The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Alexander Bard. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Alexander Bard. Alexander is an author, a lecturer, an artist, a songwriter, a music producer, a TV personality, and a religious and political activist. What a list, amazing polymath, and he is one of the founders of the synthiest religious movement. And if you want to learn more about this young fellow, he’s appeared widely in YouTube videos, podcasts, and such. Welcome back, Alexander.
Alexander: Thank you for having me. Jim Rutt, you lead the tango and I follow.
Jim: This will be fun. This is Alexander’s third appearance. He appeared in Currents 065, where we talked about protopian narratology, is a mouthful. And then in EP 95 where we talked about God in the internet age, where we talked quite a bit about this synthiest religion. Both of those were quite interesting episodes and as always links to those episodes will be on our episode page at Jimruttshow.com.
Today, we’re going to talk from at least a book by Alexander and his co-author, Jan Söderqvist, who seems to be the invisible man behind Alexander Bard. Nobody ever sees him, but he’s been the co-author on I think all your books.
Alexander: He’s quite a public figure in Scandinavia to be honest about it. It’s just that I’m probably more visual internationally because of my background in the music industry and my celebrity status. But Jan is quite well known in Sweden too.
Jim: Ah, great. So anyway, and I’m sure we’ll drift off into other topics, but we’re going to talk about the book Process and Event. Let me talk about the book a little bit. It’s a big, thick and chewy book, not for the faint of heart. In fact, I tried reading it a year ago and I just got annoyed and threw it against the wall after about a third of the way in.
But I said, dammit, I’m going to make the effort. So this year I geared up and dug in, and as listeners know, I typically spend about 10 hours of prep on each podcast, including reading a book if there is one. Took me 25 hours to read this book. It’s 560 pages of main text, 40 pages of glossary. And the terms are used in very specific ways, and there are several neologians, or at least repurposing of rare phrases. I found myself reading the book on my iPad while having my glossary open on my iPhone.
Alexander: That’s the way to do it, Jim Rutt, you should give lectures on how to read our fucking books. Because this is the kind of book you write believing that nobody’s going to get what we’re doing until at least 50 years after we’re dead. So I’m honored to have Jim Rutt himself personally involved in this project.
Jim: That’s good, that’s fun. And I will recommend that. If people want to read, I actually tried printing out the glossary first, but the too much flipping around, having the phone in one hand and the iPad and the other was the way to do it. Now, I will say and complain mildly that you don’t have a Kindle version yet, but you kindly did send me an Acrobat version. So, I had that on my iPad and I had extracted out the glossary and put it in a separate document so I could keep them separately. But you guys really should get a Kindle version.
Alexander: Well, the thing is that Jan and I are actually involved in a startup in Scandinavia called Aniara that’s about to revolutionize the book publishing industry. So I come to you and you’re a bestselling author and I said, “So you’ve written this crime novel, it’s been translated to six languages. Why isn’t it available in Swahili on the Kindle?”
And they will just tell them, “Aniara will do it for you in two seconds.” So basically, the idea is to use AI to distribute text in any language, any format you like. So, Jan and I got involved in startup last year and it’s really about happen. We even moved the rights to own six books to this company. So you are absolutely right, but all of those things will be available very soon.
And I think accessibility for text in general, I think it’s the next big revolution. And as far as the book publishing industry is concerned, I’d be happy to kill it.
Jim: Indeed, they are some parasitic motherfuckers. I actually started out in the book publishing business, so I know from the inside. So anyway, this is a big thick book and even though we are going to go into considerable depth here in two episodes, there’s considerably more depth in the book, which I inevitably will have to skip over or summarize or just completely ignore. And if you really want to get it all, you should read the book and there’ll be a link to the book on the episode page. Again, at Jimruttshow.com.
As I indicated, this is a philosophical book that takes words seriously. So we’re going to ask Alexander to define his terms as we go, as they come up, typically for the first time. But there’s five terms that I have extracted that I think are of sufficiently general importance to this book. I’m going to ask him to define upfront.
So, let’s start with the first metaphysics. You guys use metaphysics in a somewhat different way than I would. I typically would use it in the way Aristotle or Kant might. You take a little bit broader meaning. Could you tell us what you mean when you say metaphysics?
Alexander: Well, we firmly believe that human beings, and we are human beings who express ourselves as human beings to other human beings who we’re in dialogue with. We firmly believe that human beings fundamentally do storytelling. I think storytelling is the fundamental aspect of what it means to be human.
We talk with ourselves that we call the thinking and we talk to child and have conversations, but it’s fundamentally storytelling. And our philosophy in this regard is called narratology, so our metaphysics is narratological. Now, that means that when we’re going to do narratologist metaphysics, we also have to redefine metaphysics itself. You’re absolutely right.
So what we’re doing, basically, we’re just thinking metaphysics is the ultimate form of storytelling about storytelling. You could call it meta-storytelling in our case, if you like. So what are the different types of stories human beings tell about themselves and each other, and what are the purposes of those stories? And then we had to respect that process.
And we arrive with a model which is very close to Hegel, one of our idols of course. And in Hegel’s model, human beings end up in dialectical deadlocks all the time, because anything we ever say also contains its own contradiction from the very beginning. That’s just how language functions.
We end up with three different ways, three different approaches human beings have to storytelling, and they call logos mythos and pathos, and they rhyme perfectly with how the human brain is constructed, because the human brain is actually three different brains. If you think about it metaphysically, there’s an emotional brain, there’s a rational brain and there’s a memetic brain.
What we want to do in our work is I want people to respect the fact that human beings have three different types of brains, and we have different types of stories that are different types of purposes. And our work is very much about boxing in these stories in their proper places, not mistake them for one another.
I could take a word that you and I, for example, often use something we hate and we’re opposed to. And that’s supernatural entities, because if anything existed out there, it would either be natural or cultural. Nothing can be supernatural. And supernatural is simply just a sloppy category that needs to be murdered by philosophers.
The way you do that is basically said, “Well, supernatural doesn’t belong in any of these three boxes we got in front of you. But because stories about supernatural stories, they exist, we can consider them as mythical storytelling, but they’re not rational, they’re not even emotional, they’re just mythical.” So they probably originate in how you glue together as society to have a social glue, but they serve no other purposes outside of that.
This is what we do with storytelling. So storytellers work with, so our metaphysics, I would say is fundamentally narratology, and it’s fundamentally what do we do with storytelling, how do we box in storytelling and describe it in minute details that we know what storytelling is.
Jim: Cool. Well, you managed to hit my second term, which was narratology, the overarching framework of human storytelling and meaning making. You used metaphysics 48 times in the book and narratology 27. Now we’re getting to one that used a lot more a word that I knew existed but didn’t really have a strong anchoring in, now I do. At least the Bardian version of it, and that’s socion, 306 times it appears in the book.
Alexander: It’s incredibly important. And what I’m so happy about is that the younger philosophers who’ve been following me and Jan and our work for the past 25 years, for example, the Hanzi Freinacht guys, they love the concept of the socion, because finally we have some fundamental unit we can work from in understanding human beings as social creatures.
The point is that paleontology discovered it originally, what paleontology discovered was that we have a period of between 120 to 150,000 years when not much happened in human civilization. Well, not much happened until civilization came along in the first place. But if there was a gradual shift over the last 30 to 40,000 years with homo sapiens, and eventually, we caught on and had language some 8,000 years ago, and then civilization is built on those things.
Then there’s a long, long, long period before that when our genes were modified. So, we can think of it like a Darwinian form. This is not a Platonist form. We totally opposed to Plato’s. But Darwinian forms are perfectly okay because they’ve developed evolutionarily over long periods of time. So to be a homo sapien is to be a certain Darwinian form compared to other hominids.
And we know homo sapiens were successful not because we’re bigger or have bigger brains, but because we have more brains and we’re connected with each other and created a stronger overall network. Therefore, homo sapiens beat the shit out of the competition.
So if that happened over such long periods of time, then we can probably today using data anthropology, we can even scientifically prove that there’s a form that returns in any human population. And this form is called the socion, and there are two different levels of the socion. One is the clan, and this is the famous Dunbar number. The famous Dunbar number is exactly 157, but that’s what we call clan historically.
Tribe is bigger, so tribe is bigger, it’s up to 1200 to 1500 people who socialize with each other, have a shared story about each other, a shared narrative about each other, and can get along. And the funny thing is historically that these patterns are repeated in contemporary populations, and here’s the word thing, we know for a fact that up to tribal size, we don’t need a police force, we need anybody to control us.
We’re so aligned and we’re so social with each other, so loyal to each other in the community. So we can stay a tribe down to clan all the way down to family, down to the individual person. So we can have all those levels at scale within that format.
And what this brought us forward to was that if we know for a fact the socion was developed and is prevalent in any homo sapiens population anywhere in the world. You can go to China, you can go to Greenland, you can go to America, you can go to Nigeria, you’ll see the same patterns. Then all those patterns that pop out of different types of men and different types of women and anything in between you like are an archetypology in itself.
And that archetypology is there to serve one thing, the survival of the socion. So we can finally put some anthropology into Darwin and some Darwin into anthropology and start really understanding what it means to be human. And this is the model of socion. So, it was delivered to us as philosophers and paleontologists.
We are then allowed to think outside of science, of course, we’re philosophers. To think the socion as widely as creatively as you possibly can, so the socion becomes a tool both for philosophers and for sociologists as we go forward.
Jim: It’s interesting, your 150 and to 1500 falls within three of Dunbars numbers, which are 150, 500 and 1500.
Alexander: Yeah, exactly. For example, I’ll give you an example that’s not in the book. You can go to the island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic. Some weirdos who came out of the UK some 150 years ago founded a colony there. They have two churches in the community and they get along together.
Their population size has never been bigger than 600. I think it’s something like 300 today because all the teenagers go off to Cape Town. Like you and I did when we were young and take drugs and shit. But the rest are still there. Here’s the fun thing though. What’s great to observe is that you’ve got a history of 150 years on an island with a population that never that bigger than tribe.
They do have a British Empire police office on the island. They’ve never had to work. Crime does not exist. So, we can know for a fact that with a certain loyalty and a certain story telling at a certain population size, crime just doesn’t happen. What then started to thrill human beings in the Bronze Age, which I think is the biggest philosophical question of all, which is the question we address more than anything in across an event, is the question, what do you do when you try to scale up the socion to larger populations?
The socion meaning ontology, social, like the origin of the social, the socion. So you can do socionontology, you can even study the socion. But what happens if we try to imagine larger entities? And already in the Bronze Age, human beings invented nations, cities and empires. There are larger population sizes, but they require police forces, they require law and order, and they require military force to protect them from the outside world.
This is the dilemma we’re sitting with with civilization, with war and peace and everything we deal with, is that we’re not born to show loyalty to anything bigger than socion. You with your game B work has been onto this thing, because you realize that if you build it on socionic units, you have the strongest possible system overall. But then the question is how do larger populations get along?
Jim: Indeed. Next definition, it’s really two definitions that are compared and contrasted and that’s your distinction between the dividual and the individual.
Alexander: Yes, we inherit this from Deleuze and Guattari, the French philosophers from the 70s and 80s who were like idols and inspirations for Bard and Söderqvist from Sweden. So they just thought that the concept of the individual as described by the [inaudible 00:14:06] originally is very limiting for human beings, because we are many people in one body, every one of us. We are plural, and society is plural.
And what they then did, and especially the good friend Michel Foucault did, was that he asked himself the question. So he invented the concept of the individual, the way Nietzsche went through the concept of God, deconstructed and killed God, and then Foucault said, “Well, I’m going to deconstruct the individual and kill it because I don’t think it serves human beings.”
The problem is that this Cartesian, almost autistic idea of the individual sitting in his own head, looking at the world as a passive observer, really served a power structure where it’s actually great to lock up individuals either as slaves in slavery or in factories as workers and especially in prisons, they don’t do what you want. So, I firmly believe in their mission is that it’s a good idea to question the idea whether human beings are individuals or not. And since we are social animals and since we tend to go to flocks all the time, that’s just the way we function. That is better to speak about a individual.
