The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Gregg Henriques. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: This is part two of my conversation with Gregg Henriques around his new book, A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. Gregg is a professor and core faculty member at James Madison University’s Clinical and School Psychology doctoral program. Welcome back, Gregg.
Gregg: Hey, Jim, it’s great to be with you here. Thanks so much for having me.
Jim: Yeah, we’re going to continue the conversation, and for those who remember the first or haven’t heard the first, we talked a bit upfront about metaphysics, ontology, philosophy, and Gregg’s argument is substantially wrapped around these kinds of tools. And, as I was preparing for today’s podcast, going deeply through the book, very carefully as I do where I’ve taken many, many notes, and try to figure out what they mean. I can say I’m still a little befuddled by this. I’m not sure I’m seeing the need to roll out heavy, philosophical machinery. Best I can tell, the core idea here is that psychology, and science more generally, hasn’t gotten to grips with understanding mindedness in a useful way.
I’d say what you’re doing is, number one, you’ve placed mindedness in the complexification arc of the history of the universe. And, number two, you provided some very useful and crisp definition for classes of mindedness. The first strikes me as good old emergentist complexity science, so essentially, reductionist science plus relativity plus complexity. And, number two strikes me as the useful, it’s kind of a useful but not definitive variety of small “o” ontology of the sort that every science does, which is a necessary but not particularly philosophical job of making the categories clear enough to be useful. So, what am I missing here?
Gregg: I really don’t know that you’re missing all that much, but it really depends on the doorway that you’re entering. But, I do make the case as follows in the book, and that is that the standard, natural science perspective, say take from big history or Sean Carroll’s Big Picture. The argument is that, “Oh, yeah. We can just apply natural science, and the empirical categories and logical relations in and of itself are sufficient.” My argument is that that’s not the case. And, the reason that it’s not the case is what we see is the multiplicity of different definitions. And, I am proposing a new cosmology, meaning a new way to think about the evolution of complexification across four different dimensions. That can be, arguably, a small “o” ontological argument. And, to say that I’m engaged, then, in a descriptive metaphysical structure, all that means is “Hey, these are the concepts and categories for my cosmology, and then this is how I’m going to understand what I know about the world, how I know it epistemologically and what I’m claiming the world to be ontologically.”
And so, to me, I don’t see, and I’m not doing a Heide Garrigan deep dive into metaphysics and some unbelievable, okay, what’s the ultimate nature of being itself? But, let’s face it, Jim, it was the case that when science got started, it was natural philosophy. And, there are many philosophers and scientists who argue that, “Hey, that connection for clarity of thought may be something that is worth holding onto.” And, given my history in psychology, it certainly was the case that I got a lot clearer about the argument I was making. At least, certainly, that felt wet way to me.
Jim: All right, I’m going to make a last comment, and then we’re going to jump into the book. Listeners to Jim Rutt show know that I often say, “When I hear the word metaphysics, I reach for my pistol.” And, unfortunately, I don’t have a pistol with me today, but I do have a nice big ugly knife. So, I guess my final thought is that this confusion about mindedness, and consciousness more generally, is very, very reminiscent of the confusion that biology had around life. Famously and surprisingly until the early 20th century, the concept of elan vital, if that’s how you pronounce it, was still a part of the argument in biology. Is there something special about life that is not included in the natural sciences in some principle way, requires a magical rabbit to be pulled out of a hat, essentially.
And, it strikes me that what you are doing and the way I see things, which of course doesn’t mean they’re right, but it’s a good hint, is that mindedness and consciousness and all that has the same relationship to complexification as life does. Just as you’ll point out when you get down into your tree of knowledge, that fits your model as well. And so, anyway, it’s all just science as far as I’m concerned. Don’t need no stinking philosophy and anything. If we de-philosophy it, so much the better.
Gregg: Okay. Well, and I mean, you situate yourself that way. Other people will disagree. You and I are fundamentally in agreement in the sense that what I’m trying to do is I’m trying to get the right grammar on naturalism, okay? And, what I’m emphasizing is, and I emphasize this in the book, and I build this off of Lawrence Cahoone, a philosopher who basically says, “Philosophy of mind broke the world into matter and mind,” and that’s a real problem. And, we inherit that grammar. I’m trying to get us clear that we inherit a grammar, and I’m trying to get us clear that we can introduce a new grammar of energy, matter, life, mind, and culture. And, that’s a much richer complexity, science kind of grammar that should be woven throughout our basic understanding and vocabulary for the world.
Jim: And, oddly enough, I agree. I just wouldn’t label it the same way, but that’s all right. But, that’s all right. Potato, potato.
Gregg: Lovely.
Jim: Before we jump into the next big, meaty part of the book, let’s review a couple of, a few, four of your key constructs and try to keep these as brief as possible, but not so short as people won’t know what we’re talking about. First, the enlightenment gap.
Gregg: The enlightenment gap is the argument that we do not have a synoptic philosophy, meaning a synthetic, integrated philosophy that coherently places mind in relationship to matter. I was just listening to John Vervaeke, After Socrates. He went through that neuroscientist, artificial intelligence, researchers, psychologists, anthropologists, linguistics, all have different conceptions of mind. So, there you go. You have wide variety of different domains, no good, definitional system, and also, how do we place scientific knowledge in relationship to social knowledge? The argument is there’s an absent of concilliant understanding that does that coherently. The gap is in our knowledge to how to do that. I’m going to address that and resolve that. At least, that’s the proposition in the book.
Jim: All right. BM3.
Gregg: BM3 refers to the behavior, mind, mind, mind problem. And, what that is it reviews the different definitions of what we mean in psychology by mind, identifies behavior, the behaviorist tradition, and identifies neurocognitive meaning of mind, the information instantiated within the nervous system and processed by it. It means the phenomenological subject of conscious experience, and it means self-conscious justification the way Rene Descartes thought of mind. So, BM3 is, “Hey, people use the word mind or mental process and mean any one of those four things.” And, that creates a lot of confusion and equivocation, and I characterize that as the core problem of psychology.
Jim: Now, compare and contrast what you would describe as methodological behaviorism, which is how you represent psychology today versus mental behaviorism, which you propose as an alternative.
Gregg: Exactly. So, methodological, if you go and take Psych 101, psychology is the science of behavior and mental process. It’s a science because it applies the methods. It applies the methods to behavior, which science can see and infers mental processes what it can’t. And then, it applies a slew of research methods. What that means, then, is that the science of psychology is defined by the methods of science, hence methodological behaviorism. And, it’s because it’s a science, because it applies the methods. But, if you ask what it means in the world that you’re referring to as a psychologist, you get a massive amount of incoherent disagreement or chaotic, fragmented pluralism. That’s the problem of psychology referenced by the BM3.
Mental behaviorism switches it and says, “There should be things in the world, minded animals and minded human beings,” and I’m going to define, “that we can reference and have an understanding about what those are.” I call that the ontology, but a little “o” ontology. It’s the thing in the world that is the concern of psychologists. Minded behavior patterns of animals into humans is what I’m arguing the science of psychology should be about. That’s an ontological definition defined by the thing in the world. And then, we should bring the methods of science to better understand minded behavior patterns.
Jim: Great. And then, the last one before we jump in is Justification Theory.
Gregg: Justification Systems Theory is the idea that propositional language was a tipping point, gave rise to question/answer dynamics that, ultimately, was generative, generating systems of justification that coordinated people. I argue that the culture/person plane of existence that emerges out of the minded animal plane is best understood as networks, structure, functional networks of justification. I also argue that the dynamics of justification reveal themselves in the sense when we look at human consciousness and we could see that we sit ourselves on a primate, animal experiential structure, have an ego that tries to justify to ourselves privately, and then we sit on a social stage, our persona, and try to justify ourselves that way. That’s reminiscent of Freud, but this places it in a very coherent, evolutionary complexification model, and that enables us to see what it was that enabled us to transform from primates into persons.
Jim: Right. Actually, that’s a perfect setup for now, jumping back into the book where we left off, which is one of your core parts of your very extensive argument here is the description of something called the Tree of Knowledge System. Go. Go.
Gregg: So, in 1996, I was working on this and had this insight about justification. And, I realized that when I was using the word mental process, I recognized that there were two fundamentally different kinds of mental process: justificatory processes, and then the non-verbal, perceptual and emotional processes. And so, I had a particular frame of reference for understanding the emergence of humans as culture person beings.
And so, I was working on that and really excited about that, and that was going to be my whole career. I was like, “This is a really interesting idea about what is it that made us go from apes, what’s the big missing link. And, this is a conceptual structure that gives rise to the missing link.” And then, I thought about it as this sort of funnel idea. And then, one day, in August of 1997, I was stoned. I was hanging out and really, basically, had a moment, I think, of sort of transcendent logos insight. I literally drew out a diagram as a circle at the bottom, and then out of that comes a cone that I label “chemistry”. Out of that comes a cone of complexification that I label “life”. Out of that comes a cone that I may label “mind/sentience”. And, out of that comes a cone that I label “culture”.
And, what that gave me is a way to track the frequency of complexification, and it gave me a vision logic for the way in which complexification has happened. Now, you may, what is complexification? It’s the way parts get synced up to form holes, which then become parts of greater holes. So, we talk about particles into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into cells, and cells into multi cells that go into animals, and then, ultimately, networks of primates that get turned into groups of persons.
