The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Peter Wang. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: This episode is one of a series I’m doing on the worldviews of thinkers and doers. The premise is simple. I want to map how they actually see the universe and their place in it, not just dig into their latest book or project, but explore the scaffolding underneath. Enjoy this opportunity to look backstage at the minds of some of my favorite people. Don’t forget to check out my Substack at jimrutt.substack.com, where I just recently published what I thought was a pretty good essay on why the Fermi Paradox significantly raises the ethical stakes around existential risk.
Today’s guest is Peter Wang, very good friend of mine and one of the most interesting thinkers I know. He is a guy who thinks about a lot of things and has some remarkable deep insights into what you might call conventional wisdom. But more interesting, he has these amazing flights of interesting ideas which hang together. And we’re going to dig into those today. This is another of my worldview podcasts where rather than focusing mostly on what people are doing or what people are saying, we try to dig in behind that to find out what is their philosophical grounding. What is their view of reality? How do they think about the moving parts that inform the work that they do in the world?
Peter is the chief AI officer and cofounder and CEO, formerly, at Anaconda Inc., the leading Python and data sciences company. He’s also on the board of the Center for Humane Tech, and he’s the founder of a new Austin STEM Center as a community learning hub for hands-on STEM robotics, maker activities, and youth development.
Peter: Thank you so much, Jim. Thank you for the kind introduction. I am so excited about this conversation.
Jim: You woke up this morning. You were deep asleep, let’s assume. And your kids are now old enough that you can actually get deep sleep occasionally. And you woke up and you’re in the world. Who is this, or what is this Peter Wang that woke up into the world?
Peter: I think I would say that I am the music in a violin that can kind of hear itself, but not any regular violin. It’s the music that’s at such a loud sound level that reshapes the wood and bends the strings with each note. That is the dynamic emergent standing wave pattern that is at least the conscious — my conscious experience of the awake Peter Wang talking to the awake, presumably awake Jim Rutt and not an AI-generated avatar. Maybe as a very simple starting point, that I am a dynamical system able to create standing wave patterns, but that those patterns also then change the system.
Jim: How is it that it’s the same Peter Wang each day after these dynamics? Because I think we do know with some reasonable confidence that the consciousness state is a series of interwoven wave patterns, etcetera. But when you’re asleep, they’re gone. Now how is it when you wake up, you’re the same Peter Wang?
Peter: Or are you? I’m very much not the same Peter Wang. One of the things — we’re going to run into, and I know metaphysics is not a favorite thing of yours, but we’re going to keep running into it.
Jim: Bring out the gun. You better have another magazine of bullets ready.
Peter: We’re going to hit metaphysics a lot in this conversation, I think. But I would say that here we’ve run into our very first metaphysical challenge, which is that if we maintain a subject-object dualism and use that to look at the world, the subject is really elevated to a level that’s inappropriate. And in that false dichotomy or that false alienation, you would be tempted to say, well, all these objects are of classes or their forms, and some of these things are the same. And then the subject is this — not inviolate, but it is this other thing. And it is the same or has its own kind of dynamics and patterns. When really, from everything we know about the material world, there is a continuity of at least the physical thing that gives rise to the subjective experience and the rest of the world around me.
So it’s not the same Peter Wang in any way, shape, or form as the one that woke up yesterday. Because the one that woke up yesterday at least didn’t even have any of the memories of what happened yesterday. Assuming we believe in yesterday — and for now, in this part of the conversation, we’ll assume we believe in Einsteinian block time.
But one thing I would say — another way to think about the Peter Wang that woke up this morning is to say, well, let’s not ask about the Peter Wang that woke up in the morning. Let’s ask about the Peter Wang-shaped hole in the universe. Because if you say there’s such a thing as Peter, then there is clearly a boundary between the Peter and the not-Peter. One of the physicists’ classic tricks is to stop looking at a thing, draw an envelope or Gaussian pillbox around it, and ask about the boundary conditions. So if we draw a perfect Peter-shaped hole in the universe and say, well, forget about the thing in the middle because that’s hard — it’s maybe conscious, it’s got all this biological stuff happening — let’s look at all of the things that are impinging on the surface of this Peter Wang-shaped hole. What is that?
And at each moment, there’s a lot of stuff hitting that Peter Wang whether he’s awake or not. And if he were to suddenly disappear — we do an impulse response function — if the Peter Wang-shaped hole were suddenly to not have a Peter Wang in it, then first of all, there’d be a giant sucking sound of air rushing in to fill that space. The bed mattress I was lying on would spring up a little bit. The earth’s rotation would change just a little bit. But more significantly, if my wife was lying in bed next to me or if my kids were sitting in the bed and we’re all talking and I woke up and I just disappeared, there would be a lot more than just physical consequences. There’d be cries of alarm and surprise. There’d be shock. There’d be a phone call to 911. My son might get out his phone and start recording — like, this actually happened, my father just disappeared. All these things would happen and it would not go unnoticed.
So it’s good that these kinds of things don’t happen on a regular basis. But I think it’s really important to point out this weird little thought experiment to say that we like to think of ourselves as being able to exist in this subject-object thing where we sit on the frame of the world. We are really deeply embedded in it. And at every given moment in time — you can almost hear it in a Werner Herzog accent — we don’t have a choice about existing. The fact that we are here, the universe has put us here. And every moment, it is not really your choice whether or not you get to exist. You just do. And I think this is the thing to think about with that hole we draw, or the boundary between the it and the not-it.
Jim: Well, that’s a perfect setup for one of the metaphysics questions. You know, I use metaphysics a little bit differently than some of the more modern people. I use it more in the Aristotelian or Aquinas sense, which is: what is the furniture of our universe? What’s real in it? And I assume from your description of the Peter hole, etcetera, that you are a believer in a real universe as opposed to one that your brain creates or that your brain is in a vat someplace. Talk to us a little bit about your thinking about and evidence for realism.
Peter: Well, I think I am a realist in that sense. So the zeroth, fundamental plane of metaphysics — yes. I have no reason not to believe. And it seems to me that any answer we want to get to, we can get to by assuming the reality of our existence and the shared reality that we all encounter. We may have different interpretations of it. We will encounter it differently. And I think fundamentally, I believe that reality will continue even after I cease to be conscious. It does every night when I go to sleep. It does in the middle of the day when I take a nap. Reality continues. And I’m not surprised that I wake up from the nap. I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t wake up either, because there’d be no me to be unsurprised.
But anyways, the point is that I do fundamentally believe in realism, and I think questions at this epistemological pre-metaphysical level — like, is it a simulation? Is it Descartes’ evil demon? — those are essentially not just unfalsifiable but they’re actively avoiding falsification. Anytime you engage that conversation and say, well, what if we did this experiment? They will always add another set of contraptions on it to make it even further untestable. Okay, so you just want to have an unresolved question to go and drink coffee and nerd out on, pretending you’re doing philosophy when it’s just a bunch of navel-gazing. I’m not interested in that. I’m actually very deeply interested in the reality that I’m a part of and that I have no reason not to believe exists.
Jim: Yeah. That is interesting. My minimum viable metaphysics — I basically said, yes, realism, can’t prove it, but it’s useful. And it’s proven itself to be extremely useful and the counterexamples haven’t. So just assume realism.
Peter: Yeah. But like all strong ideas that I have, they are held loosely. If you can give me some evidence of the nonexistence of physical realism, I’m happy to talk about it and change my point of view if you have some compelling things. Even though I’m sort of famously known as an atheist, I say, no, I’m not an atheist. I’m an atheistically inclined agnostic.
