So the story actually hangs around. So the sky getting light in the east is semantic information for the deer.
Brendan: Yeah. And this does open up some really interesting ways, which I’m sure we’ll unpack a little bit, of the different meanings of meaning as well. As well as the way that they can often overlap or relate to each other. I mean, when I, let’s say, interpret my surroundings, then in a kind of semiotic sense, there might be meaning that’s coming through there. But that is related to, but also different from the kind of meaning that I’m talking about.
You could also, let’s say, interpret semiotically the meaning of a totally useless and insignificant passage or text or something. You could get that email I mentioned earlier and you could understand what little meaning is there. You could semiotically interpret that meaning. But it’s not until you’re using kind of semiotic meaning interpretation in a manner that actually bears on your own viability and continued existence, that it actually becomes kind of meaningful information in the sense that we’re talking about.
So this becomes really important at the human culture level where we use language to do this. But I mean, one of the main points in this structure in this book is that there are various kinds of information that are being processed for meaningful information in that way. And so you have to be able to have the sense of the meaning of that information in that way. But also it’s using that kind of information in a way that bears on your viability that makes it truly existentially meaningful in the sense that I’m really trying to track.
Jim: Yeah, I love this because you don’t need any big woo woo bullshit, right? This is the real deal here, right? I’m sure you’ll eventually find a way to get to some woo-woo bullshit, but fortunately it’ll be seven volumes from now, and you’ll have hopefully build some levels of foundation. And then Rutt will become a believer in woo-woo bullshit, right?
Brendan: That’s the goal. That’s the goal.
Jim: That’s the goal. That’s the goal. That’s a good joke. So the people say when you write a book, you should write for one person,. You should write for me, and your goal is to convert me to woo.
Jim: You should write for me. And your goal is to convert me to woo-woo bullshit.
Brendan: I’ll dedicate the evolution of meaning to you. And your soul conversion is my soul meaning.
Jim: Now, I don’t recall if you actually used these words, but in my own notes, I said one of the things that you’re trying to get across is meaning as adaptive information. Does that resonate with you?
Brendan: Sure. That’s just a different way of saying what we’ve already been talking about, which is there’s a number of ways of languaging this and adaptive information is, I think Bobby Azarian uses that term a lot and I’m sure is getting it from some of these theorists directly. That’s just another term for what we’re getting at. There’s in Shannon’s sense information an infinite amount of possible, “Information,” but only a very small subset of information in that sense is actually information that can be used adaptively by an organism or an entity in context to sustain itself. And that’s the kind of information that we’re concerned with. And the degree to which information aids an entity in being adaptive is a particular kind of knowledge.
Jim: And now closely related, and this part of the discussion, I again, also very much enjoyed distinguishing, but showing the relationship between value and meaning. Let’s talk about what you mean when you say value.
Brendan: This is really huge and I almost want to say that there’s certainly a way in which when I talk about meaning, this is already implicit in there anyway, but it’s almost gets more to the aspect that I’m really trying to explore because I could set it up this way and it bears on the way we began the conversation, which is a lot of people have this notion that value what I value, what I care about, what’s important to me is just subjective, “We all have our different values, we all have our different interests in this sort of a thing,” but it’s a purely subjective affair and similar with meaning. It’s like, “You’ve got your meaning, I’ve got mine. But we live in a pluralistic world. And everyone’s got their own different meanings and there’s no there or there to it. It’s just something that’s in your head.”
And we very much come to think about meaning and value as social constructions is the popular way of talking about it. And then of course, in postmodern discourse, this is the way these things almost they’re talked about in these terms in almost a unanimous way. There’s no other way of really even considering these ideas. They’re just inventions of culture. And obviously there’s a way in which that just doesn’t really sit well with us at certain levels. We can see it in some ways. We’re like, “We see that cultures differ.” And there are different values and different people have different values that they might prioritize over others, but we also say that there is something deeper going on there, and we haven’t really done a very good job of trying to parse out what is common and universal and what is particular and contingent. And his is a way of, I hope, really responding to that confusion and helping us move past this radically oversimplified notion that meaning and value are just invented, arbitrary, subjective social constructs.
Jim: Let me jump in here with one of my favorite ruddisms. That when I hear this, “Everything is socially constructed.” My first response is, I’ve never met a postmodern plumber or farmer. They have to deal with reality. And no, plumbing is not… Yes, it’s mostly constructed in some sense, but it’s not arbitrary. It’s informed by reality. What a concept. Anyway, continue.
Brendan: And there are more or less sophisticated ways we can even deconstruct these deconstructive notions. And I think these are the kinds of conversations that are really necessary and important. And I’ll just, again, to connect that to the opening, it’s like a lot of the sense of the confusion around meaning and purpose and value that constitutes the conditions for our contemporary meaning crisis, such as it is, I think directly stems from these kinds of confusions, is that people don’t really know how to have meaning or value in the world and given what they’ve been told these things supposedly are. And this account of meaning gives us a new way of approaching these things and specifically with how we understand value. One way of getting into this way of thinking about it is really just pretty simple. We tend to talk about things as being good or bad, and it’s pretty easy to see how those are probably pretty quickly things that fall apart once you actually do some reflection on them.
For you, the movie was good, but he thought it was bad or what have you, those kinds of things. Even when we really unpacked them in a rigorous philosophical way, we can see that there are all these aspects to good and bad that are reitifications, we make a thing out of these things that are actually more nuanced and sophisticated. And what we actually lack, I think is the contextual aspect of this, what we mean by good and bad, which is more good for and bad for which is a move into a relativist direction. But again, it doesn’t end in a radical relativism because more or less postmodern notions of these things will get you there. They’re like, “That’s just good for you and bad for this other person.” But that doesn’t necessarily help us in terms of getting our heads around what these things are.
But what I want to suggest is that when we’re talking about good for and bad for this really does have direct impinging qualities on what an entity is in its context. Does an entity continue to exist or does it not? There’s a certain way that these kinds of things do bottom out, you could say. And if there is going to continue to be Brendan Graham Dempsey in my particular informational configuration, then there are going to be normative aspects to that. I will not continue to be under some conditions and I will continue to be under other conditions. And to the degree that is, here’s the thing of value to me, then there’s going to be these sets of possibilities that are either worse or better or good or bad for me. And you can extend this more generally into any informationally organized entity in its context.
And in a way that does bottom out in a philosophical way, which would take a little bit of unpacking, you can see this process for any far from equilibrium entity. If there is a thing, then it has a normative orientation towards its own being, not in any conscious sense necessarily. A rock is just a rock, a table’s a table. They’re not aware of themselves as entities or anything like that, but just by the virtue of the fact that those things are things and therefore differentiated informationally and energetically from their background surrounding context, then there is information correlating them to that background context in such a way that a subset of that causally bears on its continued existence. And this is the aspect that eventually produces the kinds of teleological aspects that we see in biology and culture, but that can be rooted in much deeper down aspects at just the purely material level.
And we already talked about dissipative structures, which just at the level of matter exhibit this normative or teleological or teleodynamic orientations because there are normative aspects for them to continue to be. And as long as there’s a normative aspect for something to continue to be, there’ll be a good for and a bad for, there’ll be value for. And that’s a thermodynamic framing at the base level of value in such a way that we can actually track through the complexification process how it evolves into higher order versions of that that we eventually experienced at the level of human beings.
Jim: I was reading that section, I had a thought, this is probably the kind of things you’re going to get to in your later volumes, but there’s also in defining good for, there’s a framing question, what membrane or boundary you’re thinking about? And the example I came up with in my head very quickly was, let’s imagine the religion of the Shakers. The Shakers were a weird religion who had a rule, no sexual intercourse. Guess what? They had a really strong intensity to die out. Now, it may have been for the individuals that their lives were great. They didn’t have kids or spouses to annoy them.
They had plenty of time to contemplate and work on their hobbies and all that. And from the frame of Billy Bob, who’s a member of the Shakers in Iowa in 1888, his existence might’ve been fine at the frame of the individual, but at the frame of the movement, that set of value, sexual intercourse is bad, means that the Shakers are going to have a hell of a time maintaining themselves over time. And sure enough, the last Shaker died I think it was in 1955, something like that. I think the takeaway here, and again, you’ll get into more and talk about sociology, is that the frame matters when you’re talking about value.