And, you say, “Well, doesn’t a lot of people have that as a frame of reference?” The answer is yes, but what this shows is not only is it a stacked line of complexification, but what we have here is four different dimensions of complexification, also. And, what that’s going to do is it’s going to help us understand both the continuity and the qualitative discontinuity when we make jumps from matter to life, life to minded animals, and minded animals into culture persons. And, my experience was once I pulled this behavioral frequency lens off the world, I could see so much. I could see this universe of complexification in a different light.
Jim: And so, why don’t you a lay out for us in some detail the four cones. You can put considerably less detail on the first two, but let’s just draw the picture and also explain why cones, which is actually very interesting.
Gregg: Right. So, what are these cones? Well, what they do, basically, you think about them, cones, as representing the radius of the unit of complexification. What do I mean by that? Well, if we start at the Big Bang, you basically get a collapse of everything into a singular super force. And then, there’s a differentiating process, a hot inflationary, big bang, and out of that singular super force, you get different kinds of forces like electromagnetic, strong, weak, nuclear, gravity, if you want to call it a force. And then, you get the fields, quantum fields into particles, and then particles will coalesce, ultimately, into atoms. So, we get electrons coalescing into neutrons, I mean electrons, and then you get protons, neutrons, and you get the formation of helium, hydrogen.
So, what that would be is an expansion of the matter cone with a representation of a hydrogen atom is more complicated than an electron. And then, you get into molecules which have larger organizational structures of pattern. So, what it represents, then, is the expansion of units of complexification. That’s the matter cone. Then, we jump over to life, and you’ve done some wonderful podcasts on where life comes from. And, the argument here is that there is an emergent propagation of different possibilities that have some kind of variation, selection, and retention. This is the mystery of the origin of life. But, what we get, ultimately, is we get things like lipids. We get the capacity of lipids to form a membrane. We get the capacity of a structure to pull in, say, an information proto cell, and ultimately, there’s some kind of replication and variation in selection.
What happens there, then, is through variation, selection, and retention is a propagation of different kinds of complexified cells. Initially, these are single cells like bacteria, but they will coalesce into colonies. So, you get groups of cells that are behaving in certain ways. Initially, they’re not multicellular. Once they become eukaryotic cells, that means there’s a fusion between different kinds of cells. That complexified structure is a big and maybe once in a lifetime jump, and then that represents a whole nother layer of the radius of a eukaryotic cell on my graph would be much bigger than a bacteria cell.
Jim: So, you’d be coming up the cone.
Gregg: Coming up the cone, exactly, yeah. Coming up the cone. And then, we get things like multicellular plants. You get fungi that demonstrate all sorts of complex, adaptive, systemic behavior across them. They have many different systems in there. Complexification means there’s different integration, differentiation, and coordination across the whole. That’s what complexification means. Then, so that then takes place for 3 billion years in relation, and a lot of it’s at the single cellular level. Then, all of a sudden, eukaryotics, they take off, and then you get the multicellular structure.
Then, at about 550 million years ago, we see the Cambrian explosion. Prior to that, what we have is a distributed, neural network system. Arguably, some of it’s devoted to motor movement, some of it’s devoted to sense detection. You see things like jellyfish. You see things like sponges, but within a period of about 10 million years, depending on who you ask, but a pretty narrow period in geological time, we see the explosion of complex, active bodies and brains, and this is going to be mindedness.
And, in terms of complexification, what the nervous system is doing is it’s modeling the emerging animal and its complex body parts and the environment and creating a hierarchical arrangement, which John Vervaeke would say then affords a recursive relevance realization so that it can behave as an agent in an arena, and then engage in relationships to other animals in terms of prey and predation, mating, territory defense, et cetera.
This is the emergence of mindedness, and we can trail the evolution of mindedness. It starts off with a pretty basic set of body plans that really stay pretty consistent in many ways, but we do get things, basically, like crabs, and then we get the development of vertebrates like fish, and then the fish climb out of the land, and then we get things like reptiles. And then, by reptiles we move on up the scale into mammals, birds, and ultimately, the cone of complexification means there’s an increasing capacity of the complex, active, segmented bodies and brain systems to build into different intelligent niches of minded behavior and higher animals as we go up the stack into mammals and, ultimately, primates.
So, this is the minded dimension, and I’m arguing that the right relation of psychology is to ask questions about minded behavior of animals. That’s what I call basic psychology. And then, finally, there’s another explosion. I was working on this problem of justification. The argument was that humans, as hominids, were able to sync up, develop initial symbolic tagging, say, 500,000 years ago, and then finally develop a tipping point of propositions, question/answer dynamics, and that explodes the generation of culture capital C, which are justification systems.
And, ultimately, what the diagram also shows is justification systems evolve, ultimately giving rise to science as a particular kind of justification. And, that was the insight moment where I actually have on the original diagram lines going back one through philosophy, one through mathematics, and says, “Oh, we developed a way of really thinking about abstract logic that then allowed us to come back and map the evolution of complexification as a human knower in the universe.”
Jim: All right, beautiful. There’s 13.4 billion years of history and down in five minutes.
Gregg: There you go.
Jim: Now, of course, several of these things are not what I’d call crisp, for instance, mind. We think about, as you say, a jellyfish or a sponge. Actually, it’s still arguable whether sponges had neurons or not, or whether they use some other signaling, the early ones. But jellyfish probably did, and probably neurons came into, current best thinking is neurons came into existence just before the Cambrian explosion, though, just before might be a hundred million years. Still very murky. But, even on, what’s something clearly on the other side? Let’s see, the famous sea elegans that everybody uses in experimental development of neurons.
Gregg: It’s got 302 neurons, I believe.
Jim: Exactly. 302, I believe, is the correct number. And, is it minded? I mean, it’s a complex adaptive system that uses a 302-neuron network to operate as an agent in an arena, but only got 302 neurons. So, it’s really early in the idea of mindedness.
Gregg: Exactly. So, and there’s a continuity. If you look carefully at the diagram that I put up. I put a circle there, which means that there’s a continuity. And, we should see a continuity from sponges and jellyfish into plenaria worms into sea elegans. And then, ultimately, what I like to say is, yeah. There is a continuity. There are different elements, and so it’s not quite as sharp, for example, as the continuity between matter and life. But, if we, who knows about exactly what are the intermediate forms that gave rise to life? There could be a whole-
Jim: There almost certainly, almost certainly was, unless some guy with a beard came down and said, “Let there be life.” There had to have been some intermediate forms.
Gregg: Exactly. So, there had to be continuity. There’s continuity, I’ll say there’s continuity between primates and persons. Every time you give birth to a child, you’re going to see, I mean, to a new infant, you’re going to see the evolution of a primate into a person. Where do you draw the line? Okay. So, there’s definitely going to be intermediate categories.
All I’m saying is that brains and complex, active bodies that get sparked by the Cambrian explosion. We get animal on animal predation. That’s when you’re going to get full mindedness where you get a sensory motor looping system operating in a body that gives rise to a totally different kind of movement structure. And those, of course, there’s definitely intermediate forms. That’s the whole point of a continuous, complexification process. There have to be. But, I am saying that the thing takes off in the Cambrian explosion, probably because they had development of complex, active bodies and predation relation that enables the system to engage in an arms race. And, all of a sudden now, you’ve got brain, body activity going that I would call mindedness.
Jim: Yeah. Like I mentioned this last time, one of the things I love, recent insight that I had, I think it was from Bobby Azarian in his book, which is whenever there’s a top predator in a food web, you’ve just opened up a niche for a new species to develop to eat that guy. And so, you think that’s happening from the very beginning. The first animal that’s thinking it’s got its shit together eating bacteria. Nobody’s going to mess with him. Oops. Something evolved to eat him. Oh, God.
Gregg: And, I think that’s the Cambrian explosion. It’s sort of a tap predation, meaning from Stuart Kauffman that the adjacent possible is opening up with these kinds of movements that are novel, and they open up a whole adoptive landscape that evolution then filled in and propagated into.
Jim: Okay. And then, also, just make sure the picture’s complete. As you show cones coming out of cones, you’re still, like the life cone, for instance, is still there. That’s not mindful. We have trees, we have fungi, we have bacteria, et cetera. So, that…
Gregg: Right. Right. And, everything that is minded has to also be alive in this definition. So, this would then, it’s important to know that mindedness has to be embedded in living. And, you can lose mindedness. You can be anesthetized and still be alive, but mindedness is coming out of life. And, of course, not everything that’s alive becomes minded. Trees, and they demonstrate a lot of complexification and complexity, but they’re just not minded in the way. They don’t have a sensory motor looping system.
Jim: Gotcha. Now, you had a very interesting interlude where you suggested that your model helps resolve the apparent gross contradiction between Freud and Skinner. Now, those would not be my two favorite guys because I think they’re both wrong in grotesquely, fundamental ways. But, you did a cool thing about how this model can be used, if not reconcile them, at least understand them in a broader context. Why don’t you do that for us?
Gregg: Lovely. Yeah. In fact, this is the first paper I ever made on it, is basically, I’m saying there is a complexification stack that would align very much with you and basic. But, when we look at the joint points between life, living organisms and minded animals, minded animals, and cultured persons within these cones, you say, “Well, where do they connect?” There’s a thing called a joint point. And, that’s a complexity building feedback loop. And, ultimately, what this model says is not only is there’s a description between these different dimensions, but it also posits that there is a way to understand the emergence of mindedness out of life. That thing’s called Behavioral Investment theory. We can flag that.