Jim: Give me proof, and I’m happy to worship whoever, but you have to give me proof. Now, isn’t agnosticism — this might be the vernacular version of agnosticism — but isn’t formally agnosticism the belief that we can’t know? It’s like a stronger statement than just “I don’t know.”
Peter: Yeah. I don’t actually know that much about the history of that word. I use it to say I don’t know, meaning I don’t know and have no principled way to think about how I would know, but not necessarily saying it’s impossible to know.
Jim: Agnosticism is the philosophical or theological proposition that the existence of God is unknown or inherently unknowable.
Peter: Suppose he showed up here and said, “Jim and Peter, you fools. I’m real.”
Jim: This encounters — this is the whole Hitchhiker’s Guide thing. Because Western religions are rooted in a deity and rooted in faith of that deity in the face of uncertainty and belief. So if the deity ever appears, then at least the Western version of that, rooted in faith, that deity must also disappear. Anyways, sorry, a little bit of digression, but I always loved that since I first encountered it in, like, eighth grade.
Peter: So, let’s sort of finish off reality. What’s your view on things like God and gods and spirits and demons and things of that ilk?
Peter: So there are religions as practiced parts of social practice among humans as creatures. And I think there is, historically, a lot of value — and in the present day, one can see a lot of value — in encountering the unknown. Humanity has historically encountered a lot of unknown, and as we sort of boot up individual and group awareness of the tragedies of life and all these kinds of things, we have more excess caloric capacity to contemplate than is needed to hunt. So we have to come up with something — the tiger has to hunt, fish have to fly, man has to ask why, why, why. This is what we do when we have excess calories.
So religion as a way of forming those questions and shaping them and using them to bounce back and create a standing wave pattern among human collectives and tribes that are coherent and able to do things across a longer time scale than they could with just individual selfish things — seen in this way, as an evolutionary emergent practice, it is a very useful thing. Religion as individualized practice for both connecting to one’s tribe and culture, and connecting to the transcendent, and really reminding oneself of the need to have a sense of awe and contemplating the transcendent beyond our mortal selves — those are all important practices for individuals as well. An important capacity, one I call spiritual practice. I run into a lot of people who say they’re spiritual but not religious. I say that about myself sometimes.
So I think the ability to hold that question and the importance of having that capacity is really important. That’s kind of the way I view it. I think most of the religions today are a heady mix of all these things. There’s individual practice. There’s something about the awe and the sacred. There’s something about service and looking to live your life in service of things beyond just yourself and across time scales beyond your own life. Those are all important things. But there’s also the political and the social organizational and the power structures and all these things that also feed into most modern religions. So when we use religion as a concept in the modern day, it’s got all these things connected to it. Some of which are pretty toxic, some of which are in direct conflict with what the needs of individual practitioners might be.
Jim: That’s when I made my move against religion at the age of 11 — that was my insight: that religions are all false, made up by humans for the purpose of controlling other humans. And I would now modify that slightly, now that I have a more evolutionary point of view about things, which is that religions emerge in a given context usually by a charismatic, crazy person. The vast proportion of religions die soon. There were a hundred people running around Palestine when Jesus was there claiming to be the Messiah. A hundred of them went nowhere. Jesus didn’t go very far before he died. He had maybe 20 disciples or something. And by chance, or because he was selling the truth, whatever — his little line managed to survive. And interestingly, even in the year 70 or so, some years after he died, there were only about a thousand Christians in the world. So they could easily still have disappeared, but they didn’t. The thing went on and then got captured big time by the Roman Empire and all that.
So there’s this combination of reaction to a mystical view — Jesus has these ideas, or Mohammed has these ideas — and then how they interact with, call it memetics. How do they propagate? How do they maintain themselves as membranes in the world? And then how do they eventually become captured by or become the political mechanism? In Islam, typically, the separation of church and state isn’t there. The state is part of the religion and is a very strong form of coherence.
Peter: Well, I think you’re looking at the evolution of one particular religion and the key figure that started that religion — actually, I would say, adapted the Old Testament into a New Testament. And it was not Jesus, but a lot of his disciples who did a lot of heavy lifting there, hundreds of years later in fact, sometimes.
But here’s the other thing — and this is now we reach our second part of the metaphysics thing to frame in this conversation. The first was trying to avoid the subject-object Cartesian dualism. The second thing I would introduce is always to regard figure and ground. That’s another lens. We have figure and ground — two lenses we’re going to look through. And you’re talking about the figure, the figure of Jesus himself. But I will look at the background as well and say, what is the need, or what were the dynamics that led to the emergence of a group of people who had the capacity for holding faith, for tribal practice, for a scholarly tradition of scribes writing down the testaments and then passing those on and reproducing them? The capacity of the ground — so to speak, the people and the lives of countless millions of anonymous souls through history that carried this through — that’s essentially the medium through which Christianity as a practice sprouted and then emerged and then grew into a very tall oak. So we have to look at the soil. We have to look at what were the conditions needed. It’s different kinds of things than what gave rise to Hinduism, what gave rise to various aspects of Buddhism between China, India, Zen Buddhism in Japan. All these kinds of things — you have to also look at the kind of spare capacity in the people that allowed for these beliefs or these kinds of religious structures to emerge.
Jim: Yeah. And social capacity. For instance, something like Judaism couldn’t really evolve until writing existed. It’s a very written, literate tradition, as an example.
Peter: Well, the Vedas were oral. There’s a lot of these ancient religious practices that are oral in nature. And interestingly — I’m not a deep scholar, but I’ve certainly heard about the early Greek suspicions around writing. Because if you don’t have writing and you get writing, it feels like magic. Pythagoras had secrecy around his ideas, and then it was Plato who thought we’d get stupid if we wrote things down. The Homeric epics were oral. Something happened in the emergence of writing. And actually, we live now in a time that’s deeply literate. But up until a hundred and fifty, two hundred years ago, the vast majority of people were not literate. And someone who could read — that was a thing. That was a special person in the village who could actually essentially have a conversation with dead people spanning back thousands of years. Craziness if you think about it on its face. But we’ve just normalized it now. So the actual capacities of a given civilization help at least constrain what possible religions could emerge.
Jim: Yes. And time. It takes time. On the one hand you say Christianity conquered the Romans when Constantine converted. But on the other hand you can say that the Roman Empire got to a point where it needed Christianity as a binder. Because it was falling apart and needed something to actually rebuild the legitimacy of the head of the large organization and all the masses of people spread out across the empire. And it mutated to serve that purpose.
Peter: That’s a next topic. Wasn’t one I was going to go to, but it’s one we’ve talked about before, and that is teleology. Is there an attractor someplace, or are there a bunch of local attractors? Give me your riff on human civilization and teleology, or go further than human civilization if you like.
Peter: One of my big unlocks in college was precisely around this. I was a fresh young buck at Cornell, learning my physics and doing all the things. I was going to become this great researcher and uncover all the science. And I logged into the computer system in the basement computer lab they have for undergraduates of the physics building. When you log in — Unix back then — they would print a little fortune. There’s this fortune app that would give you just a little quote or some pithy little thing. And the quote appeared in front of me: “Man was invented by water to carry itself uphill.” And I was like, oh, that’s kind of funny. And then I was like, wait, that’s not funny. Wait, holy shit. What?
And I sat there — literally, Jim, you can imagine — I literally had just logged in, “pwang enter,” whatever my password was at the time. And then I’m sitting there and my fingers are literally frozen on the keyboard for, like, a solid two minutes. And in my head, I’m like, wait. And then I actually just logged off. I remember that day. I logged off and I’m like, I’m going to go across the street to Goldsmith’s, get myself a coffee, sit on the quad, and just think about that for a minute. And that’s what I did.