Brendan: And that raises a really important question, which I think we have to be careful because these things do undergo complexification. By the time we’re talking about these dynamics at the human culture plane, there’s so much more complex phenomena in which the individual is embedded that we have to do a different kind of calculus. Whereas if you go down to simpler entities, less complex entities, that just the structural material plane, it’s a bit more direct. Even that’s part of the story I want to tell here as well, because maybe some people listening to me talk are thinking, “Hey, a version of this sounds pretty familiar, functionalism, this sort of a thing that’s reductive.” And I want to be clear that that’s not just what I’m talking about. That there were these older notions, functionalist notions that, morality and value and all these things can just be reduced down to what’s good for people or bad for people.
And these can be ultimately assessed at the level of evolution. And all of that just gets reduced, you could say, to the biological level and various kinds of evolutionary processes at lower levels down. And that’s not the claim that I’m making. I’m trying to rather identify a particular dynamic or a process or a mechanism that itself undergoes levels of complexification and emergence through cosmic evolution so that by the time we get to very complex individual human beings on the culture plane engaged in religious justification systems, etc, you’re already dealing with a whole different milieu, which is really important to unpack a bit. And hopefully we’ll get a moment at least to talk about this, where my relative values are linked up with other people’s relative values. And in fact, to even be a human individual is inherently to be a collectivized, inculturated, socialized transpersonal being.
And I do want to make that point there. But the other thing I’ll just say briefly is that we can talk about entities and contexts and then we can think about the different scales that those unfold at. But in a sense, what’s going on there is itself part of what is complexifying. We just have to be clear about what we are talking about and in which context, and this is also really important, what’s continuous and what’s discontinuous as this process unfolds through complexification, because there will be these deep continuities that go all the way down to thermodynamics. And then there are these other things that are emergent that show up only higher up the stack. And we’ve got to be specific about what we’re unpacking at any given moment.
Jim: And I love that too. You did a very nice job of talking about the fact that there’s both emergence and there’s the bottom route as well, and both are real, both are equally real. And the naive Newtonians don’t understand that emergence is every bit as real as atoms. And then the idealists, I suppose you could say at the far extreme, they don’t believe in atoms at all. They don’t exist. It’s all in your fucking head, dude. And I go, “I don’t think so, but maybe. I can’t prove it or disprove it.” This is one of the little ruddy and riffs I’m going to have to do this is that I famously hate metaphysics.
I also admit that any metaphysical proposition could be true. And in fact, weird shit like the universe just flicked into existence five seconds ago with all of our memories in place and all ballistic objects in motion and in five seconds from now is going to flick out of existence, I cannot disprove that actually. And the level of things that can not be disproven is infinite. And even your most horseshit metaphysical bullshit might be right, but I just don’t think so. Anyway, let’s move on quickly here. I was going to do a longer section on this, but we’re digging deep. Something that’s quite relevant to your moving of this ideas up in scale, complexification is Gregg Henriques, UTOK.
For listeners may remember those who listened to them. I did three episodes with Gregg, EP 176, 177, and 179, where we dug into his book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology, Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. And you can get more UTOK than you could eat if you want to listen to those three episodes. It may be in five minutes, seven minutes. If you can tell me, don’t tell me I know all about it. Tell the audience what is UTOK and how does it tie into what you’re trying to do.
Brendan: UTOK stands for the Unified Theory of Knowledge. It is a broad meta theoretical framework to provide an architecture for the different planes of complexification that have emerged over the course of cosmic evolution. That’s one of the things it offers. It came about because Gregg Henriques, who’s a professor at the University of Madison, Madison University, he’s a professor of psychology, and he was grappling with the issue of how psychology doesn’t really have a very good theoretical framework for what people even mean by psychology, the psyche, et cetera. His conclusion was that we hadn’t done a very good job situating the mind and the psyche in the broader naturalistic story. Whereas you go into the realms of physics and biology, those people have a pretty good sense of what they’re studying. By the time you get to psychology, people don’t really agree on what they’re talking about.
He was able to situate what we mean by psychology within a naturalistic narrative of cosmic evolution and complexification. And a key aspect of that is what he calls the Tree of Knowledge System, which is just a way of mapping these different emergent planes as they showed up in big history. Out of a energy information implicate order as he refers to it, you get the matter plane, and this is just atoms and molecules, that sort of a thing. And then eventually through that complexification process, you get the emergence of life out of matter. And you get single-celled organisms onto multicellular organisms, and that encompasses that up to plants and fungi, that sort of a thing. At a certain point, you see out of certain living systems, the emergence of a whole new plane of complexity called the mind-animal plane.
And this is a key aspect of his contribution because here’s where we really start to see the emergence of psychology in the sense of minded behavior in nature. If you have a complex nervous system and you’re mobily navigating your environment, seeking food and that sort of a thing, then you’re an animal and that has different behavioral properties than plants do or that rocks do. And then lastly, most recently, certainly important for us, you get out of a subset of minded animals, human persons, and this occurs with the development of language and marks a new evolutionary plane of emergence, and he accounts for these different planes, I think in a very important way by identifying them as novel information processing systems. The emergence of life comes from genetic information processing. The emergence of mind comes from neuronal information processing, and the emergence of culture comes through symbolic or linguistic information processing.
You get this wonderful big history approach. You get all the layers of complexity as they’ve emerged throughout cosmic evolution, and then you get a way of tracking our different kinds of knowledge relative to these different ontic planes. Fundamental physics does a great job with the matter plane, biology with the life plane, but then psychology is really addressing both animal psychology, Skinnerian rats and things like that, but also human psychology. You’ve got to be able to divide those. And I’ve found this to be really the best map that I’m aware of for mapping cosmic complexification and for explaining why we see these new emergent levels. And ultimately, I think a key insight of recognizing that these different levels emerge because of novel information processing systems, which plugs directly into what we might mean by meaningful information and what is processing what meaningful information at these different scales.
Jim: I’ll add one extension to that from my perspective. I think the most important work he did for the work that I do, which is in the area of scientific study of consciousness was, and you missed from my mind the critical level, he talks about three levels of mind, mind one, mind two, and mind three. Mind one is nervous systems, but nothing like consciousness. Think of like a C. elegans, 304 neurons. It can learn a lot. It navigates the world, it eats, it reproduces. It’s been around for a long time, but it has no phenomenology. It would seem extremely unlikely unless you’re an IIT religionist. And then the mind two is phenomenological subjective experience. And in my world, we think that that came into being, at least at the level of the amphibians, and basically we have consciousness of some form phenomenology, what it feels like to be.
It’s an actual natural trick, Ma Nature’s actually doing something very clever to allow her to have relevance realization and real time on a computational budget that she can afford. At least that’s my argument for why we’ve had consciousness continuously for at least 250 million years. Though it is also thought that something like consciousness also evolved totally independently in the large cephalopods, the big squids and octopi, but it would be extremely alien to say at least with the same thing. That’s mind two. And that includes all animals from, let’s say, a toad up to a chimpanzee, something like that. And they all have some form of subjective experience, and the subjective experiences are each different, very radically different. Famous paper, Thomas Nagel, What Is It Like to Be a Bat? If you ever want to read just one scientist forever for shits and grins read this one.
And he tries to get you into the mindset of, “If you’re a being that uses echolocation to do most of your sense perception, what the hell does that mean? What does a shapely female bat look like to a dude bat who’s assessing them via echolocation?” It’s hard to even imagine. That’s his point. And then mind three is where somewhere along the line we’re not quite sure when this thing called language emerged and probably a proto-language first. And that then opens up a whole new plane of existence and a whole new set of affordances about what animals with nervous systems and brains and subjectivity can do. Anyway, sorry. That’s just an extension that I find very important into his theory.
Brendan: It’s crucial. And I figured I only had five to seven minutes and trying to give all of UTOK in that amount of time would not be able to capture everything. It’s actually a very comprehensive system. I tend to focus primarily on the Tree of Knowledge and what he calls the Periodic Table of Behavior. And I talk about both of these things at some length in this rather short book, but there’s actually a lot more to his system as well.
And in fact, if people are interested, the institute that I run published his book on the topic, if you wanted to get a summary primer UTOK, he just put out UTOK the Theory of Knowledge, and that offers a nice overview of that. But my book actually is really deeply engaged with his architecture that he’s using here and is its own way a even shorter summary of the basic thresholds and things that he’s using there. I really lean very heavily on his big history map in order to map the evolution of meaning, particularly as a information that’s being processed by different kinds of entities at the complexity stack.