But, ultimately, the idea is going to be, “Hey, I can understand the emergence of this structure by basically bridging to B.F. Skinner and tying him back to, essentially, a John Vervaeke notion of cognitive science on the one hand to explain how agent arenas relations emerge.” And then, ultimately, you go on up to primates, and you become talking primates. And then, you have to justify your actions on the social stage. And, the argument is you got a persona, an ego, and an animal self. Well, that is core with Freud’s central insights. So, I’m taking Freud’s central insights and Skinner’s central insights, and I’m aligning them on a physical, biological, psychological, and social picture of concilliance.
Jim: Okay, cool. Now, as I mentioned in the first part, this book is pretty damn audacious. There’s some, just, I love these moves that Gregg makes here. So, in this section on the Tree of Knowledge, you also put forth a proposed definition for the institution of psychology that you would suggest. We’ll get into this in considerably more fine-grained part when we get to foreshadowing people, the periodic table of behavior, which is my favorite part of this book probably. But anyway, so let’s audaciously tell psychology what it is.
Gregg: Right. What I want to suggest by the…
Jim: … tell psychology what it is.
Gregg: Right. What I want to suggest by this model, what this says is that psychology has errantly straddled two different domains. It dips into the animal and then tries to manage the human. It calls it, at least traditional, non-behavioral psychology says, oh, we’re studying mental process through behavior. My argument is you have to divide the dimensions of existence, the ontology, Jim, small o ontology. There are minded animals in the world, and we should have basic cognitive behavioral neuroscientists and ethologists, people that go out in the world and they study animals in nature, and we should also study them in the lab and we should understand how they learn, how they communicate, how they adjust. That’s the behavior of minded animals that should be basic psychology, the science of minded behavior, minded animals.
Then there’s a subset, human psychology. Human psychology’s not redundant. Human psychology, science of human mental behavior or human mindedness, it basically moves up into the dimension because it’s going to involve self-conscious justification, which is a game changer, the emergence of persons. I also argue that human psychology should be paired with the social sciences and basic psychology should be congruent, like ethology with the rest of the natural sciences. I make an argument for why that is, but fundamentally it creates a split in what psychology’s identity should be. Not in a way that obliterates it, but says, hey, you should have a basic and a human branch in relationship to the domain.
Jim: Cool. I guess this is as good time to bring it up as any, you mentioned it a few different places, and that is, in your definition, or your suggested definition of psychology, you also talk a fair bit about where clinical psychology fits in there. I will confess to always have being been a bit befuddled by the fact that when you go to a psychology department, you find clinicians and neuroscientists and cognitive scientists and people that torture lab rats all in the same department.
Gregg: That is true.
Jim: Yet, when you look at, say, medicine and biology, there’s a biology department and there’s a med school. Obviously, the docs have to learn a lot of biology, but they are cleanly separate disciplines. Do you think that psychology ought to take that next step and just say that clinical psychologists are a profession like doctoring and not like another department in the biology department?
Gregg: In 2004, I had co-authored a paper with Robert Sternberg, Bob Sternberg, who was recently APA president, and we outlined what’s called unified professional psychology. I would call it now a unified health service psychology, and exactly the term we use, I use, is a psychological doctor. And I train. That’s what I train as my professional day job. You come in and you talk to me. What’s the difference between a doctor and a scientist? A doctor is there to affect change, Jim.
A doctor has values, a doctor has goals. You’ve done your job well if you get a good outcome, you make a difference in the world, and you have to do that toward a valued state of being. So your job is to have skill to make a difference toward values. The skill of a scientist is to get at describing and explaining the way the world works. Those are two totally different value structures. What makes a good psychological doctor is not the same thing that makes a good psychological scientist.
So yes, I actually advocate for this in the end of the book when I’m really describing how I would lay out psychology. I emphasize really there are three great branches of the psychology as a whole, two in the science side, one, the health service psychology, which is regulating the way in which we would, we, and I say this because this is my identity, clinical counseling school psychologists enter into the world as licensed professionals, help people to improve wellbeing as a psychological doctor, just as medical doctors do.
The last thing I’ll say is the other professions get this, Jim. Physics is different than engineering. Biology’s different than medicine. Sociology is different than social work. In my discipline we have psychology and psychology.
Jim: And then you also have the psychiatrist, just to confuse things even further.
Gregg: Well, right. There are medical doctors that are trying to do mental illness or do mental illness through a medical physician training system.
Jim: I think I’m going to defer talking about the emergence of social science from physical science until we get to the periodic table. But let’s go, a last section here is, you do lay out quite interesting conversation on how your model is reasonably congruent with common sense understanding of things. But I would also point out before we go there that that’s not necessarily a requirement for good science. For instance, when I go out and talk to my hunting buddies, I cannot get a good description of quantum mechanics from them.
Gregg: Totally not.
Jim: Of course, I couldn’t get a decent description from Richard Feynman either who famously said, “Anyone who claims to understand quantum mechanics obviously doesn’t.” So Tree of Knowledge and common sense understanding,
Gregg: Every society known, I reviewed this with a colleague of mine named Dave Geary, and he published this in 2005. Anthropologically, every known society divides the world up into inanimate objects, living organisms, animals that behave differently in persons. When my daughter was four, she gave me a wonderful picture, I have it in my first book, of a little circle, representing a rock, a little stick with a little flower around it, representing a plant, and then a little dog with ears and four legs, and then finally a person. She goes, “Look, daddy, I drew your work, rocks, plants, animals, people.” The argument is that this is the basically Aristotle scales of nature. It’s an old and useful category that then breaks down because our knowledge of science does say, hey, what about jellyfish and viruses? And I talk about this at other times in the book, does this really fit?
And the old category had it as these absolute categories, not emergent, evolutionary, consistent categories that were continuous across time. When we learned about that, the categories tended to collapse and we didn’t have clear points of carving nature at its joints. What the Tree of Knowledge does is allow us us to remember that and its validity, update it with modern science and the continuity, and also understand the discontinuity with the joint points. Having both of those, allows us the kind of grammar to grip the world. And certainly it’s not a requirement that science is common sense, but when it aligns with common sense and makes a whole lot of sense, in general, that’s not a bad thing.
Jim: All right. One last thing before we move on, actually. As you’re well aware, there are multiple places where people can cut the emergence rise.
Gregg: Totally.
Jim: My good friend, and actually the guy that I can blame for more than anybody getting me involved in complexity science was Harold Morowitz. Wrote a well-known book called The Emergence of Everything, where he lays out, I think it’s 27 things, 28 layers from The Big Bang to Religion, I think it was the top one. There’s other places you could obviously cut. I think that the eukaryotes is a huge jump.
Gregg: That is a jump of complexification, totally.
Jim: A big, big, big, big jump of it.
Gregg: Big jump.
Jim: How the fuck did that happen?
Gregg: That is a mystery. [inaudible 00:30:59]
Jim: And this gets back to our earlier conversation about big O Ontology versus small o ontology. How do you come up with your four versus other possible cuts, and are they fundamental, big O, like electrons and protons, or are they small o like, all right, it could be 28, it could be five, it could be three, but I find four to be more useful for my work.
Gregg: Well, I wondered, it took me a little while, and I mentioned this in the book, took me a little while after I drew this out and had this moment of, oh, this is really useful. Then I was like, what the fuck are these actual cones really representing? And I characterized them as complexity originally. I would now realize that’s complexification. But what exactly is happening? Why am I drawing life as a totally different cone and why am I drawing mind and why am I drawing culture?
What I realized is actually these are drawn as new complex adaptive planes of existence that are tied together by fundamentally new processes, characterized by information processing, I’ll just say information processing within, like within a cell, and communication networks between them, to give rise to an entire pattern, an entire living ecology, animal behavioral ecology, human person ecology of culture, a network dimensional structure of information processing and communication. We see this in the RNA/DNA structure and the chemical communication between cells. We see it in the neuro information processing structure and the sensory motor communication between animals. And of course language itself is its communication information processing system.
So each one of these cuts of life mind and culture is a tightly associated with the emergence of a novel, open information processing system, the nervous system and language on top of the DNA cell system.
Jim: Cool. One of my favorite thinkers, David Krakauer, president of the Santa Fe Institute, and one of the most amazing human beings I know, he defines his work as the study of the history of information processing in the universe. So he uses the same lens you do.
Gregg: All right. I’d be interested to explore with him then the difference between information processing at the matter dimension, versus the other three. I argue the base of it’s an energy information implicate order, and so I think I would be very much in line with his thinking.
Jim: Yeah. But I’d love to connect you two actually. In fact, we ought to get you out to the Santa Fe Institute sometime and give at least part of the talk that’s implied in this book, since probably we can’t dedicate 10 days to it.
Gregg: I love that.
Jim: I think that you would hit them off. They would argue with you, but that’s all right. That’s what we do out there.
Gregg: This is science, Jim.
Jim: That’s what we do out there. All right, let’s move on to the next section. You paint a fairly bleak picture, and I still think it’s a straw man, but I’ll let you make your case, of the poor college student who goes, “Oh shit, it’s just all jiggling atoms.” And then I love this quote, because this is the classic obnoxious physicist, Ernst Rutherford who was reputed to have said, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” So that’s this extreme reductionist argument. Does anybody actually believe that shit after they’re 14?
Gregg: Well, I mean, I think people have believed it for a long time. You yourself talk about naive Newtonian, and there are a number of people that believed in naive Newtonian for a, I think a long time. Certainly before Einstein, there was an emerging physical, reductive determinism structure. And once that gets baked into an institutional identity, I think it’s got still long echoes of reach.
