The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Brendan Graham Dempsey. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is Brendan Graham Dempsey. Brendan’s a writer, a poet, a farmer and director of the Sky Meadow Institute, an organization dedicated to promoting systems-based thinking about the things that matter most. Welcome back to the Jim Rutt Show, Brendan.
Brendan: Hey Jim, great to see you or hear you depending on how people are tuning into this, but yeah, thanks. Good to be.
Jim: Yeah, we had great conversation last time. Look forward to another good one today. My voice is a little rough today, folks. So if I sound just a little froggy or rough or whatever, it’s not your audio. It’s my throat. So, with that note, let’s hop back into it. This is quite a little bit different podcast, but not that different in that instead of starting with a book or an article or a conversation, started with a Facebook post. And there will be a link to that Facebook post on the episode page jimrutt.com. So if you want to read all the bloody details, you can go there. Brendan and I kind of interacted and locked our swords out with a little mild sword fighting and we decided this might make a good podcast. So that’s what we’re gonna do. And we also agreed, and I’m not sure if it’ll technically work, but Brendan’s also gonna upload it on his channel if it makes sense to do so. So you may hear it twice if you listen to both of our podcasts.
Brendan: It’s not a standard way of kind of coming into these sorts of dialogues, but when you were sharing your perspectives on the questions of an ultimate telos and how much sense that made, and were also raising the prospect of the kind of classic heat death hypothesis, I thought, well wait a second, there’s some other perspectives on this that I would sort of almost expect Jim Rutt to be hip to and at least have some perspectives on himself. So I figured it would be fun to talk about those because I think that there is another way of conceptualizing this story compared to the one that we’ve sort of been given over the years with sort of the classic heat death story and the classic cosmic nihilism, cosmic meaningless narrative as well. Yeah, figured we could dive into some of that together. It’d be fun.
Jim: Yeah, it’d be fun. In fact, went back and revisited our conversation and I put both of what we set out. I love to go out and thought about it. I’ve actually tweaked my view just a little. So this should be interesting. First, before we hop into our somewhat different views on ultimate telos, let’s first define telos in the simpler sense and then take a whack at what do we mean when we say ultimate telos?
Brendan: Yeah. Well, this could do a lot of work untangling some of this itself because some of this I expect is gonna be semantics. Right? But the basic idea of a telos is like a goal or an end. It’s a Greek word that basically means something to that effect. And so notions of teleology have a long history, and they’re rather fraught. We can unpack that a little bit.
The notion basically of there being any kind of teleological orientation to anything is the notion of things having goals or aims, a kind of final purpose that they are aiming towards in some sense. And so I think roughly that’s how the term has been used.
And I guess to bring in some of that history, right, like which I think is important, Aristotle is really the figure, the philosophical voice who frames a teleological vision of the cosmos in a way that’s been the most influential. He has this notion that things are sort of developing towards a particular goal, that everything in a sense has its sort of ideal state that it’s aspiring to become.
A lot of that way of thinking about teleology got criticized in the modern period and especially with the dawn of early Darwinian evolutionary thinking, there is the sense that we could sort of dispense with teleological final causation and these sorts of things. However, there have been a lot of problems with trying to do that as well.
I’ve been really influenced by the work of folks like Terrence Deacon and others who are operating in sort of the complexity space or the cybernetic space, for example, where a lot of that got started, which has kind of reconsidered the role of goals and orienting kind of aims and teleological style logics. One of the things that, for example, Terrence Deacon talks about is the necessity of naturalizing teleology. And so that’s the kind of way that I’m coming at this.
When I’m talking about telos, I’m much more interested to frame it as something naturalistic, but in a way that sort of frees us from kind of the more simplistic naive notions of there’s some kind of maybe creators standing back behind the curtain somewhere who’ve got something going with some kind of specific intention in mind. But rather there are other ways that we can understand what teleology looks like in a naturalistic cosmos. And from that lens, I think we might be able to return or rehabilitate some notion of like an ultimate telos. So that’s what I’m interested to explore. I don’t know if you have any other semantic aspects to that word that you’d wanna bring in.
Jim: Yeah. Actually, had a slight twist on that. I will remind our listeners that one of the best all-time Jim Rutt Show podcasts was episode 157 with Terrence Deacon, where we talked about his book “Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter.” It’s a goodie. It’s really dense, so make sure you have a big mug of coffee by your side.