Jim: And as a heads-up, we’re having Gregg on the show to talk about his new book sometime in November as I recall. That’ll be fun. Now, as I said, we did do three episodes on his big fat book, and this will be probably a more popular version. I haven’t looked at the thing yet.
Brendan: I have to say I listened to each of those episodes and they were brilliant. They were wonderful. And if people aren’t going to go buy that book that he wrote because it is an academic work that has the academic publishing price to it, then definitely check out those three episodes. You guys did a great job unpacking that very full volume he wrote.
Jim: That was a lot of fun. I actually approached the publisher and asked them if they would consider providing a discount, a big discount, like down to $30 on the paperback version for a limited period of time, or even with a code word. And they said, “No.” They offered a 15% discount. And I go, “Off a $149 book, kiss my ass. Hardly anybody in my audience could spend $149 for minus 15% for a book.”
Brendan: The new book’s 19.99. A lot more accessible for most folks.
Jim: That’d be a lot more fun. Let’s now move on to where it really gets interesting when we start talking about learning and learning can happen in all kinds of interesting ways. Start talking about when you mean say learning and how those relate to entities and fields.
Brendan: One of the moves I’m trying to make here is if we can talk about meaning as an information, a specific kind of information in the manner that we’ve been discussing, then what does it look like to acquire said information, to process said information, to integrate said information? And again, to the degree that meaningful information is adaptive information, we’re also just talking about evolutionary processes essentially. And here we talked a lot about Gregg’s work. We could also talk a lot about Bobby Azarian’s work, who I also, I would say, draw equally as heavily from in terms of the underlaboring of the ideas to get this whole ship off the ground, to mix metaphors. Because Bobby’s notion that he advances in his book, The Romance of Reality, is that you can understand evolution itself as a learning process and that this is a learning process that has unfolded across different emergent planes of complexity.
I synthesized the work of Gregg and Bobby and I identify those information processing systems that Gregg is identifying in his Tree of Knowledge system as new kinds of knowledge that we can acquire about reality that entities acquire about reality. That’s new kinds of information that can be processed, that’s new kinds of meaningful information that can be processed. And you just really apply that basic framework of learning to that architecture and you get what I’m talking about in this book, which is that to really understand what’s going on in evolution, you’re seeing the complexification of entities relative to their environments through a process of basically encoding in a sense that information about their environment in a manner that allows them to be more adaptive and to continue and to thrive and flourish, enhancing its viability. What evolution is a learning process, but it’s the learning of specifically meaningful information.
Again, you could memorize all those numbers in that random email I sent you of all those of numbers, but that’s not a good use of your time. You would not have learned a great deal and actually spending time and energy doing so would be maladaptive. And you can start to see all the deep ways that all of these ideas really come together. And learning is a broad category that itself then complexifies. Ways that you and I learn as human beings can lean on symbolic information processing, cognitive information processing, genetic information processing. But this is then a very rich and sophisticated notion of what learning can be. But that deer in the field at twilight also is learning absent symbolic information processing, but it’s learning cognitively, it’s learning neuronally, having experiences and adjusting its behavior based on those.
But then you go deeper down the complexity stack just to the level of life and you see that there’s a genetic learning process underway by means of which organisms evolve by adapting to new information constraints in their environment. And even just biological evolution, again, can be seen as a learning process.
I make a bold assertion that if this is all true and there’s some continuity linking these processes, however much they may diminish in complexity as you go down the stack, then there’s some, “Learning,” that’s also happening at a purely material structural level. What I’ve basically done here is I’ve taken Gregg Henriques Matter, Life, Mind, Culture, Planes of Complexity, appreciated that there’s information processing that distinguishes them all, appreciating that there’s different entity field relationships that characterize them all and then basically acknowledging that there’s different kinds of learning that is going to take place at those different levels, and there’s going to be then different kinds of meaningful learning or the learning of meaningful knowledge at all those levels. And that’s what I’m trying to do by framing all of this evolutionary complexification process as a learning process that’s ultimately one of learning meaning and value.
Jim: Cool. Talking about Bobby Azarian, we had him on in EP 159 where he talks about on the romance of reality, that was a fun episode. We argued a fair bit, but it was enjoyable. And to the idea of physical structures learning, this is more metaphorical than exact Stuart Brand, my friend Stuart Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn, is very interesting. And he makes the point that of course the buildings don’t change themselves, but people change the buildings based on their use cases. And in some sense, metaphorical more than perhaps exact, buildings over time learn by being adjusted and become a better, more fitted to the use of the current person. Now, the other thing I’d love to get you to chat a little bit about, as we talk about adaptive, we talk about good for et cetera, fairly often we’re wrong about what we learn or it’s not adaptive.
An example I would like to just pick at, because it’s simple, imagine a kid bitten by a dog at age seven and basically builds in a over-learned lesson of fear of dogs for life and makes him miserable when he is walking down the street. And of course that’s a simple case, but there’s many, many other cases where learning is non-adaptive or where even things that were adaptive aren’t adaptive in new environments, let’s tease that apart just a little bit.
Brendan: This is interesting actually. And here’s where some of these distinctions can start to be really informative. You’re talking about a human child who is bit by a dog and then develops a certain potentially maladaptive learned behavior in response to that. Now, what’s interesting in that context is that as a human child, presuming they have access to linguistic communication capacity, they are then able to voice what their experience was, what they feel like they know about dogs and about how to behave around them to other people. We live in intersubjective, communicative context at the plane of culture, and we use language to do just that. And what’s interesting about a child then is they’re able to use language to express and communicate what they’ve, “Learned,” but they’re also probably going to get some pushback from other linguistically endowed human beings who might say things like, “I think you’re probably overreacting,” or, “Not all dogs are like that.”
Or, “You need to have different kinds of experiences to properly generalize this sort of a thing.” And again, to bring up Gregg’s work around notions of justification, which is what language ostensibly is, I guess, for you could say in some senses, that we’re able to learn together through shared justifications and shared meaning making, then that child is able to make better sense and do better sense making because they’re embedded in a whole collective of other justifying human persons. And might even say, for example, “Go to therapy and then do CBT or something and then be able to unpack those justifications.” And now I bring all that up because if you compare that to say like a chimpanzee or some animal, a very advanced mammal on the plane of mind, just at the animal level, if you lack communication at the symbolic register, then you aren’t able to communicate and therefore justify and put into words in a manner that can be informationally conveyed to your conspecifics.
And that individual experience stays in individual experience. That maladaptive pattern, that animal adopts as a response to their stimulus that occurred will stay basically with that for the rest of their life probably because there is no way to adjudicate it, to open it up to intersubjective verification and analysis and accounting. And this is an interesting way that meanings can transform in a sense for how the dynamics of meanings can shift as you move up the complexity stack. And what I’m getting at ultimately here is that as complexification unfolds and you get these emergent planes of information processing different kinds of.
Brendan: … and you get these emergent planes of information processing, different kinds of learning can occur. What is available to the human child because they have language is not available to the individual animal. When we have something like language, we are in the capacity to learn from other people and their experiences as animals as well.
I guess what I’m getting at ultimately is that learning continues, but it also takes different shapes across the complexity stack, owing to the different kinds of information that we’re processing for meaning.
Jim: Yeah. That’s very important, and I’m sure you’ll develop that further as you move into the cultural side, sociological side, and even the T word. I’m looking forward to reading that and the things that come after.
While I was reading that section, I had this following weird thought. Which was, historically, Darwinian evolution pruned maladaptive learning. But perhaps, in our time, where nobody fucking dies from their bad decisions, that may be why the world seems to be full of so much bogus learning. What do you think of that Ruddian conjecture?
Brendan: Yeah. I think that it’s interesting how … This goes back to your earlier question about what’s the scale that we’re applying, and we talked a little bit then about really appreciating all the new additions and layers that show up as you move into higher levels of complexity. Because what I’d be getting at with all this is that, as an individual, as individuals we could say, our wellbeing is impinged upon and supported by the collective. There are evolutionary pressures that might have exerted themselves on individuals in certain ways that now, collectively, we might have altered the calculus for. But those will have second order, third order kinds of new evolutionary pressures at different levels.
