The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Gregg Henriques. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Gregg Henriques. Gregg is a professor and core faculty member at James Madison University’s Clinical and School Psychology Doctoral Program. He also writes a quite useful blog on Psychology Today and hosts the interesting podcast UTOKing with Gregg. As always, links to these things we mentioned will be on the episode page at Jimrurtschow.com. Welcome, Gregg.
Gregg: Hey, Jim. It’s great to be back here.
Jim: Yeah, Gregg is a returning guest. He’s been on several times on various topics. The ones that relate to the topic we’re going to be talking about is we did one of my favorite three episode arcs, starting with EP 176 titled Addressing the Enlightenment Gap on one of his previous books. This is a really deep dive into some of the same topics we’ll be talking about today. Then way back in EP 59, we talked about unifying psychology, which is also related to what we’ll be talking about today. There’s some other episodes as well, so if you want to just search his name on the episode page, you’ll find them. Anyway, Gregg, in addition to his other cool work, is increasingly well known as the creator of the Unified Theory of Knowledge, also known as UTOK. Today, we’re going to talk about that using Gregg’s recent book titled just that UTOK, the Universal Theory and Knowledge as a starting point. Let’s jump into this. Let’s start where you do in the book with what’s the problem that we face, the context? Why do you think this thing is needed?
Gregg: Actually, we can use the word unified. One of the books on my shelf here is by Edward Wilson. It talks about conciliance, the unity of knowledge. Basically, it starts out our knowledge is a lot more fragmented in the academy, meaning when you go into the formal understanding of things like the natural sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and then the professions and other knowledge systems that branch out of that, there’s no structure for that, that coherently interrelates them.
He laid out an argument mostly from the natural sciences about how to achieve conciliance, the unity of knowledge. I’ll hone that down and home in on the argument that there’s an enlightenment gap. You mentioned that because we talked about that. What is that? We don’t have a good framework for understanding just a shared worldview, philosophical, scientific framework that says, “Oh, this is what mind is in relationship to matter, and this is what scientific knowledge is in relationship to subjective and social knowing.” I believe that UTOK can give us that there is a way to place those pieces of the puzzle together, and indeed the vision would be you could walk into an academy and say right from the beginning, almost all the way down to kindergarten, say, “Hey, these are the elements. This is how they go together,” and get a much more unified view than a chaotic fragment.
Jim: Cool. Well, let’s start out with your three vectors of knowing.
Gregg: Basically, the three vectors are as follows. Think about it this way. You go to sleep at night, you wake up, you open your eyes, you’re a particular primate and person in the world, and you look around and you see the window, the bed, you go get a cup of coffee, you taste what that feels. That’s subjective knowing. It’s a perspective in the world, it integrates your particular view across your senses and your body gives you your phenomenal mind experience of the world. That’s a subjective view. Then think about where you were, who did you vote for in the last election? Are you in the United States? Are you in Canada? What’s your justification system? What’s your religion? How do you identify in the world? That’s your cultural knowledge, the cultural stories we tell. That’s your intersubjective cultural knowledge. Then what’s the periodic table of the elements, hydrogen, helium? What’s the standard theory of elementary particle physics, et cetera, et cetera? That’s scientific objective. You get scientific objective, intersubjective cultural and subjective phenomenological knowledge and vectors just mean they’re basically framed from a point and look out at a direction.
Jim: Let me add one minor objection, that there’s lots of objective knowledge that’s not scientific. The path through the woods that I follow to go from one of my fields to another field at my farm, that’s objective knowledge that I have, and I can of course transmit that intersubjectively. I can tell the guy that’s working at the farm, “Well, to go from field A to field B, follow this path, and at the fork, turn left.” There is objective knowledge that’s not scientific by a long shot, but otherwise I think that’s good.
Gregg: Okay. Certainly, there are what we would colloquially refer to as objective facts, absolutely.
Jim: Yeah, and I’m just going to add a Ruttian synthesis, which I use more and more these days, which is science is the intersubjective verification of the interobjective.
Gregg: Well, that’s absolutely key. Where does science fit in UTOK, science fits coming out of culture. What is culture, the intersubjective? You have the subjective into the intersubjective, and then it’s a particular intersubjective knowledge that we’ll call objective scientific knowledge. Specifically by the way, and I don’t even mean science broadly, I mean actually modern empirical natural science is really the knowledge system that I’m connecting to here.
Jim: I’d add the intersubjective is actually key also, is that the engine of science is about finding things that we can agree about, right?
Gregg: Totally.
Jim: The ideas don’t necessarily start from groupthink, for instance, Einstein’s general relativity. [inaudible 00:05:14] came up with that. At first, people thought he was nuts. But then the facts, the data kept coming in and saying, “God damn it, he’s right.” Or quantum mechanics, I just read yet another book about the invention of quantum mechanics, so fucking weird, utterly unintuitive, and initial reaction, including from Einstein, was, “This is bullshit,” but the data kept coming in, coming in. It’s now the most precise theory in all of science, 14 decimal points, its accuracy.
Gregg: And the dipole, yep.
Jim: That’s the interobjective meeting the intersubjective. That’s… Anyway, let’s go on. You bring up a topic that we talk about a lot on the Jim Rutt Show, which is the need for the new system around the Meta Crisis.
Gregg: Yeah. I believe basically, we established an industrial age, modern way of thinking. It spread throughout the world, had all sorts of benefits at some level, also created potentially all sorts of problems, and I think we’re at a critical juncture in these next couple of decades to see what’s going to happen, where things are heating up. The Meta Crisis basically says, “Hey, a lot’s happening, and then it shrinks it into a heuristic,” that basically says, “Let’s really identify four major things that are happening.” Two on the technology mother earth side. One, you have a techno-environmental crisis, which basically is the industrial revolution, extracted energy in an unbelievably powerful way. Everything changed, which was great as on the front end, but then we created this locomotive system of turning mother earth into technology, and that’s burning her up on all sorts of different islands, and it’s gaining steam, so to speak, and of course, there’s climate change and depletion of particular environments and the basic extinctions that are happening, and that’s creating all sorts of stress. That trajectory seems to get worse and worse potentially if we don’t figure out a way to turn it around.
You also then have, on the technology side, you have the digital. The digital is a new information processing system and communication network. I argue that that is going to set the stage for a whole new complexification whereby basically cultured persons and digital technologies are merging singularity kinds of elements along those lines create a whole bunch of different environments, some create a lot of potential, but also undermine or threaten all the old structures. That’s a massive flux.
Then you go on the human identity side, there’s a meaning crisis. Our friend John Verbeke talked a lot about that. Basically, what’s true and good. UTOK basically says there’s a lot more opportunity for understanding human knowledge and what’s true and good across shared elements. Then finally, we see a mental health crisis. I speak as a psychologist, that relative to our control we’re a lot less happy and more crazy and neurotic than would be ideal, and what it would be like to address some of those things. Lots of stuff happening. I think there’s a way that we can think about the optimistic side of the transformation and a pessimistic side, but a lot of different things are happening here.
Jim: I’m glad that you keep that tension, because there are techno-optimists, who I think are dangerous as fuck, but there’s also people who spiral into despair, and that’s utterly useless. If you’re in a despaired state, even if we are fucked, you at least have to pretend that we’re not and give it the best college try. I still believe there is a way to thread the needle, but we have to go forward and do it and not fall into either despair or ridiculous techno-optimism.
Gregg: 100%.
Jim: You’ve identified what you called four great problems that need to be addressed by UTOK. What are those four big problems?
Gregg: This gets into, we already mentioned one, the enlightenment gap. That’s the formal philosophical problem of taking natural science, putting in relationship to human consciousness and culture, clarifying what mind is relative to matter and these different kinds of knowing. To give us a coherent picture, I came into the enlightenment gap because of the thing I’m with, is called the problem of psychology, and that is why does our knowledge system break down with psychology? What’s the history of that? Which noticed, by the way, that’s a science essentially of consciousness.
Initially, that’s what psychology was. Then it went to behavior and cognition and then ultimately now I don’t even know where it is. I got interested in that and the problem of psychotherapy. The problem of psychotherapy, sitting with somebody in the world, what’s wellbeing, and how do I scientifically know how to guide them from a psychological perspective? Then finally, there’s a problem with the psyche, which I argue is the unique ideographic particular, and I argue that science, at least by Galileo into Newton science, essentially factors out the psyche and the way it understands the world. We have to figure out a way to put the psyche in relationship to science and figure out what that is. UTOK affords us ways to frame all four of those problems and flip them from a chaotic and lack of clarity into a much more coherent, integrated perspective.
Jim: Yeah, that’s really a very interesting way to tease four different lenses out that we can look at the world simultaneously and be cross-paradigmatic in our analysis, which is really what this time seems to call for.
Gregg: Well, that’s certainly what UTOK is about.
Jim: Yeah. All right, let’s go on to the, at least in my exposure to your work, one of the first big systems that you created, which is the Tree of Knowledge. This is essentially the objective scientific vector of knowing.
Gregg: Really, it’s the natural sciences that basically says, “Hey, if we were trying to factor out the subject of incultural and then start from scratch using experimentation, mathematics deduction, how would we describe the unfolding of the world?” The Tree of Knowledge says that actually what we are seeing is a pattern of behavioral complexification. We could reduce it all the way back down into what I call energy information at whatever the initial state is of our observable universe. Out of that comes material objects on a space-time grid. Then we follow our particular trail to planet earth. We get the evolution of living organisms, which is a different dimension of complexification because of an information processing feedback loop system. If you look at like assemblage theory and other information processing approaches to life and complexity theory as you know very well, then the argument is that the nervous system and complex active bodies and animals is a very similar jump that we basically missed as a unique differentiation. That’s the mind-animal plane in the language here.
Then finally talking created a primate that could turn into persons, cultured persons. That’s the fourth plane of existence. Out of an energy information implicate order, you get matter of life, mind, culture and the Tree of Knowledge maps that corresponds them to the different investigations of sciences as it should be, not as it is, but that places psychology basically as a science of mind, brain and behavior, and then it bridges into the social sciences. That gives you a basic framework for understanding behavioral complexification in nature that I think is missing. There’s a lot of similar views out there, big history kinds of views. The Tree of Knowledge has some specificity that really deals with the problem of psychology in a novel way. And I think resolves it in a novel way, and that opens up a lot more coherence.