But if my students ask me, “So, are there individuals?” “Yeah,” I said, “polar bears.” And if I would be sitting here in Svalbard and giving lectures to polar bears and have a discourse with them, I would certainly talk about them as individuals. They even eat their own children. That’s what individuals tend to do.
So, there are individuals out there and some animals are individuals but not human beings. Homo sapiens is clearly a very social animal for good or bad. And I think it serves us then to work with the concept of the individual. So therefore, Jan and I decided that in all the six books written, we consequently use the term dividual as we think we are changing all the time as human beings. And we’re many different people all the time and we can walk in and out of different worlds, and therefore, we can allow ourselves to be individual rather than individual.
Jim: I like that distinction. I’m going to add one additional one, which is when we’re talking about humans as social beings, and humans are fundamentally social beings. The concept of a single human basically means a dead human in anything like the natural state, so dividual is quite useful there. But as an anti-woo inoculation, I also like to point out that there actually is a boundary of the individual which is very sharply defined.
And that is all those cells which were engaged in second-by-second homeostasis with gases in and nutrients in and gases out and toxins out. So for instance, I can say that my hair is not part of me as an individual, but my follicle is. So I think that I like dividual in the case that you guys use it when we’re talking about the social context. But it’s also important that there is a biochemical individual who is very distinct from that which is not part of the individual.
Alexander: You’re being very cleverly dialectical here. I would love to have a conversation too, because obviously the concepts of dividual-individuals serve us best by having a dialectical relationship between them because they serve different purposes. The problem is that our culture for the past 300 years would be so drenched in individualism.
I think it’s a central ideology of precisely the game A, that you are attacking your work, Jim. And that’s exactly why presented the individual is a better alternative. Now, here’s the thing, the individual is somebody who can have all the rights and all the responsibilities of an individual. The individual can be held higher, have a higher value than individual.
It’s not a downgrading of the individual at all. We’re doing what we’re rather saying is that we’re tired of the opposition between individual and collective, because they’re both ditches and they’re both wrong. And what we learned from the 20th century was the collectivism was Nazism and Stalinism certainly didn’t go down the right path. We went back to some kind of individualism, ended up with neoliberal society and consumerism and we’re stuck now in the meaning crisis because of it.
I just say that individual collective, both wrong human. Beings are fundamentally sociontic. We should go for the socion first, and by being a individual within a socion, I’m both free as an agent. I’m free to engage in voluntary activities with other human beings. I can create together with the other individuals, larger individuals rather than just myself being individual.
I can go all the way up to something that stimulates the idea of the socion, and that’s really fire will start kicking in and really will feel this is incredibly meaningful. Because when people are submitted to and serve and have a clear role in the socion, they feel that their lives are meaningful and purposeful. And that’s the point with our work is to try to find those deeper Darwinian forms in human beings to liberate human beings to be themselves.
Jim: All right, let’s go on to the next one. And this is the one that appears the most, which is eventology, and of course it’s closely related to event, and event and eventology together appear 537 times, so approximately once per page.
Alexander: What we’re interested in by going deep into history, I think I belong to the first generation of Western of philosophers to find it embarrassing to start with the Greeks, because nothing started with the Greeks. The East were thinking at least a few thousand years before the West was even invented.
So, it helps to go to Eastern philosophy and understand it. I’m a big fan of what I call the combo western technology and eastern philosophy. I’m a big fan of that combo. I think that actually makes a lot of sense, take the best out of both worlds. And I’m a huge fan of Persian philosophy, because the Indian and Chinese philosophy with all the richness, we discovered them.
I think Persian philosophy was underrated. There three major traditions coming from the East, and that’s the Chinese, the Indian, and the Persian traditions, and I’m a Zoroastrian, as we’ve spoken about before in these conversations. I converted in the 1990s.
I converted to an elite religion for living incredibly successful people. What else would you convert to? I think you would agree with that, Jim, if you’re going to convert to these, pick the most successful one, not the most popular one. So I’m as Zoroastrian, but I am also so Zoroastrian because I was deeply convinced that Greek philosophy starts in Persia with Persian philosophy.
So, when you look at the bigger picture in that case, then all of this has to be rewritten. And what we did, the gamble, we did before writing Process and Event was that Jan and I sit down together and said, “What if the really important division between East and West happened already at the Bronze Age? And what if it was the separation of the Indians and the Iranians,” which is about a little more than 4,000 years ago.
The Indians and the Iranians, basically the Hindu Kush Mountain range separated them. So whatever was north of that, which is currently Central Asia-Iran became the Persians eventually, and what it was south of that became Indian culture, so that’s like Northern India and Hindus and all that.
Now, what happens about 300 years later is that a reformer in Iran decides that why the fuck are we doing polytheism for? Why are we worshiping thousands of different gods? Why do we live in the supernatural? Why do we practice animal sacrifice or blood sacrifice and all? Why do we have slavery? Why aren’t men and women treated equal? Why don’t we live in an ecological feedback loop or realize that whatever we take from nature, we have to return?
Now, all of those things were asked by a guy called Zoroaster. He wrote it down a text called the Gathas. It’s one of the richest texts ever written. It was discovered by the Germans in the 1800s, inspired both Hegel, especially Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote a book called [inaudible 00:21:20] Zarathustra based on this character. So we go to this character, said, “Well, what if philosophy started here?”
Now, here’s the interesting thing. India stayed with the process. They stayed with everything returns to the same. And in a fundamental sense, metaphysics must have started with a conviction that everything returns to the same. You can’t even imagine that anything can progress or change in a dramatic way whatsoever if you live in a fundamentally nomadic society. What we call a nomadology.
A nomadological worldview must mean that it’s the season, spring returns, summer, fall, winter, starvation, and then abundance and everything returns. And we are born and we live and we die and breed new kids and they born and they live and they die. So this is just circular, circular, circular.
Now, Hinduism stayed without conviction, that process so fundamental that it’s kind of a vain thing to try to get out of the process. But what Zoroaster introduced in Iran was just a simple idea that a bored philosopher would invent, which is the idea that, but what if we do something about it? What if you’re free agents? What if you can interact with the world and just create change for the sake of change?
What if you create a different world? It wasn’t even a better world, it’s just we’ve done this already a thousand times over. Why don’t we just do things differently? That’s exactly what Zoroaster’s Gathas’s about. It says that, and this is the idea of the event, and that’s the book title.
So Process and Event goes all the way back to the Bronze Age and studies why did Indian and Iranian culture go off in two different directions? Because they were siblings, and why did eventually, for good or bad, the event become the curse of the West? And why did eventually the process become the curse of the East when in reality the world is both? The world consists both of processes and events. And that’s the theme of the book.
Jim: And then you hit on my next term, which was Nomadology, which is the opposite of an eventological perspective, and that’s the cyclical nature. And of course, part of that is driven by how many events happen in a lifetime of an average human. In those times when much was happening because lots of reasons, but think about the evolution of technology, Brian Arthur and his work. For a long time, often no event happened in the lifetime of a person, on average at least.
Alexander: Your life was short. Your life was short.
Jim: Yeah, your life was short and not much going on, so on average it looked like nothing. You could then extrapolate to cyclical if you wanted to. And then as the rate of change started to gradually accumulate with first agriculture, then the Copper Age, and then the Bronze Age, and then the Iron Age, and then off to the races we went.
At that point, one could see that in most lifetimes there was at least one event, at least over a couple of lifetimes. So your grandparents tell you things were different “when I was a kid, where we walked barefoot both ways uphill to school.” So an event perspective started to make sense, but as you say, not all societies went with an event perspective. Now, quick question I had, how does the distinction between eventology and nomadology relate to Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence?
Alexander: Brilliant question. I couldn’t have come up with a better question myself. Here’s the trick. When Nietzsche discovers the eternal recurrence of the same, he discovers it for the Western audience.
It comes out of Schopenhauer, because Schopenhauer just discovered the Buddhism could actually teach Westerners quite a few things. And it’s interesting because it kills the idea of progress in dialectics. Dialectics doesn’t necessarily have a certain direction. This also helps Darwin invent evolution.
And evolution doesn’t go in a technological direction, it just exists. It’s just the way things operate. Things die and new things are born and they’re not identical to what was born before them. Therefore, the world changes constantly. But that change does not in itself any meaning or purpose in Darwin, and that’s also Nietzsche’s point, but the eternal recurrence are the same.
All these ideas pop up in Europe in the 19th century due to Hegel before it, so this is a response to Hegel. No, there’s no progress to anything. There’s just change, and this is how change operates. So, Nietzsche dares to think, what if nothing ever happens that’s meaningful to us? What if the world is just a repetition of the same, which is the Buddha’s question?
But Nietzsche is not satisfied with Buddhism. He leaves Schopenhauer, he drops him and says, “Well, I’m not going to sit and meditate my way out of the circle, as that was the only option. I have the perfect possibility to do something affirmative with myself and my life and make a mark on the world and mark on history.”
And this is the event, so the event comes from Christianity, also from Islam. What we are arguing in our book is that because the world consists both of processes and events, it contains both repetitions and differences, and the differences of possibilities for us as free interactive human agents to engage with the world and change the world to something weird.
We are fans of the things that we want to, say, take wilderness and turn it into a garden, as an example. So if we human beings do that, that’s the eventology. So the nomadology and the eventology are complementary, and metaphysics must contain both. We are even saying that in the vulgar says the gene in the young is that the gene, if that’s the feminine, that’s the nomadology, because it lies on the feminine side to repeat things constantly and perfectly happy with it.
It allows on the masculine side to dream about doing things differently and not do them the way you did before, but try to invent something new. So that has more of the masculine side. So we laid this out and said a complete metaphysics must contain both.
The problem historically is that the East got stuck with the dominance of the nomadology. So both Chinese and Indian culture got stuck with the idea of nomadic repetition always the same, and eventually they became so fucking dirt poor that Europe conquered them in the 19th century. And now they quickly had to learn the lesson that event has to be introduced to the culture.
The opposite thing happened in the West. Christianity and Islam went for the event without process. They literally started preaching. Both Christians and Muslims started preaching that the only thing that exists is the event. So everything in Christianity is about up to the point where Christ dies on the cross, and then apparently he’s alive again three days later. And then everything after that is meaningless because that was the only point.
And with Islam, it’s probably more like Mohammed was a bit pissed off with the guys in Mecca, stormed into Mecca, and that’s one of the events in Islamic history. And they’re constantly repeated. Always, always again.
Here’s the problem though, because human beings are process and event. If we in the West, the Christians and the Muslims, decided that the event is the only thing that counts. What happens with human beings is that they start repeating that event over and over again, because we’re cursed with process.
And we’re sick of it in our philosophy, we’re sick of it. Just like can please the West wake-up to this reality that repeating Christ on the cross is not going to return Christ? And repeating Mohammed, being pissed off, storming into Mecca, killing everybody is not a good idea any longer? And repeating it does not make any sense, because Mohammed is not going to return either. The [inaudible 00:28:29] is not going to return.
So, what we are stressing in the book is that eventology has failed. On a fundamental level, Christianity and Islam have failed. The only way forward now for metaphysics is to start thinking process and event as to parallel structures with dialectical relationship with each other and that’s the human condition.