If a society starts to go off the rails because some development in culture has allowed certain things to take place that are, yeah, causing maybe maladaptive collective patterns of behavior to emerge, then that’s still going to be an evolutionary pressure, but it’s one that’s going to effect the wellbeing, and the integrity, and the viability of the entire collective social structure.
Jim: Yeah, this is this frame question again.
Brendan: Right.
Jim: If you look at some arbitrary society unnamed, where all the teenagers are doing TikTok instead of sex, then that society is likely to die out.
Brendan: Yeah. Well, the individual analyses of what we might be registering as pathological or maladaptive learning behavior could vary. But the basic idea still holds, which is that … Well, added to that though is there are also unexpected, and emergent, and rather complex forms of causation involved here. We don’t necessarily know, either, what’s maladaptive until after the case. It could be that some change in our environment occurs, and maybe it turns out that all those TikTokers were just perfectly placed to exploit that new niche. I doubt that, but I’m saying that, yeah, there are dynamics.
Jim: Yeah, you’re right. It’s very important to always keep in mind Darwinian-ism is the classic post hoc explanation for something. Yes, it happened. That’s all it can say, really. It can’t really tell you what’s adaptive right now. Other than, well, Shakerism is probably not going to reproduce very well.
Brendan: Yeah, but this is interesting thing. I do think it raises some really important meta questions about evolution. Because I have a quote of Deacon’s in the book, where he gets at some version of this. Which is that, yeah, natural selection is an after-the-fact assessment of what is adaptive, and therefore what kind of counts as learned information being passed through that selection filter. But even though the broad evolutionary Darwinian process is itself, as he says, “not normative in nature,” it does create normative consequences or normative dynamics for individuals in context. Or for collectives in context.
What I’m interested in exploring is the various ways that I do think we can even see some deep normative aspects to the evolutionary process as a whole that I think are warranted conclusions. For example, here would be one, I don’t know what you would make of this. Is it normatively the case that having more information, let’s say more meaningful information, is better? In the sense that we’ve been talking about it. We’re talking very loosely here, and whatnot. It would seem to be that that is the case. That if you have more meaningful information, then inherently that’s going to produce an advantage to your evolutionary situation, and thus would account for the sorts of changes that we have seen, over and over again, occur throughout cosmic complexification.
Complexity itself, on the whole, seems to be a direction to evolution. On the whole. Obviously, some things don’t have the need to complexify. But it does seem that the evolutionary process in its dynamics generates a situation in which complexification occurs.
I do also, mostly in the end notes talk a little bit about this, drawing on the work of, say, Adrian Behan, and talk to constructal theory, and this sort of thing. Because it’s ultimately getting at what’s the most efficient use of energy dynamics for the … Basically, the desivative adaptation and the desivative structures that we were talking about earlier. What generates the most optimal flows of energy moving through systems? It seems like it’s complexifying configurations that do that. There does seem to be a “normative” aspect.
What do you make of that framing?
Jim: Yeah. I think this is, of course, one of the big questions about complexity. Is there something about the nature of the university that favors increased complexity over time? My take on that is sort of.
For instance, as we sit here near the Sun, with the far from equilibrium flux of solar energy driving a biosphere, it’s sufficiently strong far from equilibrium flux, and particularly the invention of photosynthesis somewhere along the way, by good luck and good timing. I suspect a lot of life never develops photosynthesis. It was chemical eating only. When it ran out of chemicals, that was it. Ours invented photosynthesis. Very weird that it happened, probably. That’s allowed our life to have this far from equilibrium Pergosian flux, and our complexity will continue to increase.
But, one of these days, Sun’s going to go super giant, it’s going to roast the Earth. We could just be entirely wiped out. Or we could be wiped out by an asteroid, or lots of things that could wipe us out. In which case, the complexity that we have built, say mammals, mammals could get wiped out. Whether that level of complexity would ever be found again by Ma Nature is entirely unclear. If there was an event sufficiently bad, say a snowball Earth, where this happened before, where the Earth froze solid except for a small belt at the equator. Everything on the surface died. The only thing that existed was relatively simple organisms in the ocean. When you replayed that tape, would we get this level of complexity? I don’t know. But we might. We’d get some ramifying complexity. But what level of contingencies were necessary to produce our level of complexity? I’m just not 100% sure.
Brendan: Well, I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure. We don’t necessarily have to do the calculations of how much is contingent, how much is necessary, these sorts of things. There seems to be some sort of dialectical dance between chance accident, and also just law-like progression to the unfolding of certain kinds of behavioral complexification patterns.
You brought up earlier, the potential independent emergence on consciousness in cephalopods. Those instances of convergent evolution are always very suggestive to me. The crabification process is another one. I forget what the technical term is. Carcinization, or something like that. Where there do seem to be these functional aspects that keep reemerging because of their adaptability, because of the ways that they’re able to most effectively and efficiently allow an organism in context to extract and energy it needs from its environment, and to gather meaningful knowledge, you could say, in all these ways.
I find those things really compelling and interesting. And probably move me into the direction of an exploration of these ideas which I’m trying to present in the most compelling way possible, or the most convincing way possible. Because this, to me, does start to lean into where a lot of the conversation at the end of the book heads to and concludes with, before the next book will start, which is the question of the sacred, which we’ll probably touch on in a second.
This is an interesting way of thinking about this, because if there these deep patterns that are shoring themselves up through time, getting amplified through the complexification process, that we experience as not just meaningful, but actually the source of meaning itself because these are the deep processes through which meaning emerges and develops. Then, yeah, I feel like there’s something that we could almost say is sacred about complexification, and that there’s a meaning in it in that sense. Which, I think we can say without recourse to woo, but just merely based on the complexification narratives that we’re talking about.
Jim: Yeah. A great example from the evolution of life is that the eye, or something like the eye, has evolved independently something like 18 times. There is an attractor, at least a co-evolutionary attractor, when other people can see, you better be able to see or you’re going to be in trouble, you’re going to be out-competed. It’s probably partially co-evolutionary. There’s an attractor for vision, there’s no doubt about that. At least, in the context of our biochemical homeostasis negantropic thing that we call life. Within that boundary, for sure there is a driver. Co-evolution is a huge driver, and we get that principally from life.
One final thing before I move on is the amount of information. I’m going to say that probably, over the long arc of history, being able to process more information is positive, right?
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: You inform. You produce a form that more effectively harvests far from equilibrium energy to allow yourself to persist and to grow exponentially.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: However, humans, I believe, part of the reason we’re suffering from nuttiness is we should only be processing X amount of information per unit of time. For a person who has got their notifications turned on their phone, don’t do that, people, spend two hours a day on TikTok, don’t do that, people, they are receiving far more messages than we were designed for. People always talk about disinformation, misinformation, mal-information. Well, I think those do have some impact.
But a supposition, unproven but I’m looking for the evidence, that it’s the absolute number of inbound informational interrupts, that you get above some number and that number probably varies by person, that you are pushed into some form of a less adaptive state.
Brendan: Yeah. No, I would largely agree with all of that. I think even just what you said a second ago is really telling, and I would also very much agree with. You were suggesting that there is this overall directionality towards greater information throughout cosmic complexification. Or that the generation of, and you could say then the processing of more information. But isn’t that just a different way of saying that there is a universal learning process underway that’s unfolding across all these different emergent levels of complexity? Which I don’t know how metaphorical it then is to say something like …
The question would be at what point does what I’m about to say move from science-y based to outright woo? If we go from the universe is generating more information, the universe is generating more meaningful information, the universe is learning more meaningful information. The universe is learning more meaningful information about itself. The universe is generating more meaning and value, in terms of a process that’s leaning towards entities that can understand themselves as part of it. These sorts of things, I think, start to lead us into ways of understanding this process that maybe start drifting into the speculative and maybe even theological register.
But that’s the exciting stuff about this work for me, is that some of these deep, even mystical questions start to bump up pretty closely to some of these complexity questions and information processing questions at a cosmic scale.
Jim: Yeah, very cool. Though, I will caution the following. Which is the learning history of the universe was pretty damn shallow for a very long time. The most significant thing that was learned by the universe was probably the star. Next time I talk to Greg, I’m going to ping him on that a little bit. “You left a star out yesterday!” It’s probably almost as important as life. But the star got going within less than a billion years from the start of the universe, and the stars are really interesting.