Jim: It’s a take at the big history of the universe and then narrowing in and then expanding back out as we reach the human. I would also suggest you did not use the E word, emergence, right? That the complexity lens would say, “Yes, this is approximately correct.” The mechanism, even though we don’t understand how it works, is emergence. I would point people to my original mentor in complexity, Harold Morowitz’s book called Emergence, which he lays out 28 stages of emergence. The last one is fucking spirituality, but that’s the other 27 were fine.
Gregg: Actually, John and I are working on a book right now. There’s a whole chapter devoted to what we call Extended Emergence. It clarifies our philosophy of emergence between weak and strong emergence and how to understand that in relationship to the different levels and layers of understanding.
Jim: That’d be fun to get you back on. We can talk about that. All right, next. In the book, you talk about, and I didn’t frankly didn’t fully understand this, it seemed a little bit confusing to me, or at least it wasn’t speaking to me, which is the iQuad Coin. Why don’t you tell us about that?
Gregg: Yeah, this is the weirdest part about the thing. First off, let me put it this way. We take for granted that each of us is a subject in the world. That’s essentially a backdrop understanding. Then I argue that science essentially has that as an implicit, and by that I mean, again, modern, empirical, natural science. I don’t want to keep saying that, but when I say science, that’s what I mean. The reason is, because science works a particular way essentially, if you know its history to factor out subjective qualities and values and try to define the world a particular way, so it plays by a particular set of rules, I argue that those rules actually create blind spots. In fact, there was a book by Evan Thompson and others by that name. There’s a real problem in our knowledge systems with this blind spot.
Our subjectivities are part of the knowledge equation. First and foremost, the iQuad coin simply is a placeholder for each of our unique ideographic perspective in the world. That’s the first thing that it is. What that does is it allows us to identify our unique historical accidental error perspectives, basically, if you want to put it in the language of science. Then the design of the iQuad Coin, and I won’t get into this, but basically its structure, if you think about the dimension between what is the most unique particular aspect, like here I am wearing a blue shirt sitting, happened to be in this chair at this moment in time and you are over there, that’s a unique particular element.
Then what are the most generalizable elements that we try to get at to gain the big picture of knowledge. Design of the iQuad Coin says, “Well, philosophy is trying to get at the most generalizable things of the ontic and epistemic. The ontic is the technical word for what’s real mind-independent. Epistemic is how we know philosophy’s fundamental question is, what is real and how do we know about it?” I argue that physics really teaches us about energy and information as the most generalizable concepts, and math gives us real numbers and imaginary numbers. The design of the iQuad Coin actually connects ideographic particular elements to the most abstract generalizable components in philosophy, mathematics, and physics, and it is that bridge architecture that provides a novel way to bridge the unique subject with science down the road.
Jim: Yeah, I got to say, it just did not land for me. It was like, “What the fuck?” Starting with the math thing, I go, “What the hell?” I assume you’re being metaphorical here, because I could not land this in actual mathematics at all. I mean, what you said was mathematically true, but then linking it to the other things, at best, it’s a remote metaphor, right?
Gregg: Right. This takes a long time to get into. I’ll certainly grim that. All I can say is that the short version for listeners is that there’s a unique architecture in UTOK that bridges the particular epistemic portal of the individual, meaning the knowing portal of each subject in the grid. Science basically has given us a map of the grid, but it doesn’t actually specify each one of the nodes that we are, or at least arguably. This provides a framework for doing that. How it actually does it at the technical level of why is it I to the fourth, which is the imaginary number and how all that works and actually relates to quantum mechanics in a particular way that probably takes us too far afield.
Jim: That would be fun. That’s the things I’m interested in, but it’s a bit of a rabbit hole.
Gregg: There’s a thing that’s behind this called the First Law of UTOK that I’ll explain to you one day, Jim, and show you that there is a logic here, but it looks weird, I’ll tell you that.
Jim: Well, you said that was the most weird thing. I would actually say it was the second weirdest thing. The next thing we’re going to talk about is the UTOK garden frame. As you can perhaps imagine it produced considerable eye-rolling for me, but nonetheless, it was interesting. Let’s take us through the UTOK garden frame.
Gregg: Basically where this whole really has launched me into a whole second way of thinking. The garden is a depiction of what’s called the Tree of Life, and on it has nine different elements plus two B’s. Each one of those elements is a set of ideas that helps make sense out of the world from a UTOK perspective. On the left side of the tree has four key ideas that make up the Unified theory of psychology. That’s the Tree of Knowledge, which basically gives us an idea of what science is, Justification, which frames human consciousness, the behavioral investment theory that frames animal cognition in the world and the influence matrix that frames how social animals relate, particularly social primates like humans. Then you go to the right side of the tree. It gives you a framework for the Unified approach. You talked about that with my fiancee Masiya, some four different ideas that make that up and give a lens for that, all tied together by this thing called the Metaphysical Empirical Flower or meme flower.
The symbolism here, Jim, is there’s a way to bridge the sciences and the humanities and psychology’s at a nexus point, especially with its one step in science and one step in psychotherapy nested around the social sciences on the one hand and the physical sciences on the other, and the garden’s a visual depiction about how knowledge can come together. I call it a dialectical dance between the sciences and humanities. You could add the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. It’s an intersecting nexus point, which would then bridge into arts and other kinds of elements. It is definitely a different idea. I had it back in 2016 and many people scratch in their head with it.
It’s actually a whole idea about the way in which education might work. I’ll give you this idea. The vision that I had when I built it was that you’d build a kindergarten that would be in a garden literally, and a bunch of kids would come together, and one of the things in the garden is called the stepping stone. You pick up a rock, Jim, and you’d throw it at your friends and boys would fight over it, and you put it in water and you see how much it weighs. Then over the grades, what you would reveal in that is the stepping stone is actually the standard theory of elementary particle physics. What that would then be is a map of educating individuals into, say, the matter dimension down into energy and would give a whole way of understanding the world that you interact with. First, you play in, and then it reveals itself to increasingly levels of abstraction. The idea is that it’s a representative of an entire academic educational system from kindergarten all the way up through doctoral training.
Jim: I guess. Good description. Now, let’s move on to the next thing, which is UTOK’s descriptive metaphysics for science, behavior and mind. For the listener, I have just pulled out my GP100 stainless steel Ruger 357 Magnum pistol, and I’m waving it around at the mention of the word metaphysics. I was very careful to make sure it was unloaded, not smart to wave a loaded pistol around. I mean, what the fuck? I don’t believe any of this stuff is metaphysics, but…
Gregg: Right. As we talked about, metaphysics is a very complicated word, like mind, like behavior and like science. Jim, I mean, what do you mean by the terms?
Jim: I mean the same thing that Aristotle meant or Kant, something that is outside of our ability, our potential ability to describe scientifically. I am quite convinced that there’s no, as are you, no magic about consciousness or subjectivity, and it is yet another natural thing in the world. That’s why I call myself a naturalist rather than a materialist. Things like phenomenology, subjectivity, language, culture, et cetera, are all natural phenomena, and I do not need to bring in the M word.
Gregg: Okay. Well, that’s the S word. That’s for supernatural. I’m not bringing in anything magical here, and that’s not what metaphysics normally means to many people. It’s certainly not what it is. First principles of philosophy, many people describe metaphysics as the concepts and categories. Now, I add the word to descriptive and systematic metaphysics to be very clear, and I differentiate it from pure metaphysics, which is disconnected from the empirical world. Jim, in the garden, there’s a meme effin flower that puts metaphysics right next to empiricism and makes clear that the problem of psychology turns out to be we don’t know what the effin term mind is, and we don’t know what behavior is, and we don’t know what cognition is, and we don’t know what consciousness is, and these are concepts and categories that we don’t know how to map.
What popped out of my head at the Tree of Knowledge in 1997 was a network of concepts and categories defined in relationship to each other that can be described effectively as a descriptive metaphysical system that maps the empirical knowledges that have been given to us by the sciences. I would just say, put the pistol away. You could call it logic, call it description, call it definition. If we want to console out metaphysics, that’s fine. I disagree that that’s what you should do, but I’m happy at your podcast to say, “Just call it a descriptive system.”
Jim: Yeah, it’s just yet another part of understanding the natural world, right?
Gregg: UTOK’s endo naturalistic. That means we go within the natural world, we stay there. Maybe there’s aliens, which would be potentially naturalistic. Maybe there’s parapsychology, who knows? Interesting stuff on that as you know, lots of different things. But let’s stay with what we know, like this conversation, the fact that I’m sitting in a chair, the fact that I’m going to die, let’s just stay with what we know. That’s what UTOK’s fundamentally about.
Jim: All right, let’s go on to the next thing, meta. I personally believe this is your biggest contribution so far, is the idea of mindedness, the forgotten dimension of existence.
Gregg: Fundamentally, what UTOK shows through its Tree of Knowledge is it says, “Hey, there are these four different planes of existence, material objects, living organisms that coming off of, and then there’s this whole mind animal.” Mind here then is a set of properties, a sensory motor loop that gives rise to a new class of behavior. The behavior of animals as whole bodies with brains acting against each other like in prey predation, hunting is a classic example territory. These are all the things that animals with complex active bodies do that plants, fungi and bacteria don’t. Really, that’s actually what I argue, the science of psychology. When you get right down to its nuts and bolts behaviorism, it’s actually trying to describe minded behavior. It’s a totally different thing. Then once you get minded behavior, then you’re going to be able to get mind as consciousness and mind as self-consciousness in a clear descriptive system.
Jim: You have Mind 1, Mind 2 and Mind 3. By the way, you still have those stupid fucking superscripts in this new book.
Gregg: Well, I asked Brendan, you can ask Brendan Graham Dempsey. HE’s like, “I like the superscripts.” He was the publisher, so I left them.
Jim: They’re hard to find.
Gregg: But they’re hard for your search system.
Jim: Yeah, I would suggest don’t use superscripts.
Gregg: I know.
Jim: But that’s all right, because-
Gregg: You have.
Jim: This is the second time I’ve complained about that. Also, another minor pitch about the book is there’s no table of context in the…
Gregg: It’s not a table, right.