Jim: All right, so that’s it for our introductory definitions. Now into chapter one of the book, which is titled Everything It’s History and Time is A God with Four Faces. Actually, before we hop in, I’m going to make one transition comment. When you talked about Darwinism, you mentioned that it has no [inaudible 00:29:04]
Jim: When you talked about Darwinism, you mentioned that it has no teleology. You cannot say that evolution has a point. It was not the case that humans were the purpose of evolution, though that’s a belief by some idiots out there. On the other hand, there is a systematic pattern. Not always followed every trajectory, but there’s certainly a vector in history of more complexity over time. And there’s some, of course, the whole field of complexity science tries to address why that might be. And we don’t have definitive answers, but…
Alexander: I totally agree. Here’s the point though, the teleology, and I’m interested in Bergson and his revival at the moment of philosophy. I’m really interested in teleology. The thing though is that is the teleology is always local. So within a certain constrained system, complexity seems to increase over time and that’s amazing and very interesting and it’s also evident in mathematics, right? So this is really interesting. This is not part of the process event. I’m actually going there myself as a philosopher next. But there’s no global teleology. There’s no teleology for the universe as a whole. So I think it’s important to stress that local teleology is perfectly allowed in our philosophy and actually we should encourage it because the whole idea of creating an event to do something remarkable with the capacity for human innovation is what we’re totally pro. We wrote the Synthesis book 10 years before this one, precisely to lay that out. So it’s perfectly okay to think teleology locally. And I agree with you on complexity science, system science that America contributed to philosophy 20th century, remarkably so is where that’s at.
Jim: All right, so let’s get into the meat of this chapter. And somewhat surprisingly, you talk about time and dissect time into four different varieties of time. Let’s do that.
Alexander: The really dramatic shift in Western philosophy happens between Immanuel Kant and George Friedrich Hegel between Kant and Hegel. This is late 18th century. What happens is that Hegel makes a shift from space to time as first category, and that’s happened a lot in eastern philosophy and never before in Western philosophy. Spinoza all the way up to Kant, it’s still focused on space as first category and thought of the world as an observer is actor passive observing something and it’s very spatial environment you’re talking about. And space and time for Kant was totally phenomenological categories and didn’t go into it. So the shift towards time and in America this catches on quickly because the pragmatists, the Peirce and James and the other great American philosophers in 19th century we’re all focused on time first. And then you come to Whitehead again time first.
So the question today, and it’s also a question of physics. We’re not physicists. We don’t pretend to be. We’re meta physicists, which is different. We’re philosophers, we’re allowed to speculate. We don’t to prove anything. It’s interesting ideas that win a philosophy, not the right ideas. It’s interesting ideas that win a philosophy. So the question then is we think time is first category. We must be able to think, try to think time without space no matter how weird sounds because we’re so trained in thinking space-time now after Einstein that we think they’re connected. And a lot of philosophers out there, a lot of people who are pro-space pro-Time still will think to different categories. We must be able to think them separately.
Now a word for that, I know Lee Smolin uses the term pure time and physics. We call it hyper-time. So hyper-time is a time that can work any way you like. We can speculate how it must work. It doesn’t work like space-time because space-time is clearly a time attached to mass and space. So that’s like the unit for physics would be to think that. The possibility of thinking hyper-time is separate from space-time is the two different ways of thinking time and that’s the whole point. Think time. So we think time differently. We can think time so we can for example, say there can be something prior to big bang or a big bounce and we can start discussing that physicist from metaphysical perspective because it’ll allow ourselves to think time. It might not be time where you can have a physical clock that measures the time, that’s okay, it’s still there, it’s prior or it’s after something else. So we start thinking time properly. And by thinking hyper-time and space-time, just allowing them a separate categories. You could also allow yourself to think that physics might be two different things.
Physics might be physics and sub-physics. The way physics and chemistry and biology are different categories, which is of course something that a lot of physicists love because then they could become both physicists and sub-physicists and start thinking the different things they’re talking about. So for example, in physics, the hard problem of not being able to unify gravity with the other forces and quantum theory could just be that they’re talking about two different things altogether. So that enables physicists to have tools provided from us as philosophers they can work with. But this is all about the thinking. Now the trick though we do in hyper-time and space-time as separate categories is that ourselves, we as human beings think time either is process or event. So this rhymes in perfectly. We can start to play with four different categories of time and that’s what we call the first chapter, [inaudible 00:34:05].
We said what if time is a god that is four phases? If that’s the case, we can think circular time, we can think linear time and we can think hyper-time. We can think space-time. And this is the richness of philosophy. Once you have these four different categories you can start to play with in what way are they similar to one another and what are the crossovers of one another? How do they dialectically relate to one another? And this is what we lay out in chapter one in process event, we’re basically saying, “A proper philosopher of time has to think both of an objective understanding of time, which is separation of hyper-time and space-time and of a subjective interpretation of time.” The phenomenological experience of what it means human, our relationship towards time. And this is what opens up to the idea later in the book that human history has taught us that we’re both process and event. Time is both circular, returns to the same place or linear. It never returns to the same place.
Jim: Yeah, I must say when I was reading this section, it wasn’t at all clear to me. It’s still not clear to me what hyper time has to do with the rest of the argument. If it’s what is time like before physics? I don’t think that really has too much of an impact on our socions and our greater than socion organizations. I was curious why you went into it.
Alexander: So we’re playing with an idea. You become quite a philosopher yourself, Jim, in the process, although you were one already, but you’re really getting the beauty of philosophy. It’s an art form. It’s not about being right, it’s about being an interesting, that’s why we love it. You can perfectly sit in armchair, be good philosopher. I’m totally defending armchair philosophy. Think philosophers should sit in armchairs and smoke cigars and have cognac and take drugs. That’s what they should do and they’re right. But anyway, the trick here is to understand that the hyper time concept allows us for time, which isn’t linear because space-time obviously is tied to an era of time with the current expansion of the universe. Or the universe might go down one way or maybe just dissolve as Roger Penrose thinks and then be reborn or whatever. Or maybe we’re inside a black hole. We don’t know, but we don’t have to know.
But what we do have to know is that it makes sense for us. We subjectively, this is about story time, we subjectively understand the world is process, event. It could make sense that the funny thing is that it’s linear time which is tied to the event. And it’s circular time, everything comes back to the same point, which is quite a logical way to look at hyper time. Hyper time is like it doesn’t go anywhere because it nothing to go with. It has those space, it has no mass, it just goes round, round. It might be infinite. Maybe it’s infinite. And then finitude is something that occurs because of space and everything tied into space.
So think of space-time as like space came along, hijacked itself onto the time that that became space-time and the current universe we’re living in. It’s just philosophical, but the point in having both hyper time and space-time in a philosophical chapter is to enable us to think sub physics and physics separate the Burgess vectors you want to, but the real point here is to take the reader with you into the idea, the process can coexist. The way hyper time is based time obviously coexist. It’s just a subjective version that will be circular and linear.
Jim: And then of course for me, and I expect for you as well, it was the linear time, which you oddly titled Phallic Linear Time that’s probably most relevant. And of course it immediately reminded me of the work of Walker and Cronin on their model of time, which is essentially an evolutionary form of time and evolution is like events and they have a formalism developed in biochemistry and oh by the way, we did have Walker and Cronin on in Currents 100 titled Time as an Object. So let’s talk about linear time and-
Alexander: Their work is brilliant by the way. There’s no contradiction here. What we’re saying is that in the local category we can have teleology, we can have ontology, we can have events, we can create a better world. We can create technologies that are amazing. We can move to other planets if you want. You can dream as much you like, you are in a local anywhere. But for the global category, the universe as a whole, we’re not looking for a creator or God anywhere and we’re not looking for any meaning or purpose anywhere because we create meaning and purpose ourselves. So the global category would have a circular attitude to it. It’d just be the repetition of the same over huge eons of time, very likely. But why would we care? It’s of no concern to our current life here.
Jim: I have to ask, why do you add phallic to the description of linear time?
Alexander: Because that is the actual historical description. If you go to pagan religion, you have phallus and you have matrix, fundamental entities. Matrix is where you born from. Matrix is what feeds you your first year of your life. Matrix was you must get away from rather, you must get away from the memella that follows from the matrix. Get away from mommy’s tit when you’re one years old and start wanting to become a grown-up man. Phallus symbolizes the grown-up world simply out of negation because matrix and the feminine body originally symbolizes where we come from and where we will return one day when we die. This is anthropology. Then the whole journey of life between birth and death has to be phallic through negation. That is why we talk about the person you want to impress in your life by doing the right thing and being a contributor to the social and by finding your archetype and live it fully during your lifetime and live a long rich life and die happily said, “I did it. I live the full life. I’m dying with a smile on my face. I’ve done it all. I’m finished.”
If you want to succeed with that whole project, then you are performing to a phallic gaze all the time. And this important to understand the power of religion, we are basically deconstructing religion all the way through. I’m a radical atheist like you are, but I’m a radical atheist like it’s almost dialectically the other way around. It’s just like I’m a radical atheist in understanding why these mythologies exist in the first place. And they exist because we’re looking for that phallic gaze to give us the encouragement to give us, “Yeah, go on, go to the next one, stay with your direction, follow your path,” all those things. And that’s a phallic gaze.
This is why it’s called phallic direction. And the example we’re using in the book, because at least for Western is the most famous one, is of course the Exodus out of Egypt. Because the exodology, how you create a goal for yourself in the future, how you put a goal which is higher and further away from you, it’s in the future and it’s higher than you are now and you put that gold there and it’s like you throw something in that direction and then have to pull yourself towards. It’s like you pull yourself through the desert towards the promised land. That is eventology in a nutshell. This is what men dream about and women dream about marrying, this eventological force which has an exodology, getting out of the old into the new and to go higher than we were before. And this is what we do in the book.
Jim: And of course this idea of going higher is in some sense what the post-seventeenth-century scientific mission has been about, to go higher and higher in our understandings, though sometimes narrower and narrower. But the real goal is higher and higher to understand more and more. And it’s no longer a male-only pursuit by any means. There are a lot of good women in science these days, very strong.
Alexander: Absolutely, that’s the point. But it’s just that in our imagination, because we come from the mother and mother represents birth or death, then father or men, phallus has to represent the rest, which is life in between. And that’s exactly why in pagan anthropology, the earth mother and the sky god are the two fundamental entities that return all the time.
Jim: Okay, so now let’s wrap up on chapter one where you introduced the concept, which I think is pretty core to your ideas of transcendental emergentism.
Alexander: Yes. So this is the name of our metaphysics that Jan and I developed with Alexander Verde, a Danish philosopher, and we spent three years doing it. We were frustrated with metaphysics as we know it because metaphysics constantly falls into a trap that we call reductionism. It’s like people go into metaphysics and immediately want to get to that one explanation for everything. Not a theory of everything but one explanation for everything which is very different. So it’s always been either down to some kind of fundamental atom that somehow it’s a monad because it contains all the world’s history, both the past and the future and therefore it’s the smallest unit and therefore everything is a replication of that unit, which doesn’t make any sense at all. Or the other one go all the way up to themselves of their own big fat egos as philosophers and say that, “Well, my consciousness in my mind is the peak of existence and therefore I find traces on myself in everything.”
Whenever I meet these panpsychists, I always give them a little rock and say, “You don’t need to talk to me. You can talk to the fucking rock since apparently it has a consciousness.” I’m so sick of these ideas. So you either go for consciousness or you go for the atom and you want to reduce everything to one of the two. So reductionism historically is to go down to the atom, it’s called atomism, but the other form reductionism, which I call reversed reductionism. It’s just panpsychism, which is saying everything is conscious. Well then the word conscious means nothing.
Jim: I’d say there’s a third class actually closely related now that I’m thinking about it here on the fly. And that’s this amazingly dysfunctional tendency of humans to want, as you say, a single explanation. And this is God or Aristotle’s prime mover. And this is where I believe complexity and evolution have offered a unbelievably useful and powerful lens to get us away from that trap. In particular, all these species did not have to be created by somebody, right?
Alexander: I’m sick of the fact the creator God still hides in so much philosophical thinking still today. This is ridiculous. You always end up with a prime mover being. Why would the prime mover then move anything if everything was so fucking perfect? Oh, then it was imperfect. Okay, it’s so boringly stupid. So this is the alternative then, because then if you start looking at the world from processes and events and then a dialectical relationship with one another, like a dialectical deadlock. So both are correct. Now if you start with that worldview and assume that both are right, although they have a deadlock between them, which is probably where creativity comes from, and we can choose process or event at any given time as human beings, which is amazing. If we have the freedom to choose between processes, what if metaphysics should just be done process and event?