Now, one kind of little nudge on language. When I go back and read Aristotle, try to get my head around what he means by a final cause, I’m not sure it actually means goal so much as it means purpose. And the homey little example I created for our conversation was let’s think about a squirrel, particularly a mama squirrel. What’s her teleology? And the reason why teleology is interesting from a complexity science perspective is that in this case, it can map onto the idea of downward causality.
You know, why do the atoms that make up mama squirrel do X and Y rather than Z? Right? If you took mama squirrel, put her in a blender and poured the chemicals into a bucket, they just sit there. But since she’s part of a complex adaptive system with a purpose, she does different things. And, you know, I actually wasn’t sure how much nurturing mama baby squirrels did. So I looked it up, and it turned out they do a fair bit. They look after their babies for about ten weeks, and they defend them vigorously and all that.
So I would suggest that a maybe tighter interpretation of Aristotle in the micro domain is more like purpose rather than goal. The purpose of a mama squirrel is to raise her young, and if we wanna go deeper into evolutionary teleology, evolution – Darwinian evolution – has what I call mid-level intermediate teleology has resulted in mama squirrels whose behavior on average results in more than two living offspring per mama squirrel. And so the local teleology is mama squirrel takes care of her babies because that’s her job. And then the intermediate Darwinian teleology is that it’s always sorting shit out to survive and do a little bit better than just survive. And so Mr. Darwin wants to tweak things so that either the average mama baby squirrel has at least two offspring or sooner or later they go extinct. So that would be my somewhat tighter shading.
Brendan: Yeah. And there are a couple of things – as far as the cause part, Aristotle had these four causes, including efficient causation, final causation, these sorts of things of considering an entity in its full scope. You could consider what it’s made out of, you could consider its shape or its formal aspect, or you could consider what it is supposed to do – that’s more the final causation element of his philosophy.
I’m happy to spend more time on the Aristotelian notion, but I think we’re probably both using that as something of a foil, because I don’t think that Aristotelian notion of teleology holds up very well. There are too many problems with it. Though as Deacon’s work emphasizes, and also in Greg Henriques’s work and others, there is this recognition that he was onto something. He was definitely getting at something real. And if we lack that kind of goal-directed or purpose-directed nature to entities, then it makes it a lot harder to account for that kind of behavior.
Maybe we should spend a little more time digging out the specific semantic shades that we’re trying to speak to here – to distinguish between purpose versus goal direction. I use that term a lot, something being goal-directed. I more or less equate that with being teleologically oriented. For me though, I think part of the problem with using a word like “purpose” can be that it does seem to smuggle in a lot of intentionality into things, which is part of where this becomes really problematic.
We could say that a squirrel has goals and, to the degree that squirrel is conscious, there’s even intention there. But that kind of intention is going to be different from a rational language-using organism like human beings in terms of intentionality. Similarly with a plant – Aristotle would say there’s a particular kind of telos for a flowering plant that you can see because when you compare a dead withered plant or just the seed, neither of those seem to be the realization of the full form of this entity, which we would intuit is when it is literally flowering and flourishing, at its most beautiful, at its most robust.
There’s stuff there that we could dig into. Purpose – I’m not against using that term, but it might smuggle in some associations of intentionality. Part of what Deacon is trying to do is be clear about the gradations of this. He coins that term “ententionality” to kind of speak to those goal-directed processes that aren’t intentional but are still goal-directed. Could we say that the tree is the purpose of the seed? Could we talk about the goal-directed behavior of animals gathering food or having offspring? That seems a lot more comfortable, at least in the way that I’m thinking about naturalistic teleology. Is there anything in there that lands for you or that you’d want to pick apart?
Jim: Yeah. I guess my knee-jerk against “goal” is it sounds like it’s something somebody made up rather than being emergent. Right? Okay, mama squirrel, this is your goal – rather than my purpose is to run around gathering nuts and take care of my kids. And then the result is emergent from the behavior rather than having… and then so I promote to the intermediate level, the sorting mechanism of Darwinism as what I call intermediate level telos, which is different than the purpose-driven local telos. And purpose isn’t quite the right word either. You know, local telos – you’re responding, you’re a complex adaptive… let’s use life. Life is a – I’m gonna make a distinction later between life and non-life – but in life we can clearly say you’re a complex adaptive system responding to all kinds of signals from your environment and from inside yourself and in your social milieu if you’re a social animal, which some are and some aren’t. And then you are doing something which is essentially your purpose programming, what your complex adaptive system decides to do in response to the signals without necessarily having somebody say, “Here’s your goal. Right? Go to school for twelve years, get your certificate, and then go to college, bore yourself to fucking death for four years, go to work, sit in the cubicle, and stamp insurance forms for forty years.”