Essentially, gravity and matter interact to produce all kinds of different stars. There’s many different kinds of stars, they each have their own trajectory on how they evolve. Then there’s generations of stars, when stars out-gas in the later stages. Larger stars, even including ones like the Sun, they’re not going to go supernova, but it’s going to go into a super giant stage where it throws material out. Those materials have concentrated over time. The astrophysicists are quite certain that the Sun is at least a third generation star, and perhaps a fourth generation star. Its raw material was enriched by elements greater than helium and hydrogen. And indeed, our planet would not even have existed if we had formed from a hydrogen helium cloud, such as existed for the first sets of stars.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: There’s an evolution of elemental generations, but we only got three generations probably in 12 billion years, so moving fucking slow. But life is qualitatively different. This weird-ass thing, how in the world did we evolve the complicated machinery for DNA replication is, to my mind, just a huge question mark.
Well, I’ve done recently a show on the Fermi paradox. We go into all these very interesting, is the great filter behind us or ahead of us?
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: If we don’t see anybody.
Brendan: Well, I did briefly also want to touch on the second thing you brought up there too, which is this information overload notion. I think that there is a lot of truth to that as well, but I also think we shouldn’t over-read that either. In the same way we were talking about maladaptive behavior before, that can take generations to parse out. There are still those evolutionary pressures unfolding at the social and collective level that will take effect. It’s not like evolution ends or even that it just leads to collapse of society per se. It’s that we’re just at the beginning of a process, and we don’t know what that looks like in a number of generations. Which hopefully we’ll see, if we can get there.
But there is that continual filtration process, and the adaption process, and the learning process underway that, what to us might be total information overload, hypothetically to people 500 years from now, again if we’re around, might just seem like, “Oh, a TV commercial.” I’m open to that as well.
Jim: My regular listeners know that I constantly rant, “There’s a trillion dollar opportunity out there,” and I see how you’d even do it. If I was 45 and not 70, I’d probably go do it. Which is to build personal information agents that serve as membranes that mediate the messages that come in, and get approximately the messages we should, and approximately at the rate we can actually absorb.
Brendan: Well, that’s fascinating. Versions of that, we already do to some degree. But it’s also interesting because that could also be itself very maladaptive, unless it’s in an equilibrium finding context, where it’s able to know how much information to let in and filter. Because we need, through the processes of justification and linguistic meaning sharing, we need to be bumping up against other people’s information.
Jim: Yeah. I was warned that. There has to be a serendipity filter in there. On the other hand, you also have to understand who controls that membrane. If it’s Cheese China, it is not going to turn out well. Or if it’s other well-known maladjusted politicians, it’s not going to turn out well.
Brendan: I would trust Cheese China with my life, I don’t know. No, I’m just kidding.
Jim: Yeah. [inaudible 01:16:57].
All right, let’s move on here. We are having so much fun here, but we want to get a little bit further into this.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: One of the ideas that I’ve stumbled across over the last few years that has been most transformational in my own thinking is John Varvaeke’s concept of relevance realization. We, of course, have had John Vervaeke on the show numerous times, and probably most well-known.
This is scary. These five episodes, which are dense, hard shit, all score in the top 17 of my all-time listenerships. That’s Vervaeke, EP 143 to 147, where we spend 10 hours condensing his 50 hours of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis to 10. If people want to learn more about relevance realization, and an unbelievable huge amount of other stuff, go listen to those five episodes, you got 10 hours.
Why don’t you explain to the audience what relevance realization is, and why it’s so core to what your thinking is?
Brendan: Sure. I guess I’ll also say that this book that I’ve written summarized who’s-who on whose been on The Jim Rutt Show as well. Because not just Greg and Bobby, but John Vervaeke is also in here as well.
I think he fills a particular place in this conversation. Well, let me back up and talk about relevance realization first, so then we connect it with what else I’m getting into here. The challenges he tends to have framed, where this issue came from to articulate relevance realization goes back to the frame problem. Which is, in artificial intelligence context, how do you know what is actually information you can attend to, should attend to, and how do you not?
I relate this, again, back to the Shannon thing where there’s a hypothetically infinite amount of just “information” out there. We could spend all day reading all the random numbers in the world that we could potentially read. But, how do we know what’s relevant information? It was very difficult to be able to offer a formalized account of this idea. Essentially, that’s the crux of the problem.
My understanding of John’s work is largely tackling this through the lens of applying certain kinds of, one, predictive processing models, but also certain kinds of opponent processes as dynamics that can help explain how we effectively do this. He talks about different forms of trade off relationships that the mind uses to find equilibrium, that sweet spot between attending to different kinds of extremes that could be drawing our attention in different directions. Do we pay attention to the most general aspects of something, or do we pay attention to its most particular qualities? Do we look at the forest or the trees?
Well, adaptive behavior seems to take both into account, and find that dynamic equilibrium between them that’s able to optimally home in on what is most relevant in a particular context. Doing that continually, through an adjusting of differentiation, and integration, and assimilation, and accommodation. Yeah. Through these kinds of dynamic processes that the brain uses, we are always transjectively attending to the relevance of our situation. And ultimately, looking for affordances that allow us to increase our viability in flourishing.
His work, really, I fit very neatly into the cognitive learning part of the architecture of this argument. If there’s a universal learning process underway, what John is talking about with relevance realization really seems to refer specifically to what animals with complex active bodies and nervous systems are doing using, using their complex neuronal infrastructure to process information for meaning. He fits right in there, to be able to talk about that. That would be how I would, in a very quick way, situate his work into this.
Jim: Yeah. I’d add a very simple quantitative component to it as well. Which I’ve run by him, he doesn’t disagree with at least. Which is our perceptions are bringing in millions of bits per second. Our eyes, our ears, our skin. There’s a very large amount of perceptual information coming in. Yet, our conscious cognition, where a lot of our learning, not all of it but a large amount of our learning, particularly our symbolic learning occurs, only updates at the rate of about 50 bits per second. There is a vast winnowing that has to occur between the millions to the 50.
And then further, this is very close to the Ruddian theory of conscious cognition, those bits and our memories together form the cursor of attention. We only keep only one object approximately in mind for anywhere for 250 milliseconds to maybe three seconds. As we hop from object to object, and keep in mind, the object can be an internal word. This is the internal monologue. As we hop from thing, to thing, to thing, that is who we are actually. Our cursor of consciousness is, to a very substantial degree, who we are. Relevance realization is, one, pruning the millions to 50. And then the second of those, let’s call them 25 versus 50 objects in your conscious frame, choosing the one to focus the spotlight on of attention to, and then the next one, and the next one, and the next one. If that’s well-tuned, you are well-fitted between your entity and your field.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: If that is maladapted, let’s say the classic neurotic, who goes down … What the hell do they call that thing? Morbid remuneration, or something. Anyway, if you’re head is thinking about, “Oh my God, the girl turned me down, the girl turned me down. I’m going to die, I’m going to die, I’m going to die.” Those are actually attentional cursors moving in a very non-adaptive fashion.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: If, on the other hand, your cursor is going, “Hm, I see some sign of a deer. Let me attract that motherfucker. Oh, there he is.” Boom! If that’s how your cursor of consciousness goes, that’s highly adaptive.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: I find those two aspects, the pruning of the flood of information, and the deciding on what to pay attention to in a second-by-second time click, is both being of the essence. If it’s mal-tuned or maladjusted, you are suboptimal as an entity in your field.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: If that makes sense to you?
Brendan: Definitely. That’s all well said. This also is a great way of bringing back in mind one, two, and three. So much of that processing is happening unconsciously. It’s just that little additional stuff that is coming up into conscious awareness that we’re able to put our attention on things. But that’s because I don’t have to pay attention to my heart beating, or my gallbladder doing whatever it does, and that sort of thing. And also, all sorts of information processing, even from my environment, that’s coming in and being, in the sense processed, but not consciously so. You just get a lot of mind one doing that work for you, so that mind two can be that attentional filter.
The only thing I would add to that, which I totally agree with, is that we tend to make the point, talk about adaption or adaptation using metaphors of getting food and increasing our survivability rate, or something. But one of the core points I want to get across in this book as well is that viability, at the level of human being, isn’t just that genetic level survival.
It’s also how am I not just adaptive relative to the energy for the food that’s going to keep me alive, but how’s my attentional filter paying the right kind of attention to the social dynamics that are around me? How do I pay enough attention to the fact that that girl turned me down, but then don’t allow that to become the neurotic loop that leads to reciprocal narrowing, and then doesn’t actually aid my flourishing? Because I do need to pay attention to that, but I need to pay the right kind of attention to it. That’s all part of the meaning making that we do. I just wanted to throw that.