And to some extent, we don’t have an answer to this question. You want telos? Maybe we are just water trying to carry itself uphill — but all the hills. Maybe not just uphill in some little local river valley, but uphill across all the river valleys, across the entire planet. Maybe all the planets in the local cluster. Who knows? At the end of the day, just like all of our physics — and now I have the words, then I did not have the words, I could just smell something was true in this and weird — now I have the words to talk about it with Prigogine and all the stuff, all the people, your friends at the Santa Fe Institute. That’s actually the descent — or the ascent — of my interest in complexity and chaos and emergence and all these things.
So this idea of telos is a really important one. But I don’t know of any level of analysis that gives us a satisfying answer about this. I feel like this is one of the great questions. But if you put that metaphysics gun to my head and say, just come up with an answer right now, do your best — I would say that it feels like our question of telos is rooted fundamentally in the failures of most of Western philosophy. Again, rooted in the subject-object dualism and our separating ourselves from the system.
But if you look all around the world, if you believe in presentism, and if you believe in some sort of process metaphysics, then what’s obviously true is that all of existence as we know it here on Earth — all the interesting stuff — is in the process of becoming. Presentism in the present is its constant state of unfolding. Our concept even of an ultimate goal or ultimate aim is a very small conception from like five pounds of gray matter in here. Really, the existence itself is the aim. And the process of becoming — it just is. And then the question of course of good and bad emerges. And I think we can actually approach that question without having an ultimate externalized aim that we point to to say, well, you’re not orienting towards the telos, so you’re bad, and I am, so I’m good. If we remove the need of telos from that, we can still regard questions of virtue and questions of right and wrong, good and bad. But anyways, if you’re going to force me to come up with an answer, that’s kind of the best answer I can give you right now.
Jim: Yeah. I like that. It isn’t too far from my own view, which is we’re going someplace, but we don’t know where.
Peter: No. No. No. We’re not going anywhere. We’re becoming someone — and someones, and something, and some things. There’s an adjacent possible which we’re unfolding to in each click of whatever granularity you want to play. I believe each of us has agency in that. I do believe there’s this fractal amount of will and agency that we have in it. So even though I believe in causality, maybe not the most strict, harshest version of physical realism and determinism.
Jim: Well, let’s probe into that a little bit. Where do you back off from the edge of physical determinism? Is God sitting there messing with our DNA to get Peter Wang?
Peter: I’m not quite sure where it’s seated. I think you had a really good conversation with Krakauer about this, about the Ouroboros of causality — thinking about the question of consciousness and the illusion of free will, and also the question of these things being very loaded. But on the idea of determinism, a term or phrase I’ve used is that human beings are narrow-band sensors with a preference for structure. Which is to say, back to metaphysics, we tend to distinguish “is” and “not is” on the basis of what is salient about a particular object.
If I say, look, here’s a hundred billiard balls on some table surface and I’m going to hit one of them and it’s going to hit a bunch of others, and I want to derive Newtonian mechanics out of this — okay, that’s all fine. We can do that. But if you have an Avogadro’s number of billiard balls and they’re all really tiny, we’re no longer using Newtonian physics. We don’t say Newtonian physics is wrong. We just know that that particular analytical and predictive framework is not useful when we’re in the realm of chemistry or statistical mechanics. So even at the lowest level of the physical sciences, at the intersection of that with metaphysics, the physicists don’t have any problems saying, well, this tool’s not so good for this, we’ll use this tool instead. And they don’t really question it. They just kind of do. And from that kind of philosophical pragmatism, we have all of the modern world.
Any graduate physics student — has Einsteinian gravity been reconciled with quantum mechanics? Absolutely not. Well, do you believe in the GPS that is coming off the satellites? Sure. Do you believe that CD players work? Yes. That’s lasers and quantum mechanics. So we’re okay with this stuff not reconciling in the modern world. We build it using whatever cognitive tools we have.
Now all of this is an answer to your question about determinism. In that strictest version of determinism, when we boil all the way down to the Planck scale, we’re really asking something of physics that even the physicists themselves don’t ask of it. Philosophers are demanding of physics a kind of deterministic precision that the physicists themselves don’t ask. And so this, I think, gives us license to engage in the kinds of interrogations at the boundaries of mathematics, epistemology — our friend Carlos Perez has this wonderful line that numbers are processes. If you can unlock your brain enough to understand that there are hyperreal numbers, Cantor sets, set theory, the axiom of choice — numbers are processes — all these kinds of things. You’re squarely now in a realm of assembly theory or Wolfram-level computability. In this world, it’s a totally appropriate world to interrogate the roots of how do we build causal models and predictive models. And what is our judgment of quality of reality or realism that we attach to these computational models or cognitive models.
To net this out for those who are not steeped in some of this stuff — what I would say is that within any epistemological regime, I believe in causality. But it is possible for any causal model and deterministic model to be stretched beyond its limits and then not be sensical. And I don’t know how to integrate all of the different deterministic models. One of my favorite little paradoxes is the coastline problem — the origins of fractal dimension and the idea of fractals at all — which is that the length of anything you measure depends on the length of your measuring stick, if it has any kind of real texture to it. And this is a fundamental attribute of reality. We can’t deny that.
So that’s the metaphysical and epistemological humility I would condition this conversation on. Within any particular well-defined and sensible regime of analysis, we should absolutely treat determinism as a real thing. But any particular model of determinism has limits to its applicability.
Jim: Limits to knowledge is something very important that I learned at the Santa Fe Institute. I think there are two kinds of limits to knowledge. One is fundamentally unknowable, at least at our current level of wisdom — things like what’s the point of the universe. But the other are things that are practically unknowable, like the emergent trajectories from a chaotic system. Even a three-body problem, we can’t calculate. And so there are huge amounts of deterministic chaos that are in practice uncalculable in anything. Even if the whole solar system were solid computronium — and those are somewhat different things — both of them establish, at least certainly for everyday use and even for philosophical use, boundaries to what we can know.
Peter: But here’s the thing, Jim. I would look at your three-body problem. And here again, we run into another really deep paradox — a problem of our own making. There’s a metaphysical trap that we fall into here. Because we assume it’s three bodies whose only salient characteristics are their position in x, y, z, their momentum in x, y, z, and their mass. Subject to the force of gravity, under Newtonian gravity, let’s say, or even Einstein — whatever, it doesn’t matter. But we pretend there’s one force, three masses of god knows what. Like, who cares? It’s just mass. It’s just neutrons, protons, and a little bit of maybe some electron mass in there. At that level of analysis, yeah, your tools are broken.
Just like if I were to go and model the neurological impulses to the brain of Mozart, I cannot predict what note he’s going to play on the harpsichord or the piano with his finger. But if I understand music and I know the back catalog of Mozart and he plays a particular run, could I tell you exactly how he’s going to end the next five or six notes? He’s going to do a trill here, he’s going to do this thing here, he’s going to repeat the pattern here, and then boom, he’s going to end it with this kind of finale. So you can actually predict with the right tools, the right level of analysis.
Jim: You still can’t calculate the next click of the three-body problem. So there’s—
Peter: Not with that kind of attitude, you can’t.
Jim: And of course, just to keep everybody oriented — the quantum interpretations are one of my favorite little hobbies. I do want to underline that the idea of strict determinism is still an open question. Is the universe deterministic or stochastic at its root level? The answer is we don’t know.