As I say in the book, do I think most scientists are naive or physical reductionist? No, but I could certainly find people that are making that argument in various ways, and I highlight that. And I basically also want to trail the evolution of science from a naive, reductive physicalism into one version of emergent naturalism that I think is very popular, and then I’m going to argue that the Tree of Knowledge gives a slightly different version of that emergent naturalism.
Jim: Cool. And then the other one that you bash, which I love to bash, is the Cartesian dualism.
Gregg: Well, Cartesian dualism, famously, one of the famous rationalists and scientists, precursors of whatever you want to decide when science begins, Rene Descartes, his obviously most famous verse, “I think therefore I am.” He’s gaining access to early mechanistic notions about the way the world works and has to decide there has to be a mechanism inside the material world, and he knows he behaves quite differently than that and basically presupposes a dual substance world. And I argue that yes, most people these days, that’s a really unworkable. The metaphysics, Jim, of that are unworkable, or just it’s bullshit.
Jim: Let me expand on that a little bit, because obviously you know so much about this, but for the audience who don’t know this, essentially the Cartesians viewed that mind was more or less the equivalent of spirit in the religious sense. But even if you didn’t believe in religion, it was still a thing that’s out there that’s not physically connected and is not directly emergent from the physical. And then of course, there’s the famous problem of how does this spirit, this geist, interact with the body? And he idiotically proposed it was the pineal gland as the mechanism for the geist or the ghost in the machine to talk to the machine. Frankly, there are still, we talk about folk psychology, I would expect 50% of the people walking around in the town of Staunton, Virginia believe in some loose form of Cartesian dualism. So while it’s fortunately dead in the sciences, in the pop world still out there.
Let’s turn back to your claim. Further, let’s assume we’re not talking about flatland radical reductionists. We’re not talking about the Cartesian, we don’t want to get the cart before the horse. But you also suggest that your Tree of Knowledge system is significantly different than the way big history is usually told. How?
Gregg: One of the things is really, how do you think about in terms of emergence? There’s what I would call weak versions of emergence, and that’s aggregate forms emerge. So for example, a bunch of molecules get together, they have fluidity, they don’t have fluidity by themselves, but as a group they have fluidity and they’ll carve a river. And we have to describe the world as a river. And that’s a weakly emergent system that is a function of the aggregates that then have properties that don’t appear at the individual level. And then we need vocabulary to describe those. That’s what I would call a weak, emergent view.
And virtually everybody says yes, that is what happens. And we do need vocabulary. And somebody like Sean Carroll will say that we can apply this to simply things like cats. Cats do not exist in the standard theory of elementary particle physics, but cats are real in the world, and we need a vocabulary.
Now, then the question is, well, what is the core ontology? And then what’s also, at a more little o ontology, what are the core calls and forces that we need in order to explain the behavior of cats? The issue here is I think a lot of folks like Sean Carroll wonder about the emergence of novel, causal properties, novel causal properties. I argue that there’s an emergence of a different kind of information processing system that has irreducible causal aspects to it wet life.
What I would argue is when I listen to Sean Carroll, I feel like he’s got one big cone, and he’s realizing that there’s different levels of complexity like cats, and he has to point to them, but he’s not arguing that there’s a fundamentally emergent new kind of causation. What the Tree of Knowledge suggests is actually these information processing communication networks, they’re actually what some people might call top-down causation, I like to call them information causation, and they give rise to new causal principles, and those things then cannot be reduced to the language of physics. It’s not strong emergence in a magic sort of way, but it’s a stronger emergence than many weak, emergent naturalist views.
Jim: I will say at the Santa Fe Institute, people discuss a lot top-down causation and exactly what is it. To give a naive example of top-down causation, the random bag of chemicals in my body would very unlikely to randomly go to the liquor store that’s four blocks away. Per quantum mechanics there’s a unbelievably small chance they’d all suddenly hop there. But effectively in the history of the universe, it never happens.
On the other hand, if in my head I say, “I need another bottle of scotch.” Basically it bubbles back down the stack and guess what? That bag of atoms gets dragged to the liquor store.
Gregg: That’s right.
Jim: That’s clearly a thing. I think this is what I think of as the meat of the matter, anyone who doesn’t think that the thought, I want to go to the liquor store, is part of the real world is just wrong. In fact, that one statement summarizes your book in a sentence.
Gregg: There you go. And I’m arguing that actually we can nest that argument in information process of communication networks that are then mediated by life, mind and cultural processes with different kinds of information languages. That’s where the meat of the action is, absolutely. And if we all had that as our grammar, we’d be in good shape.
Jim: And as you say, you put it in the full stack. It’s a full stack explanation,
Gregg: A full stack explanation.
Jim: And I like that. I like that lot. And you call it. Just so people know this, the worldview number C, scientific worldview C. Truthfully, I have never talking to Sean Carroll. I actually should have him on the show, but he is affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute, so it would not surprise me that if I push hard enough, we’d find that he’s a worldview c kind of guy, but I’m not sure.
Gregg: I think there’s a lot of ambiguity here, and I believe that the Tree of Knowledge and its description and contrasting that with one set of cones is the way to get at the vision logic difference between the different conceptions of causation that people have. And I would love to have those conversations, and I will make the case, of course, for the different credential cone model.
Jim: All right. I’ve been meaning to do this. I’m going to reach out to Sean Carroll, and I will challenge him with this. All right. Let’s move on a little bit into more philosophy.
Gregg: We can skip over this if you really want, Jim. No, I’m teasing.
Jim: Actually, I really want to go here. One of the reasons I do these podcasts is I learn about new rabbit holes to go down, and I’ve never heard of this dude Lawrence Cahoon before. And I’m not probably the only guy, because I was sniffing around today, say, “All right, who is this dude?” Well, he doesn’t have Wikipedia entry, but nor does he have a Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy entry. Trying to find much out about him is hard, actually, without actually going and reading his book, which I have ordered, by the way. So you’ve just either wasted five hours of my time or taught me something important here, which I’m going to get into. But you go into a really deep dive of Cahoonian, is that how you pronounce it? Cahoon?
Gregg: I believe so, yeah.
Jim: Cahoonian philosophy, as being strongly aligned with your work, and as far as you know, the guy doesn’t know about your work. Is that correct?
Gregg: Well, he didn’t, right. He published the Orders of Nature in 2014. He’s a philosopher. The entire book basically is an articulation from a philosopher saying, the general natural science view needs to be brought through the lens of, what he calls, systematic metaphysics. He critiques what he calls the Cartesian bipolar disorder of matter versus mind and argues that we should learn from natural science and emergence, but bring a particular philosophical view about concepts and categories and track the organization of nature. And he argues that there are five orders of nature.
The ground of what he calls the physical order grounds out in big bang and quantum field, that would correspond to what I call energy. Then he calls it the matter order, which basically corresponds to chemistry and the normal Newtonian world. Then he calls the living order, then the mental and cultural order. So he generated, as a philosopher, an analysis instead of matter versus mind, five orders of nature independently of either big history or my thought, and argued we’d need a systematic metaphysical picture, grounded in nature, grounded in science, for a big picture view to transcend matter versus mind.
He’s argument, he’s not super well known. He was president of the American Metaphysical Society in 2018. I actually found him at that time, had just read his book a year or whatever, reached out to him. We had a number of really positive conversations. I shared where I was coming from, from psychology, and the bottom line was the convergence between the two perspectives, a philosopher concerned with organizing the natural world and me as a psychologist and wondering about a big picture view of science that could hold psychology, came up with remarkably similar and parallel and convergent pictures.
Jim: Cool. Now, one thing I’m not sure about, and maybe I find something useful in Cahoon, or maybe he’s just confused, which is the distinction between physicalism and naturalism. Here’s one of his straw mans that he puts into the mouth of most scientific naturalists. “Naturalism is not metaphysical at all. Nature is what we are left with when we abandon metaphysics.” Yay. I’d suggest that physicalism might fit that definition, but not naturalism. Could you make that distinction between a physicalist and a naturalist?
Gregg: For me, the physicalist corresponds more to reductive physicalism and more of a weak, emergent position. The naturalism says, hey, the word physicalism, while everything that is living is also physical, life is not just physical and it’s not just a continuity of complexification. There’s actually a fundamental thing that I’m looking at at the organization of living that I need a biological scientist to map, and it’s not that we just don’t know it well enough. It’s actually sustained at the higher order, top-down level of information processing communication, and that’s where the pattern structure is ontologically in the world, you can’t dissipate it down, and you have to hold it at that level.
For me, what I’m saying is, if energy matter, life mind and culture are these different dimensions, to be a naturalist is to grab all of those to be of one world, but to say, basically, it’s a less reductive, more holistic stance is the short answer.
Jim: So you’d actually disagree with Cahoon where he’s trying to straw man the naturalist perspective. But I’m with you. As we said, the core sentence that explains everything you’re saying is that this non hard physics stuff is real, right? My desire to go to the liquor store is as real as this glass here that I’m taking a drink out of. They’re both equally real. They’re just different manifestations of reality, and they have a different organizational structure. So anyway-
Gregg: If you read his book, I’d be curious to see what you think.
Jim: I’ll definitely will. I mean, I bought it and I sniffed the introduction and I said, “Yeah, this would be interesting. It may piss me off, but it’ll be worth reading.” Now let’s move on to the next big move that Gregg makes. This boy likes the big stuff. He’s not screwing around here. You basically, I think you might actually be right. This is the scary thing, is that you’ve defined behavior as the central concept in the natural sciences. This is a gigantic claim, so let’s do it.