Jim: There’s a glossary in the Kindle version. There was a table of contents in the PDF, which you nicely sent to me. I like to use Kindle to actually do the read through, and then I like to use PDF to go through and analyze it and make my show analysis. Now, as we’ve hit it about at lunch a couple times, I do have somewhat of an objection to this Mind one, Mind 2, Mind 3 thing. I think I can articulate it now. It’s not really an objection, because I do buy the model, but this is something I see all the time from people who come from a psychological frame, which is way too anthro-centric. In reality, I would suggest that Mind 2, subjective conscious experience, there is the kind that you and I share, which came up from the tetrapods, the lobe-finned fish into amphibians. Then there’s a whole other one we think that came through the large cephalopods, the octopi and the big squid. Those are two qualitatively different things, ontologically meaning in an ontology, not meaning in the philosophical…
Jim: Ontologically, meaning in an ontology, not meaning in the philosophical sense. And so, if I were trying to be ultra precise, I would say, the Mind2 you’re talking about is mind-tetrapods, right? Which is the kind of mind that tetrapods have. And then Mind3, I would label mind homo sapien, right? There’s nothing that says that there can’t be other ways of having mind that use one dimensional encoding of things that have syntax, which can then run through an interpreter and be turned from one dimensional to three or four dimensional, depending on how you want to think about it. And that’s really what differentiates the human mind from, let’s say, a chimpanzee mine. And I understand why it’s useful to compress this when you’re thinking about it in terms of psychology, but if you back away from an anthrocentric perspective, the tree gets bushier.
Gregg: Okay. Well, there’s a lot there in relationship. Let’s back up and say, all right. So, what’s first mind? Okay, first mind is a nervous system that can consolidate in a brain and then really of insects cephalopods and the vertebrates. Look at Peter Godfrey-Smith, he delineates this and emphasizes the importance of complex and active bodies in the consolidation of brain. And I would say, we share all of that.
Then, if you’re going to talk Mind2, Mind2 refers to the epistemological gap, meaning there’s an opening of subjective point of view, which I would say, if it’s in octopi then certainly it’s a different thread. But if it is the case that we’re talking about subjective experience, that is something like to be an octopus, it’s a different kind of mind, because I mean like, an octopus has got brains in its arms and God only knows what that is. In fact, there’s a great book by Peter Godfrey Smith on Other Minds, emphasizing octopus minds.
I think that calling it Mind2 would say, well, it just has the features of a subjective conscious experience. That’s where the hard problem comes in, what I call the neurocognitive engineering problem. Exactly what that is and where that gives rise to, is a good thing. I think that the word Mind2 would be useful in that context. It is absolutely important in UTOK to recognize that we are across a historical line. It is our history that we’re embedded in and operating from, often you could call it the Unified Theory of Human Knowledge, to emphasize the fact that these are humans pulling stuff together.
Jim: That works better for me. If you were to call this map of human mind, then definitely it works.
Gregg: Well, certainly I believe that the vocabulary works in terms of what people are referring to. You’re also right that you can gain increasing recursion on Mind2. And if you pass the mirror self-recognition, the famous Gordon Gallup… Although some fish may even pass that, that’s debatable. But if you pass that, that’s a good example of a particular kind of proto self-awareness. But Mind3 in UTOK, because it gets paired with the tree of knowledge system and the emphasis on novel information process and communication networks that are open and generative, says that propositional language is a tipping point. And then you get an entire mediated structure through a novel propositional language system, which may be true in orcas, may be true in… But I don’t see the kind of… It hasn’t become an open self-recursive, self-generating system, at least the way the culture of person plane is in humans. So, you and I are clearly, certainly with human minds, we can now say, okay, this intersubjective language mentation is a different kind of thing than my private vision for experiencing the world and my embodied behaving mind of Mind1.
Jim: And specifically, the lot where you draw the line is around, having sufficient language and sufficient linguistic culture to build a web of justification.
Gregg: That’s right. That’s right. Because the argument is that there’s a, you get socialized into a network of legitimizing structures, you need language to gain access to that. You build a network of propositions, that’s what capital-C culture is, which is different by the way than society. But capital C culture is the network of propositions that we get socialized in. And to be a person is actually to have accountability on that and to be able to justify your actions, accurately or wisely or whatever is the different question. But to be able to justify your actions on the social stage, and that is Mind3 culture-person dimension.
Jim: And you gave a good example. Gog says, “There’s an antelope over the next ridge.” Then Ogg says, “How do you know that? Are you sure you’re not lying because, you want to go hunt a rabbit over on this side?” Right?
Gregg: Totally.
Jim: And that is really somewhat, call it the lever that created this arms race in language and brain probably. But on the other hand, I think this is important for people to know, and it doesn’t invalidate your system, but I call it a footnote. That probably didn’t arise in humans until something like 70,000 years ago. We had proto language, which was not complete.
Gregg: Totally. That’s what my system says, that, it follows Tomasello, who emphasizes our capacity to sync up minds, intersubjectively, shared attention intention, in a way that’s better than the other apes. Then you symbolically tag them from about half a million years ago to about, I don’t know, 200,000 to a hundred thousand years ago. Then there’s a tipping point of propositional language, where you get symbolic syntactical syntax, that allows the proposition to emerge, that immediately triggers questions for counterfactuals, and then you get a tipping point that’s generative. And we do see the explosion of human culture over the last a hundred thousand years, that would be suggestive of that. That’s where I’m pointing.
Jim: Yeah. And more specifically in the last 60,000 years.
Gregg: Right. Mind’s Big Bang is 75 to 60,000 years ago.
Jim: By the way, the erudian contribution to this discussion, people used to say 40,000. I’d say, “It can’t possibly be 40,000 and here’s why. The Out of Africa event was about 65,000 years ago, maybe 70,000. And it’s quite clear that the people that came out of Africa and the people inside Africa, both shared full language.” Right?
Gregg: Right. I won’t be surprised if we push that thing back 100,000 years. We’ll see. There’s a bottleneck on the genetics. It’s an interesting question. The point is, logically, there’s a tipping point when you get a sentence that has propositional meaning, that opens up the dynamic to question it. Once you get question-answer dynamics, that builds to legitimizing structures. And then you look at us here today and what are we doing? Question-answer dynamics to legitimize.
Jim: Yeah, and I’m making you justify your stuff, right?
Gregg: As you do with the guests, that is the nature of the dynamic. That’s what it’s pointing to.
Jim: Again, I think this is the most interesting part of the work. But there’s lots of interesting things here, but this is the most interesting. But the next one’s also extremely interesting. We went and did a very deep dive back in the three-part arcs. Let’s just hit this lightly, which is your periodic table of behaviors.
Gregg: This sort of a map of emergence ontology. It basically, again, it comes off the tree of knowledge system. When you do this thing of, oh, matter, life, mind culture, you notice something really interesting when you do that division is that, each one of those seems to have a primary unit of organization. Atoms for the matter, cells for life, animals for mind, and persons for culture. And then when you look at those, if those are wholes, you do a part-whole mereology. That’s the philosophical term for part-whole relations. And you then go down, so from atoms, you go to parts and you go up into groups, you get molecules. Likewise, you go to cells and you go down into parts. And the most common part I point to is the gene, but it could do a number. Or you go up into multi-cells, you get the eukaryotic shift, which is really two cells sort of coming together, and then you get an explosion of multi-cells.
And in ecology, you go to animals, you go down into a neural net and groups of the nervous system that get yoked together, or you go up into animal groups. You can go over to humans, you get units of proposition and human cognition. They get bound together in persons justifying themselves in various contexts, all the way up to societies. So, you get the primary units, you go down into parts, up into wholes, across, and it gives you 12 floors.
And then you say, well, if that’s true, and if science is about objectively tracking things in nature, there should be a correspondence between these 12 floors and the way science is organized. And I argue, that’s exactly right. Things like neuroscience fit immediately into this, as saying, oh, that’s between biology and psychology at the seventh floor of behavior. So, it gives, I think, a nice analysis of how to map the way science has mapped the natural world.
Jim: Yeah, I’ve had it very interesting, and I think we dug into it for half an hour maybe, in EP 177 or 78, it was quite good. So, if people want to know more, go check that out. Next, you pulled together a number of threads to create a Unified Theory of Psychology. But before we have you do that, let’s talk about some of the underlying components of the theory. Let’s start with the first one, which is behavioral investment theory.
Gregg: Yes. So, basically the idea here is that, what is the nervous system? I talked a lot about sort of like, well, it’s a brain and complex active body, it’s moving the system around. And what does it got to do? It’s fundamentally got to manage energy expenditure and decide what it’s going to invest in, to get a return on its investment. So, it’s a cost benefit value system, that then will emerge in very narrow context and then expand accordingly. That can get yoked to John’s recursive relevance realization. We’ve done that.
So, what is the nature of the cognitive structure that affords behavioral investments? Got to determine what’s relevant and realize what’s out there and then realize what its potential are. And then recursively do that through a hierarchy. The argument is that, from behavioral investment, it tracks the behavior of old investment across the animal kingdom from reflexes into operant learning, into thinking and then recursive stuff, and in humans then, that’s what popped out into language. So, it gives a model for sort of, what I used to call weak neurocognitive functionalism, now it’s a much stronger version, because it connects to predictive processing and recursive relevance realization. It gives a basic framework for why animals are doing what they’re doing.
Jim: Yeah, I think, again, it’s a good biological lens in that, mom nature is a cheap bitch. She doesn’t want to spend any more energy than necessary. Because, if you spend energy, then you got to go kill something, right?
Gregg: You got to go kill something. The first principle is energy economics. That’s the first principle. Then it identifies principle evolution, principle of genetics, principle of learning, neurocomputational control, that sort of recursive relevance realization, and then developmental life history. You put all those together and that cuts across the cognitive behavioral neurosciences in an evolutionary animal lens, and I think it’s a powerful consolidating perspective.
Jim: Now, one particularly interesting formalism you used is P [inaudible 00:34:05] minus M, yields E. I thought that was quite interesting.