Peter: I guess this is one area I will go on a limb and say, I fundamentally believe there has to be some kind of local hidden variable kind of thing going on.
Jim: Yeah. That is my current — if I had to put some money down, I’d put it down on the Bohm model, basically, which is a hidden variable model. Though interestingly, I think we’re pretty clear that you have your choice of either determinism or non-locality. You can’t have both. We can’t have locality and determinism. I think that’s been ruled out experimentally.
Peter: Well, Lee Smolin was saying to me a little while ago that they’re working on some stuff where they’re using an analysis — basically a reformulation of quantum mechanics from the lens of Kolmogorov complexity — and they’re actually able to recover a lot of what seems like quantum weirdness as essentially statistical artifacts from this formulation. I haven’t read the paper or whatever, but I’m looking forward to seeing that when it comes out.
Jim: We have to invite Lee back. We had a great discussion along with Sara Walker on assembly theory, which was very interesting. It’s one of the more interesting frontiers of scientific speculation out there today.
Peter: I do think the chemists don’t get enough respect, because there’s really a lot of interesting and deep stuff in chemistry. Everyone goes to the physics nerd part and warp space-time. And it’s like, actually, the real stuff that we have is really important to understand.
Jim: That’s actually a very good point. Now, a few minutes back, you mentioned a word I was waiting for you to use, which was “quality.” You recently encouraged me to go back and reread Pirsig, and I did. I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and then Lila, I think, was the second one. And at the end of the day, Pirsig is advocating for a metaphysics of quality. Could you explain to the folks what he means by that, to the best of your ability? And then why you think it’s important? Because you’ve mentioned Pirsig many times.
Peter: Well, Pirsig — the reason why it’s personally important to me was because that was the start of my — so I was reading Pirsig, I read the James Gleick book on Chaos, I was myself playing with both artificial life simulators on my new Pentium that I had just gotten — Tierra and Core Wars. I was doing all these different things about the same time, investigating fractals and Julia sets and emergence and all these things. And in those things, we have the recovery of complexity from determinism. This is the leaf motif — the recovery of complexity, the emergence of disorder, and actually order both, from a very well-ordered set of primitives.
Prior to that — when I was like 14 or 15 — I’d always been thinking about the world in a very Greek and maybe Cartesian mindset of decomposing to the bottom, understanding the primitives, and then building those atoms back up. And that seemed like obviously a useful and correct thing to do because it worked so far. And it was readings then — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and these kinds of things — that helped me have some tools to talk about how do we actually contemplate a real metaphysical reality to these emergent dynamics at what we call higher levels. It’s a somewhat different strata or plane of phenomenology.
At the same time, my personal background — I was growing up as a nerdy Chinese immigrant into physics and computers in the middle of the Bible Belt. The Scopes monkey trial was 40 miles from my house. So I was constantly surrounded with and bombarded by well-meaning friends trying to convert me to their whatever brand of evangelical Christianity, or being bombarded with various creationist talking points. So I was having to defend the theory of evolution and also getting into Popperian origins of science and all these kinds of things. That was a lot for a 14 or 15 year old to hold at the same time.
And with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I started having tools to say, oh, there is a way out of this. I can actually talk about a synthesis that bridges these divides. The key sort of punchline hook from the back of the book is that the Buddha is as comfortable sitting in the workings of a motorcycle engine as he is sitting in the petals of a lotus flower. That idea — and maybe Feynman said it: it doesn’t hurt the mystery to know something about it — that was a key unlock for me.
But that doesn’t actually answer your question about what the key ideas are. So the key ideas of the metaphysics of quality, as he calls it — he introduces it in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and develops it much more in Lila. It’s this idea that everything we see from a metaphysical standpoint can be talked about as layers, patterns of static value. What it means is that he has a sort of ontology, a taxonomy. At the base level, you’ve got the physical atoms and the physics that comprise our physical world. The level above that, the stratum above that, is biological processes. When you see life forms doing things that are far from equilibrium — as we might say in the physics world — they have a lot of extra energy, and then what do they do? They do all sorts of interesting things.
Then above the layer of life and biology is the social realm. Mostly he was talking about humans, but you can see other creatures — elephants, dolphins, monkeys — there are social lives for them. Certainly dogs and any kind of pack animal have social lives to some extent. But really significantly for humans, there is a realm of social dynamics that are in our feelings, in our sort of how-we-are-together kind of things. And then above that, there is a layer he calls the intellectual plane. That’s the realm of ideas — people might call them memes today.
We talked about Christianity as an idea. If we believe Christianity exists as a thing, it exists as a thing up here, not made of atoms, certainly not made of just cells. It’s made up of ideas that float on a substrate. So each one of these layers of strata is of the other and all exist at the same time. If you look at a human, you are both a physical creature and a biological creature and a cultural creature and an intellectual creature.
The other thing that’s interesting is that he says that at every single one of these levels, the things that comprise or operate at that level — he calls them static patterns of value — but at each level, things are reaching for something better. They’re reaching for quality. Dynamic quality. He sees that as this über thing that each one is going towards.
So if you have excess energy, at the physical level, things are absorbing that energy and jostling around and doing things. Think about the electron transport chain happening inside the actual biology of the mitochondria — your ADP becomes ATP because of a physical need of how the electrochemistry works. But then at the biological level, things are reaching for order. They’re trying to get more sugar, trying to get more energy, trying to maintain homeostasis. There’s a whole thing that happens at the biological level. And you even see layers of emergence at the biological level. An individual cancer cell inside you might want to get more and more resources, but the overall system of your body says no, and the T lymphocyte comes in and tries to zap it.
Then at the social level, we have individual people who want to do this and that. Every human tries to get more resources, tries to reproduce more. But then at the social level, we’re curtailed because we have this dynamic between us. But as a tribe, we’re trying to vanquish the other tribe or make sure that our progeny have great lives. And then above that, the layer of ideas — ideas themselves compete with other ideas. They try to find more hosts and more cultures to affect. You see this when people in countries outside of the Western Hemisphere talk about Western values colonizing them, taking over through Hollywood, destroying their culture. That’s the plane of ideas.
One last thing that’s important — and I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it’s an important thing to think about — is that from Pirsig’s perspective, in Lila, his inquiry into what is right, his thing was that it was never right for a thing of the lower level to sacrifice something at a higher level in service of something for the lower level. So for the sake of saving a cell, you should not kill a human. You can use this thing about book burning — you shouldn’t — there’s a whole stack that’s pretty rigid in his formulation that I think has a lot of exceptions.
The example he gave in his book was that they were going to make a movie of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and Robert Redford was on deck to actually be the star. He was working with Robert Redford and Hollywood to make this movie, and then something came in and he realized, holy shit, no. This is wrong. Because a movie is a cultural artifact and a social artifact, but my ideas in this book — they are an intellectual artifact and I need them to remain at the intellectual level and not become subsumed and rendered only as a cultural object.
And this is actually a really, really, really important thing to think about. If you throw everything else away, this little insight of his about the difference between the intellectual plane and ideas versus the social plane and the social valence around ideas — it’s so important now. Tim Urban actually does a great job of this in talking about woke versus liberalism versus traditional premodernism, Ken Wilber’s pre-trans fallacy. These are all things that swirl around this fundamental insight that we cannot help but put social valences around ideas. And we as a society now — as a result of social media and everyone being online — have almost lost the ability to exist in a realm of pure ideas. Our friend Eric Weinstein with the Intellectual Dark Web was trying to recover this ability for ideas to encounter each other in some space that was free of social judgment — to say, well, you’re the wrong person, you don’t get to say that, you can’t have that point of view. But that was the premodern bad times when ideas were only attached to individuals who had the right to have those ideas.