Brendan: I’m comfortable using the word goal in the sense of any living entity – if it’s gonna persist, it has a normative set of goals in order to continue to be. And obviously, you’ve read my book and you enjoyed my book on the evolution of meaning, a universal learning process. And that’s sort of the whole argument throughout is that this entropic universe that we live in generates a kind of set of minimal demands for any entity to exist in the universe. And if there is going to be a thing, then it must in some ways reach certain goals, you could say. Otherwise, it’ll just dissolve into equilibrium and not be a thing.
So it seems like, I don’t know, that’s where I start with a lot of this – that anything for it to exist has to, by implication, have certain goal states, relatively speaking, and that this is what we start to see grade into increasingly complex forms of goal states, the more complex these entities become. But, you know, I’m working from sort of a universal Darwinistic framework here, kind of universal selection theory. And in that frame, just existing, just being an object, there’s a kind of survival of the stable element. And so I think at a minimal level, we can start to distinguish if something is, then there is in a sense a normative aspect to its being, which is at the lowest levels of complexity, very understandably, that might be a hard sell. But it has a continuous thread, that line that goes from structural entities that just kind of exist at the purely inanimate material level, up into living entities that are operating at the level of genetic information processing and that sort of system into neuronal and then cultural beings like ourselves. And there’s a common thread connecting all of that with this complexification of normative goal teleological orientation that I think you can track shading down into the simplest phenomena like whirlpools and dissipative adaptation and this sort of thing. So that’s how I use the word goal but I mean, it’s interesting. We could parse these terms for a while – that could be productive or we could move on.
Jim: Yeah. I’m seeing that this is actually gonna be a thread throughout the conversation. And I see that I don’t think we’re gonna be able to solve it because I think we have a somewhat different perspective. But that will be illuminating. Remember this bookmark here that this conversation we just had, I think will be recapitulated. And oh, by the way, folks, Brendan’s book, “The Evolution of Meaning: A Universal Learning Process” is a wonderful book. It has the best definition of meaning I have ever read anywhere. It gets my unqualified recommendation as a book worth reading. And it’s short. Was it like 94 pages or something like that?
Brendan: Yeah. Plus the notes.
Jim: Yeah. And the notes are worth reading, by the way. Went back and read them after we did the podcast, I will confess. But they are quite good and particularly focus on his definition of meaning. I mean, a word that gets used and abused far more than used well, in this case used well. Anyway, let’s move on now to the real topic here, which is cosmic teleology or ultimate teleology. Maybe a little bit on the history of it. Two points I found as I was doing my research. I knew about both of them, but not, and I know a little bit more Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point, which I think is probably maybe closer to you. I don’t know. And then, Whitehead’s relational teleology, which might be a little closer to me.
Brendan: Yeah. I mean, I think both of those thinkers I resonate a lot with. Again, we could, I guess, parse what it specifically is that each one of them is saying and how they might differ. And to be fair, I guess I’m probably going to articulate a perspective that is different from all of those folks. Everyone that we’ve named so far – Aristotle, de Chardin, Whitehead and others – because there are different ways you can slice this pie. But yes, those are two thinkers who have certainly been influential for me. And I think something like the Teilhard de Chardin notion of the cosmic omega point at the end, the telos of existence, is one of the more poetic and spiritually invigorating sort of framings of this. But I’m also super keen to try to synthesize those kinds of insights with science and with what we’re actually getting from the cosmic evolutionary picture. That’s super important to me as well. So where those diverge, I’m gonna wanna follow the empirical evidence rather than maybe holding out for some kind of a particular spiritual vision. But I do believe and I think I’m of the general persuasion that that basic orientation is largely correct. And I think we should take these ideas very seriously that rather than seeing ourselves as part of a universe that is, again, sort of entropically dissipating into an eventual heat death, I think that there’s a radically different way of conceiving of the whole thing in which actually, we’re much more part of a sort of evolving, developing organism. And Whitehead referred to his philosophy as a philosophy of organism, which is also I think just a much more spiritually satisfying kind of picture of reality. So I’m gonna try to defend a version of that. But yes, those are two thinkers I think are definitely playing in this wheelhouse.