And here’s the point, there is already a school of philosophy that tries to get out of reductionism called emergentism. The problem is that emergentism, which basically says that, “Well, there is a world apparently and shit happens.” Sometimes American English is just great for philosophy. Shit happens. Okay. So what if the fundamental aspect of philosophy is that shit happens? Well, that means philosophers will be busy defining what shit is. It’s called ontology, and they’ll basically defining what happenings are, which is eventology. So okay, if the world is there and the world consists of differences and shit happens all the time, then maybe philosophy should start with the question shit happens. What’s great with that is that we don’t have to start with some primordial history and some beginning because that’s just being obsessed with your own birth in your own mother’s womb. That’s what it is.
Everybody goes, “Well, the beginning was the big bang.” So the universe was birthed? Probably not, probably was just a big bounce or whatever. But it’s just this obsession with your own birth and your obsession with your own death that makes human beings faulty in the sense that they think the universe must operate the way you do. Well, it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with you whatsoever. The universe as a whole operates very differently. That’s a clear cut case here. So if you take process and event to create a metaphysical song, you must go with emergentism. And this started with American pragmatists in the 19th century inspired by Hegel. Hegel is definitely the pro emergentism. He just sees the dialectical deadlocks and they arrive temporarily at something which is solid for a while until that explodes again and then moves on again. You can see how Hegel inspired Darwin. You can see how the thinking goes here. But the American pragmatists really started thinking that emergentism is the shit. Emergentism is the key to metaphysics. So emergentism is emergentist. The problem is that emergentism is young and still sloppy and not well done.
Jim: Even in good faith, it’s a very young field. I would say that serious emergent science is only 40 years old if we’re lucky. We know some things, but there’s a tremendous amount that we don’t know about emergence.
Alexander: But I was interested in America philosophers like Adrian Johnston and Terence Deacon who are really going into this over the last 20 years, and they’re my compatriots and we were contemporaries. And I read their work and I was inspired and I said, “But this can still be worked on. It can still be tweaked on one step further.” The problem was that in their work, they got still stuck with reductionism by calling their philosophy materialist about calling their philosophy something mind-centered or whatever. And I’m just like, “But why stay with any of the ditches? Why not just start philosophy right here?” Shit happens. Okay, what is? What is happening? And if you start there, then emergence is the name for a really important happening. There are things happening all the time. There are face transitions, there are shit that happens all the time, especially repetitive things happen all the time.
But what if the most important things to us as humans in universal history could be described as emergencies? And that’s how we arrive at the birth of sub physics or prior to physics, physics, chemistry, biology, and eventually complexities for the complexities like mind and consciousness and language and culture. All these different categories can be studied. They should be studied separately from when they were born. So then you have lots of babies all of a sudden. So all these babies are emergencies. That’s the birth of something novel that never happened before in history. And once something is born, it turns out that it starts behaving in a certain pattern after a while because habits are actually very useful when it comes to energy. So when it comes to energy, information maximization and minimum use of energy, then it turns out that any system of any kind we can speak of generally will actually go towards certain habits they call laws.
We call them laws of nature. We even have laws of culture they’re called nation states and the FBI, whatever. So there are laws of nature, laws of culture, but they are aligned with the certain emergence. So from the emergence you have a vector called an emergence vector. That means the world consists of emergence vectors. Why then is this emergentism transcendental? Because it’s not about materia, it’s not about spirit, it’s not about any other things. It’s just that there’s a world and it has emergence in it. And the first category for this world is difference and emergence in the world. So there’s one world, but in that world things emerge. And when things emerge, if they emerge dramatically and mean something to us human beings and they stay around, we should definitely look at them as new emergence vector. Here’s the thing though, this is not preconditioned because then you get the fucking creator God. The problem for philosophy is always to not sneak the creator God in through the back door.
I’m adamant about this, otherwise we’re sloppy. The way to remove the creator God is to say, “Well, if a new emergence occurs to us as human beings, it can be so fucking dramatic that the entire model for emergence vectors might have to change.” That means that our emergentism is transcendental and we have arrived at a metaphysics which is credible. And when I started presenting this model before the philosophers, the first reaction was the best reaction of philosopher could get. They didn’t applaud me at all. They said, “This is so underwhelming.” That’s a good sign of good philosophy because that means you’ve just killed a lot of fantasies they have. And that’s what good philosophy does. So I’m staying with the TE model, I’m working further on it and I can start applying it. And I think next is the VEP theory that we discussed in process and event. I think that’s definitely where we’re going next, philosophically speaking,
Jim: When you talk about emergence vectors, what do you mean by that? Maybe give an example or two, because obviously we know a lot about emergence. My original mentor in complexity science was Harold Morowitz who wrote the very well-known book, The Emergence of Everything, where he lays out 28 steps of emergence from the big bang to the economy, or even he goes to spirituality. But what does the vector word add to the concept?
Alexander: He’s one of our inspirations. Stuart Kaufman is another one. We went to the biologists because it wasn’t the physicist that did two reductions. But biologists, certainly saw all of this, complexity scientists like yourself. The system science, complexity, science and biology, totally subscribe to the idea of emergentism except philosophers have been sloppy. And therefore philosophers have to redo and rethink emergentism properly. And basically sale philosophers should say, which is, “This is what we can say.” Anything else to say beyond this, it actually has hidden axioms in it, creator God syndrome hidden or whatever, and we don’t want that at all. So the great thing with transcendent emergentism is that it starts from right here in the universe we’re operating right now. It seems to accidentally be monist. Please observe that our monism is accidental. The world just happened to be placed from as far as we know, everything is connected with everything else.
We haven’t seen traces of other universes in this universe. If you do, we have to change the model. That in itself as an emergence vector. But right now, as things are looking, we live in accidentally monist universe where everything is connected with everything else. And in that universe, we have different emergence vectors. The point with having emergence vector is that it clearly cuts domains for science and academics to take care of. Here’s biology for example. I say biology is the perfect example because we don’t know if there’s a life or anything remotely similar to life anywhere else in the universe. When it exists on a certain planet called planet Earth. It must have started sometime. It could have started several times over, we don’t know. But it started. It got started, and life then because of the constraints on the specific planet developed into plants and animals and plants and animals are original husbands and wives, put them next to each other and they feed on each other and they both survive. And that’s exactly what life is.
So life exists here, and because life operates on its own terms, biology operates differently from physics. It’s not that physics isn’t there. Biology consists of physical and chemical compounds, but they operate differently. No law of physics makes any sense in the world of biology. So the world of biology operates differently. Therefore, biology is its own domain, and therefore it makes us philosophers say, “Biology emerged on at least one planet.” Now we can start a biology on this planet for what it is and see what we can learn from it, and therefore it’s its own emergence vector. Now, I think human consciousness and human mind should be looked at the same way.
Jim: I think I got something I want to run by you see what you think about this and that is… Because that makes a lot of sense. So that’s a branch of emergence that is constrained, right? It’s interesting. Biochemistry is constrained to a small number of chemicals, the famous carbon, oxygen, sulfur, nitrogen, phosphorus, a couple others plus a few trace elements. But now there’s an interesting one that this branch is off from, and that’s the evolution of matter through stellar evolution.
The universe started out with hydrogen and helium then just those. The heavier elements were made is now believed in supernova and in fact, something that people don’t focus on, but when you think about the Fermi paradox, and is earth unique or not in the universe? My position on this is now fully agnostic. I just don’t know. We’ll just look for the evidence. But one of the things that I think moves the needle a little bit towards maybe we’re unique, is that the sun appears to be a fourth generation star that has gone through four cycles of supernova to get a relatively high concentration of elements beyond helium.
And this is an emergence vector since the big bang or whatever happened at the very beginning. I’m with you. I’m not at all sure that it’s this canonical singularity. But anyway, something happened in the first three seconds that was very concentrated. But when we get enough stellar evolution and we get a star that’s gone through four stages of supernova and concentrated elements beyond helium and some of those coalesce on a planet that’s in the right zone, then a new vector branches off the previous vector, and we call that vector biology.
Alexander: Well, I agree with you totally. And here’s the trick, I totally wait on planet Earth being unique. Why? Because human beings cannot think uniqueness properly. They don’t understand that everything is unique constantly. They still think that all the occasions that occur in history somehow are within a box, and somehow we return to same point or something like that at all. That’s not at all how existence operates. Existence is constantly, constantly, constantly creating unique, unique, unique occasions in all directions. Your own life is that way. I’m literally sitting here talking with Jim Rutt, and hand on my heart here, sitting in Sweden right now. We’re having these fun conversations. We want to be around having these conversations in armchairs and record them and all that. But when we’re having these conversations, what’s so striking is that every damn second, millions of potential Jim Rutts are killed. Every damn second million of potential Alexander Bards are killed.
It’s not just that the sperm got into the egg ahead of half a million other sperms. It’s not only that. It’s that your entire life, every momentum, this is why I’m a philosopher of time, every damn momentum, every opportunity that was there that didn’t occur is dead. Death is everywhere. That means if we really start thinking momentum, start thinking time, we realize uniqueness is itself a quality of the universe. Planet Earth is absolutely unique, and if we ever find anything remotely similar to life or biology on any other planet, it will not at all look anything at all as what we have here. Actually, by the time we look back on planet Earth, we’ll have changed too. This is why I’m a philosopher time. We’ve been lazy to think a concept like uniqueness. And I sit with physicists and I talk about these things and I realize they’re hidden axiom is that, “Well, everything returns back into some kind of closed box. Everything has to happen sometime somewhere.” And I’m just like, “No, it does not.” They really don’t understand plurality. That’s the problem.
Jim: Yeah. When it comes to life, I think, again, I’m an agnostic. How constrained is it? Harold Morowitz was of the view that there may only be approximately one way to do life. Now there’ll be some differences, but he has extensively searched and used AI to look at physical chemistry and the possible networks that were possible that would produce a homeostatic metabolism, et cetera. He’s come down with least a soft diktat that any life will have to be based on the reverse citric acid cycle, that there is no other answer.
Now, he may be wrong about that, but I would say it’s an empirical question that if we do find additional life out there, it may be biochemically not all that different from us, though per Steven, J. Gould, when the evolutionary the Darwinian tape is played a second time, the results will be very different. There’s no reason even to assume that four-limbed symmetrical beings ever got created. It’s a happenstance of our evolutionary period that the tetrapod became another emergence vector that came off earlier forms of life, and essentially all the reptiles and birds and mammals and such are all symmetrical tetrapods. No reason that had to have occurred. It just did. But once it happened, it then produced a competition and an evolutionary bush of nothing but tetrapods on this particular branch. So I remain agnostic about that.
Alexander: I think the proper approach to that agnostic idea, which I totally subscribe to, is that that’s also why August 6th, 1945 for human beings is an absolutely a terrible anti-event. As we lay out in the book, the question is now, can we create God if God is needed to stop the devil? Because we did create the devil, and it blew up on us in Hiroshima in 19…
Alexander: … devil, because we did create the devil, and it blew up on us in Hiroshima in 1945, and that means that are we cursed in the sense that biology creates a reasonably intelligent mind and consciousness that can do technological innovations on the scale that we do as humans? Are we then cursed to blow ourselves up because we’re so fucking stupid anyway? That’s a good philosophical question, a good ethical question to ask. Because if we skip the creator-God thing totally, and we have to, then we’re stuck here, and we’re stuck with our own dilemma. And it’s just like, “Wait a second.” It’s even about our own survival, because we are fundamentally so stupid in large groups that we could blow ourselves up. That’s why we wrote the Syntheism book. We didn’t write the Syntheism book because we love religion. We wrote the Syntheism book because the only way to describe a future emergence that could stop us human beings from blowing ourselves up is the idea of God. Let’s take the God word back and own it, but put God in the future. That’s what we did with that book.