Gregg: So, this is, if anybody knows cybernetics, cybernetics is a control theory, and this puts it online. I got this in part from the work of William Powers, who was sort of a life control systems guy. And we can see this now also in things like predictive processing. So, what does it mean? Perception, which is checking essentially the map or reference, the sensory perceptual map of where you are, and then it checks your interior gut, we’ll just say, your interoception, like, are you hungry? Are you in danger? Are you wounded? Et cetera. And it makes a difference between where you are, where you want to be, and then it energizes motion, emotion, in relationship to that, which then feeds back. So you get a gestalt.
And really I think, our subjective conscious experience of being can say this, we have an outward looking exterior reception, we check it against our interior reception, then we feel energized to be a particular way. So, this pulls perception, motivation, and emotion in a control theory way, that also connects to things like, well, how do we understand operant theory, meaning the learning theory based on instrumental conditioning?
Jim: Yeah, I’m going to add a ruddy in perspective, which may or may not be true. I strongly believe that, part of this conscious cognition is that, we tag our episodic memories with the emotional valences. And that when we yank them back, the way they behave in the calculus of what we pay attention to next, is very strongly influenced by the direction of the valence and the strength of the valence, with strong valences having much stronger votes in how our conscious cognition unfolds.
Gregg: Semantic associative network theory is a theory that suggests that to be accurate.
Jim: Let’s go on the next part, the influence matrix.
Gregg: So, the influence matrix says that we’re social animals and particular kind of social primates. And it says that, as we develop this sophistication that Michael Tomasello talked about, that I referenced earlier, to track others, are normal roles… Other animals, I argue have pretty potentially rigid roles like, are you mating? Are you a parent? Our systems became increasingly flexible and what became important there were not necessarily particular roles, although there are important, we got more general at tracking processes, which were sort of constant. What I mean by that is, oh, what’s the relationship of self and other and how do you track that?
So the influence matrix says, we track our relational value and social influence, which is, how much can I move others? That’s your social influence. And hey, do you really care about me as a person? Or the reverse? And we feel good or bad tracking that. And then we compete with others, there’s a vertical line. We cooperate, love or get hostile and defensive, that’s a horizontal line. Then we navigate how connected we are on the Z axis. That gives us a power, love, and freedom map, around social influence and relational value. That’s the influence matrix. It actually combines work and attachment theory and personality theory by Timothy Leary, on sort of the basics, what’s called the circumplex model, blends those together and says, hey, this is your human primate relational system.
Jim: That makes a lot of sense actually. Now, we’ve already talked about the tree of knowledge system, and we’ve talked a bit about the justification systems theory. So, let’s now see if you can weave the tree of knowledge system, behavioral investment theory, influence matrix and justification systems theory, into a unified theory of psychology.
Gregg: That’s right. Well, we start, remember, with the problem of psychology, and that’s, people don’t really know what it is. I agree there’s a vertical problem and a horizontal problem. The vertical problem is, where does it fit in the complexity hierarchy? Well, the tree of knowledge tells us this. It’s coming out of living organisms are minded animals. That’s the base. Behavior is pointed to this, animal psychologist early comparative pointed to this, and this is the nervous system operating as a sensorimotor loop. Even Aristotle pointed to this.
And this then grows, behavioral investment theory frames this. It grows in all sorts of different directions. Now we are going to get to human psychology. We drop into, well, us as primates, the influence matrix and the evolution of behavioral investment joins those together for us as thinking animals, that are relating in complex social networks. Then it pops to a whole other dimension of complexity, when our symbolic tagging turns into propositional language. And then you get human psychology, which is the basis of social sciences, where us getting together and building justification systems, that gives us collective intelligence that’s going to spawn our technological evolution, build societies, and voila, you put humans in terms of complexification, not necessarily better, but in a totally different dimension of behavioral complexity than animals, which in turn were better than, more complex than living organisms.
And what that does is that, there’s a basic psychology, essentially corresponds to brain-mind behavior stuff, gets into primate psychology, and then ultimately human psychology, which then jumps into the social sciences because of this justification dynamic. That gives you overall package and allows you to ask the question, what is psychology? Oh, it’s the science of mind and behavior in general, and then human-minded behavior in particular, when we get into humans, and that gives us the way to answer the question.
Jim: Yeah, it’s actually very nice. Because as you say, if you go to a psychology department and wander around, you basically find five or six different schools of thought, that are epistemologically incompatible in many cases.
Gregg: That’s exactly right. And indeed actually really, if you go your route and hang around with scientists, psychologists, they’re basically just doing methods-based stuff. There’ll be high quant people, measurement people, doing abstraction. My son’s getting his doctorate in quantitative psychology, that’s their science side. And then they have mid-level theories anchored to particular schools. And then you ask, you zoom back one layer from that and say, well, how do these schools and mid-level theories go together? And that’s where our field just… Well, who knows? It’s like, well, maybe we can know. And that’s what UTOK says.
Jim: Yeah, I love that. I thought it was quite interesting, is that you then compared the unified theory of psychology with folk psychology.
Gregg: That’s correct.
Jim: And surprisingly congruent.
Gregg: It’s surprisingly congruent. So, many hit moment movements in psychology, most notably things like neuroscience and psychiatry, Freudian theory and behaviorism, essentially almost really backdrop folk psychology and then look for other things. Oh, it’s actually your brain or your genetics, or it’s the reinforcement history, whether you’re aware of it or not, from a behavioral perspective or Christian Freudian perspective, it’s your underlying unconscious motivations. And there’s some truth to all of that. And there’s also a lot of overshooting about what the claims are.
UTOK says, hey, first and foremost, you’re an investing animal. You’re a relating primate and you’re a justifying person. Your beliefs and values are these justifications. You have desires because you’re an animal or the person, can think about stuff in the long term. And so you get belief, desire, psychology. And so, why are we on the call? Well, I’m trying to justify what I’m trying to do. Hey, how do we navigate our influence? Are we cooperating or competing? What’s reinforcing in relationship to that? What are we investing in? Even money, for example, is a symbol of human potential investment. And we can take these concepts of investment, influence and justification, tweak folk psychology, but also see them very much in the real world using folk psychology, belief, desire, action, psychology.
Jim: I actually thought that was good, right? It’s not always true, of course, things like general relativity and the quantum mechanics, where our intuitions are just fucking wrong. But in a lot of cases, particularly in the social sciences, I’m somewhat suspicious when theories are not congruent, at least to some degree with our popular understanding of what it is to be a human. So, I actually took it as a good sign that your unified theory of psychology does have a number of touch points with folk psychology.
Gregg: It does indeed. It certainly says, there’s a lot of reasons we’re behaving in the world, that are at least related to the reasons we give. Maybe not one-to-one correspondence for sure, but certainly it’s something you have to give consideration.
Jim: All right, your next section in the book was called A Unified Approach to Psychotherapy. We’re going to skip that. We’ve got lots of other interesting things to talk about. We very recently had an episode with Marcy Gralha, who is your fiance and very close collaborator, back in EP 266. So, if you want to hear what Marcy and Gregg are thinking about with respect to psychotherapy, I’d suggest, go there.
Gregg: Yeah, Marcia did a great job, I appreciate that. The common core of psychotherapy collapses and specifies, hey, there’s a general model that comes off this model, that says, hey, be aware of neurotic loops and how you adapt and get reflective about that. And you guys did. I had a great conversation. I appreciated that.
Jim: So, now let’s come back and take the garden a little bit and get rid of some of the goofy shit. At least that would be what Rut would say. And talk about the tree of life, more specifically.
Gregg: Right. So, the tree of life is this… I’ll put it in context, where does this come from. Okay? So, this garden is a light bulb origin moment, and I think that’s really to understand what it is. I was at a conference in 2016 called the, Cultivating the Globally Sustainable Self. And it was a conference that pulled together a bunch of social science people, a bunch of activists, a bunch of educators from around the world, thinking about how do we share our identities with others, our cultures, with others, our psychologies, et cetera. And it was a really interesting conference. But at the end, all the heavy hitters had a panel and they were asked this question, how do you cultivate this globally sustainable self? And the conversation, as far as I was concerned, just broke down. There was no cumulative sets of understanding that could do justice to all the complex issues, but also frame them in a way that allowed us to get a grip on it.
At that time, I had built the unified theory and unified approach, and I yoked them together, and we’ve called it UTUA, U-T-U-A. And notice what’s happens with psychology, you have the science side, and then you have this sort of applied human flourishing side. That’s what psychotherapy is about. So, it’s this intersection. And after I saw the conference, how do we cultivate a globally sustainable self? Kind of like a game B thing for psychologists, Jim. I walked out of there saying, “Hey, we should plant UTUA seeds and grow UTUA trees.” Meaning that, we should give people a sense of who they are as justifying primates, help understand the dynamics that influence, help them see how they adapt, understand what values are, and have that as a bridge between social sciences, humanities, and the natural science, in a coherent, naturalistic framework, that does justice to human meaning, but also just justice to physics in a way.
So then, boom, plant UTUA seeds and grow UTUA trees, that’s all of a sudden where it came in. And frankly, I was envisioning a future of virtual reality, a future of interfacing with the visual story, a future… We did a little game, where my brother asked me, “Hey, how do you make this interactive?” And I create a little PowerPoint game for his eight to 11-year-old boys that went on a quest for the scepter of UTUA and fought a dragon called Trumpertin and saved Princess Hope and the land.
So, I agree that it’s weird, I agree that it’s out there, but the general structure of the garden. Now, sitting at the center of the garden’s that tree of life, that’s a symbol, for how to pull knowledge together and getting right, wise relation across them. And then it’s got the little UTUA or UTOK elements in it.
Jim: Now, the other thing, at first I just thought was weird, but that actually turned out to be kind of interesting, is the two bees. Talk to us about the two bees.
Gregg: So the-
Jim: Oh, by the way, bees, we’re talking about little things with wings and stingers. We’re not talking about the letter B.
Gregg: That’s right. But it also is a playoff of being. So in the garden are these two bees and one sits on the left side of the tree. We call that the Bee of Sophia, which is knowledge into wisdom. That’s what it symbolizes. And on it is a data pyramid, a data knowledge pyramid. It goes from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. I flip that around and call that WKID. And on the backside of that are the quadrants actually from Wilber. And what you have there is basically a way of understanding sort of the epistemological hierarchy and perspective-taking of the Bee of Sophia. And that represents, how do we gain knowledge that’s epistemologically valued, and then how do we pollinate it, share it, and orient towards the love of wisdom through knowledge.