Jim: And Whitehead, to the degree I understand him, argues more things like cosmic aims emerge relationally through interactions between entities, and you might even think of them as like harmonies. This is again very much like my coevolutionary intermediate telos. So essentially, we are going somewhere where we don’t know where we’re going – suppose it would be the Ruddian way of putting it. I think that Whitehead would agree with that as opposed to Teilhard de Chardin who believes there is a point, the Omega Point that we are headed towards.
While in the very long run, I might be a heat death nihilist, I do believe we have a very long journey, perhaps trillions of years before that point, and there will be all kinds of interesting complex emergencies that occur. But, and this is my favorite line about this: We will get somewhere, but we don’t know where. So there is a destination. In this weird sense that Teilhard de Chardin talks about a destination, he’s right. We will be somewhere at the end of ten trillion years, but where that is, I can’t tell you. I think I can tell you some of the drivers that might be worth talking about.
I’m going to read my little short post on Facebook which triggered this thing: The ancient quest for a universal purpose, a grand narrative guiding existence remains unfulfilled. In the absence of evidence for such a universal telos, Prigogine’s concept of dissipative structures offers a striking alternative. According to Prigogine, systems driven far from equilibrium tend to self-organize into increasingly complex forms, accelerating energy flow towards higher entropy. A simple bathtub illustrates this example – whirlpool drains water more efficiently and more rapidly than a chaotic glug-glug-glug swirl, dissipating potential energy faster and therefore increasing entropy.
Studying this idea in biology and beyond, life forms from trees to human brains consume resources at exponentially higher rates. This, I only learned in the last year or two – a tree produces more energy per unit of mass than the sun. Isn’t that interesting and strange? A human a hundred fold more than trees, and the human brain at least an order of magnitude more than a body. So your brain is a thousand times hotter than the sun. Now that is really interesting. And that’s what Prigogine predicted – that as complexity increases, the amount of energy being run through the system to maintain it far from equilibrium pretty much must go up.
So anyway, back to my little post: if this pattern is not mere coincidence, it seems likely Prigogine’s idea contains a cosmic imperative – not a drive towards enlightenment, but towards an unrelenting push towards maximum entropy. That is the Rutt view – that’s the big push, but unlike a traditional telos with visions of purposeful progress towards a transcendent goal, Prigogine’s anti-universal telos elevates entropy as the ultimate force instead of a final self-justifying end. The only cosmic destination in this view is the exhaustion of all gradients – the smooth uniformity of maximum entropy. Whether this principle is truly universal remains an open question. Nature’s complex systems offer supporting evidence, but theory lags behind.
In the meantime, the whirlpool persists, pulling us ever faster into entropy’s embrace. Corollary of this view is that as the universe advances towards heat death, ever more potent and energy-efficient dissipating systems will likely emerge. Today, the rapid evolution of high-performance computing, epitomized by graphics processing units and large language models, illustrates this trend. We all hear about nuclear power plants being brought back online to run these large language models. Holy shit. Talk about intensity – you have to calculate the energy intensity of an LLM. That’s an interesting question. These technologies harness vast computational power, pushing the limits of both complexity and energy consumption. In doing so, they may represent the next step in the cosmic drive to accelerate entropy production.
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Brendan: Yeah. So I would say that’s half right. I mean, there’s nothing incorrect there. I think it’s a matter of how we interpret these phenomena. You mentioned this a second ago and I highly recommend this book – it was really mind-blowing and life-changing for me – “Cosmic Evolution” by Eric Chaisson, the Harvard physicist. You talked about a plant being in a sense hotter than the sun. Well, that’s, you know, per unit per mass per energy flow, this sort of thing. This is energy rate density. And Chaisson, when he charts this, shows that yes, indeed, compared to a star, a plant has more energy moving through it at a faster rate kind of per unit of mass and that you can track the complexification of entities through cosmic evolution using this complexification scale.
And when you do so, yes, the human brain is really at the top of this chart. And actually, you’re exactly right – I don’t know if anyone’s done those calculations yet, but I’d love to see it because now that this new sphere has taken hold in the digital kind of register and you’ve got LLMs processing things, you’re probably looking at energy rate densities that are just fully, fully off the chart. So there’s definitely been an exponential increase in the rise of information and energy rate density through cosmic evolution. That’s Chaisson’s whole point.
Now, where I think that how you framed it is a bit off, is because it looks at sort of byproducts as the goal. I think you’ve got the kind of cart before the horse there. So rather than seeing entropy as the goal, I think we do better to see it as a kind of exhaust or a kind of byproduct of complexification. This is what I’m doing with my work on the evolution of meaning and what I talk a lot about in that volume is that this complexification process that we see requires more energy to be used to create more complex entities. That does generate greater entropy because in order to get that energy, you’ve got to in a sense get it from somewhere. And there is that second law of thermodynamics in the background of all of this.