Jim: Very good. I like that. That was real good. Let’s go on to another topic, which is closely related, though not quite isomorphic, which is game theory. First, let’s take a little bit of a Platonic look at game theory. What is it fundamentally? And then what does game theory have to do with, specifically in the human social realm, the emergence of the various civilizations and ways we have of being? And then let’s click up to something you came up with recently, which is that our late-stage financialized, capitalist, semi-democratic world has a very specific game theory thing going on.
Peter: That’s a lot. Well, if we talk about formal game theory to start with, I think game theory is an effective tool, but we should be very, very careful in how we use it.
Jim: Oh, well, let me clarify a point I should have clarified, which is I’m not necessarily speaking exclusively about game theory as a body of knowledge. I’m also speaking about the implicit game theory that’s driven human behavior since always.
Peter: Ah, this is so great. This is another metaphysical frame thing we hit — from Zen Buddhism, the classic: words are always fingers pointing at the moon. It’s not the moon itself. Here, you’re saying game theory — not just the finger, but the actual thing that game theory is gesturing towards. The intrinsic competition versus collaboration dynamic of humanity. Well, I think that’s a far more interesting thing to talk about than the study of the field of game theory in quotes.
Humans are social animals, and there are some really interesting tidbits that I’ve seen. Most species are not daytime social hunters. Humans are pretty rare among these. In fact, one could argue that our walking upright — so we have more efficient long-term stamina to basically stalk prey — that upright walking led to a number of different kinds of things that from an evolutionary biology perspective led to who we are as creatures. It meant a certain kind of social hunting and allowed us to do it in the daytime. We could actually stalk prey that were faster than us. So social daytime hunters — humans — which means that from the beginning we have a need to be together.
And whenever you have creatures that are together, I would say that what we’ve observed is that when you have a group of individuals collaborating on a thing, the opportunity for defection arises. And defection could be big or small. Defection could be, I’m a little bit lazy, I’m not going to go in the head of the thing where the buffalo could stomp me or the antelope could kick me, I want to hang out in the back. Defection could be, I’m going to steal an extra piece of meat and give it to my child. Defection takes many different kinds of forms. But all of this has been around this idea that we have a group, you have potential collaboration that leads to more for everyone, but defection is always a possibility.
Jim: And in many cases — I think this is the fundamental base for this analysis — there’s always a temptation to defect. And in many, probably most cases, defection is good for the individual, at least in the short term, but is bad for the group. And cooperation is the winning strategy for the group. So pretty much everything about human society and social systems is about trying to constrain defection.
Peter: Right. And it’s worth noting that everything we have today that makes our lives good and comfortable, that makes it even possible — it’s the result of, if you think about the selection process, groups and individuals who all leaned into collaboration and living their lives in service of something outside themselves. Living their lives in service of mutual benefit. Living their lives with faith that others will return their kindness.
And the origin of Game B, as you always say it, is that you and Jordan were contemplating, hey, when did being a good guy become a sucker’s bet? Our modern systems have created a condition within people that they believe living lives for themselves — the selfish gene, the almighty dollar, transactionalizing, alienating, and optimizing for self-achievement — is just fine, because what could be wrong with that? The world continues. We wake up the next day, everything continues to work.
And it was almost never this case — for all of the history of humanity, if you defected, if everybody in a tribe defected, that tribe went away. We don’t hear about them. None of us are descended from the people who defected at scale. So this is a really important thing to highlight, because we’ll get to this later about diagnosing what are the root ills of society and what do we need to fix moving forward.
But I would say that from a game-theoretic standpoint, one of the interesting things I’ve read is this concept of “death from a distance.” It was a book called Death from a Distance where the — I think husband and wife — authors identified this interesting thing that because humans are upright hunters who stalk their prey, that means you have two other limbs that used to be used to hang from trees that can do other things, like take a rock and throw it. That’s very interesting because in most social creatures, there is this alpha male, beta male dynamic, a challenging of dominance. All these dynamics are there in the animal kingdom. But in pretty much all other species, that competition causes the challenger to really risk something significant. If you’re the beta and you attack the alpha and you lose, the alpha has really hurt you. If you go head-to-head, like some longhorn sheep, they will kick you off the side of a cliff. So there’s a lot at stake.
But if you’re these upright hunting monkeys that can chuck rocks, well, a bunch of betas can go and chuck rocks at the alpha. And the alpha really has no strong defense against this. Because the alpha, if he chucks a rock back, can only target one beta at a time. If he goes and tries to stop one guy, there are others chucking rocks at him. So you end up with this détente where the alpha basically has to figure out some social intelligence. The alpha has to develop a network of power and figure out all these kinds of things, because if they don’t, death is possible from a distance. That check on runaway power, that elevation of this middle class of power, then created the need for all these other kinds of things that we get as humans — these social cues, possibly the emergence of intelligence.
So anyway, it’s an interesting thesis. They call it the conspecific — we’re the only species that can kill other members of its species from a distance.
Jim: Yeah. It’s interesting. Of course, Chris Boehm also includes that in his evolution of the forager egalitarian operating system. He did the exact same example — the high cost of being a beta challenger to an alpha, but two betas with spears, not so hard.
Peter: Not so hard. Yeah. And this is the other part of the game theory — the more betas you get together with spears, the less is at stake for each of the betas. Because now you’re essentially hunting the alpha the way that the group of you used to hunt some of the prey. Same deal.
So from a game theory perspective — and this gives us launch points to lots of other topics — it is important for us to understand that many of the virtues that we hold from a Jonathan Haidt sort of moral foundation theory perspective, things like service and duty, all these things, those all emerged to give us easy templates for behavior that leads to win-win scenarios as opposed to strict win-loss scenarios.
But in the modern day that we live in, where we don’t see ourselves as deeply connected with all the infrastructure around us, we just see ourselves as relating to an institution or an alienated and abstracted set of things, then it’s very easy to bring in your locus of control and your locus of what is “us” and what is “me.” Who am I solving for? Who’s my tribe? Your locus of care becomes just the self. From that perspective, it’s extremely rational to then solve for yourself and not defect on yourself, but defect on everything else.
Jim: You mentioned it in passing. I think it’s important to underline a little — even a hundred and fifty years ago, humans lived deeply embedded in a social context. If they had a problem, somebody would take care of them, as long as they were a decent person. We lived together, dependent on how the crops did, etcetera. But now since 1870 or so in the West, and as our technological capacities increased at an amazing speed, the interactions we have are now transactional as opposed to social, many of them. They’re either with the government — you get a welfare check — or they’re with the market, where I trade money for stuff totally anonymously with no moral valence whatsoever. And both of those are unique in human history.
Peter: They are. And they’re the product of the industrial revolution. Any color you want as long as it’s black. Interchangeable parts means homogenized architectures of product. And homogenized products then lead to consumer taste that is manufactured and homogenizable, which then leads to a condition of being that doesn’t have the necessary fluidity to really be situated in its local environment. These are all things that have been talked about for a long time. Some of these are rooted in Marx’s original critique — he talked about alienation of labor and capital. But the idea of our ability to transactionalize these kinds of relationships that used to at least connect the making from the using and the buying and the consuming process — all of those things have been completely evaporated and turned into thin slices. And although they allow us to reach certain levels of scale, the condition they create within the human is a deeply disintegrated human being and human experience. People lose their situation.