Gregg: All righty. What I will argue here is that the natural sciences emerge both ontologically, epistemologically and metaphysically, meaning the concepts and categories that science brings to bear. What does it mean to be a natural science? In some ways, Jim, this is super simple. What do you do as a natural science? I’m an observer and I’m going to model any number of different observers. The idea is the world’s out there. I can gather information about that world, data. I build models about the way the world unfolds, which means I’m going to identify entities in relationship to other things, nested across systems, see how they change, develop measurements of how they change, develop models of that change, and then develop theories and eliminate bad ideas and try to build off the better ones and get as accurate as possible, never foundationally knowing what exactly it is that I’m looking at.
What does that mean? It means you’ve got an observer tracking behavior that is potentially inter subjectively objective, meaning you have trained observers, learn how to measure entities and change. Then model, first describe those entities and then develop causal explanatory networks, and then do quasi-experimental, experimental kind of manipulation on entities, fields, and change. In other words, that’s the basic grammar that we’re going to do. Epistemologically, we’re going to set up an observer in relationship to the entities in field change, and then we’re going to say there are things in the world…
Gregg: … to the entities in field change. And then we’re going to say there are things in the world that are entities that sit in fields and they change. And the argument is that actually the periodic table of elements, well, it’s a bunch of atom structure, standard theory of elementary particles. Well, there’s a bunch of that, which cells, et cetera. These are entities. They have patterns of change. And the task of science is to delineate those. When you look at it that way, you’re like both, “That’s super common sense. And what the fuck?” There’s this central concept in science that is actually situated to be observed and as epistemologically and then mapped in the world.
Jim: And how would you say that adds a new lens or is different from how the sciences think that they’re doing things?
Gregg: Right. Well, as I say in the book, this is sort of a common sense, so it depends on how you emphasize it. My point is is that, where did the term behavior come from? My discipline, I write about this, it comes from John Watson. He introduces the term, and I want to highlight that John Watson introduces a term in a way that’s very confusing, that people surprisingly haven’t caught. He uses the term behavior to connect to the natural sciences, meaning biology and physics. He’s very explicit about that. And he says, “Because we’re structured to observe and track stimulus responses, that makes us just like other disciplines.” And indeed it is precisely because this concept is so aligned with the general framework of the rest of science that’s epistemology ontology, that the word behavior spreads down into behavioral biology and ultimately physics. It’s like, oh, the behavior of atoms, behavior of galaxies, physicists talk all the time.
Well, the term actually wasn’t around before John Watson. Physicists and biologists took that and now it became part of the natural lexicon. Why? Because Watson was pulling the basic epistemology ontology and then said, “Hey, we’re going to apply this to psychology.” But what then he didn’t do is realize that he had both absorbed an ontology. Actually Watson was one of these reductive physicalists. He thought everything was stimulus response reflexes. So, that’s one point. That’s the ontology and epistemology. But what he didn’t do is realize that if he’s going to call it behavior that he’s interested in, it’s the specific kind of behavior that a psychologist is interested in, just like it’s living behavior that a biologist is interested in or chemical behavior that a chemist is interested. And then you could say physics is sort of the interested behavior of the whole.
But the point of it is that if you’re going to do, he links the term behavior to what everyone’s doing and then the term behavior becomes specific because it actually gets contrasted to the mentalist. So, the term behavior is used to both link it to the rest of the sciences and then differentiate from the rest of the sciences. That’s a real problem with it. And I believe people have overlooked the origin of this term and its power, for a whole host of different reasons. And I’m trying to make a case that when we put on behavioral lens glasses, all of a sudden, the entire science language game comes online as a particular kind of knowing system.
Jim: When I read that, I got, “Wow, I like this.” And the reason is it gets to the distinction I like to make, I use it as my shorthand for what is the complexity lens, which is the difference between studying the dance and the dancers. And what we’re getting at here, and you make it quite explicitly in the book, is that understanding complex systems or frankly even fairly simple systems in the real world, are not just about their static structure, they’re about the dynamics, about what’s going on in terms of motion and change. And when you get the complexity where one thing influences something else, and as we know from our physics, even something as simple as the three-body problem in physics, three orbiting planets, you cannot actually describe that in closed form. So, you suddenly get off into this land where we can’t know things in a fundamental sense, and I think this is actually a very helpful move to my mind, is to encapsulate all interesting phenomena as behavior because it forces you to realize that structure and dynamics are intimately linked. Does that make sense to you?
Gregg: Totally. Totally. Exactly. In fact, I reference structure and I basically say a lot of people emphasize structure, but if you define behavior as entity field change, then the structure of entity, the structure of those relationships as static is already implied. But behavior captures dynamic and dynamic’s not inside of static. So, you can place static inside of dynamic. You can’t place dynamic inside of static. So, it creates a whole dynamic process view that can enable us to understand the utility of a reductive view when necessary. But it’s not going to be the complete picture and not really going to be able to see the dancing as opposed to the dancers.
Jim: Yeah, I think it also fits in nicely with another distinction. I think I picked this up from Dave Snowden, the difference between the complicated and the complex, where the complicated is something you can take apart, put it back together again and it still works. Like, for instance, a car that’s not running. The engine is not running. Do not try to take a car motor apart while it’s running.
On the other hand, a human body, if you took it apart and put it back together again, it ain’t going to work. And the reason is the human body is involved in a whole million varieties of dynamics that keep it running. And so I think that also fits nicely. It is very congruent with the distinction between complicated and complex.
Gregg: Absolutely.
Jim: And all kinds of interesting things here we’re going to have to jump over in the interests of time including, I was going to say something nice about Descartes, because I’m going to have to do it just because we dump on Descartes so much.
The last math course I took in high school was analytical geometry. It was pretty odd that we had a whole course, almost the whole course on analytical geography, a little bit of calculus at the end. But I loved analytical geometry. In fact, that reinforced my naive Newtonianism probably. And Descartes invented analytical geometry, for what its worth.
But anyway, let’s move on to a big point here, and this is maybe our biggest disagreement, but maybe not. Maybe I just need to understand what you’re saying better, which is I think you are saying that there is a distinction around scientific method such that the scientific method… Not the scientific method, I’m not sure what my right words are here, that phenomenology is not susceptible to the exterior method of study.
Gregg: Okay. All right. Yeah. So, we have the exterior behavioral view, and throughout the book, one of the big points I’m making is that there are two major epistemological positions, say, exterior from without, which affords the observer that can be interchanged to see behavior. Then there’s the view from within, mind two, we’ll talk about it at some bit, which is your subjective conscious experience from behind your eyes, which can’t be directly observed. Now, what I am saying is you commit to a science language game, which I do, as a scientist, it is not impossible to gain access, but it’s indirect access to the first-person phenomenological experience of being. I am a big fan of global neuronal workspace theory. That’s a wonderful way to now analyze what I would call mind two. At the same time, the nature of what we’re getting at is through the veil of behavior physiology and we’re modeling. We don’t have direct observational access to a first-person subjective conscious experience of being. That’s all.
Jim: Okay, let me drill into that a little bit. I do read a lot in the science of consciousness for instance, and they have a methodological position, at least most of them do, which is that firsthand reports of phenomenology have probative value. And of course, we also know that there’s more and more, some of it dubious, but some of it useful, things like the neural correlations of consciousness. And we also know that there’s studies of brain rhythms and how those might well be implicated in the emergence of mind two, et cetera. And so I’m not at all sure that this line between exterior and interior rules out very much about the study of phenomenology.
Gregg: Well, I think it depends on what you mean by rule out. If there’s a position that we take and then we’re going to develop a particular way of understanding the behavioral view of the world that allows us to infer what’s actually happening. Like there’s a P3 ignition-ship wave if you follow global neuronal workspace, whereby the parietal and the frontal lobe are corresponding and we see a neurocognitive correlate and that gives us wonderful knowledge. And I love the modeling that goes on in relationship to the kind of way in which my consciousness, through the kind of studies, can be understood scientifically. I’m not opposed to that at all.
What I will say is the way in which it’s going to be mapped by science is fundamentally different than the way in which certain other kinds of behavioral processes will be mapped because of the nature of the epistemological gap. That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think, not too many people actually disagree with this as far as I see. I mean, people like David Chalmers and the hard problem emphasize aspects of the epistemological stuff, the whole problem of psychology. It’s like, well, how are we going to get our hand? Behaviorism emerges. The early cognitive science stuff avoided consciousness. The reason we’re only starting with consciousness studies now is because of brain imaging techniques and the difficulty that we have in accessing it. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I am saying it’s a different kind of… It’s a vector of epistemological awareness or knowing that is opposite to the standard scientific view. And that makes it challenging.
Jim: I think that one of the reasons it’s challenging is yet we… And this is to be clear, I guess we’ll talk about it here, why not? Chalmers and the hard problem, the idea of we don’t really know why the redness of an apple has that qualitative qualia feel to it yet. That problem has not yet been solved.
Gregg: Right. I call that the neurobiological engineering mechanism binding problem, which is basically, yes, we don’t know the mechanism, but the fact that we can’t see redness and really don’t, that’s part of our epistemological problem. And he is like, “How the hell are you getting access to that?” So, there’s two issues there, I argue. In fact, I come along with a third later on and then place it in a historical unique context. And I’m actually going to generate the word psyche for your unique historical, particular subjective, qualitative experience of being, which is a totally different kind of knowing than science. I don’t think that’s a problem. I just think we should know that we don’t necessarily have to have all the same kind of epistemological knowing systems. We want to interrelate them.