On the right side’s the Bee of Phronesis, that’s the WIC W Bee. It basically represents the consolidation of the various elements towards pragmatic, well-being. It’s the wisdom of the grandmother. The wise grandmother who knows how to live in the world, doesn’t necessarily worry about all the abstraction. Both of those are taken directly from Aristotle’s conception of wisdom, knowledge into wisdom and life into wisdom. And they also consolidate different elements, if you embrace them. It connects to our animal being, and it connects to wisdom as a symbol. And bees are archetypes, relationship to trees of life, that serve lots of different symbolic meaning.
I will make a comment here, Jim, about what I’m after. Okay? I just saw not too long ago, Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson had a conversation. They got together [inaudible 00: 46:42] conversation. And it started with archetypes and memes. Okay? Dawkins has this comment about memes and Peterson with a psychologicalism does the archetypes.
Well, if you were there with the UTOK book, you pull out the UTOK book and say, “Well, memes are these justifications…” Well, one key aspect of memes… There are several, but one key aspect, are these justifications that replicate, right? They build these systems of belief, they spread out, and they organize culture for us in a particular way. And actually the meme flower is a play off that, as a central way in which gives rise to our memeplex, our belief, value structure.
And then you look at the picture of the whole book, this picture on the front, and it’s like, here are archetypes. The archetype of the coin, the archetype of the tree of knowledge, the archetype of the tree of life, the pursuit toward potential flourishing with a dragon, and that will eat you. I mean, these are, within that framework, that’s what I’m speaking to is some of the validity. So, for me, what UTOK would do, going right into that conversation would say, “Hey, I can advance both of those conceptions and then place them in right relation.”
Jim: And you basically pay them off with wisdom. And I have a love-hate relationship with the word wisdom. It’s one of those things that gets, oh, airy-fairy, wisdom, I sat on top of the mountain for 17 years and I understand everything about the universe. On the other hand, if you actually think…
Jim: … everything about the universe. On the other hand, if you actually think hard about wisdom, and John Vervaeke is particularly good at this and you kind of reinforce it, at the end of the day, all wisdom is is making correct decisions, really.
Gregg: It’s certainly, adaptive living. It’s a recursive statement. I think at it’s core, wisdom is capacity to be recursive about what you’re doing and be oriented toward valued states of being. So in some ways it’s really simple and then you try to turn it and everything as dangerous. It does pack a lot in. I think it is called the ultimate virtue for good reason, and trying to live with virtue and virtuosity toward wisdom isn’t a bad thing, although it’s dangerous, as all things, to get simplified and then caricatured.
Jim: Yeah, if you do cook it down to making correct decisions, then it makes sense that it is the ultimate virtue, right? Why do we have the other virtues, right? In support of making correct decisions in our life. Of course, that also means defining what it is to make what the decisions are that are right.
Gregg: Right. You have to have that, and then valued states of being and the processes by which you go through that and then you arc that across time. But yep, those are the key variables.
Jim: And I will say despite the elaborate symbols with bees and stuff, Gregg does avoid going out into the airy fairy land and-
Gregg: Endonaturalism, Jim. There’s nothing here that’s magic or outside of the basic causal principles of physics. It’s causal closure, okay?
Jim: Now let’s go back to the airy fairy though, and that is the elephant sun god.
Gregg: Right. So I believe in the concept of God. Here’s the basic idea here, is that God’s important to people as a concept. It can do all sorts of different kinds of things as a concept. So the elephant sun god symbolizes… It’s a play off of basically thinking about what humans find powerful, sacred, archetypally orienting toward wisdom. It basically combines three different archetypes. The first is the sun god from Ra and the way in which people get all their energy and light from sun. Then the elephant is a play off Ganesha in Hinduism, which then also relates to the blind men and the elephant by John Godfrey Saxe. And then that brings it to me as a scientist who’s connecting to try to put lots of different things together to create a whole and to have a transcendently orienting beacon toward loving goodness, truth and beauty. That’s essentially what it is.
And again, it’s not airy fairy, but it’s as the next thing, maybe if we talk about the dragon, living bitter and angry and frustrated like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe Trump won,” or whatever it is that drives you crazy, there are a lot of ways to go neurotic and live foolishly and in sin as it were, and there are a lot of ways to live wisely. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but these are archetypal symbols to stay on the right path, and there are also ways to bring us to connect to other traditions. So again, it’s a concept of God, not like I think there’s an elephant son god that cares about this conversation, but it is a place that you can for me [inaudible 00: 50:59] and set values and connect to other traditions.
Jim: Well, as regular listeners know, I’m shaking my head going, “God, what the fuck, right? That’s for feeble-minded people and children basically.”
Gregg: Well, if the first thing I say is I believe in the concept of God rather than the fundamental reality of God, then I think it’ll be in pretty good shape.
Jim: Why? The concept of God I would say is, to use a fancy word, ontologically about the same as the concept of Santa Claus. Yes, it has an effect on four-year-olds and seven-year-olds, but then it dissipates as you get a little older.
Gregg: Well, actually, historically that’s not true, Jim, is it? I mean, the concept of God’s had a huge role to play. Maybe it’s because the Enlightenment allows us to shift our perspective on that, but historically, that’s not the case. The concept of God’s had a huge play [inaudible 00:51:46].
Jim: I would say the Enlightenment was childhood zen and we should put that shit behind us.
Gregg: You have a particularly strong view about that relative to many, but that’s fine. Actually, one of the things that I don’t think I mentioned in the book is all of this is an aesthetic aspect. So we’re in the subjective and cultural side of the equation here. So this is values that we are bringing, aesthetics that we are bringing, subjective angles that we are bringing.
There’s a thing embedded in the work called the anti-equivalency that basically is a signal, let’s be aware that others are going to have very different opinions about what’s valuable and what’s good in relation based on issues of aesthetics, value, and what we should be doing. Holding that diversity across a pluralism is key.
Jim: That’s interesting. Yeah. You got to talk to superstitious people, I suppose, right, who actually believe-
Gregg: We need a multiplicity of different perspectives.
Jim: Yeah. Well, I don’t know about that. We do need multiplicity of perspectives that aren’t bullshit. The question is-
Gregg: I don’t think the Ruddian view is the corner on everything that’s not bullshit. [inaudible 00:52:50]
Jim: It certainly is. It certainly is. My colleague at Santa Fe Institute, Murray Gell-Mann, used to often say, “We have to be open to fresh, new and iconoclastic ideas from absolutely anywhere, but we have to know where to draw the line against cranks,” right?
Gregg: I agree.
Jim: As you can imagine at the Santa Fe Institute, the shit that would come inbound in the mail with people’s theories of fucking everything.
Gregg: Yeah, I mailed it. That was… I’m a quack that sent that theory in 2001. I sent my tree of knowledge there.
Jim: That’s it. Somebody probably looked at it and said, “Wrong side of the line, crank.”
Gregg: Wrong side of the line. That’s right. I appreciate that a lot of people do that.
Jim: No, I would say that we did not have the capacity, certainly not in 2001, to make any kind of informed judgment on something like that. We just didn’t have anybody from that part of the world of knowledge. And I’ll turn back the other way and say, “Okay, God, what the fuck,” right? You can not vomit, at least I can not vomit, if I think about Spinoza’s God or Einstein’s God. How would you relate those concepts of godliness to your elephant god?
Gregg: Right. Well, I mean, there are a lot of different ways to potentially relate, say, to nature, the way I interpret. I didn’t take John’s course. John just has a course on the lectern, Einstein and Spinoza’s God. I would’ve liked to taken that, especially-
Jim: I did not know that. I’ll have to take that because I use that analogy all the time.
Gregg: Well, there you go. In the interest of time, let’s just put it this way. I think that we can relate to nature as an almost infinite entity, and I mean that by the cosmos. I can think of ourselves as being humbled by that, inspired by that, horrified by that, awed by that, completely ignorant of it. I mean, we just don’t know. That’s one of your lines. And God only knows what’s on the other side of that. There’s ways to relate to that structure with sacredness, with fear, with awe, with lots of different elements. I think we’re prepared in some ways to do that archetypically.
So to me, yes, that’s exactly a personal god that we know and have access to and can specify cares about this conversation. I don’t see how that fits in an endonatural view, but the way we relate to the concept of God and the way we relate to nature opens up all sorts of very fascinating things, and people like Spinoza and Einstein do brilliant things with that, as far as I’m concerned.
Jim: Yeah. Well, let’s move on. We could argue this one for 20 hours over beer and buffalo wings.
Gregg: We agreed in advance. There’s a lot we’re going to be… I was going to be to the point [inaudible 00:55:20].
Jim: Yeah, you’ve done a great job, actually. Let’s very briefly hit the next one, then we’re going to get into the deep stuff. I did not find the dragon’s lair objectionable. Talk about the dragon’s lair and what you were trying to get at in that section.
Gregg: Right. So I mean, symbolism wise, it’s very similar in the sense that what is the state of human? So dragon’s lair is a picture of a shadow dragon, and by the way, the shadow dragon then archetypally, something that eats you comes out of the abyss. Shadow is a reference to Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud and U T’ak, which basically says you have a justifying system that you’re self-conscious of, and sometimes you engage in defenses, you block shit, you avoid shit, you can’t accept shit, and then that creates a pressure, makes you vulnerable, that all of a sudden the world’s going to remind you that what you tried to deny is actually true, and then you’ll be overwhelmed by that.
So the shadow dragon represents your dark shadow. It’s chained to the cave through what we call the neurotic loop chain, which is when you’re scared, a very normal defense is either to avoid, to blame other people, to try to gain control, and that often creates, unfortunately, a vicious cycle that makes you feel more anxious or trapped. If you’re not as successful at controlling stuff, you get frustrated and depressed.
The dragons inside the cave of behavioral shutdown, U T’ak gives us a frame for asking this question, what is depression and clarifying it. It’s interesting to know that the World Health Organization identifies depression as this unbelievably important thing, but nobody can really define what it is. U T’ak says it’s actually a state of behavioral shutdown. It’s got biological elements, psychological social elements, and ultimately it’s all under a personality disorder star.