It’s funny how all these things mirror each other in fractal ways. We move to the city centers, and the high-IQ people or the people who test well go and move to the city centers and the urban areas. Whereas the people who do work with their hands, who have less abstraction capabilities but are needed to make things or to farm or do whatever, they’re sort of left behind in the rural parts. You get the stratification of society at a very physical geographical level, and you get all these homogenized little stamped homes in a suburban kind of environment. All of these things create a pattern of life where everyone is deeply disintegrated from all the supply chain that makes them, that makes the food that gives food to them. All these things are deeply disintegrated, and that creates Vervaeke’s meaning crisis that he talks about. What we need as a human for purpose, for feeling of connection — that disintegration makes that not possible anymore.
Jim: Yeah. It no longer feels like we need to cooperate. Goes back to the Smithian perspective that each of us being selfish is all that it takes, and yet that’s turned out not to be true. But he didn’t even quite say that. If you look at the actual source text, he always contemplates people solving for their own specific needs.
Peter: He’s saying more subsidiarity than selfishness. This is where I take great issue with the articulations of people like Ayn Rand and others. Adam Smith doesn’t say this. If you look at the text, it’s like — oh, why won’t people do bad things then? Well, because there’s social shame. He’s contemplating in the source text — pages away from “truck, trade, and barter” — he’s talking about how these people also have to face their neighbors the next day. There’s a sense of an implicit social bond that is just part of the water, because you can’t even contemplate a world that doesn’t have that. You don’t have a world where you could fly hundreds of miles away. You don’t have a world where you could take your ill-gotten earnings and turn them into Bitcoin and run away to a foreign country and buy yourself a private army. You couldn’t do that in those days. So it wasn’t even worth saying. It was like a throwaway comment — the social bonds are going to be a natural check against people defecting at scale.
Jim: That goes back to Jordan and Mav’s conversation about what the hell kind of civilization is it where doing the morally correct thing is the sucker’s bet? There’s something fundamentally, deeply, deeply wrong about a society like that.
Peter: Well, and this is — to our conversation a few weeks back, or maybe a couple months back — this core nugget that maybe the heart of all that’s gone wrong in Game A, the core toxic little fragment of DNA that makes everything in the world go wrong, is that we have created many systems — all these systems that allow people to move places, move identities, move capital, do whatever. What it’s allowed is an agglomeration of defectors, and it has given a fluidity to defectors to hoard their gains. And then all that’s left behind — if you have that kind of a system, back to game theory and evolutionary dynamics — people who do that will amass more and more stuff. The sociopaths, the crooks, and the criminals will amass more and more stuff. And then all the good people, the law-abiding people, the people who are acting out of eusociality, they’re left behind to pick up whatever scraps are left in the system as it’s supposed to run.
I was just reading, whatever the last few days, about yet another instance of this horrible cash-for-pardon thing with Trump. The toxicity of this isn’t just that a person got to make billions of dollars off of something he literally got sent to prison for and gets to keep it because he paid off the president. It actually destroys the very foundations of why people would opt into a system like a country of our scale and scope. If I can’t actually go and take a shotgun and point it in the face of the defectors, I don’t want to be part of that system. That’s what people are going to think. Why should I trust that there should be justice at scale, when the president flies around with literal pedophiles?
This is the kind of thing that — when we stop actually pretending that justice is a thing that we actually go and implement, then people will vote with their feet. At the end of the day, any kind of creature knows when it’s wounded. Any creature. You kick a dog, it knows it’s wounded. You cut the tail of a snake, the snake is going to be thrashing around in pain. All creatures know when they’re wounded, even if they don’t understand how it is they got to be wounded.
So when people are defecting against the system, I would say a lot of the Trump protest vote was this: I don’t know how to fix it, I just know I don’t want this or that. The Bernie vote, the Trump vote back in 2016, all rooted around the same thing — I’m a wounded animal. I don’t know how exactly I got wounded, but man, I’m pissed. But of all animals that get wounded, it is only humans that know how to repair ourselves. And this speaks to — what’s her name? The anthropologist who said the first evidence of civilization is a healed femur. And that speaks to this idea that we view ourselves as individuals.
Back to your original question — who is this Peter Wang? Well, Peter Wang first and foremost is a little bud on the current surface of humanity, Humanity Inc. I do not pretend that I am a lone individual. I do not pretend that I could possibly exist without the service and support of many, many millions of people around me. But we’ve been given — especially as a population in the modern first-world order, the whole weird Western-educated, industrialized, all of that — we’ve been given this very toxic brew that you are the sovereign individual. You are this noble, almost Nietzschean sort of thing. And it’s useful as a counterpoint to totalitarianism, to certain things like communism and Maoism, but it’s actually a really, really bad thing to overemphasize for people.
Jim: It gives no brakes to the system. As I sometimes talk about it, the adjacent possible always has a pruning rule. What comes next after this epoch — however you coarse-grain it — the pruning rule says what is possible, what is allowed, with respect to the next step. Today’s pruning rule is pretty much only what gives the highest money-on-money return, risk-adjusted. The result is things like ubiquitous gambling apps where 25-year-old morons can bet on whether the next pitch is going to be a ball or a strike. Is that the actual right move? Because very talented people put those apps together, and even more talented people probably market them. Is that a society that we want? Yet the very simplified rule of money-on-money return says, quite loudly, yes.
Peter: Well, and not just the money-on-money return. You can do money-on-money return with good apps, with good things. You can still hunt for technological efficiencies. You can find new markets. The world is not by any means saturated in terms of technology and a good quality of life. You can make money-on-money returns building water purifiers for places that don’t have clean water.
The reason we build these kinds of apps — the gambling apps, the porn services, things like OnlyFans — at scale, people build that because they have no internal thing saying I shouldn’t do this. Years ago, I had this idea for a thing that would have made a bunch of money. But the reason I didn’t do it was ultimately I said, I’m not going to be able to explain to my children how I made my money. It was sort of like some bullshit wellness thing, and if someone with a fatal illness is buying my product thinking it’s going to cure their illness, that’s not a great way to make money. So that internal governor of morality is what’s absent in these things.
But the betting thing is particularly pernicious because when people are leaning hard into it — if you’re just throwing away some casual bets because you have so much money and it doesn’t matter, whatever, get your thrills however you want — but for people for whom betting is something they really view as a ticket to success, that means they’re so desperate. This whole wounded animal thing — they know that they don’t have, or they believe they don’t have, a model of how they can bank real wins. So they might as well roll the dice. Bet all on black.
There’s an article I was just reading today about young people in China and the rise of tarot and superstition. And they’ll quote in there something like this one young woman saying, well, nobody plays tarot if they believe the future is going to be great. If you have any better options, you’re not going to sit around noodling over tarot cards. It’s when you’re really in the slumps and you really can’t model what is happening in the world around you — to where you know if I put my time and energy here, I will be better, if I put my time and energy here, I’ll be worse. You lose that ability to model, and so you just roll the dice.
I love that quote about lotteries being a tax on poor people. And then I thought about it, and I’m like, well, that’s not such a great quote. It’s a really dark thing, because it’s not a tax on poor people — it’s actually predatory on poor people. Not just a tax. Because the tax thing is a bit arrogant. It’s like, well, I’m smarter than you, I know better than to play lotteries. But actually, we have a world today that is way too complex for any single person to understand. I’m a software entrepreneur, I build software businesses, I’ve raised VC money, I have a degree in quantum physics — I can do a lot of things, and I don’t think I understand this world. So what hope does the everyman or everywoman have unless they band together and engage in collective sense-making?