Jim: Yeah. I suspect, obviously can’t prove, that we actually will solve the so-called hard problem. In fact, I’m going to have Anil Seth on soon and he redefines the hard problem for it to be the not-so-hard or the not-quite-as-hard problem as we thought it was problem. And he points towards a possible solution. And once we do, I think, I suspect, again, this is all just supposition, that it’ll be as revolutionary as understanding the linkage between biochemistry and life was to allow us to no longer think about life as this black box, which we just don’t understand. Once we understand the mechanisms that give rise to phenomenology and the quality of our brain imaging continues to go up, it’s like right now, they claim, they, whoever they is, that under certain circumstances, if you’re thinking about a daisy, they can scan your brain live and say, “He’s thinking about a daisy.” As that continues to improve in resolution and we understand the mechanisms for the emergence phenomenology and what it actually is, which I have a few theories about we can talk about over a beer, then this distinction will just gradually go away and we will fully naturalize the first-person perspective.
Gregg: When we get onto the book, I have a entire chapter on mind two subjective conscious experience in animals and humans. I’m simply saying it is a hard ontological problem at the mechanism level. It’s hard epistemologically because of the language game of science. It’s not impossible. We’re making progress, absolutely. I do make then a further distinction between the unique psyche and the general phenomenon of mind two. But that’s another issue. I’m trying to give us a vocabulary that’s very useful to cut through a lot of equivocation crap.
Jim: Yep. I agree that particularly the distinction between mind one, mind two, and mind three is very, very helpful. And the discussions I have with people about the science of consciousness, oh my God, how much time would be saved if everybody just used those three? So, there we go.
Now, let’s move on to the even more audacious idea that Gregg has. I think it’s the most audacious one in the book, but we’ll see. When I do the prep for part three, we’re going to give it away here that ain’t no way we’re squeezing all this whole book in even two episodes, there’s going to be a third episode. So far, my prep tells me that this is the most audacious idea yet. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like mind-twisting. And after reading it I go, “Damn. He might be right.” Or at least it’s useful. And regular listeners know that the gold standard in the Rutt world is is it useful? And that is the periodic table of behavior. Drum roll. With that kind of somewhat hyperbolic introduction, tell us what the periodic table of behavior is.
Gregg: Lovely. Okay, so the periodic table of behavior, it’s a building off of the tree of knowledge system. As I ask those questions, well, what are those cones? I was basically, what emerged over years, I don’t develop the periodic table of behavior until like 2016, ’17. First published on it in 2019 in the literature in several different articles I write.
But anyway, so what I realize is, well, these cones are growing, so there’s an emergence of complexity. They also then, it’s not that they represent complexity, it’s that they represent complexification. What is complexity? Well, complexity emerges across aggregates. So, when you get groups that stick together, like all those water molecules that make a river, that’s a particular kind of emergence of complexity. And then there’s this complexification that happens when you get a part jumping up to a whole and then those wholes go into groups. That’s what I call levels of complexification. And then there’s this big jump in the dimensions.
So, there’s actually three different kinds of complexification that are easy to identify, aggregates, levels within a dimension, and then the jump between the dimensions. And then I noticed something really clear when I was looking at the organization of the entities that characterize the matter, life, mind, and culture dimensions. That is that there are core entities that organize them. The most obvious entity that organizes the matter dimensions is the atom. In fact, I think it is Feynman who says, “If there was one sentence that we could say that science has discovered, that is, if anything is true, it’s the argument that the material dimension of complexity,” using my term, “is made up of atoms and the atomic theory of matter.” And then if you move to life, it’s obvious that cytology is a science of cells or cell theory. The argument that the core unit or central structure of living organism is a cell was obvious. If you move up to minded animals, well, the animals, the core fundamental unit there and that the culture person plane of existence, you have persons, a person or persons that are the fundamental unit.
What then I saw then was that each one of the dimensions of complexification at a primary unit of organization, and from there I could go down at the level of, say, from an atom to a particle. So, there were parts that made up that core and that would go down a level. And then I could go up a level to create groups so that when a atom organizes itself into a molecule, they get stabilized too. And then I jump over to the cell dimension, I could go down. There are lots of different kinds of parts of cells, but in particular, once you hone in on an information processing, you’re like, “Oh well, the gene is a really important part,” especially I’m emphasizing the evolution of complexification.
And of course, cells jump together like the eukaryotic cell, if you want to call that a, well, it’s a partial multi-cell, it’s a complexified cell. But then of course, they set the stage for a multi-cell. There’s also cells that aggregate the colonies. So, the point of it is you go from a part down to a group up and then there’s aggregates across scale. But what emerges then, the same thing in animals. You drop down to neural information networks, neural networks. It’s the part that are making up the coordinated animal. Of course, animals get into families, they then get herds, they get into groups. And then you jump one up to the culture and you get a unit of justification. That was the fundamental unit of human information processing. Human persons justifying at individual small-scale levels. And then of course, they go into groups, a multiplicity of groups, and you get the explosion of the human society or multi-culture. We talk about the difference between culture and society.
But the point of it is is that you get a 12-step layering system of complexification because each unit, each of the floor is a core. We go down one, you go up one. When you do that as a 12 floors of organization that I say correspond very tightly to major categorizations in science, at least on this scale of complexification. There are other sciences like geology, cosmology, that are more on the aggregate scale. But this unit, tight unit of complexification across these 12 different floors gives me a nice cool map to organize the unfolding behavioral frequencies.
Jim: Yeah, I love this. I can see why you decided to call it the periodic table because this level of analysis and then the induction that came from it is not dissimilar to Mendeleev’s thinking, right? He saw all these things and they were kind of just isolated facts and isolated, and then beginnings and ways of describing pieces. And then he had this aha moment, one of the great ideas in the history of science. I think most people don’t understand how fundamental the periodic table is.
Gregg: Totally.
Jim: Not just the chemistry, but the physics and the biology. It’s huge, right?
Gregg: Oh, it’s absolutely central.
Jim: So, it’s interesting. I think you’re trying to make a move here that’s very similar. But now, let’s do the really interesting part, which is okay, he gets this idea of all this underlying phenomenon, turns it into a periodic table and then he populates it with different elements, which it was one of the great holy shit breakthroughs. Why don’t you start populating your 12 floors with sciences?
Gregg: Right. Okay. On the first floor, I argue that the core, as far as we know, ground of this before the material dimensions, there’s an energy information implicate order that the periodic table of behavior, which is tracking entities and fields. This is how entities, fields, all collapse together. And God only knows what the initial state is. I call it stuff or an energy information implicate order. Out of that, then comes the emergence of particles and this then-
Jim: Yeah, let’s try to name the science that studies these things too. Because if I think of the periodic table of behavior, it starts to look more like the chemistry one if we have sciences in the boxes.
Gregg: Right. Okay, good. So, then we have particle physics in box one. We have atomic physics in box two. Chemistry in box three. Then you have genetics, and then you jump over into life, drop down to the life and genetics as the primary emphasis of the part. You could also do molecular biology.
Jim: Yeah, metabolism without-
Gregg: Things like metabolism, exactly.
Jim: Yeah. You need both genetics and metabolism to have life.
Gregg: Fair enough. So, I emphasize one part, molecular biology would be, but genetics then, genetics/molecular biology, then cytology, which is a science of cells. And then really the science of organisms is sort of like biology, but I emphasize then multicellular organisms, like botany and mycology, for box six, that’s the science of plants and the science of fungi.
Jim: And the distinction there is this is before neurons have showed up.
Gregg: Before neurons have showed up. So, you have multicellular kingdoms that engage in all sorts of complex behavior patterns, but they’re not mediated by a nervous system. Now, you jump over to floor seven, that’s the base of mindedness and you get the neural networks and the people that study neural networks are neuroscientists. And then how neural networks sync up, you get a cognitive neuroscience that then is trying to explain the behavior of animals as a whole. I would argue then you get animal behavioral science, which I argue should be basic psychology, comparative psychology or ethology at floor eight. Then you jump up to social behavior of animals, sociobiology, which would be interesting. So, with E.O. Wilson now being placed in the minded dimension. We could see how he’s happy about that or not. But anyway, you get behavioral ecology, groups of animal behavior or sociobiology on floor nine.
Then you jump over and you’re now in the culture person dimension. The ground of that, the core unit of that is argued to be sort of linguistics, justification, core reasoning processes of human cognition. Cognitive science would be the primary floor. John Vervaeke coming in here at the base of this, about what gives rise to human aging arena relations of the core structure. Up one is human psychology, that’s personality, developmental psychology, and family psychology, social psychology. That then creates the individual person in a small group justificatory context. And then ultimately, you jump up into the social sciences, you get a cultural anthropology is the ground of that. And then of course, culturals are starting to build lots of technologies. You get into sociology, economics, and political science. Because now we’re going to build technologies that regulate societies that actually bridges us off the periodic table of behavior because it’s about natural behaviors into things like technology. But nonetheless, we’re going to have sociology, political science and economics as the regulatory structures of macroscopic group, human group formulation.
Jim: Yeah, very interesting. It does sort of work, though I’m also going to suggest it’s a little bit like that famous New Yorker cartoon that says the view of the United States from Manhattan, basically, or from the Upper East side, I think maybe it was, and it showed the Central Park and the Upper West Side and Harlem and then Brooklyn a little smaller. But it was still about this point, about two-third, half the map and then the Hudson River. And then the far parts of it was like the flyover region and California or something. Very thin little slices, because I count here, you have four out of the 12 being what is today encapsulated within psychology. And you have all of social science above psychology in one box.