Jim: Now, of course, this idea is part of the famous Drake equation about intelligent life. Because one of the terms in the Drake equation, which we’ve talked about a lot on this show, by the way, it’s one of my pet obsessions, is The Fermi Paradox and the Drake equation, is how long do communicating species that can communicate beyond their cellular system, which we now can do, how long do they last? If they last a billion years, and even if they’re created infrequently, there’ll be a fair number out there. But as people like Robin Hansen talk about the great filter, he says, “Is the great filter behind us or is the great filter ahead of us?” The great filter behind us might mean part of the evolution of our DNA machinery was so unbelievably rare and hard to get to that we’re the only ones that did. The idea that the great filter is ahead of us is that, “Oh yeah, we all developed the bomb and we all are bioengineering. We all wipe ourselves out within a few hundred years of developing modern science.” And the answer again is, we don’t know.
Alexander: Maybe a few of us survive. Or, as he write in this book, at the end of the book, I can jump to that right here because it’s part of this current conversation. Let’s just imagine Jenny Young here in a fundamental sense. One, women give birth to children. Two men envy women for giving birth to children. Three, because women give birth to children, which is biology, men give birth to technology. Four, technology develops faster than the children do. Five, that means it’s inevitable that soon or late technology kills the baby and takes over the whole show. Now, it doesn’t have to be as bad as it sounds because I’m not a humanist. I’m just pro-intelligence, pro-life, and pro-prosperity, whatever. It’s also a possibility we could invent something that actually could conquer outer space for us and save us that isn’t us, because sending human bodies to Mars would be fiendish expensive and stupid, probably, but we could certainly create intelligent forms that somehow are perfectly suitable to inhabit other planets.
So in this sense, whatever complexity we’re actually defending, we’re saying we’re defending life. It’s a certain of complexity we enjoy here. If that complexity is going to survive and the world is not going to go simplistic and complexity is gone, over and done with, then we can start imagining what that would being like.
Jim: Indeed. Let’s go on to chapter two. We’re going mighty slow here. Might have to pick up the pace a little bit. And that is logos, mythos, and pathos, the narratological triad.
Alexander: Yes, Hegel had done dialectics wonderfully in the early 19th century, but they hadn’t really talked about narratives. And what if we take narratives as the starting point for our philosophy? Then we should do what Hegel didn’t do, which is complement him by creating a Hegelian narratology. The great thing about three is that three never gets stuck in one place. It’s like three guys trying to run a company together. One guy gets too cocky, the other two we unite against him, put him down to earth again, and the whole thing will go on further. This is the foundation of the U.S. constitution. The brilliance of it is that has three parts in it. Triads are therefore very useful.
Jim: By the way, let me just add this because you bring it up. When I build companies, I always have three founders for exactly that reason, because if you have two, you can get a communications gap that’s unresolvable. If you have a third, you have a way to route around. So three is actually the smartest building block for almost anything.
Alexander: It’s like I say, you have a chairman and secretary and then you put the accountant in the room and he takes the other two guys back down to earth to run the company profitably. And why not an old lady while you’re at it to run it? She usually does it best. Triads are useful. So we know for example, from power theory, that triads make sense. They create stable systems over time. We know dictatorship doesn’t last long. We know triads last much longer. Democracy is built on this idea, especially the American democracy, which is the brilliance of the U.S. constitution. Triads are also actually how the world operates when we try to interpret it. So when we phenomenologically try to understand the world and we have a dichotomy between two things, we realized none of those things are right. If our collective and individual and both have created lots of havoc and destroyed over the last hundred years, maybe I’m just should think a third category.
Well, what if we take individual, make it individual, that it’s more movable, it can move around in different social spheres, and be successful in different social spheres at the same time? Oh, we got individual. So we philosophically solve the problem. We can say collective individual, historically done and over with. Why don’t we work on the individual and try to be individuals? So this is what we try to do with triads all the time. That’s what dialectics is. It’s to stay with the deadlock and use it creatively and then find a temporary solution, always temporary solution, to a problem you can work from. That temporary solution, it can be temporary over thousands of years, temporary over minutes, doesn’t matter. It’s temporary. It’s not eternal, and that’s the trick with dialectics.
So it then turns out that human beings to interpret and stand the world have three different brains, and they call it the rational, the emotional, and the mimetic brain. The rational brain is basically the zeros and the ones of the brains, calculations, making sense of the world. Factual truth is fundamental to logos, and this is the logos. The pathos is your emotions, what you feel about things and how you feel about them, wants you to get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, not kill yourself. All those things are pathical, and we have pathical narratives around us. News feeds, pornography, they’re always very direct, very brutal. They show reality as it is without analyzing it. That’s the pathical. So the pathical is another narrative. The third one is the mythical and the mythical narrative is the only way to unite the other two, because otherwise you’re stuck in either logos or a pathos. We even describe it sexually and said men are fundamentally stuck in the logos-pathos division, therefore when they sleep with a woman who is a mythos, they feel unification.
So women are sold in the whole oneness of existence, oneness of the world, whereas men are much more interested in difference. Now that’s different from that, and that’s different from that. I’m going to mend this into something new, which is different from what it was before. So the difference and the unity are really sexual in that fundamental sense. The great thing about this is that that means that human beings have three different brains. And here’s the trick. The rational and emotional brain, yet the mimetic brain is the one least understood. The mimetic brain is the social brain, and as social flock animal like human beings, we have to spend an awful lot of brain power on social relations, otherwise the social doesn’t stay together.
Jim: It’s thought by evolutionary primatologists that that is probably what drove the large human brain, essentially doing the social calculation for bands or you call them clans of 150 rather than 30, which was the chimps.
Alexander: Exactly, exactly. That’s the point. And of course this was done in psychoanalysis, done in philosophy, this kind of work, and one of the best things to come out of the 20th century, when philosophy was more or less dead, but anthropology and psychoanalysis were amazing places to be, what came out of anthropology was the understanding of the three different brains. Now you can solidify this, and it actually turns out they’re gendered. That means women on average have a much larger mimetic brain. They have a smaller rational brain than men, but that’s because they also have a smaller emotional brain. So the only reason why the emotional and rational brains are smaller women is because they have less emotions to handle with the rational brain. They’re probably more rational than men are, actually, because they just have less of a problem with emotional brain, because the emotional brain has been developed in men to go to war, and has been developed in men to go hunt and to kill and to go outside in the world of risk your life.
That’s exactly why the emotional brain, rational brains are bigger in men. Men are socially inadequate and their mimetic brain is smaller than women. To prove the theory, we then did the same research on gays and lesbians, and here’s the funny thing. A gay man is essentially a man with a larger mimetic brain than average. That’s what gay guys are great, Shakespeare and plays and dramas and Broadway musicals and everything. Bring the gay guy into the room, you’ve got a man who’s an expert in dealing with social relations, instantly. Communication, media, that what gay guys are good at. That’s exactly why their sexual orientation is secondary to the fact they have a large mimetic brain. Then the other way is that if you talk to lesbians, you discover that the lesbian couple is the perfect example of the logos and the pathos. The thumb, solid, properly know that, but the more feminine of the two, she’s the logos, and the more masculine of the two is like boots dike, all over the place, driving big motorcycles, taking huge risks all the time, joining the military, getting big guns.
You know the lesbian with a big gun, she is a pathos of a woman. So the female pathos and the female logos are located in the lesbian couples. This explains also why homosexuality is equally prevalent in every human population in the world. It makes sense within the sociome, we go into [inaudible 01:07:36], we discover we should have about 4% lesbians or 4% gays in the general population because that creates a really healthy population, because of the brain structures. So there’s a very fascinating shift in sex that has to do with the brain, but every human being has all three types of brains, rational, emotional, and mimetic. And mimetic is the one that handles social relations.
Jim: Now it’s interesting, the data as I’ve seen it is that cross-culturally, it’s typically about 2% lesbian, 4% male, pretty much exclusive homosexual, and then about an additional 5% of bisexuals who though are on average more polarized to one sex or the other, but have some fluidity. So those are the numbers I’ve seen.
Alexander: Yeah, but what helps though is that in our research that I did was that we had four categories instead are three. So we said hetero and homo and shamanoid, which is basically you don’t care and it turns out 4% of the general population are shamanoid, and a lot of the bisexuals are in that category or they’re hetero-homo, they don’t care. They simply do not care. They can fuck anything that moves. So these wild people out there are certainly overrepresented in certain pathologies and whatever, but they’re also the most creative artists and everything come out of the category. What is great is that we got into a 4% shamanoid population, a 4% LGBT, who we teach to really own that, and then 92% regular Joes and Jills.
Jim: Yeah, that sounds about right. I come up with 92% straight people, approximately.
Alexander: That’s exactly why the numbers are correct. My point is that if you ask them, if you give them another category, like a category which is blind to sexual orientation, about half of those guys out there, usually bisexual, would just say, “Well, that’s totally me.” And this is represented in every population we checked, historical, contemporary populations. So that’s what we did with the data.
Jim: Seems about right.
Alexander: Seems right. Yeah.
Jim: Very close.
Alexander: Yeah.
Jim: So, as you know, I like to rant against religion and thunder and curse, et cetera, and to apply that to your narratology, it struck me that I think my actual objection is when people start to believe they’re mythos, when they don’t realize it’s a mythos. Could you react to that statement?
Alexander: Exactly. I’m totally with you, Jim, on this one. That’s exactly the problem. When the mythos takes over and people literally believe in the mythos, we get problems. We currently have a problem in the Middle East with Muslims and Christians and a few Jews running all over the place who want the Armageddon. Well, they have the fucking bomb. That’s what we don’t want, right? That’s precisely when mythos goes havoc and creates confusion. I think historically, if you have all three narratives there, you discover that the pathos is the spirit or the emotion you have towards life and wanting to live and wanting to fight death, whatever you want to do with your life, and all those like your purpose and your meaning in your life, your sexuality, all those positive libidinal forces are in the pathos, and rationality certainly needed was evolutionary developed for human beings to survive as flocks. Otherwise we would’ve killed a long time ago.
And we probably all had to go up against quite a few other hominids before homo sapiens was the only one left in the room, but that’s probably what happened 40,000 years ago. So [inaudible 01:10:48] was certainly required and is still there. The problem is that mythos is the quickest way to unify these two, and this is where you, Jim, and we totally agree. When you go for example to the curse of the logos, mythos, pathos, the curse of it is that mythos is the only way to unify logos and pathos. It can only temporarily be described the solution to the deadlock between logos and pathos. So that’s exactly what made sexuality is we want to fuck a woman. He says, we want to get inside that cave we came from to get inside the ones want to feel the unity, the universe, and then we get out of the cave and we’re done with it. It’s just like we’re back in our separate mode of having logos and pathos separated, which is a very masculine mode to be in.
So the trick is then to understand this bigger picture like that’s a curse, and that means what returns in human history constantly is mythos. Mythos is the quickest way to have a story about any larger population. That means the original mythos was something like this. Everybody killed each other mercilessly in Mesopotamia. We know this for a fact from the church’s data that that’s what happened. About a thousand years into that entire bloodbath. Somebody came up with the idea, “Why don’t we build up a ziggurat between the Euphrates and the Tigris, between the two rivers,” because they’re fighting each other constantly. And then you walk up the Euphrates stairs, you always walk up stairs to look impressive, you have a big dress on, whatever. So one priest walks up and says, “I’m the priest over the Euphrates Valley and you are my Euphrates people.” And the other guy walks up the other side of the ziggurat and says, “I’m the priest of the Tigris Valley, you’re my Tigris people.”
“We two priests, we sat down and looked at our shared history, and we found a root of the phallus we’ve never seen before.” It’s called the root of the phallus, which is like when you in storytelling try to create a prequel to make sense of what happened. It’s called root of the phallus because it’s a root on which the phallus can be born, which is like the story that you want to achieve. So the root of the phallus, which is not a historical fact, that’s why it’s a separate term, it’s not actually a fact about history. It’s how we reinvent history and tell a story about history to make sense of what happens now, which we have to do all the time. And myth is the only accessible form we have.