But that requires trust. That requires their local pastor they go to every Sunday to not be buying private jets with the collection they put on the plate. At every scale, people understand that they’re being preyed upon, and they also know they cannot do robust sense-making about consequences of causality in this complex modern world. No wonder why people are pining for the trad wife thing, and for the idea that if I go and become a farmer, at least I know where my next meal is coming from. And if my crops fail, it was the weather, and I don’t think the billionaires control the weather just yet. So there’s nothing to be done about it — that’s just God’s will. That’s why people are reverting to that, because we have created an unintelligible world for the people that live in it.
Jim: Yeah. And we have not developed — in fact, we’ve developed a pernicious reinforcement mechanism against collective sense-making on how to get out of it. You think about if all the hours spent on TikTok and Instagram were spent on developing from the grassroots an alternative to what we currently have, we could make a lot of progress. But part of the current system is building these attractors for people’s attention, and it’s gotten brilliant at it. I used TikTok for two weeks in 2022. And as a professional designer of products, my reaction is: this is the most brilliant product I’ve ever seen and the most evil. This is the vacuum cleaner to suck up all attention, basically.
Peter: Yeah. One topic that I thought was pretty obvious, but some people said they haven’t heard before — this idea that the joint attention of a group of people is a scarce thing. A group of people in relation — let’s say it’s the board of a company or the management. At a corporate level, we know this. You don’t put an hour on the calendar for the senior executives and just sit there and BS them the whole time. If you get an hour of all the senior executives, it’s important for everyone to know that everyone else knows something. We’re going to go figure something out. Or if you put an hour on for everyone in the city — everyone, you have to pay attention to this thing — like the buzz for an Amber Alert. That joint attention — not just individually, oh, I watch this channel, you watch that YouTuber — it’s the joint attention. The fact that we all collectively know that we all know something is super important in terms of building and maintaining the intersubjective infrastructure of a community, a tribe, a society, a nation.
And we allowed that to just get shotgunned. You take a Gatling gun and just perforate that thing. And that’s what we have as a society now. People don’t know what other people like. People don’t know what other people know. We have, well, yours is fake news, mine’s real news, but your fake news — this whole thing. The idea that not only do you have fake news, but the fact that we have differing views on this is deeply problematic. That is not somehow seen as such an existential problem.
But all of it — you mentioned the TikTok thing and preying on people’s attention. The second thing though is that in all this, I think people do have agency. We have to fundamentally believe that people have agency. And I would say this is something I’m really holding for and that I try to use as a guiding principle: the choice for an authentic life always rests inside each person. And when we make those choices — sort of like the idea that the line between good and evil runs through every person — the choice to lead an authentic life rests inside each person, and Moloch arises. The Game A Moloch, the thing that does all these bad things to us that we don’t like — Liv calls it Norma or whatever — that is really the sum aggregate of all of our micro-abdications, our micro-cowardice. When you sum it up across a population of people and across many hours in each day and many little decisions, you get something very powerful.
And we didn’t know — just like we didn’t know that attention was something that could be farmed — this micro-cowardice, this micro-abdication, this desire not to encounter the liminal, allows a part of yourself to turn into a vegetable or an NPC or a bit of stimulus-response automaton. And so you’re just going to swipe the images. You’re going to just partake in whatever the spectacle is, the spectacle du jour, get upset about whatever the controversy is of the day. But all these images that are rendered to us, they’re flat. They’re dimensionally and experientially reduced to just that which can be broadcast to us. And if we all just get addicted to that, or if we allow ourselves to essentially become only a receptacle for that kind of experience, then we have abdicated our full human ability to actually encounter the liminal and make sovereign choices in the face of liminality.
Jim: It’s important to keep in mind that these things didn’t just emerge. Something like Instagram — there’s a team of a thousand psychologists, probably more, tweaking this thing to produce an artificial world for, let’s say, teenage girls, where their status, their activity, a large amount of their time, how they dress, the filters they use to make themselves look more whatever the current view is of feminine beauty, etcetera — so they’ve actually built an alternative reality designed by people who understand human nature better than humans do, and specifically driven by the profit motive.
Peter: Specifically driven by the profit motive. That’s right. And there’s no shame in the boardroom on this. There’s no shame on Wall Street for this kind of thing. One of the thought experiments I’ve had is if we were to create an augmented currency system — maybe using the complex plane or something, using real and imaginary components — to say, yeah, you made $100 here but you also scored negative 5,000,000 in terms of human thriving. So yes, the real component of your earnings is this, but here is the externality, the sum total of however many dimensions of strife and suffering that you’ve incurred in order to mint that. But we don’t ever meter those things.
I think it was the Netflix CEO or head of product who at one point said, “Our biggest competitor is sleep.”
Jim: Yes. I think it was Netflix, actually. And it was a long time ago.
Peter: But the fact that that person said that isn’t really just the problem — it’s a symptom. The fact that we have a society that produces companies where, after that statement broke, the Netflix board of directors didn’t all get out on stage and bow and say, we deeply apologize for this deeply inhumane thing that was articulated by this person, but that is not in line with our values, and they have been shown the door. They didn’t do that because it was like, that’s kind of funny. But that’s the appropriate way to view what you are — you’re an app and people have the right to make a decision whether they want to watch you until 2 AM. That’s their choice.
Jim: Yeah. In our society, we thought it was clever and insightful. Ah, this guy deserves to be the CEO to have such deep thoughts, rather than what should have been: this is pretty damn horrifying.
Peter: Yeah. That’s a really horrible comment to make, because it’s implicitly stratifying users. It goes back to the whole metaphysical quality stack. You’re saying this is not a human being integral and imbued with life energy to do whatever it is that their magical thing they want to do in the world. They are just some hours on an eyeball. They’re eyeballs that are kept awake, barely just kind of propped open, and we’re going to extract view time out of those eyeballs. That’s not great.
Jim: Yep. And yet — TikTok, gambling apps — there are so many examples of this. Basically understanding and mining low-level human capacity. Think about junk food, another one. We are evolved to like sugar and salt and crispy starch and stuff. And so we have teams of food scientists designing the most addictive, even if quite health-degrading foods, and they spread across the world — not just in the United States, but every country has issues with this kind of stuff because it’s so cleverly adapted to human nature.
Peter: Well, I’ll quote the bard: “These violent delights have violent ends.” And when these grapes of alienation grow heavy for the vintage — we’ll see what happens, but this is not humane. This is not good. We cannot pretend that this will not end in some kind of disaster. And it is good that — I can tell when I talk to my billionaire friends and whatnot — people are starting to become aware that, oh, crap, things are really hard and things have really gone off the rails. We’re starting to maybe just turn this thing around. But chop chop, we have to really get to it. And not only that, we have to really diagnose the root of the issues — that we’ve used technology to alienate people from living full integrated lives and being agentic and sovereign as humans.
So the problem is when you start to untangle that, you go all the way back to the origins of the industrial revolution and all these things. And we have the opportunity to reform and transform society in a much better way moving forward that uses these things, doesn’t fall prey to them, isn’t captured by them. But I find very few people are thinking about that transcendent move. And it all becomes this, like, are you for it? Are you against it? Doomer, Foomer, or whatever. It’s really depressing how facile some of these conversations are, the level of simplicity that people have who are in some of these conversations.