Gregg: That’s a very reasonable critique. And I think, I want to be clear, I want to be clear, repeatedly clear, that the unified theory is born out of American psychology and it sits, as we all do, in a particular perspective, that it specializes and emphasizes certain key elements. I find myself nested in a set of problems and it is skewed through a particular kind of lens.
I also am very clear that we have to wonder about how psychology should be defined. 95% of psychologies these days are working with humans. 60%, I think, or 70% are on the psychological doctor side. So, there’s an entire way the institution has moved that’s quite different from what I’m proposing. I’m very clear about that. And this is a problem we need to navigate.
But what I am saying is I see this logic, and if in the 1850s when we were proposing mental evolution and that psychologists were concerned with the mental evolution of minded animals, if they had grabbed a hold of this, I think this thing could have evolved exactly with an enormous amount of coherence and integrity. That’s what I’m highlighting. The ontology is what it is. Let’s organize our structures accordingly now that we have a framework for resolving what is often missed in the life-to-mind joint point and the mind-to-culture joint point that allows us this differentiation to show what mental behavior is in the world.
Jim: Cool. All right. Let’s move on to a nice example you give, which is someone goes to a furniture store and is looking-
Jim: … you give, which is, someone goes to a furniture store and is looking to possibly buy a table. You say that this example aligns with a famous analysis by Arthur Edington, and the two tables paradox.
Gregg: Right. So Edington was one of the early physicists in the early 20th century, was one of the few people, according to him, that understood design science, general relativity, also tracked some of the emergence of the way atomic physics into quantum mechanics was beginning. I’m not sure exactly, I think, in the 1920s he’s giving this. What he says in this example is, hey, the world at the table looks radically different to my everyday phenomenology. My experience of being, hey, here’s a desk. If I then bring a scientific lens to that, it looks totally different. It’s like this is mostly empty space made up of electrical charges that are all in constant dynamic motion in relationship to each other.
What I play off of there is I can then say, okay, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to put on my periodic table of behavioral glasses, and afford us an opportunity to map this man observing the table through this macroscopic science structure, which begins at things like energy into photons and electrons and then moves up into atoms, molecules, and then places the individual acting on the table through language like man to behavior and justification.
Jim: Got you. All right. And I think what’s important about this is, again, these boxes are not in isolation. One includes the other, and that’s one of the key takeaways here. All right, let’s now move on to a little further a field, which, I think, you called defining mental processes and grounding the domains in metatheory, and then mental behaviors and the map of mind, one, two, three. This was an interesting chapter, and one that’s kind of all over the place. Let’s see if we can try to bring some structure to your thinking up there. Which is one of the things you talked about is a guy named Clark Hull, and his holdings. Let’s start with that. Keep it short, because we’re getting short on time.
Gregg: Yep. Sure. So, anyway, I want to now pick up the mantle from behaviorism, and I dropped down into science, come back up, give you this map. What I’ve tried to do here ultimately is books about mapping science, behavior, and mental process. What I’ve tried to say is, okay, I’ve now actually grabbed a hold of science and behavioral, map that for you, and now I want to pick up the ball again and say, here’s behavioral psychology. Clark Hull, in the 1940s, a major behavioral figure, wrote Principles of Behavior. I quote from that. I pick up to John Watson, and I just show that he’s got a particular epistemological angle, and a particular way of thinking. Okay. I then bridge from that to the emergence of the cognitive revolution in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, where we start to really build models of information processing. And this sets the stage for what mostly people date the cognitive revolution in psychology in the 1950s.
But a fundamental shift happens, Jim, that you’re well aware of, whereby we go from, you can’t talk anything about the black box, and you can just do physiological research on it from a brain-based perspective, to say, no, shit. This system is a neuro information processing system. We can now build stuff that compute stuff, and then we can model that computing with artificial intelligence in the way the mind works as a computational information processing system. And so I trail that. I articulate the emergence of cybernetic artificial intelligence, and then trail that history, ultimately get into modern four incognitive science, and explain the different meanings of cognition, building off of the behavioral contrast, both in terms of neuro information processing, and then more embodied, enacted, embedded, extended mind stuff that emerges in relationship to cognitive science. And that’s going to set me up to say what the tree of knowledge and periodic tables say about behavior as minded behavior, minded animals.
Jim: All right. That’s a big good compression, but let’s now dig in a little bit into the influence that cybernetics and systems thinking had, which then rolls over into the cognitive science revolution. Let’s go into those two in a little bit more depth.
Gregg: Exactly. So cybernetic emerges, and really flies across the scene from 1943, 1953. It’s a super exciting theorem, the cybernetic sort of relates to governance, and it’s the way a control system works. And what they started to build, which I think I wish this had really continued, was an information feedback system, a negative feedback system where they could build a particular reference goal. They’d have an indicator, they’d have an output mechanism, and they could show that they could basically build a way a system could regulate. A super simple example of a cybernetic system is your speed control, your cruise control in your car. You set it for 75, and then as it goes lower than that, it adds gas as it goes over and that the gas comes off, it maintains a control structure. And this then connected to all sorts of ways in which systems might be having nested cybernetic hierarchies. And then what a system was, it gave rise to system science. The cool thing with of cybernetics was this is an integrative model that could apply to all sorts of different elements.
The dangerous thing was it was this integrative model, and in many ways, Norbert Wiener, and other people. There’s this whole history about how it got ripped apart, sort of broke. And another thing that was happening is they started to build computational modeling structures through computer systems, which have just input output recursive. And those things took off in terms of trying to solve artificial and problems. So cybernetic, generally, it dissipates in terms of its influence. And one of the things about it is that you see the early stuff and trying to embed the mind as a behavioral entity, meaning that it’s embedded in the environment, it’s got to make sensory motor choices. But when you break it out and say, okay, I’m going to try to use a computational system to solve a chess problem, you have now disembodied the mind, and just turned it into a recursive computational structure.
Now, that was super exciting. Computers were super useful, but then that came to dominate the way people thought of mind artificial computational intelligence as a pure information disembodied processing system. And then what you get ultimately is the return to 4E cognitive sciences, basically. No, we got to put the mind information processing back in the neuro and the embodiment and the behavioral acting system.
Jim: This is actually a very important distinction. And some of the work I do is involved with this, which is the original cognitive science model was, I think, significantly formed by Shannon’s information theory, and the rise of the digital computer and tried to stuff even human cognition into the model of computer processors talking to each other over wide bandwidth protocols. And it’s just not actually so. It’s analog, it’s asynchronous, it’s highly parallel, it’s a lot of things. And it’s, of course, embodied as it turns out and embedded.
Gregg: It’s alive and then minded.
Jim: Yeah. And which, of course, is nice to point back to your argument is that yes, there’s something kind of a bit like computer information processing at the top, but it’s fully embedded in everything else.
Gregg: Totally.
Jim: Right.
Gregg: That’s exactly my point.
Jim: I mean, not that the early cognitive science thinking was bad, but it was very substantially incomplete until it’s now been extended into first embodied, and now four e-cognitive science. So tell us what 4E cognitive science is?
Gregg: So, basically, what happens is you have this disembodied structure of computation, and the 4E cognitive science is starting a bunch of research that starts to show, hey, the way we think about the world, if I’m going to look up to you, I’m going to move away from you. You notice that actually what we’re doing is, I don’t really mean, I’m going to have to look down and look up, it’s a metaphor. It’s a way in which I enact on myself on the world. So 4E stands for I’m embodied, meaning, hey, you’re living, okay. You’re enacting, meaning you’re behaving. I’m acting on the environment in a sensory motor loop system. Okay. I’m embedded in the environment developmentally, and my mind can be extended. I’ll give you an example that they talk about what’s extended, and then this get raises questions about what you mean by the mine. So most people would say, if I’m going off to the grocery store, and I’m trying to remember, I got tomatoes, I got onions, I got bread.
And you go through that list, and you tell yourself, that’s all sort of within the mind. But then the argument was, well, if you write it out, and you have a list there in the environment, and then you use that to interface, isn’t that a kind of extended memory? And so there’s this big debate about where the mind is, and basically I argue that actually what the 4E cognitive science people are saying, they’re seeing mindedness as a complex adaptive systemic network. The traditional cognitive neuroscientists are seeing mind as an information processing takes place within the nervous system. I’m going to bring a map of mind that defines, shows you where both of those are and resolves what is now an emerging debate in activist interventions by Gallagher in 2018 is basically saying, hey, we’ve got to redefine the mind. What I’m saying is actually what he’s pointing to is mindedness. And we can place the mind and mindedness and really get a good, nice resolution between the 4E cognitive science people and the traditional cognitive neuroscientists.
Jim: Yeah. Let’s go with that a little bit. Where does Google fit into this model or Chat GPT, or at a more mundane level, the calculator or the nav device on your car, right? Go with that.
Gregg: Sure. Okay. Well, I’m trying to map natural behavior. So as soon as you’re in a technological structure, you’re building off of a different kind of evolutionary trajectory, the trajectory of technology and the processing. Now, the issue is there’s a now functional analogy, which is the fact that we’re both talking about in both cases there’s an informational recursivity, and a computational process that has an input output functional relation. So there are the analogous structures, they’re mediated by different elements. And then we can wonder about, well, what is the actual identity? Well, there’s an identity around certain functional analogies. There’s a dis-identity in relation to mediation, and, of course, lots, of different things. We still don’t have computers that are both playing chess and swimming at the same time, or at least sequentially. So there’s all this capacity that we humans have. I mean, a century from now, if we build robotic humanoids that are moving around, and doing all things completely functionally equivalently, that’ll be an interesting thing. They still won’t be minded in my definition, but they’ll be functionally equivalent potentially. Absolutely.