So what you have is that these guys say, “Well, we discovered that the god of the Euphrates Valley, Thor, whatever, and the God of the Tigris Valley, Odin, have a shared father, his name is Abraham, blah blah, and now because Abraham is a shared ur-father, we can get along and start trading with each other. And the great thing with religion was that it just put a break on the bloodshed. This is the good part of religion. Religion put a break on the bloodshed by being a myth. The problem though is that once the myth was there, and if you… The stupid guys out there were too obsessed with the event that this had happened and somebody declared something from a ziggurat and there was history before this declaration of the ziggurat and after the declaration of the ziggurat, and therefore this declaration of the ziggurat has to be repeated every year at certain occasion, every Easter, whatever. These mad guys, they turn the myth into a dogma. Big mistake.
Jim: It happens every time when people believe their mythos. If they could keep mythos at the level of fiction, right?
Alexander: Yes.
Jim: You and I both famously say no magic in this world. I’ve read Lord of the Rings 34 times, I love a world with a little bit of magic, and as storytelling and as ways to do moral reasoning, some magic can be good. Just don’t believe that it’s true in our world, goddammit.
Alexander: I turned 12, I got over Harry Potter.
Jim: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
Alexander: And the beauty of a world with is natural was just all there, and in my mind, I can imagine whatever I like, but that’s not the world around me. And if I think my imagination is the world around me, I’m a fucking idiot. Now it turns out evolution hasn’t really gotten rid of these idiots. They say somehow managed to breed and they’re probably good soldiers or good hunters or whatever, so we still have them around.
Jim: Well, I’m stronger than that. To your point, that mythos is this unifying force. Daniel Dennett, one of the four atheistic horsemen, modern atheist horsemen, wrote a book on atheism and one of the big sections was, “Well, why the hell is there so much religion?”, and his argument is it’s actually very adaptive, partially for the reason you said. It can change much faster than the genes and it can produce a coherence within groups, can increase group coherence. People willing to die so they can get their 74 virgins or whatever. And it actually works in group competition.
Alexander: It does. The original memeplex is religion. So I perfectly agree with Dennett there. We borrowed the term from him as well. Memeplex is a good term for religion. But here’s the thing though, you just said it works because it was popular. My attitude is the same as Zoroaster’s was, 3,700 years ago. My attitude is the same as philosophers, always have. This attitude is that I cannot expect the vast majority of humans to get these complex things and to get anything close to reality. I’m struggling with it myself as best as I can. I’m probably one of the better, the 1% that could probably get things more than anybody else.
But I think in this sense, my religion, Zoroastrianism, is an elite religion. It’s not for everybody, and [inaudible 01:15:53] basically says that I think the age of mass religion is over. I think Islam and Christianity have done what they did. I think the secularization of the Middle East is going to happen much more rapidly than it in Europe because they’re just copying what happened in Europe and America. I think secularization is in inevitable. I think Eastern spirituality is easier to adapt to because you can keep your spirituality and be an Atheist, and if you can be an Atheist and keep your spirituality, much better off.
So I think what we’re going to see is that the mass appeal of religion was so damn tied to the previous paradigms, and especially to the printing press, that when the internet came along, it becomes impossible to do master religion with simple dogma. My hope for the internet is that it will devastatingly slaughter these mass religions that only were around because they were popular. And my hatred towards their storytelling and their fixation mythos is totally shared with you. My philosophical mission is to get rid of them and to make people understand [inaudible 01:16:48], and at least have an educated elite system. Well, at least not for me, that’s not for me at all. I go with this much more elite version, which is basically philosophical conviction of how the world operates and my role in that.
Jim: I think this is one of the areas where maybe you and I have a fairly strong difference of view. Late in this chapter, you talked about the barred absolute. I think there’s almost a little bit of a pun there. Did some research on who else uses the term barred absolute, and the answer is nobody except Bard. So there’s a kind of a little homonymic pun involved with that, and I have long always resisted the noble lie or Plato’s Republic or any of these schemes where there’s some elite group of philosophers that know and then we just tell random horseshit to the people to keep them well behaved. It does not seem to me to be actually a good end state for humanity.
Think instead of where northern and western Europe are getting to. Finally, we have large populations that have basically rejected the mass cults, the Walmart versions of religion. Now, of course by no means are very many of them yet to a higher-level perspective that understands things like mythos is useful, but it’s not true and it makes no sense for us unless it’s pragmatically useful to force our neighbors to take our mythos at the point of a gun. We don’t have to do so because some God in the sky told us we must. But I could see that we could get there. We could see further evolution of the most advanced forms of humanity where we don’t have to fool the people with Walmart-brand religion. When I run across the term the barred absolute, I said, “Well, that damn Bard is trying to have 1% of people figure out the truth and then build Walmart religion for the 99.” Now, am I reading too much into that?
Alexander: No, no, no. You don’t have to be worried about it. I’m not a Platonist at all. I’m saying I choose for myself, my own game B community of people that actually can share beliefs with, have dinner conversations without getting embarrassed. For me, religious or philosophical convictions basically hang out with people that don’t embarrass me with their stupidity. I don’t mean to lead. We still have to work with democracy and improve on democracy, whatever, but at the end of the day, people will elect whatever leaders they want. I think that’s by far the best we have so far, and anything remotely looking like a Platonist fucking Nazism, I’m out, so don’t worry about it.
No, the barred absolute, and this is B-A-R-R-E-D, to be clear about it since this is a podcast. Yeah, it’s fun. The barred and Bard are pronounced the same way, but the barred absolute actually comes from Jacques Lacan’s philosophical concept of the barred subject. The barred subject is a very simple but genial concept. It’s basically the concept that your subjectivity is your own blind spot. You are your own blind spot. Like I tell to my students when they say, what does it mean to record subject? Well, it means that anybody else in the world could lick your ass except you. You are your own blind spot. Actually, subjectivity starts from the fact that it’s a blind spot. If you want to have a riddle to solve, it’s yourself, and you will never solve it and you will die, and then you give up on trying to solving the riddle, because that’s what subjectivity is. Hegel says it’s like a spurious infinity trying to find itself. And precisely this process, the spurious infinity, I call it poetic infinity, is what subjectivity is.
Now if that’s the case, that means you are inaccessible to yourself and you can only be accessible to yourself through other human beings in relationships with them, which is perfect way to describe that you’re a social creature. Now embrace that. You can only be your true self by other people having access to you, and they will see you, because they will see you not from the blind spot, not from your own position, but they will see you from outside. Now the trick is then to understand that if we understand subjectivity as barred in this fundamental sense, that means that the barred absolute can be a principle we should apply on things, for example, when we tell people “You are not ready for this yet. You shouldn’t go in there because the transparency inside this room is something you’re not ready for.”
Because I’m a big fan of transparency and I certainly want political power to be transparent as much as you possibly can and it should be. But the thing is that for people to understand that during your life path, there are certain things you don’t understand, it probably never will understand, and we’ll call them barred absolute. And this is for example, if you meet somebody, Jim, who’s stuck in a mythos and is so fucking stupid you get embarrassed to have a dinner conversation with him and you decide that you can’t stand it. So you basically tell them, “Listen, I guess truth is a barred absolute to you because you’re stuck in front of the barred absolute, your mythos, so I’m not going to have a dinner conversation with you, because I’m actually on the other side of the barred absolute. Means I see a reality more for what it is than you do, and that’s just the way it is to me. Sorry, that’s my conviction. No dinner.” Right?
So the barred absolute is very useful. I know Zak Stein, we were doing the sort of preliminary work for [inaudible 01:21:46] event, we’re doing this amazing podcast, my friends in America, and Zak Stein once, he was sort of very pro-transparent, said, “Well, the barred absolute is like the most evil idea ever.” And I just said, do you want your children to watch hardcore child pornography? “No.” Well, that’s a barred absolute. You turn off the computer, make it impossible for them to watch hardcore pornography. That’s the barred absolute. We do have barred absolutes around children all the time. We prepare children to one day be adults.
Now, I’m of the conviction that adults also have to be prepared for the fact that some things they simply do not understand and probably never will, or they could understand if they make the effort. In the current consumerist society, we’re telling everybody they’re smart, we tell everybody they’re intelligent, we’re telling everybody they’re educated just by being born, and then we throw everything at them and they aren’t hardly understand anything and they come back with conspiracy theories and astrologies and all these stupid mythos things that you and I hate, and that’s not good. That’s exactly what the barred absolute is because it is on your side, Jim, because it’s actually great when you’re telling people, “Actually, your arguments are totally wrong. You don’t even get the basics of it. You need to study this or this before you can have an opinion on it.” That is practicing the barred absolute.
Jim: I’m going to suggest a measure of the goodness of societies that the larger the amount of barred absolute, the worse the society. That if a society inculturates its people correctly, if there’s education that’s correct, if there’s radical transparency, and this is where the whole game B movement, Zak Stein and others, Daniel Schmachtenberger all agree that radical transparency is one of the most powerful things that’s never been tried, and our networked world finally allows us to do it. I’m going to suggest that if we do things right, we build game B and it’s good or game C and it’s better, one of the ways to measure that it’s better is that the amount of barred absolute goes down over time, maybe not quite to zero but close. What do you think about that?
Alexander: Okay, yeah, I get it, and I get the idea, and I would minimize the barred absolute if I could, but if they’re warranted, they’re needed. And it’s exactly why we have kids so fucked up today. So Zak and I going to a podcast this fall, I can just mention that, with Michael Gibson and Tom Aroraki on these issues, and it’s very interesting to see actually how between 2010 and 2024, we screwed up an entire generation of kids to smartphones.
Jim: Social media.
Alexander: If you turn off the smartphone for a teenager, that’s a barred absolute. So apparently they are needed still in society. Minimizing them, absolutely. Minimizing centralized power, absolutely. I think we agree on many things, but my take on the barred absolute is that it’s very important philosophically to put it there, and it’s also important philosophically to put it that when I attack Christianity and Islam, because Christianity and Islam are fundamentally cults of transparency, it’s like God made himself transparent to humanity, now we know everything about God, and that transparency is someone that will save the world.
Jim: All you got to do is read the Bible, you and the Bible.
Alexander: Exactly, yeah. In that case, I come back with my tantric philosophy inspired by these to say, “No, actually not. I’m sorry, the barred absolute still needs to be there, and only those who trained for it can go into the temple, because if you’re not trained for, you can’t get in.” And in a way, we have to work our society that way because even if you have a very transparent society, and I totally love the idea, although it’s anarchist, but I love it, but the problem is that if I didn’t ask you, so who would you like to have over for dinner part at your house tomorrow night, you certainly want to have a say on who the guests are, don’t you? And if you want a say on who the guests are to come to your dinner, then you have a barred absolute. The people are not invited, they’re not welcome. That’s what a barred absolute is.
Jim: Maybe.
Alexander: You can’t [inaudible 01:25:27] a nightclub without having a great guy at the door, and he has to turn down quite a few people from getting in because otherwise the nightclub is not going to be very popular.
Jim: We’re going to get to this, probably not today, but later. And that’s the concept of membranes, membrionics, right?
Alexander: Oh, yes, yes, of course. Yeah.
Jim: See, I do not read membrionics as the same as the barred absolute. In fact, in game B, one of the few reasons we’ve kicked people out, and we have kicked about 25 people out over the years, one of them is what I call playing the guru game, which is claiming that you know things, but you can’t tell people because they’re not ready. We have found this to be a classic model of exploitation, and it’s frankly part of the religion game. I am the intermediary with Yahweh, right? Therefore, if you piss me off, I’m going to tell Yahweh to smite thou. The guru game of having barred absolutes that I’m only going to let you in on my terms strikes us as a very bad exploit, and particularly one beloved by sociopaths.
Alexander: It is sociopathological, absolutely. Here’s the trick though. A spiritual teacher, real spiritual, would love to teach you everything he or she knows as quickly as possible. That’s the starting point for spiritual teaching. Then the question is that you figure out what you’re ready for and not ready for yet, and that’s exactly… The barred absolute is your own. You place it in you, and that’s what a real adult should do. The barred absolute is all mine.