Jim: Yeah. Again, this is what you mentioned earlier — broken collective sense-making. A hundred years ago, people had specific views on what values were, what was good, what was evil. Now a lot of it was silly, like the Scopes monkey trial you mentioned earlier — I actually drove through that town just for giggles one time. And that’s one of the downsides of having rigid orthodoxy. It’s kind of an interesting problem, how to get emergent values that are situationally appropriate without going either for “values are completely arbitrary” or “values are handed down from the man in the cloud.” Finding that dynamic, adaptable set of values — that’s the key.
Peter: Yeah. And it’s not just finding them. It’s giving ourselves space as individuals and as collectives to be in the process of finding them. And that’s part of how we live. We are discovering these. And the original question of teleology — the reason why I sort of dodged it, but also rejected the question, is because it’s good to try to understand it, but we should not say, well, we believe we found it. Truth is a pathless land, as Krishnamurti said.
And this touches on something that is connected for me in terms of a worldview thing — that for us to actually find the answers to the biggest questions out there, it seems to be more and more another leaf motif running through my life: that not a turn inwards, but developing better calibration internally gives you the ability to see further and see more deeply. Just like the James Webb Space Telescope — a $10,000,000,000 space telescope. It’s not just big. What they’ve done is they’ve taken it above the noise floor of all the light pollution on earth and all the atmosphere. And also they cool those instruments down so that it’s very, very sensitive. It’s very, very quiet. So when a couple of photons bounce in, it’s like, ah, I registered something different. So this is kind of the meditative practice — trying to align all the parts of yourself so that when you’re becoming dysregulated, you’re sensitive to it. And you’re like, wait, hold on, why did that just happen? Why am I responding this emotionally in this way? These kinds of capacities and this kind of inner work is what will allow us to create better societies that can actually do the outer work.
Jim: I’ve got one question I’ve been saving. I didn’t know when I’d drop it in. And it speaks to a lot of these things, and it’s actually something that had an impact on me, and that is the idea of the sacred. My traditional view: ah, the sacred, a bunch of religious nuts, forget that. But you’ve talked about it quite a bit in a way that’s far richer and far more interesting and potentially far more generative. Why don’t you give us a good rap about Peter Wang’s view of the sacred?
Peter: I think I said at one of our earlier conversations that we need a definition of sacred that doesn’t make Jim puke.
Jim: Exactly.
Peter: And it is around this alignment. It’s around all this stuff. And I think it’s how to be together, not just do together. Maybe it’s a way for us to intuit about how to relate to really complex systems. Maybe it’s us developing capacity — having some space inside to say, we don’t understand that, and that’s okay, and together we’ll come to understand it. So a secular conception of sacred would be around connection and transcendence, I think. Those are kind of the two pieces.
One thing I’ve said to friends of mine who are deeply steeped in individualism and an individualistic way of thinking — again, this kind of Western, weird, alienated way of being in modernity — one way to think about sacred is to break through some of these things, look through the other lens that we’ve talked about. Stop with the Descartes and the subject-object dualism. See yourself as this expression of energy that’s alive in the present in the moment, that hopefully will come back tomorrow and be conscious again. Really seeing yourself as this pattern in this wave — but not just in physical space and in this moment in time, but understanding the fate of your life to be connected to what I call the eternal golden braid of humanity. A hundred billion souls that have come before that have done everything from discovering metallurgical processes to give us the metal we use to create a world, discovering science, writing interesting books and plays, making interesting music — all the things that form the tapestry of the current moment in time. We’re just the latest polyps on the coral on this gigantic reef that’s had a hundred billion souls before.
So if you can actually hold space, deeply consider this, look at every object around you and think about how many people it took to not only make that object, but to discover all the principles behind the making of that object — I’m looking around my room, it’s breathtaking just to catalog. I’ve got photographs here, LED screens and smartphones and wood. Who knows where this wood came from? This table — all these things. So when you see yourself as just being almost like the thinnest outermost layer of the shell of an explosion at this current moment in time — that’s humanity. Humanity went off on this planet like a bomb. We transform and we partition and we collect and induce energy in ways that are not possible with just biological processes. And not just with biological processes — you couldn’t do a Manhattan Project and set off a nuke without not just biology and multicellular life, but humans that can go and actually have coordination across these kinds of scales and figure out the physics of chain reactions of neutrons.
So the idea that we are somehow separate from the world, or that humanity is this other separate thing, masks us from seeing the connection we have to all these things. And for me, the sacred is being able to hold that full mystery, or as much of that mystery as possible. And when you see it that way, this connects right back to the Buddha from Zen — the Buddha in the middle of your machine is the same as the Buddha in the lotus flower.
I have some koi fish in my pond over there. And as they wander around and I get pleasure from watching them, the aesthetics of it, and they respond to me because I feed them every day — there’s all these kinds of things. But in that connection, in that being present in life, in every moment, in every little thing — we just planted some plants here at spring, put some plants down, and I take care when I put the plants in. My wife’s like, oh, put some topsoil down at the bottom of it and then water it. All of these things that we do in life are part of this overall tapestry.
So maybe the sacred is the conjugate of the alienated and the separate. So even though we see ourselves as distinct, we think of ourselves as making our own choices, we are separate from each other, we’re separate from the world, and we’re making our way through it — if we can also hold the conjugate to say we are of the world and the world is of us, and to really be engaged in that mode of thinking as well, that’s the space for the sacred from my perspective.
Jim: I like it. Now the Ruttian take on the Wangian sacred — simplistic as usual — is that a sacred attitude is a useful way to interact with the truly complex. Trying to analyze it in a reductionist fashion just leads you nowhere. But we still need ways to deal with the complex. In fact, most of our problems are in the complex realm. And the interesting thing is humans have evolved for a long time dealing with complexity in a kind of intuitive fashion. And if you can get your head in a sacred place, as you say, confront nature and say, what is nature? What’s it for? What do we get out of nature at multiple levels, including the practical and the spiritual — then that works. At least it works for me.
Peter: And something I’ve actually picked up from you. So thank you. But this is brilliant — that’s a very, very good distillation of all my flowery prose. But I would say this: in the Western world in particular, it’s really hard to see “ofness.” We have this and that. There’s the famous Buddhist concept — “thou art that.” But we have a hard time seeing ofness. And that was for me the unlock when I was in late high school or whatever time frame — that there are tools even through Western reductionism, even through all the math and all the things, to get to ofness.
And so if you can — to your point about encountering complexity — this gets to our current moment in time with AI. Are they conscious? Are they going to kill us? Are they of us or whatever? We can’t even think of ofness relative to the actual existing societies that are of us. And I think AI is something that could transform us collectively much more powerfully than it can transform any individual of us. But if we are always looking at it as, well, this is a big powerful tool and only we can have it, then we don’t want the Chinese to have it, or they’re going to have it and their people are going to hurt our people — when you’re looking at it in these reductive terms, then all of these emergent possibilities look extremely dangerous.
Imagine if your liver was fighting your pancreas, and they’re both upset with your lungs because there are two lungs and only one liver and one pancreas. And they’re like, who’s going to take over the body? And it’s like, no — all of you are needed as part of the body. The body comes of these things working. And this kind of failure to contemplate the ofness, this failure to hold not just complexity within, but the ability to have the courage to conduct our energy and our life force and our will and pump it into an emergent complexity on the outside of us — that is going to be our failure to manifest the full possibilities of what comes next for humanity. It’ll be that failure.
Jim: Well said. Alright. This has been as amazing a conversation as I was hoping it would be. And I want to thank Peter Wang for coming on The Jim Rutt Show and having a random walk around his worldview.
Peter: Moderately ergodic. That was great. Thank you so much, Jim, for the opportunity. Enjoyed it thoroughly. It was really good.