Jim: What I was getting at was something different.
Gregg: I’m sorry.
Jim: Which is, if I’m here as an embedded human cognitive thingy, I’m also using Google in real time. Right?
Gregg: Oh, right.
Jim: In fact, I actually use Google three times during our podcast. Looking things up. Right? Like, how many neurons were there in C. Elegans? Was it 307, turned out it was 302.
Gregg: 302. Right.
Jim: You knew, right? But I didn’t, so I knew it was the 300s, and a couple other ones. So in some sense, my use of Google is now become an extended part.
Gregg: I misconstrued you. I’m sorry. Yes. But absolutely, that’s one of the things about the human condition. The fact that we’re in these minded extended and acting systems that we can then engage in what I call information interface with new computational technologies totally extends our computational capacity. And that’s going to embed our mindedness capacities all that much further. That’s the nature of them. We’re now interfacing with them. When we’re doing mindedness structures. There’s a technical dimension, but then there’s the extended dimension that this is pointing to. And that’s absolutely the case.
Jim: And that’s going to get stronger and stronger over time.
Gregg: Well, that’s when we get into the fifth joint point, Jim.
Jim: Exactly. Exactly. Well, I don’t know, hopefully, we’ll have time to do that in a little bit. Okay. Look over the horizon next time. So let’s wrap up here. We’re coming up on our time. With your map of mind, where you basically lay out a five part model.
Gregg: Exactly. And I’ve already delineated the three main parts. So one is neurocognitive activity, the second is subjective conscious experience of being. The third is self-conscious justification. So these are the various sort of ontological layers, but as we’ve talked about, they’re different epistemological vectors that allow you different kinds of access to them. So we can take a videotape like we’ve done here. We’ve videotaped ourselves, we have access to our moving around. Okay. Overt activity is called mind one B. That’s the overt-minded behavior that you can film with a camera. The neurocognitive activity is the information instantiated within and organized by the nervous system. That’s mind one A together that meets up the suite of mind one mindedness. And I use the example of a praying mantis. I describe a praying mantis on the hunt. I describe it with riches in detail, praying mantis is tracking shit.
And then there’s a complicated neurocognitive architecture and a complicated segmented body. And I argue that’s an example of mind one, that’s a full mind one. Then I ask the question, hey, is it this something that there’s like to be a praying mantis? And my answer is nobody knows yet. Okay, I’m of the opinion that may well have flashes of sensory experience in pleasure and pain. That would make sense. There’s arguments I make later in the book that justify that. But that would be mine too. The extent to which there is a subject of conscious experience of being for a praying mantis. I use the example because it exhibits all the functional awareness and responsivity of a mind one, and has a brain and activity. And we know a fair amount about it. I’ve studied that for a little while.
It’s a fascinating research topic, but we don’t know about mind two. We can, because of all the stuff you talk about, and feel very strongly that my dog Benji has mind two. That means that there is a fundamental experience of perception, motivational drive, emotion, and deliberation that’s going on inside of a higher order mammal. Later chapters describe where I think causally that, how that makes sense and arises in nature. But fundamentally the point of it is that’s a different reference, and we need the vocabulary, and it’s a different epistemological vantage point. As much as I love my dog, I still don’t know exactly what it’s like to be him. And then finally, I can tell you what it’s like to be me, Jim, and you can get a sense of that through mind three, my justification system when I make it public, that’s mind three B, when I tell myself privately how is this going and have thoughts that I want to maintain privately to myself, that’s mine three A, that’s my ego talking to myself versus my persona and what I am justifying to you publicly.
So mind three B’s public out here, verbal mind three A’s inside me talking to myself, mind two behind my eyes, and then mind one is my neurocognitive structure inside mind one A, and then what you see me do is my minded behavioral patterns.
Jim: Yeah, that’s good. I’ve got just a couple of minutes here. I’m just going to explore something I’m personally been fascinated by, and there’s less about it in the literature than I would like. And that is, let’s call mind three A, and the topic is internal talk. I have a feeling that we don’t rank internal talk quite as importantly as we should. Or maybe I missed that literature. What’s the literature about using justification type architectures inside our own head? I think we’re pretty clear that my dog doesn’t have a muttering dialogue in his head today saying, God dammit, I don’t like that dry dog food you gave me this morning. Why can’t I have my canned? That’s not happening inside the head of a dog. But an analogous conversation might go on about the lunch somebody brought to me. Right?
Gregg: Totally.
Jim: So talk about mind three A and internal talk.
Gregg: Lovely. Well, the first thing we could say is actually there have been some studies done on the extent to which people experience this and engage in their internal processes, either through monologue, dialogue, I mean sort of images in their head. Interestingly, five to 10% of people very rarely do this. So one thing’s worth noting is there’s big individual differences about how much internal monologue people engage in. With not a completely insignificant percentage of people doing it very rarely. I would really like to research the implications of people that do this rarely or not. What I will say is this, although depending on how you define the research as a clinician, I got trained in Becky and cognitive psychotherapy. The fundamental insight of Becky and cognitive therapy is the ticker tape of self-talk, and the implication it has for how you feel in what you do.
This cognitive and cognitive therapy is your internal atory system. The process by which you make attritions, explanations, anticipate events, and the impact that that has on your feeling and what you do. And it’s says, really, it’s a study of whether or not that’s adaptive, whether it’s accurate in helpful thinking or inaccurate and unhelpful thinking is the entire therapeutic enterprise. And so the whole idea that you go around with a self-concept, and wonder what you think about yourself and your self-esteem, clinically, is super important. And the concept of the ego is what we use often to describe it. I describe the kind of psychotherapy I do is ego-based psychotherapy that dynamically, and I don’t mean that psychodynamically, just the way it changes and operates and filters and tries to project out into the world in a way that feels comfortable. Well, that structure is super important in the psychotherapy enterprise.
Jim: Yeah, very interesting. I have also read that some measurable, but a small percentage of people at least claim to have no internal talk. And I go, how the fuck could that be? Right? Because I will say, everything I’ve ever done in my life that was interesting. Most of the big breakthroughs came from going for a walk and thinking about it, or being in the shower, going for a swim, or driving a mindless route that I’ve done a thousand times, driving from Stanton to Harrisonburg, God dammit, up 81, right? And it’s this very intricate little dance of one idea leading to the other, then feeding back. And whether it’s actually in words or not, I’m not entirely sure, had a conversation with Ray Jackendoff about this one time. And of course he’s a strong proponent, there’s something mentalese, which is different than language. I’m not sure I buy that. I think it’s more like language.
But anyway, yeah, the idea of not doing that, that’s just kind of mind-boggling. On the other hand, I have also read that one of the core, at least phenotypes of depression is what’s called morbid remuneration, whatever the fuck it is.
Gregg: Rumination.
Jim: Rumination. Morbid rumination, where people are just thinking about themselves and their problems and all that sort of shit. I must say I never do that. I don’t give two fucks, right? If I’ve got problems, I’ll deal with them. If someone’s giving me shit, I’ll punch him. Right? I’m not one to morbidly ruminate about anything. But I could see how that if you got caught in that loop, it could keep you from doing all that good kind of internal talk that I enjoy doing so much.
Gregg: Exactly. Well, right. There’s talk and in that kind we don’t mean, oh, I’m aware of myself, and wondering what’s going on in the world. It means there’s a spotlight that I don’t want, and I’m worried about. I feel vulnerable, and I need to worry about what’s going to happen to me. It’s a feature of trait neuroticism. You’re pretty low on trait neuroticism, so that line of psychic activity is not going to be high, but people who are high in trait neuroticism are going to have that self-conscious vulnerability. For sure.
Jim: Yeah. It’s funny, when I took the big five tests, was it last year or the year before? I actually scored at the hundredth percentile of anti-neurotic.
Gregg: Okay. Well.
Jim: I had some other high scores for disagreeableness. I think I was 98.
Gregg: Extroversion. I think you’d be up there.
Jim: Yeah, I was way up there on extroversion and also on openness. Those were the ones I was very high on and lowest possible on neuroticism. But anyway, I can understand though, morbid blah, blah, blah, blah, and thinking in your internal thoughts and doing most of your good work there. But man, I can’t envision somebody that isn’t having something going on in their head.
Gregg: Well, I want to be clear. What they don’t have is just they basically do all of their thinking and perceptual reasoning imagining. So they certainly think they have an internal mental life, but the active portion of their thinking is image-based rotation and intuitive, non-symbolic thought.
Jim: Oh, okay.
Gregg: And that’s different then, so that’s the issue. It’s just not a talking kind of thought. There’s certainly stuff going on inside their head.
Jim: Okay. Okay, good. Okay. Okay. Good. Good. Okay. That’s good. That helps me be a little bit clear about this, not just be going, what the fuck? Because, for instance, what you’re describing there is Einstein, right?
Gregg: Right.
Jim: Famously said that he thought in terms of geometry, right? Yeah. And he was famously not that good a mathematician. He’d have to had other people helping with his math, including his wife. And there’s a lot of controversy about to what degree did he steal some of his best ideas from his wife. But who the hell knows. Anyway, this has been another great conversation, and we will have you back in a couple of days for part three.
Gregg: Alrighty. Woo-hoo.