So, Ferguson’s idea here that every kind of local increase in complexity is sort of offset by the export of greater entropy into the environment, which is also Schrödinger’s notion in “What is Life” – this is how this process works. So we do get localized increases of syntropy or negentropy, even though the sum total of entropy is increasing in the system.
But there’s two major points I guess I want to make there – or maybe three depending on how we unpack this. I would agree that this process gets started as entropy maximization. If you unplug that stopper in your bathtub, you’re going to see that gyre form to more efficiently glug, glug, glug that water and dissipate that gradient. So that is, I think, best described by entropy maximization. However, I do not think that the way that human beings, for example, operate in terms of creating new technologies, in terms of developing civilizations, in terms of all the sort of creative output that we do in the developing of new ideas, etc., it becomes a perverse inversion to say that we’re doing all of this for the sake of increasing entropy.
We would say, “Why am I eating?” “I’m hungry.” “Why?” “Well, I’m trying to maintain myself. I want to keep living.” We don’t say, “Oh, well, this helps dissipate the entropy in universal system faster if I do all this.” This is where the kind of accelerationist thinkers, the kind of EAC people, I think, have the script totally flipped. You can see why people make this mistake, but it is a profound mistake if we misinterpret it that way.
So what I would suggest is that yes, as this process gets started, it is probably best characterized through the lens of entropy maximization. And that never goes away – that’s always what is happening, an increase in entropy. But by the time complexity picks up, you see more and more that it’s the teleological goals of the entities complexifying that is the basis of that entropy maximization, not just that the universe is trying to maximize entropy per se. So I think that the story here is one of cosmic complexification, the increase in structural complexity, and then we can talk all about what this brings with it, the implications for moving up the complexity stack as well, because that’s a key part of the story.
But that’s the story here. And what we’re aiming then for, we should appreciate isn’t just heat death and maximal entropy, but actually maximal complexity. And to the degree that we can recognize that as an end or an aim or a goal that the entire ultimate cosmic system is aiming towards in some way, I think that that’s a better way of framing it. And there’s a lot of things I’d like to pull out of there, but I’ll pause there because I’d like to get your thoughts on that interpretation.
Jim: That’s a good place to start. And so my perspective would be, it is definitely true. I don’t wake up in the morning and say, “Ah, let me go generate some entropy today.” And then I go back to bed and go, “Job well done, right? You generated a lot of entropy.” But this is the interesting thing. At the same time, I would suggest that the deep universal arrow of increasing complexity, even in our universe, even locally around us, is still towards increasing the flux of entropy.
And here’s how we square this circle, which is that actually we don’t know. This is a conjecture, strong conjecture that I would say most complexity people believe, but we can’t prove it yet – is that at least in a domain where there is a substrate that is capable of information processing, and it turns out that biochemistry is such a domain, that as the flux of energy increases and you give it time, this is very, very key, this is Cronin and Walker’s theory of evolutionary time, that you need a certain amount of time to evolve certain kinds of structures. And they suggest that’s actually a better notion of time than say Einsteinian time.
As we develop these structures, some of them become good at information processing. As a side effect, right, the universe is not trying to create information processing. The universe is trying to burn up its energy and head for entropy. But along the way, its way to do that is to build complex systems and certain of those complex systems in certain environments have developed the ability to process information. Some of them not even biological. There are some physical systems that can process energy, not very well, but they can do so.
Life is really amazing in processing energy, including a tree, including a fungus, including a bacterium. But once you get to neurons, you get to a whole new level of information processing. The universe did not intend neurons. Neurons are something that the semi-random walk of Darwinian evolution stumbled upon 600 million years ago and then took off about 550 million years ago in the Cambrian explosion and produced this amazing tree of animals who then quickly got in an arms race with each other and developed more and more information processing capability.
You know, that’s how I get up in the morning. I now don’t think about creating entropy. I have 550 million years of evolutionary priming to convince me that, oh, I want breakfast. Then I wanna go take a shit. And then I wanna take a shower. Then I’m gonna go to my office and check my email, etcetera. That coevolutionary context, the mid-level Telos is what forms around the exaptation, the use of this information processing technology that came about as an unintended result of the increasing flux of energy through the systems.