Jim: Yeah, that’s exactly right. This is the thing I’ve gotten from John, is that it’s so important that that be tuned correctly. In some sense, trying to improve as a person, above all else, is tuning your relevance realization to who you are, what your natural talents are. If I want to tune my relevance recommendation to being an NBA basketball player, it’s not going to work too well. Being an old fat man, that’s not going to work too well. But if I want to tune my relevance realization to picking out deer from my deer stand, then yeah, that’ll pay off very handsomely. You have to understand your field and understand who you are as an entity, and then tune your relevance realization to do as good a job … It won’t be perfect, I guarantee. But it’s as well as you can do in processing the information the world gives you, and then triggering the affordances that you have so as to accomplish whatever your mission is.
Brendan: John talks about that as wisdom, which I think is spot on. That is very much what I’m getting at here as well, with when we do start talking about the sacred, and how this does eventually enter into meaning systems, and belief systems, all this stuff of the traditionally religious, philosophical, existential, and wisdom oriented kinds of information that we’re processing. That’s all meaningful information, and it’s ultimately about our viability, and our flourishing, and our context.
Interestingly, it does relate back to that question, or the thing we were just talking about a second ago, in terms of information overload. It’s maladaptive to have your notifications always sucking your attentional filter way. Wisdom is always that process of honing your own behavioral responses to the various stimuli that you’re taking in towards your and the collective flourishing. Which I keep returning to again, because I can’t stress enough how, by the time you reach the human level, because of language, we are socially embedded creatures, and that’s a huge part of our context. Our meaning is collective in that nature as well.
Jim: Yeah. That’s very true, very well said. Though I must say, wisdom is one of those other words that gives me gas. Because in the sense, I had a conversation with somebody yesterday, they were trying to tell me, “Wisdom, blah, blah, blah.” I said, “Well, if you take wisdom as the ability to make correct decisions, I’m all for wisdom. But the way you’re using it, dude, it’s just some woo bullshit.”
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: I’m a little skeptical of the W word. But the concept as you described it, absolutely. John Vervaeke, when he uses wisdom, he means it in exactly this way.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: I probed him very deeply on it. There’s not a woo bone in John’s body, even though some people think there are. You can interpret John in a woo-ish fashion. But let me tell you, after many hours of conversation, he’s sound.
Brendan: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: All right, let’s go onto the last topic here we’re going to talk about. I’ve got to do two things. We’re going to have to do the first one probably a little faster than I would have liked, which is the arc of the complexification of meaning into the social. And then I want to spend a moderate amount of time on the concept of the sacred.
Brendan: Yeah, okay. Yeah, those dovetail pretty well actually. Thanks. Because yeah, I wanted this part to come across. It is very important.
Even though, as I’ve said, there is this deep process which has a structure to it, it is also discontinuous in the way that it manifests as things complexify. As learning unfolds, as the universe complexifies and you get these emergent levels, matter, life, mind, and culture, then different kinds of meaningful information is processed through those information processing entities at those different levels.
Briefly stated, learning, meaning, value, these are very loose, semantic usages for what’s going to happen at the deep, material, structural, or quantum level. There’s interesting work that can be done to show that quantum de-coherence can be framed as a predictive processing, and this and that. I mentioned some of that work in the book. And in that sense, could fall into this general pattern that we’re talking about. But this process itself looks more and more like what we mean by learning, and meaning, and value as you go up the complexity stack, because well, those are all ideas that we as humans developed. We can see their continuity lower down, but it’s not until they get to our level that they reach the level that they do.
At the level of matter and structure, it’s about persistence. Meaning, it’s unconscious. It is purely that transjective relationship of a particular thing in context that has meaningful information by warrant of the fact that it needs to resist entropy if it is going to continue as an entity. Only with life do you see then meaning take on a broader significance, as meaningful information becomes the basis by means of which organisms evolve. The natural selection process is a collect-
Brendan: And so the natural selection process is a collective learning process. We might still put learning in quotation marks, but that’s up for folks to determine.
Jim: Yeah, I’m for not putting it in quotations.
Brendan: Okay. Great.
Jim: I think you made the argument extremely well and other people have too, but you did it really well, that absolutely evolution is learning.
Brendan: Great. So yeah, we can look at it through that lens, but I think the thing that I would emphasize is that it’s a collective process, that what is learning isn’t the individual bacterium per se. It is the genome of a particular species that is getting updated by means of natural selection. And that that is a way that we can map sort of the information there that’s being processed to the environment in a way that it is about the environment. And Terrence Deacon makes that point very eloquently. So that with life you do see learning and you see the aboutness of information. So it’s semantic information about the environment, but it’s being processed phylogenetically by the entire species. By the time you get to cognitive learning and you’ve got complex animal bodies, now you’ve got the possibility for ontogenetic learning, which is the individual organism is itself processing information based on the environment through the nervous system and then adjusting its behavior accordingly, so.
Jim: Yeah, let me give you a quick little example from my white-tailed deer here.
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: The way a young deer learn what to eat is they eat the same thing as their mother and they copy her, mimesis essentially, and then some small percentage of the ones are a little radical. They’re the ornery teenagers. They’ll go try something else. Some of them will die and some of them will discover a new food source. So that’s the ontogenetic learning in just a hardcore material sense because it obviously impacts your ability to survive. If your diet is too narrow during a time of drought, you will die. If it’s too rich, you won’t be eating the right optimal stuff. So it’s a tuning, again, like relevance realization.
Brendan: Well, and that’s a good way also to illustrate that by the time you get to cognitive learning, it’s not like genetic learning has gone away, it’s just been supplemented actually by a new information processing system. So in that case, actually I would actually call that genetic learning because what’s actually happening there is then the genome or the genetic information of the white-tailed deer species has gotten an update based on the engagement with the environment because those deer who died are not going to reproduce, and therefore that’s information about the environment that’s going to be carried forward, you could say. But now another example using those white-tailed deer, you could say a deer goes and tries to eat something that mom hasn’t eaten and it’s a prickly plant and it doesn’t like it and it freaks out and it stops.
Now that’s a great example because that is learned behavior, but it didn’t lead to the death of the organism. They were able to quickly adaptively respond and learn not to eat that thing so that now that information has been encoded in their nervous system, you could say, and in their memory so that when they encounter that again, they’re not going to do that. So that’s adaptive behavior at the ontogenetic level that leverages neuronal complexity as an information processing system. Now, as you get more and more complex animals, you get more and more complex animal relationships and those themselves bear on the viability of the animal. So for example, mama deer and baby deer, that’s a social relationship broadly conceived that bears on the viability of the deer. Right. If mama isn’t there, then the baby deer is a lot more vulnerable and less likely to succeed.
So there are social relationships that then get mediated through ontogenetic individual learning at the animal level that leverages the kind of pain, pleasure, attraction, repulsion response of the nervous system to facilitate learning, right, so that when the mother caresses the baby deer and gives it a sense of comfort and all these things, you could very literally say an emotional bond that takes place between those two animals. And that that is also deeply important to what is valuable to the deer. And so again, at this level, you can see emotion, you can see value, you can see meaning, and these processes continue up to very complex social interactions like apes who have whole hierarchies and these sorts of things. I mean, yeah. We see this amongst more neuronally complex entities like elephants and dolphins and whatnot, that there’s a very rich emotional life and very rich social dynamics.
And by the time you’re seeing that sort of dynamic unfold, again, you can see how meaning is enmeshed in social and collective contexts. So that what’s valuable for that deer hinges upon what’s valuable for the mother deer and vice versa, or what’s valuable for the ape hinges on what the alpha or whatever thinks in relation to the rest. So the point is that as meaning complexifies and you start getting deeper emotional connections and social bonds, you start seeing a deeper enmeshment in the valuations and meanings of other entities in conspecifics.
By the time you get to humans and the advent of language, then you get a real revolution in meaning making because now the individual experience of meaning can be articulated in using the information processing system of language to a conspecific in a way that keeps its informational form. And now I am able to tell you, Jim, everything I’ve been telling you, and we’ve been able to share our meanings for the past bit of time. And this now is a, and this is kind of huge I think for obvious reasons, but one of the big reasons this is so important is we are now able to learn together. We’re able to think together. You can go eat, hopefully you wouldn’t, you can go eat that spiky plant that the deer eight or whatever, and then you can just tell me, “Hey guys, don’t eat that. That’s no fun.” And we don’t all have to do that.