Jim: And say by you’re learning science, right? So you’re learning physics, you start with statics and simple dynamics, and you work up to waves and vibrations, then relativity. And so that sense, if you take barred absolute in that sense, I have no problem with it, nor would Zak Stein, but it’s when you say that there is-
Jim: Nor would Zach Stein, but it’s when you say that there is only 1% ever going to understand this, and we’re never going to tell people about it, we’re going to run a burger burgers, or whatever the fuck they are, going to run the world because they’re smarter than everybody else and et cetera. That I strongly disagree with.
Anyway, let’s move on to the next chapter, and it’s probably going to be the only one we finish. We may get one more, and that’s chapter three. This is a very interesting one, actually. Tribopoiesis, everything begins and ends with the sociont. This idea of tribopoiesis is a quite interesting one, and hits on origins of order, and how emergence and order and disorder all work together. So tell us about tribopoiesis.
Alexander: Well, it’s actually going against my father figure here, it’s rebelling against Deleuze, because Deleuze and Guattari borrowed from Valera and the Chileans, in the 1970s borrowed the term autopoiesis, which is roughly translated, badly, a self-organization in English. Now, a system can self-organize, and we know how that works. And system science and complexity science have proven that very well, and that’s philosophically incredibly interesting as well. But my point is that, for us as human beings, it doesn’t make much sense to put order in there, because what happens is that what is order in the poiesis, which is birth in Greek, not poetry, poiesis, not poetry. So in the poiesis, the autopoiesis is not actually in itself suddenly organizing itself. It is the collective that organizes itself, but it has a function built into it that can organize itself in a certain pattern under certain conditions. And it can also be creative, and playful, and adaptable.
So it makes more sense to connect social sciences and philosophy with the natural sciences. It makes more sense in that case to start talking about tribopoiesis. The tribopoiesis is developed, is like an autopoiesis plus. But what is it actually that organizes? So you get the magic out of the whole thing, because self-organization itself sounds like magic. It’s like magically a flock of birds organize themselves to fly in a certain pattern. No, that’s not magical at all. And the point wasn’t that that was going to be the case, but to get the magic aspect out of autopoiesis, which has become a popular term in UHs, of course. We just go in and say, “No, it’s tribopoiesis.”
Now, human beings start with a sociont. We start with the social grouping. We are personified archetypes in the group and that’s where purpose and meaning comes from. We’re men and women together in our community. That’s where human beings start. Now, that is the case. Now, why do we look at the world that way? So we started imagining what if not just social sciences and anthropology can be developed tribopoietically, and it started to make sense that actually once you start using the term tribopoiesis a bit like individual, you can basically replace the individual, and you can replace autopoiesis just about everywhere the term is used. So I would say, in our philosophy, by having tribopoiesis as the proper term, which better describes what actually goes on when something self-organizes, we can just say the only autopoiesis that exists is the universe as a whole. Only on the universal global level can we really talk about autopoiesis. The universe as itself organizes itself in certain patterns and does certain things apparently, and we can study them and they’re called laws of nature.
But when we look at tribopoiesis, it makes more sense for us in the local aspect of say a flock of birds flying, it makes more sense to talk about them tribopoietically. Now what’s also great in tribopoiesis is that tribopoiesis then becomes a really useful term philosophically, for example in ethics. So you can say that my ethics, my values are built on tribopoiesis as first principle. Whatever serves my sociont, whatever makes my sociont expand. What makes my sociont grow? What’s make people in my sociont thrive is tribopoietic. You can’t say about autopoietic because there is no tribe involved. Tribopoietic is basically judging from the sociont, does not make sense. So we can build values based on that.
I think it’s perfect for your GameB communities when they set up their own little local laws and rules, whatever they want to do, that they think about them from the principle of tribopoiesis as a starting point. We are here, we’re here together, we create a community, we’re peaceful with each other, we’re civilized, we have conversations. We want to build a home together. We want to build a village together, whatever. Let’s make anything that we’re making, this [inaudible 01:31:21] tribopoietic. Regarding as shared property for example or something shared value or develop together.
Jim: One of the things we have come to is to realize that every GameB membrane will have a commons as part of it, otherwise there’s no reason to have a membrane, right?
Alexander: Exactly. So you’ve got the membrane, which is get nutrition in, get shit out, out of the system, which is fundamentally what a membrane is. That’s why intelligence starts with membranes. We’re going to talk about later conversations. We’re both love membranics, you and I, and it’s the most interesting thing ever. But once you’re inside the membrane, you have a community, whatever comes out of that community is being created, children being born, technology is being invented or whatever you want to call it. Just the whole thing maintained, fed, taken care of is tribopoietic. So that’s what we launched the term. I was just frustrated that the word autopoiesis was sloppily used everywhere and it’s sloppy because there is no self there to organize the self in a self-organization. It is the system itself that organizes and if that is the case, then skip the auto entirely and get the automatic whatever out of the picture or the magic out of it and just look at it… That’s how a collective should organize itself. It’s not magical or anything.
Jim: I’ve said this before and you know, I think that people use autopoiesis in a way that carries too much water and sort of verges on the magical, but as I hear you define your tribopoiesis, maybe there is a useful distinction that in the social realm, tribopoiesis makes sense, but in say for instance the pre-life, early self-organizing of cycles of chemical reactions, the Stuart Kauffman auto-catalytical sets or sand pile complexity structures, et cetera. Something like autopoiesis is distinct from tribopoiesis. Then of course we can also, because we’re talking about tribes of people or groups of people, we can also then layer in the idea of group selection from a Darwinian perspective, which provides the co-evolutionary force field to determine if a tribopoiesis is working or not. Again, things I’ve warned about GameB is no, this isn’t a bunch of utopian hippies in mud huts because if you can’t compete, you die, right? You can’t make your own food, you die.
Alexander: I totally agree and this is why there’s a new term, tribopoiesis complements autopoiesis. And this is the great thing and probably that’s what’s going to happen as well. So for example, if you look at autopoiesis in, for example, in fundamental biology, then the trick is that if you talk about the collective of forces involved in something happening, then it’s a tribopoiesis. If you talk about the system as a whole developing a certain way because it’s enclosed on itself, for example with membranics, then it’s autopoiesis.
I’m perfectly fine with the term, it’s just that like you said, autopoiesis was widely used everywhere and the magic was attached to things we wanted to get magic out of the way and especially the social sciences. I will not hear ever again, people talk about social gatherings as autopoietic. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. They’re certainly tribopoietic, there are so many different drives and desires and things involved in people getting together and grouping. They must be described tribopoietically. And I think it’s also great way poetically to use the term we say that when a child is born to community, we celebrate the fact the child is born to community, a tribopoietic occasion has occurred, an event has occurred. So the word is very poetically useful as well.
Jim: I like that. I like that distinction. This is good. I’m glad we had this conversation. Now let’s move on to something we’ve alluded to several times, which is membranes and boundaries. This is something we both are extremely interested in and to my mind it’s becoming one of my main lenses to think about what comes next. So let’s have the Bardian view on membranes and boundaries.
Alexander: Well, the thing was that after having studied Sloterdijk, the German philosopher for years, and especially his Spheres book, which is one of my… Three books on Spheres and Foams is my favorite of the three. But I got tired of the fact that he was really only interesting to architects because it was really interesting in the inside of the foam.
Now I find what’s interesting with a unit that separates itself from the rest of existence, it’s actually it’s membrane because everything happens on the membrane and there wasn’t really a philosophical discipline that delves the membranes. So again, we had to invent it and we called it membranics. And it’s really useful in terms off a scientists too because they use the term membranics. So membranics is basically how does a system isolate itself from the outside in an intelligent, interactive way? Because if you have a wall, and we think of a wall of legs, nothing sneaks out or whatever, we know that’s still the case, neutrinos need to, but think of a wall as something definite. A membrane is something intelligent. For example, biology is full of it, like fats and things like that. So something has a break on what comes in, therefore you can’t get in that easily, but it can probably get in.
Jim: Yeah, the term we like to use is semipermeable, right? And in fact, you could even go a step further and say lawfully semipermeable, which is the membrane, this is very much true for cell walls for instance. Your different cells in your body have different lawfulness in their membranes and they allow certain things in and certain things out, and they actually rate limit the rate at which things come in and out. For instance, the way synapses work is the way calcium compounds get exuded at a certain rate actually has to do with the way our nervous system works. So in biology they’re hugely important. And of course in the economies as well, think of the nation state with its borders and its tariffs and its customs.
Alexander: Jim, this was the genius of the concept exactly. When we realized membranics was applicable to any kind of system, any kind of system. So technologists love it because how are they going to develop AI if not having the membranics? So the point was to not be interested in what’s inside the circle, but rather interested in how the circle has a membrane towards the outside world because that’s where all the interesting shit happens. You totally agree. So membranics is a very, very simple set of principles for how a membrane must operate to the self-interest of the inside of the membrane. And we are not focused on the inside giving anything you want.
Jim: Once we, let’s say have membranes that have lawful semi-permeability, these then become units for emergence. This is how we potentially get well beyond the sociont numbers and can cooperate at arbitrary scales as humanity has always done without top-down command and control.
Alexander: Exactly. Or an emergence could happen because the membrane implodes. Negation can also kickstart something new, which Terrence Deacon is quite interested in. Maybe the universe is whole, to a large extent is a lot of emergencies that are actually are losses of something. Something got lost and therefore something else happened. So whatever. But the great thing with membranics is that you very, very quickly because you’re only working with principles that are neutral across emergence vectors, can work you for anything, you basically work with metaphysical concepts called inside and outside. And what does it mean to be an inside compared to an outside? Well, number one, the inside is different from the outside. It can be different heat or whatever, but it’s different from the outside. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make any sense to even think about a membrane. So there’s clearly a membrane that creates a difference between the inside and the outside.
That means as soon as you get a few little things that get stuck inside the membrane, they can operate in some kind of a memory, can be very, very rudimentary, but as soon as there’s a memory or the membrane is created with the memory in it, which is human being with a gene plex, right? So as soon as you have a system which has any sort of memory storage in it, it could be very rudimentary, then the system can learn or be pre-programmed. So if you can learn to be pre-programmed in that sense, that means that it can discover that certain things that it has tried in the past were not nutritious, rather be shitty and won’t let them in. And other things where nutritious and therefore keep letting them in. And certain things that are pushing on the way out turn out to not be nutritious in the past, turn out to be shitty, you let them out.
So the system becomes system or nutrition comes in and shit goes out. And once you see a plant and an animal next to each other, you discover the perfect marriage between the two because if you see them as membranics, exactly what is the shit for the plant becomes the food for the animal, then what exactly is the shit for the animal becomes the food for the plant. And therefore biology is full of plants and animals and they should be together because plants and animals really are mutually beneficial for each other from a membranic point of view. Now the trick is then you can start applying this on ethics and you can say, so which technologies human beings have around them? Which technologies must we ban and go after? Which technology should we encourage more of? Well, you just take the question, is it good membranics with human beings? If the technology benefits human beings and makes us grow and expand and has value for the social, it’s a good technology. Embrace it, take it in, become a cyborg if you want to. Don’t fight it.
Have it including you because it’s nutrition for your membrane. Whereas the shitty technologies that actually weren’t beneficial for you, for example, smartphones in the hands of 11-year-olds probably need to be turned off shit, you throw it out the membrane. So you can create values by looking at membranics all the way through and you are absolutely right. The great thing with the model of doing membranics is that it’s so simple and so principled, it’s metaphysical that it can be applied on any emergence factor you want to work with.
Jim: And I’m going to do a little divergence here into a little bit of GameB thinking that fits perfectly at this point, the code, let’s call it, inside the membrane, defines the membrane and it can dynamically change, right? Let’s say 25 years ago, a membrane might not have a rule about smartphones at all, right? And then smartphones exist and say, these are cool, let’s encourage people to use smartphones. And then it learns, oh fuck. Once social media and advertising supported internet becomes a thing in 2004, suddenly it becomes an attention hijacking machine. And so then by 2023 we realized, fuck, we don’t want smartphones in here. So the code inside the membrane can modify the permeability.