Actually, people ask us, “Hey, is this empirical?” I did a whole research program showing the personality disorder star comes off the influence matrix and shows things like avoidant personality is opposite of narcissism, histrionic personality is opposite of schizoid and antisocial personality is opposite of dependent and borderline obsessive-compulsive have interesting polarizing [inaudible 00: 57:14] element.
So it’s a map of the ways in which personality, that’s identity, emotion, and relation, can go wrong. So as a clinical psychologist, personality dynamics, frustration, neurotic responses, defenses potentially ending you up in a cave of shutdown, mythically represented by a dragon that eats you and leaves you suffering is what that’s about. And that’s crucial to know that this is all part of the system. This is not some utopian system. This is shit we’re going to be dealing with. It’s about trying to get out of the cave and orient toward the elephant sun god, and that’s the metaphor for what it’s that we’re trying to do in life.
Jim: Yes. I don’t know why, probably it’s the G-O-D word, but I have no problem at all seeing-
Gregg: Trying to get out of the fucking cave, right? Shine a [inaudible 00:57:55] flashlight out of the cave.
Jim: The dragon as an obvious symbol and metaphor is fine, but when you say God, I just go, “Oh fuck, they’re trying to sell me something.” Some goddamn guy on TV said-
Gregg: [inaudible 00:58:08].
Jim: “Send me $100, send me $100.”
Gregg: Well, metaphysics and God, right? You have a position on those things.
Jim: Those two things.
Gregg: Okay. Well, we love it, Jim.
Jim: Actually I did find that section quite interesting and it’s quite important, because as you know in your clinical practice, in some sense, neuroticism is what drives the non-psychotic aspect of mental suffering.
Gregg: Totally. I mean, neuroticism, there’s a trait version, and then there’s what drives people into the most psychotherapy. And I don’t mean that pejoratively. I have my own neurotic ways of being in the oral. We all do. And if it intersects unfortunately with life in a particular way, it gets you trapped, and that’s [inaudible 00:58:43]-
Jim: Everybody has neurotic traits except me, as I think I told you.
Gregg: Well, you’re very low on neurotic traits [inaudible 00:58:50]-
Jim: I definitely have my quirks.
Gregg: You got your quirks.
Jim: But I literally scored at the hundredth percentile of anti-neuroticism on the OCEAN personality profile.
Gregg: Yes. Well, that will make anxiety and depression much less likely to stay around for you for sure.
Jim: I think the longest I’ve ever been in an emotional valence that was negative was two weeks, and generally I couldn’t stay in a negative emotional valence for three days, more than three days if I tried, right? And it’s just the way I’m wired. Oh, well, right? And that’s one of the course important things we think in social chains like Game B. I keep coming back to thinkers and say, “Wait a minute, that works for Buddhism,” I argue is a good fit for introverted neurotics, right, but it’s not good for extroverted, disagreeable low neurotics, right?
So when you’re thinking about prescriptive things like John’s religion that’s not a religion, et cetera, practices is the word I guess I was searching for there, you have to realize that most practices aren’t good fits for all personality types. So it’s really important to not be overly universal when you’re thinking about practices. You really have to map the practice to the person.
Gregg: Right, and I’ll just say then, the tree of life, okay, so if you ask that question, you go to the wheel of development, one of the spokes of the wheel is dispositions mapped best by big five. That’s how this thing works as a little knowledge structure. If you have that in your head, you would know that what you’re saying is accurate.
Jim: Right. Now we’ve covered a lot of very interesting ground. I commend Gregg for being amazingly conservative in the use of time, which we talked about in advance, that this book is so full of stuff that we had to move fast, but now we’re off into some really big, big, big ideas. So the payoff in some ways in the earlier book and also here is the idea of the fifth joint point. This is a big fucking idea. So tell us what the fifth joint point is and how it relates to the overall theory of knowledge.
Gregg: Okay. So what my basic ontology, since you used that word, I’ll allow myself to use that word without feeling anxiety, [inaudible 01:01:00] reality. That’s scientifically we’re going to say, “What is reality? How do we understand it?”, and the base naturalistic vantage point, as we’ve talked about several different times, is that there are these five layers linked by four joint points, okay?
So the five layers, the first one’s energy information, then the big bang gives rise to matter object layer of the plane of existence there, and that’s realy actually a consolidation of energy, cooling, consolidating and chunking of it I think would be the best way, so sort of like a memory kind of a thing almost. There’s an analogy there. Then we get life and that’s processing to maintain its organization, reproduction, metabolic process effectively, and then we get nervous system modeling life to also maintain free energy, to use a Karl Friston term and to afford behavioral investment so you have organization, but it’s a novel information processing system, communication network, and then propositional language yokes subjects together in an intersubjective cultural space that gives rise to our capacity to build technologies.
Historically, technology has been pretty separate. I mean, they allow our behavioral investments and they bring us together and even art brings us together in a particular way. But it wasn’t until we started writing and having money and societies that we really started to abstract this and create technologies that could feed back on our information processing in active ways. And then of course, we get science and technology and the emergence of computers like the Babbage machine and Difference Maker.
We really start to then see that tip into an information processing system that first then gets computers begin, and then we get the internet, which you know a lot about in relation, and then that internet’s like a nervous system. And my analogy is this, that Jellyfish were, before the Cambrian Exposure, Cambrian Exposure like 530 million years ago, before that we had jellyfish with distributed neural nets and then nature found its way into consolidating that and then popping to give rise to things like crabs, which could behave in a much more sophisticated way.
I see us, and really we’re going through this now, but in 1997 when this thing popped out of me, I could see that life-minded culture with these novel information processing systems, and then you look around at the 20th century, we’re like jellyfish. We laid out the structure and now that’s going to get consolidated, and as we interface with things like large language models and as we get real cybernetic intelligences fusing natural and artificial intelligence systems, I actually think about NAGI, so natural artificial general intelligence. Is that coming? And when it does, where we are in terms of behavior is a wide open horizon. Hopefully it will consolidate and allow us to all the affordances it does without drawing all sorts of chaos.
So the fifth joint point is how are we going to make this transition? I use the analogy of, as several people do, as a third attractor, and you know what this is also I believe, in terms of, hey, as we go through this phase shift where the digital global system begins to organize, A, it’s going to create a lot of chaos, potentially so much chaos that it creates collapse. As chaos happens, then order’s the opposite of that. We’re going to get totalitarian systems trying to control, and you could see very easily one direction is unbelievable chaotic flux on the one hand, and the other direction is sort of a 1984 totalitarian nightmare.
The third attractor is a protopian. That’s the way some people use it, an adaptive wise way of maximizing our valued states of being realistically across time. Can we do that? I’ll use one other analogy is I think we’re sort of like a biplane flying into a hurricane. That’s my analogy for where we are. And I think we want to be able to read the readings correctly and we want a knowledge system that enables to make sure human nature, mother nature and the relationship between technology going forward, U T’ak fundamentally is part of that. It’s not all of that by any stretch, but it is part of that, getting some of those key points correct, so we’ll help read some of the dials of our biplane better and think about the kind of trajectory we want to track given values and our nature and mother nature and technology.
Jim: You mentioned the third attractor. That’s actually a simplification. The person that came up with the third attractor simplified my… In Search of the Fifth Attractor, which is an essay.
Gregg: I wondered whether there was a connection. That’s [inaudible 01:05:09].
Jim: In fact, I talked to Daniel when he was concocting that and I said, “Yeah, I can live with that.” But just for the audience’s perspective, which takes your point and takes it further, which is if the current civilization, the attractor that we’re living in is coming to its end, which I argue it is, there are multiple other attractors it could fall into. And some of the bad ones are neo-feudalism. I think of that as the technolibertarians, neo-theocracy, think of that as Christian nationalists and Islamists, neo-fascism. I think the finest example of neo-fascism is China today. You go down the list of fascist attributes, it has them all, but it’s very different in its wiring than a traditional one. And chaos, right? We could fall back into a dark ages, right, which we might.
And so there are four bad attractors out there, and the goal of people who are working in rigorous social change and finding trajectories is to find the fifth attractor. And of course five is an arbitrary number. So it’s not just tyranny versus something else. If you want to really think about it as a basins of attraction model, there are multiple bad attractors, more than four are bad ones. And unfortunately by the nature of the universe, in the same way that a tornado going through a junkyard will never produce a 747, there are far more bad ways to do things than there are good.
And so we have quite a challenge in front of us to find the fifth or the nth attractor, which is a better attractor than the current one. And then the other very important point, and social change, people often forget this, even if our current basin is not good, which I would argue it’s not, many, maybe most of the adjacent attractors are worse. So don’t follow something just because it’s different. Make sure that you have some level of confidence that this attractor is actually a better, more humane thing that actually has the capability to provide increased human wellbeing within the context of planetary limits for some reasonable period of time, hundreds of years. Anyway, that’s just an aside.
So anyway, let’s get back to this emergent phenomena of the fifth joint point, which if real, means that we are sitting in one of those truly liminal times, right? If this indeed is correct, and I have a strong intuitive sense that it is, this is comparable to the Cambrian explosion. Nothing gets any bigger than the Cambrian explosion, speaking of which I did a deep dive with Doug Erwin on one of my podcasts, who’s one of the leading scientists on the Cambrian explosion, and he had wrote one of the best books. So just type Jim Rutt Show, Doug Erwin, E-R-W-I-N, and you’ll find it a very interesting deep dive into the Cambrian explosion.
Gregg: Sweet. Yeah, that’d be great.
Jim: So let’s think about here what this new wired world is and how it’s qualitatively different than the past. And then as I was pondering this while I was reading it, is let’s take justification framing that you use as your justification theory, and we go back to forager times. Much of the justifications was, as it still is in real life, small groups of people talking and arguing about things, right? That’s what humans were really evolved for. At the most, it was 30 to 50 people around a campfire trying to make a big decision, right? Should we have abandoned this valley and move to the next valley? And we developed tools for how do people get to speak in what order in we develop both formal and informal ways, weighing their influences and whether this person could be challenged and if so, how, et cetera.
But we didn’t really have any tools for greater scope until we started developing tribes and states and things of that sort. And you can think of something like the US Congress actually as machinery for working through justification, right? Propose, counter proposal, argue, and then we came up with the idea, not the best idea probably, but better than the alternative, of putting things to a vote. I’ve pointed out to people that a vote is essentially a way to avoid having a fist fight because 55 to 45, if a fist fight, probably 55 wins, right?