So we can all collectively start learning together and we can start sharing our meanings. And as we do this, we develop collective systems of meaning and value. And this is where you start getting into the whole social sphere of meaning and value, which just to emphasize again, we’ve seen now is deeply emotive, socially connected, interpersonally enmeshed, and has based upon earlier meanings at the animal level to add an additional layer where you’re deeply interconnected in terms of all the meanings that are going on here so that it’s not just a matter of, Hey, what’s good for my viability as Brendan Dempsey because now my viability hinges on your viability and vice versa. And we’re all kind of quote, unquote in this together.
Jim: Yeah. I’ve got Rudin theory. Of course I got Rudin theory for everything, but what evolutionary ratchets drove this, and I have three. One, and there’s quite a bit of support for this amongst anthropological linguists, that the famous Dunbar number has to do with how many credit and debit relationships we can keep track of in a social system. Chimps have sort of a max group size, about 30, but big groups can beat little groups generally in chimp warfare, and they do engage in warfare. Humans, once we develop some form of at least proto-language and a big enough brain to do bookkeeping on our social relationships, we’re able to ratchet our small group size to 50 and our big group size to 150, and we can beat any group of 30 chimps, even though a chimp is a lot stronger than a human. Right. That’s number one.
Then number two, and this is kind of the gossip argument. Once you have the beginnings of language enough to be able to increase your group size, now coevolution within the members of the group on who can add the most value seduce the most members of the opposite sex, lie their way to status, whatever. And so as you get better and better at language, you’re better and better at doing those things. And then finally, we’ve had tools for a very, very long time, long before Homo sapiens, way back, Homo habilis was making tools several steps before Homo sapiens, but it was only late in Homo sapiens period that we started making multi-part tools. And I cooked up this idea with a guy named Walter Fontana late one night after a bottle of whiskey, the whole bottle.
Brendan: It’s the way to do it.
Jim: That the set of skills to teach multi-part tool making, because that’s order, but there’s still some freedom. You don’t have to do it in exactly the same order, but if you do it in a great crazy order, it doesn’t work. Was the substrate necessary to develop syntax and then syntax took language to a whole new level, and there’s a fair bit of argument that full language didn’t flourish until maybe 40,000 years ago, which is suspiciously close to the same period when multi-part tools came along.
Brendan: Yeah. I mean, so I’m open to any number of these theories and I think probably it’s not either or, right? Collectively these could have,-
Jim: That’s why I have a three-part theory, that’s three things because the language leap is unbelievably huge, right? And so I don’t believe like Chomsky did. Oh, yeah, by chance a very low probability mutation occurred and we suddenly had full Chomskyan universal grammar and recursive language all at once. I go, no.
Brendan: Yeah, I agree. I mean, to some degree I sidestep, and granted it’s a short book anyway, the issue of where did language come from and why and all of that. I’m very open especially to theories like Kevin Laland I think has, that talk about social learning as being key to this so that,-
Jim: Yeah, Everett also. He’s most extreme. He claims there’s no machinery at all and that it’s purely social learned and he wrote old book on it. It’s sort of, okay. I like Deacon myself as somebody who’s in the middle. Says a little bit of machinery, basically the circuit for symbols, and that’s all you need, and the rest can be bootstrapped socially and coevolutionarily the way I just talked about.
Brendan: Well, and one I think core aspect that I’m going to focus on for the rest of this series that’s really core to the argument, which can very much align with these other theories as well, at least in terms of what got the process going. But what I really lean heavily into is that once you get shared meaning justifications going on in culture through language, then you can have a co-learning process occur collectively that to the degree that yeah, having a better sense of what meaningful information is, is adaptive, that’s going to have a kind of evolutionary advantage in a way that could have runaway effects. Right. As soon as we break the solipsistic prison of just our own individual experience and we’re actually able to just develop kind of shared understandings about the world and to test those understandings with each other and say, I had this happen.
Well, I had this happen and have thousands of generations of this unfolding. Then through the processes of justification alone, you get sort of Piagetian-style learning. And that’s kind of what the rest of the series is really going to dig into very much, is using the kind of inheritor of the sort of piagetian developmental psychology tradition, which is hierarchical complexity, to look at the complexification of thought through that model, through that lens and see how culture has sort of progressively unfolded using a metric like that and by analyzing its systems of justification according to their levels of complexity.
And so core to that is this notion that, and it’s in John’s work as well, but more at sort of the individual animal level of assimilation and accommodation. We bump up against each other and we’re looking for that dynamic equilibrium, and I can have my own individual truth, but as soon as I have to compare that to yours and there’s disagreement, we’ve got to kind of work this out. And if there are 10 other people who agree with you and only… So these processes of sort of meaning sharing and justification sharing, I think themselves are sort of a ratcheting process that leads to more complex thought over time and that in many ways you can read the entire history of cultural evolution through that lens.
Jim: Yep, absolutely. And I’m looking forward to that. I’ll just suggest the one thing that you probably have in there, but if you don’t, you should, which is science itself was a new form of justification that had far greater ability to self-correct in real time than any of the previous ones. And that was a very important, huge, and as we just look at the effect of it, right, we go from living in mud huts with no glass in 1700 to about ready to land somebody on Mars. So unfortunately we don’t have time to go into this, the implication of this even further. Because I do want to leave a little bit of time to talk about the sacred. Now this is another one of these words that I used to go blah, sacred. You talk about fucking God, fuck that. But I’ve developed a much more nuanced sense of the sacred, and it’s actually pretty damn close to your view of it. So why don’t you tell us what the word sacred means to you?
Brendan: Sure. So the sacred is one way of thinking about this whole process. Let’s start at the level of humans though because I think that what we mean by that is most obvious.
Jim: Yeah, that’s mostly focused on the humans and just point back very briefly that in some sense it’s applicable prior.
Brendan: Yeah, that’s enough to say there for that. At the human level, once we get these collective systems of justification that we’re using to process meaningful information together, then we are creating kind of collective representations that are more or less helpful for us in increasing our collective viability. Right. So you get collective meaning, collective value, you get worldviews, you get collective justification systems. And one of the ways of thinking about the sacred in that context is what are sort of the repositories of tried and trued established successful forms of understanding the world that we can draw on as a template, as something to turn to in order to understand the world in a way that has proven success? Right. What are the deep informing aspects of our collective ways of being that have been the means of our flourishing in the past? These are collective representations and modes of being.
They can be beliefs, they can be ritually enshrined, they can be all sorts of things, but they are sort of tried and true aspects to our flourishing. And because of that, we give them a special reverence and a special appreciation and a special care and protection. And so we develop culturally, sociologically, a relationship to these sorts of things in a particular mode that marks them off as being particularly sacred to our collective. And I think this is well-illustrated, if you just think of different kinds of social collectives and what they have deemed sacred, how those different things can be, and yet functionally they serve a very similar role, right?
In a forager society, a nomadic society, for example, there might be a sacred pole that is the center around which the group kind of considers it, Mircea Eliade would say it cosmicizes the world, but this is the world pole. And it will have a story, a myth about an ancient ancestor who gave it, and it’s a sacred thing and there are taboos around it, et cetera, kind of classic anthropological treatment of the sacred. Now what is that? That’s world building. That is the construction of sacred space, which is the making of a world which is a world sustaining concept. It’s something that has had the role of bringing people together and cohering them through a duration of time in a way that has proved successful. And so it is held as sacred because of that.
And if you want to read Durkheim through this lens, it’s all kind of right there. I think he kind of reduces it too much and is a bit too extreme in some of his conclusions, but a lot of his insights are really gesturing at this where compare now the way that we talk about what are sacred in kind of a modern democratic state. You hear talk about all the time when people talk about January 6th for example, oh, they stormed the seat of our sacred institution or the sacred seat of democracy or what have you. Right. Or any number of instances when we talk about the sacred right of voting or the sacredness of human rights and dignity and this sort of thing, right?