Alexander: That’s what’s called dialectics, you just described it. A good membranics has a dialectical process. All is required is memory. So if you put memory next to the membrane, you can have a dialectical process. You can have a dialectical process, no time at all. And this is the case also for machine intelligence as much as it is for animal intelligence or plant intelligence, whatever you want to call it. But any sort of intelligence system will be membranic, fundamentally be membranic to then develop itself.
Jim: Okay, let me get onto this next point. I love your reaction to this. I think we alluded to this on our mailing list recently, didn’t quite nail it, which is one of the neat things about thinking about society being built from membranes and particularly if built up from a bottom up perspective is that it’s possible within a membrane to have very strong sauce. This is a Jordan Hall-ism, right? You could have a really radical point of view within your membrane. And in contrast to late stage financialized capitalism plus liberalism is a very thin sauce. What do you really say about our society? It’s banal, it’s shallow, it’s just [inaudible 01:42:33].
And part of it’s because of our democratic aspects. I believe democracy was both a solution and a problem that came into existence around 1700. The country size of the United States or even the size of Sweden, we all have to agree that these are the rules and so therefore the set of actual rules we can have is kind of thin and not very interesting. But if we have a population of 1500, we can establish really cranky rules. We can say for instance, there will be no marriage and it’ll be all free love. And that’s in membrane A. Membrane B, a kilometer away, it could be anyone who has sex outside of marriage will be expelled. And both of those are okay. And essentially both of them are radically strong sauce. And then over time evolution will take care of which ones work better, which ones attract people, which ones repel people.
Alexander: I love how Jim Rutt, the biggest opponent to organized religion, is inventing religious cults. I love it. I love it. It’s deeply dialectical, Jim. It’s deeply dialectical.
Jim: As you know, I am not opposed to religion if people find it useful, as long as you don’t try to make me follow your shit, right? And so I absolutely expect in the GameB world or in the world that you envision, the return of the sociont in the digital age that there will be cults and some of them will work for people who like cults and people are different. GameB world, we call it coherent pluralism. There’s a small number of things we agree on and a certain way that we interact via protocols, but the content of the protocols is not defined and inside the membranes, there’s a tremendous degree of freedom of how people choose to live to increase their human wellbeing within ecological limits. And that’s going to feel so much better for people once they find the right membrane.
Now at first, instead you’re born into this bland, flat land and there is no alternative really. Instead, in this world of membranes that are highly differentiated, probably you’re a wanderer for a while as a young person, right? You go, “Ooh, I hate this. I’m here two weeks, I’m out of here.” And then you go on the next one, “Okay, this is better. But then I’ve heard that this free love one down the road, that’s for me.” And you go over there and that’s great until you get the clap and then you go, “Fuck, this is not such a good idea.” And then you move on to-
Alexander: You have no idea how Zoroastrian you are, Jim Rutt. This is Zoroastrianism in a nutshell.
Jim: All right, well if that’s the case, then count me in, right? Count me in.
Alexander: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we are going to go deeper into that next conversation we’re having as well because this is actually where it comes from, the [inaudible 01:45:09] event is Zoroastrian manifesto. This was thought already late Bronze Age. That’s what’s so funny, people did actually imagine things like this already back then. And this is why I was interested in whoever thought of extending the size of the membrane of the sociont to larger membranes must be the greatest philosophers ever because that’s what philosophy should have done over the last 3000 years. That’s the greatest most important philosophical lesson in all. And this is where [inaudible 01:45:35] does run with GameB, absolutely. I totally agree on that one.
Let me just add one thing to that about the membranes because you were a bit uncomfortable with the Bard absolute before, but the thing is that we are huge fans of experimental laboratories, experimental labs. An experimental lab, what I call tantric lab is a lab where you can do anything you like with sex and drugs or whatever because you’ve signed in, you’re grown up, you go in the room and whatever happens and there is something, you are totally consented to it because you’re part of a process that shouldn’t be out there and outside society, that has a very strong membrane because what happens experimentally something… It’s like a laboratory where you’re experimenting with viruses and bacteria, whatever for military purposes, nothing must leak out otherwise you got a world by a pandemic in two seconds.
So this is what we mean with the Bard absolute. The Bard absolute is there for us to be able to create experimental labs, even social labs in that case, that are so damn experimental that they go beyond our wildest fantasies and then see if they work or not. But by containing things inside a membrane of a laboratory, it will not leak out and destroy the world for us.
Jim: Though, I’m not sure why a sex cult needs to be a Bard absolute as opposed to a semi-permeable membrane. But of course how semi-permeable and under what rules is up to that membrane to define.
Alexander: I tell you what, nothing is more fine than going to the whorehouse and get drunk when there’s a Baptist church neighbor to it, doesn’t even know the whorehouse exists.
Jim: Exactly. And I would say in the world of coherent pluralism must as a matter of principle, tolerate the whorehouse, whether it likes it or not, right?
Alexander: I’m going to borrow coherent pluralism. Is that from you and Jordan?
Jim: That’s me. That’s Jimism.
Alexander: That’s you, that’s Jim Rutt. Okay, coherent pluralism, definitely term. It’s just like [inaudible 01:47:18]. [inaudible 01:47:18] is just reinventing religion, theology and philosophy for digital age. And in this sense, coherent pluralism is the perfect term for that. It is the Zoroastrian religion essentially. That’s exactly what it is.
Jim: This will be the last thing we talk about today. The Zoroastrians, I’ll take your word for it, we’ll get to it later, invented coherent pluralism and this vision 3,500 years ago, something like that. But it did not work. The strong man model continued to dominate the world. Let’s say for various reasons it didn’t work. And I’m going to hypothesize it didn’t work in part because the nature of the technologies of the time that the top-down command and control empires worked better in head-to-head competition. But we now live in a world with a whole bunch of new affordances. This network world is qualitatively different than the pre-network world. I’d love to hear you wrap on how membranics, the return of associate and technology work together to provide a potentially relatively radically new emergent vector for society.
Alexander: So anybody goes for simplicity at this stage where the world is more complex than ever is the liar and must be stopped. So I’m totally with decentralization. I am seriously terrified of the surveillance police state. I think it’s just around the corner. I’ve never met a politician in my life that said no to more power.
Jim: Look at China today.
Alexander: Politicians and bureaucrats never say no to more power. That means they love communist China. They’re just not admitting it. And they want to create models similar to communist China and even worse. Now, I do not want that. Now this is where I go personal in my philosophy, as a philosopher and a possible futurologist, I cannot predict the future. All I can say is that we have a minimum chance of stopping the surveillance police state from happening. And if it happens, at least if I have to give my data to the fucking government, I want to give it to five competing forces that are fighting the government at the same time. So I’m all for division split. That’s why Max Bord is a great friend of mine, a neighbor of yours on the east coast of America as well. He’s a great guy. Max Bord and I met a few years ago, read each other’s books, realized we’re on the same mission.
The mission here is to go for decentralization when it’s the most important. That’s why I love the GameB project too, because I [inaudible 01:49:33] anybody today who re-thinks larger than [inaudible 01:49:37] creatively as free and open systems because we have to avoid tyranny. And the general theme of process event is how do you avoid tyranny? You avoid it precisely by pointing out the tyrant is a failed human being and tyranny will not last but will cause enormous havoc while we have it and therefore it must be stopped. And that’s why we fundamentally phallically say the priest of chief may never be the same person. That means the two main brain halves of men, the bad side of patriarchy must never try to be the same person. To stop the tyrant is our ultimate mission today. And to stop the tyrant, we must use any technology we can find, any social tools we can find, any [inaudible 01:50:18] we can find to spread the message of decentralization being a force for good.
Open source for example, the more we have, the better off we all are. We know that already. So I’m totally on the side of decentralization. I think left and right is done. I think centralization, decentralization is where the world is going to be at. And I think people out there once they realize that my message is that you should be in control of your own algorithm. You should be in control of your own AI. You should know what kind of algorithm they are surrounding your children. Now whilst people realize that, and it’s not the big tech company, it’s not the governments, anybody else who controls the algorithms they have for us, then we really started moving thing in the right pattern. And I want to be the streets of Paris against establishment of Versailles when this struggle really breaks loose. And I predicted it for a long time. Over the next 50 years it’s going to happen. And I’m totally on the side of decentralization here.
Jim: Very good. Then obviously we’re on the same page. One of the big influences on our GameB thinking was a book called Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm. And his argument was that at the clan [inaudible 01:51:19] level, the Dunbar 150 and below, humans developed an operating system to defeat big men. That inevitably big men emerge somewhere on the sociopathic line, cross-culturally just as about 4%, 3% are dedicated homosexual and another 5% bisexual, also appears about 1% of sociopaths. So in a community of 150, guess what? On average you have one sociopath. And sometimes those sociopaths are charismatic. And in fact there appears to be a positive correlation between charisma and sociopathy. So you get a somewhat charismatic sociopath and they decide to set themselves up as a big man. Happens again and again and again.
And Boehm’s argument is that over tens of thousands of years at least, Homo sapiens developed an operating system to defeat big men, which he describes as first you ignore him and if he persists, you laugh at him. If he continues, you exile him. If he comes back, you kill him. And then lays out and looking at both current forager level peoples and what we can tell from the archeology and anthropology of the past, that most clan level societies were able to not get captured by big men. But once we started building bigger entities, even at the level of the tribe that started to break down and certainly the chiefdom, which is the next stage up from the year 150. But some chiefdoms were 150, 1500 I should say.
So it strikes me that part of our mission, both of our missions is how do we allow organizations at every scale, including worldwide… We still want to do worldwide things. We want to do the Gravity Antenna, which was a 30-year project of people all over the world, a beautiful project of human cooperation. We still want to send a probe to Alpha Centauri. We still want to mine the asteroids, so we need to do big ass shit, right? But what we want to do is have a social operating system in which we disenfranchise the emergence of big men. What do you think about that as an idea?
Alexander: The big man in the book is called The Boy Pharaoh in chapter six across events. That’s exactly the character you’re talking about. He’s an underdeveloped guy, could be born that way or due to a child [inaudible 01:53:35], sort of boy [inaudible 01:53:37] mentality. He has no sense of humor. That’s why you use humor against him. And he just wants to get ahead of everybody, he’s revengeful. Now he was probably useful evolutionarily speaking in war or hunting or something like that. That’s why they’re around. But as soon as your social gatherings and a prolonged period of peace, we get these problems. And that’s exactly the point. But describing the boy pharaoh, we’re also pointing out in that chapter that there is also divergence from… There’s this opposite figure, which is equally problematic. And that’s the pillar saint. The pillar saint is an ideological big man, the little boy with big ideas. And he wants to conquer the world memetically and not genetically and take over the world.
And the problem with the Axial Age was that we had long periods of peace. Suddenly these characters thought they were dead important and they became the tyrants. And this is why we can point out big man, yes, but think of it two ways. Think of big man as either being somebody who’s beneath the throat and hates everything above the throat he can find. That’s the boy pharaoh. Or somebody who loves everything above his own throat, but is everything beneath the throat. So the disembodied, fundamentally these guys, the disembodied and therefore the boy pharaoh and the pillar saint are the curse on humanity. They must be pointed out. They must point them out through argumentation, said, “No, no, there’s another pillar saint coming over there. Watch out.” And that’s the problem I think fundamentally.
And the socio-pathology is basically just the boy pharaoh or pillar of saint to discover they have no other path forward, but to stay with the boy pharaoh or stay with the pillar of saint to it because it’s the only game in town they know and they try to get it by using that game and they must be exposed. And this is why Hierarchy in the Forest is a brilliant book. It perfectly rhymes with chapter six of [inaudible 01:55:15] event. This is the way to deal with it.
Jim: Cool. We’ll be back for at least one more episode. My guess is two, if Alexander is willing, and we will continue to dig in at approximately this level of detail throughout this long and thick and chewy book. So I want to thank you Alexander, for a wonderful, energized and on-point conversation.
Alexander: Thank you Jim for having me. Love your show.