Now, the problem is that our society, particularly our politics, has gotten so sophisticated in data and analytics, et cetera, that we’re not going to have 55, 45, we’re going to have 49, 51 forever, right? Because in real time they adjust their positions. And at the same time, the internal institutional dynamics of things like our Congress and partisan primaries first pass the post single seat legislature, in the absence of a strong external enemy at least, has a tendency to produce bi-modal distributions that are highly polarized, and yet they orbit around a median voter. So you get 49, 51, and the result of each election though becomes radically different outcomes. And so that’s extraordinarily dangerous. That’s a little-
Gregg: Yeah, no. Well, first off, you’re doing a great job describing what I would be tracking as the evolution. And I like the simplistic, it’s grossly simplistic and more western, but the simplistic phase of oral indigenous on the one hand, and then we transition with enough social technological innovation to build societies into traditional societies, we get the bronze age and then the axial age, and then we get modernity, then we get the postmodern critique, which isn’t an age, but it’s critiquing some of the justification structures.
What you’re getting here is, and you’re building capital C justifications, which are collective large-scale systems that people are buying into that are legitimizing, is and ought for the collective through human negotiation. And then you have institutional powers, things like buildings and tanks and structures that enable the organization like the Constitution, et cetera, that enable the structural organization. And all of this is set up in a particular way and I believe that the digital tech revolution is in the process of changing things so radically, the financial way things are held, the laws, the borders of nation states, the issues of weapons, issues of false information, if you want to call it that, information warfare on and on. So now you’re going to get this really big massive flux of change potential open up in a system that was [inaudible 01: 11:23] and built for the modern age, as it were.
Jim: Yeah. And with your justification theory, the glue that holds all such institutions together is language, right? What’s the constitution? It’s language. It’s a one-dimensional string that when run through the induced institutions produces action, right?
Gregg: Totally, but laws and things are professional legitimizing justificatory structures. My brother’s a lawyer. I said, “Hey, you’re a professional justifier in your specialty.”
Jim: And he wouldn’t deny it. [inaudible 01:11:54] a hired liar, right? You’re a lawyer.
Gregg: He’d prefer justifier to liar, I think.
Jim: Anyway, so let me finish my story and then we’ll get to your fifth joint point.
Jim: Anyway, so let me finish my story and then we’ll get to your fifth joint point. Let’s call it late modernity 1975, the mass linguistic engine was mass media, TV with three TV stations, big newspapers, daily newspapers in small towns, but they mostly ran the AP wire or the UPI wire, et cetera. So there were lots of choke points and quality control points, and also manipulation and dominance control points in the discourse. And the discourse leads to the institutions, institutions lead to our culture.
Starting in about 1980 with the very earliest days of digital revolution, the entry cost and the nature of the information topology started to change slowly and then more radically after about 1998 or 1999. And now we’re in a world where the mainstream media is much less powerful than it was, and there’s a zillion new ideas in flux at all the time. And of course, back to the idea of junk yards and tornadoes, most of the new ideas suck. They’re terrible. Either they’re stupid and flat or they’re evil.
But, and this is I think a very interesting analogy I picked up from somebody, it wasn’t mine, but I love it, which is despite all the garbage that gets generated here in this transitional period, liminal zone before we actually transition the fifth joint point, most of the stuff that’s created is garbage. But just like most stuff that garage bands play is garbage, without garage bands, rock and roll would not progress. So the green shoots around the edges that this new domain of ways of sharing justifications is producing lots and lots of shit, but probably things of huge import. The thing that maybe we’re missing, I’d love to get your thoughts on this, is something the equivalent of mainstream media, which mostly filtered out garbage, but also filtered out good stuff.
But let’s just think about this idea that this is where we’re at, where we have this unbelievable flowering, a million flowers, bloom of people putting forth their ideas and their arguments, et cetera. But so far, at least not much in the way of social skill or social institutions in mediating this flow such that it produces wisdom, which is good decisions.
Gregg: I mean, that’s a beautiful point. I’m glad we’re really arriving at this because it comes at UTOK, in a slightly different angle, but it represents my hope, and that is this enormous amount of bullshit, just a tremendous amount of bullshit. And of course, what you’re pointing to in their hope is there’s a variation, selection, and retention. It’s a relationship of complexification growth. There’s a variation, then there’s selection hope that can be built off of it, and then there’s retention.
In the information age, the amount of variation is enormous. And what are the kind of lenses that we’re going to be utilizing to make sense out of the world collectively? It goes back to my biplane metaphor. I know there’s a lot of weird shit in UTOK, but actually when you really strip it all down, there are these big ideas that can organize a tremendous amount that we have a huge amount of knowledge for. And if you operate off of them, you can pull out, and actually I argue I did this with psychology.
Psychology is this unbelievable mess of stuff. But actually UTOK creates categories that allow me to cumulatively integrate to create a complexified whole of that knowledge that allows us to see the tensions between them in a way that’s coheres rather than breaks down. If there’s a base structure that enables us to have a schema to make sense out of the world, cumulatively with a complexified whole, that’s what I don’t think our knowledge systems are doing nearly as well.
So if we think about this as knowledge technology, how do we train individuals to be aware of bullshit and not be bullshit propagators? That’s what education should be doing and training us to be good citizens. I don’t think it’s doing that at all or very well at all for this new age. How would we consolidate that so that we have educated citizens that live enlightened age lives in a time of massive amounts of flux? Well, the right education system potentially would do that, and that’s one of the things that UTOKs about. So what’s one of my saying fundamentally? What’s the right schema to cut through the bullshit, have right sensitivity, specificity issues, yoke them together to enable us to make good decisions? Well, that’s what I mean when I say, hey, this is a way to read the biplane elements and guide toward the eye of the storm and move towards the fifth attractor.
Jim: Yeah, the bullshit thing is really, I think of the essence of our current moment and the flood of shit is actually exponentially increasing due the invention of LLMs, right? It is now amazingly easy to create a completely bogus website by creating a template and a series of… Bit of prompt engineering, press a button and create this looking like authentic website. It’s called the National Courier, right? So it looks like a real newspaper and it’s utter horseshit pushing some propaganda line. And humans were not trained to be able to distinguish those. That’s not what we were… It’s so far from our forager period, which was most of our lives that we do not have the tool, the mental cognitive tools to easily and inexpensively do that using heuristics. It requires more brainpower than we actually want to have to spend to make sense of that.
So I’ve been arguing for some time that we will be caught in this ugly liminal time until we reverse the tables on the flood of shit and use things like LLMs and other AI to be able to create our own personal information agents that will not let things through the membrane to us that are obviously shit or that are contrary to our strongly held positions about the world. Not to say that our strongly heard positions about the world are always right, but at least it would be nice to be able to… I don’t want to hear anything about fucking flat earthers. Please, never, right? Though, I shouldn’t say never, because one of my other theories about the ultimate information…
By the way, and I’ve said this many times in podcasts, if I wasn’t old and rich, I would be working on this problem. If I was 45 years old, I would be working on the personal information agent, and I believe it’s the next trillion dollar opportunity. So young entrepreneur out there, somebody do this. If you want some advice from me, probably know more than advice, send me an email and we can talk about it. But I think this is unbelievably important, this institutional invention of a way to somehow deal with the flood of shit.
Now where I was going there, I left out my one payoff point, which is while I don’t want to see what I don’t want to see, I do also think that a good information agent ought to give you a little bit of shit you don’t want to see, a serendipitous approach, so you don’t create your own filter bubble, right? I want to hear the occasional argument for the existence of God. It will cause me to grind my teeth and wave my pistol, but it’s bad for me not to be exposed to the very highest quality arguments about the [inaudible 01: 19:01], which is by the way, why I’ve subscribed for over 30 years to an extremely hardcore religious magazine called First Things. It’s really, really smart people, and I just shake my head, why are these really, really smart people arguing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? But I read it religiously when it comes-
Gregg: Pun intended.
Jim: Pun intended, because I want to be exposed to the very best arguments for why tradition… This is very traditional, Catholicism, traditional Protestantism, traditional Judaism, even the occasional traditional Hindu they have in their pages. So while it’s Christian centered, it’s not exclusively Christian. So I do think that an info agent has to expose you to challenging views, but quality challenging views. I don’t want to see Pat Robertson and the 700 Club. Fuck that. But I do want to read about really smart people discussing the relationship between ethics and God and the reality of the universe at a level of intensity that causes your head hurt when you read it. That’s good stuff to read.
Gregg: So actually, Jim, that’s really fascinating. We should maybe pick that up at a different time. But the placeholder of the coin, by the way, it can be framed as what’s called PTOK. If you go with my acronyms, that’s a personal theory of knowledge that basically was like, that’s again, you representing your justification systems in your perspectival and you’re unique in the world, and to personalize that and then create a relationship between your personal and the other inter-subjective systems, and then to guide that dialectic is actually embedded in the structure. So I love what you’re saying there, because that actually points to the way you would actually build that particular architecture or frame it. So that’s cool.
Jim: Yeah. Let’s talk about the problem more generally. This is the Ruddian prescription. Do you agree that we are not through to the fifth joint point by any means, and we’re in a liminal space where the flood of shit and complete lack of institutions to deal with this new hyper-connected world kind of leaves us quite at sea?
Gregg: Totally. That’s the hurricane, the lack of stability that we haven’t stabilized. I mean, my placeholder for this is, the digital meta-cultural dimension, that’s my placeholder for what it would stabilize as. And no, we certainly in the fifth joint point. We haven’t stabilized. There’s too much variation, selection shit, chaos, uncertainty, not a lot of stabilization on the old institutions. They’re in the metamorphosis, and hopefully it will be a good one, but we’re still in the process of waiting to the end to unfold. That’s why everything feels in flux and heated up. There’s not a stability that says, oh, I know what things are going to look like in 25 years. Maybe the acceleration will just keep going, but the idea would be that it could settle down and there would be some predictability in our relationships with the other technology and Mother Earth.
Jim: Yeah. Let me toss out another thought, not one that you particularly talked about, but I think it’s closely related to this fifth joint point, which is by most measures, the complexity of our world is increasing exponentially, and yet our cognitive capacity is fixed. In fact, we’re probably 10% dumber than a forager because natural selection was a fucking ruthless motherfucker back in the forager days. If you had screwy ideas, you mostly fucking died, right? Of course, probably both of us would die too because we both have glasses.