How does this relate to a poll that coheres a tribal group? It’s a very different thing, but its function is kind of deeply similar, which is without this, we couldn’t continue to function and thrive as we have been doing. And so we shore this up and we enshrine it as sacred, and that’s real. That’s not just, oh, they invented some sacred bullshit. It’s like, yeah, that’s actually true. If we lost these things, we would cease to function. And what would happen is we’d experience entropic breakdown. The complexity that we’ve amassed through the course of human evolution in our social configurations is based on sort of a ratcheting sense of what the sacred is and how it needs to function in our society. And when you see moments where societies collapse, it’s often directly, let’s say, related to or involving a collapse of notions of what it holds to be sacred. What are its meanings, what are its values? Right.
Arguably, we’re experiencing a moment like this right now and we talk about the meaning crisis. Well, it’s a breakdown of collective meaning in a way that we can’t get on the same page of what’s actually meaningful, what’s actually valuable. Maybe it’s all a social construct, et cetera. So one of my notions about the sacred is that, and I guess quickly what I’ll say in addition to that is I think in a very cool way you can connect this all the way back down through kind of the complexity stack to deep thermodynamic principles. So I talk about at the end what I call the thermodynamic theory of the sacred, which is to say that you can imagine the sacred itself as a kind of complexifying structure that uses the substrate of human collective social configurations to express itself via linguistic justification systems and requires energy to be maintained.
And actually as these collective social organizations complexify, they do require more energy to maintain them. And as the sacred complexifies, it in a sense is buttressing societies of increasing collective energetic consumption as well. So there’s a way in which the sacred is a kind of dissipative structure that is complexifying. And so anyway, that’s a brief summary version of some of that.
Jim: Believe it or not, I don’t have a single objection to that view. I think that is a very useful way to think about it. Let me put some gloss on it though. One, looking back to the whirlpool, the drain is sacred.
Brendan: Sure.
Jim: How about that? Does that work?
Brendan: Yeah.
Jim: And now let’s get back to humans. And as I look at the broad arc of history, people have held all kinds of weird shit sacred, obviously, right? Think about the Aztecs. If we don’t cut the hearts out of 200 teenage boys and girls every week, the sun’s not going to continue shining. And eventually pissed off all their allies, or not their allies, their neighbors who they were going to raid to get teenagers. This guy Cortes shows up and says, let’s go overthrow those motherfuckers. And so even though Cortes had like 300 guys and the Aztecs had an army of 150,000. Because they pissed off all their neighbors with their sacred, they got overthrown.
And so when I look at the sacred, I think of it as sort of a meta way. How do we set the sacred? It has to do with thinking about what is the proper viscosity for our operating system? If we just change willy-nilly with the wind, what you talk about happens. I would argue we just dissipate, fall apart, and turn to a flat land. Nothing interesting going on. On the other hand, societies easily get stuck on very rigid senses of the sacred, like I’d argue that for, and maybe these were adaptive in those circumstances, but not adaptive anymore, how long slavery, patriarchy, racism, dominance through violence were sacred more or less, right? The warrior. I recently reread the Iliad, two different translations. And these Bronze Age dudes, man, they were some strange ass dudes. Right. They were reveling in their capture and raping of people and pillaging of cities, and we are great people, but that’s what we do. Right.
And that stuff was sacred to them, the warrior ethos. But rapidly in the last 500 years and more rapidly 300 years, we have changed those senses of the sacred. We no longer think of slavery as sacred or the warrior rapist is sacred. But on the other hand, if we change too fast, we risk getting to flat land. But if we don’t change at all, we are going to be non-adaptive. And I suspect the stress around the sacred right now is that the coevolutionary context of humans and culture is changing at an unbelievably rapid and escalating exponential. And we do not know at what rate to preserve the sacred versus to modify it. And one could even say that the idiocy of American team red and team blue politics at the deepest level is where should we turn the knob for viscosity? Team red says we want less viscosity. Team blue says we want more viscosity.
Brendan: Wow. Yeah, love it. I mean, I could spend two hours just talking about these dynamics because this is what ultimately most fascinates me. And I think you’re exactly right. The sacred evolves, which is what this whole book, series is going to be about exploring by identifying what are the taxonomies of worldviews that have certain structural, cohesive integrated aspects to them that we could look at through time to see what is held as sacred in these different worldviews and these different cultural configurations and why. And are they measurable at different levels of say hierarchical complexity in terms of where they show up? And some of my current research is actually directly related to testing those kinds of hypotheses. And I also, people should know this, and I think this is why it can be very oh, there’s so much to this, but that kind of warrior, if not rapist, then at least destroyer ideal as sacred is in the, let us say, it is enshrined as well in the scriptural tradition of the West. If you read the book of Joshua, for example, and Judges.
Jim: I love Joshua. Every 10 years I read the Pentateuch plus Joshua. And as I say, why do you read Joshua too? I said, If I want to read the joke, I want the punch line where Yahweh actually shows what he’s really all about, a goddamn psychopathic paranoid, so. And as I often will say after that, I’ll say, and if Yahweh exists, I’m on the other side.
Brendan: Well, and I mean these are really profound. I mean, great theological questions. What got me started exploring meaning was my own grappling with these issues theologically, because I had to deal with that. I’m like, hey, how do we integrate this aspect of the divine warrior into this notion of divine compassion and love? It didn’t make sense to me. And that can lead a lot of people to deconstruct and just give up on the meaning thing entirely. But what I am looking for is a sweet spot where people listening to this could hear that all of this is true. But once you frame that in a broader context that the sacred itself is evolving, then we can appreciate that actually these met certain adaptive requirements at the time and that they were of lesser degrees of complexity. And to the degree that this is itself caught up in a universal learning process in which humanity itself is learning and learning meaning and value better or at least more complexly over time, then of course we should expect to see an evolution of concepts of God and the sacred and value.
And that is indeed precisely what a lot anyway of the historical record does reveal, at least when we examine the better angels of our nature. And so I find that to be a very inspiring story and trying to trace that is a big inspiration for me in this project. So I agree all that’s there. And then what we make of it I think is we can be more or less sophisticated with these sorts of things. And I would agree also with your analysis around the turbulence that we’re finding ourselves in. Right. I mean, we’re undergoing a collective phase transition where there’s a lot of instability and chaos introduced into the system. And in a large part that’s because of the decomposition of our meaning structures and value structures. And for us now the question is, well, what’s next? Do we change that viscosity dial and just go back to some like, oh, no, actually what we really did need is just some kind of medieval notion of an absolute or something, right?
Or do we find some other kind of even more complex notion of the sacred on the other side of our current collective problem? And that’s what my work is sort of trying to gesture to ultimately, is that people especially right now who feel like they have to choose, oh, well, is the sacred just some old religion-y woo stuff, or do I have to choose science and whatever. This is just like false binary. There’s a false dichotomy there where actually science has its own notions of the sacred, you could say.
And what we, I think are heading towards is a radically complexifying world that is a dissipative structure that’s just relatively historically speaking, and certainly geologically speaking a second ago discovered all these untapped energy resources. So all this energy is flowing into the system, blowing up the kind of organizational structure that had existed by means of which these collectives kind of maintain themselves through justification systems. And now we’re like, how do we put these pieces back together in a way that is suitable to the complexity of the moment that we find ourselves in? And ultimately, this work is an effort to try to articulate a notion of the sacred that can meet us there and say, hey, yeah, we can actually do this sacred thing and we need to, and meaning and value, yeah, those are real without falling into old kind of absolutist, essentialist, transcendentalist, woo-wee positions that actually aren’t of a requisite complexity to meet the moment.
Jim: I love it. I am so looking forward to these other books. Believe it or not, all this extremely detailed conversation we just had for two hours is a relatively light gloss on Brendan’s 94-page book. And I will also say the book is extremely well-written. It’s very clear, it’s very elegant, and I don’t do this very often, but I’m going to tell you people buy this book. If you don’t, I’m going to come kick your ass. So no, I’m serious. This is one of the best books I’ve read in years. I mean, seriously.
Brendan: Wow. Thanks, man.
Jim: And regular listeners know I don’t say that very often. In fact, once every five years maybe. So anyway, I really want to thank Brendan for first writing a book this good A Universal Learning Process (The Evolution of Meaning) book one as it’s shown on Amazon. What a weird ass title. But hey, we discussed that earlier and I really look forward to having you back as you crank out the rest of these books.
Brendan: Thank you so much, Jim. I’ve already got around 100 pages of the next volume, so hopefully it won’t be too long before that.