Gregg: Right. I’m not looking to go on a loan or whatever that show is. How I live as a hunter-gatherer.
Jim: Yeah. Most of us are maladapted to hunter-gatherer world. So we’re probably not as smart as… It’s thought we’re about 10% less intelligent, say than a Cro-Magnon man. But so our cognitive capacity doesn’t increase, but maybe we can build hierarchical complexity to allow us to deal with exponential change. But at some point, exponential change gets to a point where we’re just out of our depths, really, and this is where I don’t believe that our current institutions can metamorphosize into a place to deal with that, but rather… Because it’s so strange and so different than what the original institutions like Congress, right?
Congress, what the fuck? What do they know about the AGI risk? The answer is nothing or actually probably have misinformation. So it’s worse than nothing is probably what they know about the AGI risk and how we should solve it. So I suspect at least that if we’re going to survive this transition, and we might not, people talk about climate change, huge importance, forever chemicals, et cetera, nuclear war. I think that those are all huge risks, but I suspect that the near-term risk is the total breakdown of collective sense-making, and that we’re on the very verge of that if we aren’t able to somehow create probably entirely new institutions that create a new network of justification that results in wisdom narrowly construed as making the correct decisions. Does that make sense to you?
Gregg: Zak Stein talked about the time between worlds, and he reduced, as you know, he was on your show talking about that for maybe a couple of episodes even, education and time between worlds. What he identified as the fundamental root, very similar to what you’re talking about, is sort of the education, which is what he meant by that was not what just happens in schools, but what is the knowledge and wisdom of one generation down to the other that distributes itself in a way that affords wisdom more or less. The UTOK system is the idea about what would be a platform for education that could cultivate the growth of selves that can live in a new digital world fundamentally.
So yes, I really do, at least this is where UTOT comes in with the idea of what is an operating system that enables us to clarify where we are in the world in a way that reduces and compresses a huge amount of knowledge, but doesn’t simplify it to the point where it makes stupid, but it complexifies and compresses it, and then allows us to share it, maintains our particular perspectives in ourselves, in our groups, in our nations, but then recognizes also that we’re in a digital global meta-transition, and what would be the shared values that would enable us to have the right layer of cooperative organization at the meta-level, and then down through a rooted cosmopolitan kind of frame, which is basically up into the networks of culture, then down into your grounded relational world space.
That’s what UTOK kind of points to is it gives a way to tie together a bunch of different stuff, compress it, relate it, and orient toward valued states of being.
Jim: Of course, that’s exactly game B, right? How did we get-
Gregg: That’s exactly that. That’s why you and I-
Jim: Grounded states of being, and that to Jordan Hall’s great idea of the Civitas. How do we get the exponential scaling of size like big cities? But of course, big cities also have the exponential scaling of badness, right? Mental health, crime, disease, et cetera. And one of the big… That’s what I think the fifth attractor substantially is how do you split apart scale and keep network scale, but have the scale at which we live day to day be smaller, but way richer, the reinvention of the meso-scale essentially, while not giving up on being able to do global scale things?
Gregg: Dude, the parallels are great. That in the credo at the back of the book, the credo that Masi and I developed to live by, the first belief is I believe in the garden fractal. The garden fractal is thinking about where you are at the level or agency across scale and how to create a coordinated scaling structure?
Jim: Yep, very, very similar. That’s why we enjoy chatting with each other. I will also point out to the audience, Gregg mentioned Zak Stein’s Education in a Time Between Worlds. We did do a very deep dive, three episode arc on that book, starting with EP57, Zak Stein.
Gregg: Those are great episodes. I recommend them.
Jim: Very interesting. Some of the really good episodes I’ve ever done. Zak, he’s been on numerous times on various topics, but that’s the one that’s the anchor. If you want to find about what Zak thoroughly thinks, do that one. He’s got a new book out. It’s fucking strange as shit that I’m just starting to read, but we’ll see.
Gregg: Is that CosmoErotic Humanism and David J. Temple stuff?
Jim: Yeah. I go, what the fuck? I’m going to have to read it twice probably before I decide whether it’s entirely-
Gregg: Well, actually I’ll say right [inaudible 01:27:21], actually that book that David J. Temple CosmoErotic Humanism gave me the motive and idea for doing this book. I went to the CosmoErotic Humanist conference and I got that. I was like, I need a book that specifies what UTOK is.
Jim: That’s kind of interesting. All right, let’s move on to probably our exit point. We’re kind of moving along here in time. Thank Gregg for doing an amazing job of speeding through this, and this book is hugely rich, so we are just touching… We did better than superficial, but we didn’t go to the great depths.
Gregg: We’re popping the highlights for sure. I appreciate.
Jim: Yeah. So if you really want to go deeper, buy the fucking book. Make Gregg rich.
Gregg: It’s 19.99. Unlike my last one, which was well over $100. This one’s only 19.99.
Jim: Yeah, your fucking publisher, you hooked me up with your publisher and I offered to publicize the book if they would sell it at a reasonable price for 30 days, and the motherfucker said, “Well, we can give you a coupon for 10% off.” And I go, “Fuck you.”
Gregg: That’s what happens.
Jim: But anyway, this is a popularly priced book, and if you’re interested in these ideas, it’s relatively short. It’s exceedingly dense, but it’s written in a popular style, so you don’t need to be a PhD in psychology or a complexitarian to figure it out, but there’s a shitload of content in it, so you will get your $19 worth, I guarantee. But anyway, so that’s enough of that plug. And of course I get 10% of the sales. No, not really of course.
So let’s go on to the final topic, and this is where you kind of really open it up to thinking about what should we, all of us, be doing as part of this crazy, crazy situation we’ve been thrown into to use the Heideggerian frame, right? Well, I got to get my pistol out and wave it around when I say Heidegger. Which is you called it, orienting towards wisdom and being a good ancestor.
Gregg: Amen. So part of my own journey is identifying myself and my ego and then being like, hey, that’s a perspective in the world. I think a lot of people go through this and where are we in the network? My brother told me I’m carrying my baton of energy information. How do I want to hold it? And then how do I want to let it off? I also have seen, I can’t remember who actually gives the quote of how to be a good ancestor, but being that orientation. So really folks, the basic idea of this whole conversation is we need to wake up. Basically, there’s a lot going on. There’s a lot of enormous opportunity and enormous danger. There’s ways to live in the world. John’s very well-known for saying it’s not about meaning of life, but there’s meaning in life.
Jim: In life. Lovely, lovely, lovely saying, right?
Gregg: Yeah, and I think that’s super crucial. When you take John’s work and my work, what you get is a transcendent naturalism. The endo-naturalism, extended naturalism are the terms that we use for like, oh, you talk science. Transcendent means that we have a potential to connect with each other, gain contact with what’s real, and orient towards what’s meaningful, living life in a particular way that feels real and meaningful, and that you’re a part of something that matters. One of the great things about, hey, how do you know something matters? Well, if I die, I would be willing to die for it. I see myself as a part of it. Be a good ancestor means I’m connected to the web of humanity and technology and Mother Earth. I’m a small part of that, but I feel my identity expand and connect to that in terms of the whole part relationship that’s synergistic.
Fundamentally what I… And I have this fantasy that… Okay, so with Trump it’s like, okay, well Trump’s going to do one thing and then he now maybe represents a tremendous potential for a reset. That’s my optimistic shift. It’s wishful thinking at one level, but adaptive thinking, where am I? I’m not going to crawl in a hole. I’m going to think about, okay, what do we really need? We did need a shakeup. The old institutions, blue churches needed a shakeup. Trump’s sort of an anti-establishment, but clearly we can’t, Jim, you and I will, just activate bullshit everywhere. And that can’t be our model. We’re not going to kill intellectual integrity and just say whatever we want to say for our damn egos. We can know that that’s a pathway to hell. Every wisdom tradition will tell you, any sensible individual that’s thinking about long-term will tell you that’s an absolute disaster.
So Trump pops the anti-establishment issue. What comes after him? I don’t know, but maybe the opposite of that. We all got to sort of get back. He talked about sort of a common sense era. What is common sense? Well, you’re a justifying ape, frankly. We fucking know that you are. And then how do we want to justify what’s accurate? Cultivate, clarify what is, and cultivate what ought to be collectively across scale. How are we going to do that? That’s the problem of the fifth joint point, and we shall all be coming together and being like, how am I contributing in a positive way to valued states of being across time at the time of the fifth joint point? That’s the collective call of UTOK.
UTOK offers a particular version of that. It’s a coherent, integrated pluralism, and it’s going to be a lot of other versions. I get no anxiety when you say, “Hey, I think that fucking garden is weird and bizarre. It’s not my style.” But I’ll say, “Yeah, but you do know that we want sort of humanistic values and scientific truths, right, Jim?”
Jim: Absolutely.
Gregg: You can get around with that shit, right?
Jim: Absolutely.
Gregg: You say you don’t like the garden, but you like those values and I think lots of people can, and I think there’s an opportunity for us to consolidate our knowledge, compress our knowledge in wise ways, complexify it, and use it for good, but that’s not happening at the level of degree that I’d want. And UTOKs out there trying to move in that direction.
Jim: Yeah, I’d say specifically, we need to become much, much better at some new form of collective sense-making, that’s probably where at least the short-term payoff is.
Gregg: Justification and tree of knowledge tries to give us that, quick synapses of big picture stuff and oh wait, what is the nature of my human knowledge? Am I buying three, in humans at least, as a justifying system?
Jim: Gregg, I want to really thank you for another amazingly good conversation. Those of you who want to go deeper, get Gregg’s recent book, 19.95, probably cheaper than that on Amazon. UTOK: The Unified Theory of Knowledge.
Gregg: Jim, thanks. As [inaudible 01:33:39] Bart said, “Nobody comes better prepared for a podcast then Jim Rutt.” And once again, you have shown that and I’ve loved the [inaudible 01:33:45] friend. Thanks so much.
Jim: All right, thank you. We’ll do it again when your next book comes out. Probably before that.
Gregg: Right. When me and John come back, it’ll be a little normal.