Brendan: The thing about that though – I mean, I would agree with the phrasing that the universe didn’t intend to create neurons in any kind of simplistic way, as though at the beginning of things, back when there was just hydrogen and helium, there was some blueprint to do that. I don’t think that.
But I also think we’re sort of begging the question if you just say that there’s no teleological import to evolutionary emergence of neuronal information processing, because we live in such a universe in which neurons did emerge. They are, in a sense, the carrier of a process of increasing entropy maximalization. You could almost say if there is a universal drive towards entropy production, that the generation of neurons doing their thing is actually part of that story. That there is something intrinsic to the fabric of reality that, just as a ball will roll downhill, there’s some notion that neurons will emerge in evolutionary time, and before that genetic information processing will emerge.
The whole evolutionary story is a subset of what the universe is doing that, in a sense, is doing it the best. That’s doing it like no other place that we see happening in the cosmos. I would personally – we can have a different conversation – but I think given this, it’s likely to presume that it is happening elsewhere throughout the vastness of space. But just working with what we know, it seems like if there is, as you want to tell the story, just this impulse towards entropy maximalization, then what humans are doing and all down the complexity stack, what things are doing there is pushing that ball further and further down that hill, in speeding up that process in the sense of fulfilling some kind of deep teleological orientation to reality.
And I want to suggest something like – we talk about constants, talk about whether you want to call that fine tuning or whatever – we live in a universe that is such. And the universe that is such is one in which this is the driving kind of logic of the emergence of phenomena in spacetime. That you set that clock going, that helium, that hydrogen, they’re gonna form stars, and then stars are gonna explode and make heavier elements. Then those are gonna congeal and those are gonna make planets. If you just play that tape forward, those things didn’t happen because of some outside supernatural deity saying “do this.” They happened because it was like water rolling downhill. It was a natural energetic and informational processing unfolding, however we want to language this, that led to where we are.
And so I just want to, from our perspective, not privilege the entropy maximalization side of the coin. Because as you say, I think that once you get this increasing ratcheting information processing going on, that becomes rather ridiculous to frame it in those terms. And so similarly, I want to suggest that the universe that we live in, if we’re gonna talk about telos, I want to say that the constraints that create a universe such as the one that we inhabit – in which this is the sort of thing that unfolds – is the evidence for some kind of ultimate orientation towards a particular kind of goal, which is an increasingly complex information processing system further and further into the future.
Jim: Let me push back a little bit because I agree with a lot of what you said. However, it’s obviously true by inspection that a universe with our set of universal laws, whether they’re constants or not, we’re not 100% sure of. We think they are, but there’s some evidence that at least some of those things we thought of as constants may not be – like G may not be, the quintessence or the cosmological constant may not actually be constant. But anyway, whatever the laws are, which we’ll probably never know fully, but we’ll have a better and better sense of them, must allow for the emergence of life by definition because here we are.
Now this is one of the huge – would call the second biggest question in science. Now people ask me if you say second biggest question in science, what was the first? Well, the first is why is there something, not nothing? And I think that was well beyond my pay grade. But the second one is life. How did it start? Is it contingent or is it necessity?
I’ve had many origin of life people, some of the top ones in the world on my podcast. Could have another one coming up soon with Sara Walker, which we’re gonna focus on origin of life. I’ve had Eric Smith on. I’ve had Deamer on several times. I’ve had Stuart Kauffman on. So this is an area of deep interest of mine, talking to the very top people. Nobody really knows yet. And when I ask them sometimes at the end of the podcast, they say, “Alright, what’s your bet? Do you think we’re unique in the universe or not?” And some go one way and some go the other. Stuart Kauffman will say, “Oh, anywhere that there’s this mix of elements, absolutely guaranteed that you get self-catalytic autocatalytic networks.” Bruce Deamer would say, “Oh man, the circumstances that caused this to happen are fucking rare. My guess,” whispered quietly, “is that we’re here by ourselves in this universe.”
Fortunately, and this is going to be kind of an interesting adventure for humanity, we’re going to get some clues on this in the next few years. We are now just barely able to analyze the atmospheres of some exoplanets, planets orbiting other stars. And there’s a whole bunch of arguing going on about what would be a biosignature in those atmospheres. At first people said, “Oh, oxygen, that’s definitely a biosignature.” Well, somebody else has demonstrated that a hot star with water will produce oxygen by hydrolysis.
Worst case, within ten thousand years, we’ll be able to send a probe out to stars in our neighborhood that say have a biosignature for oxygen and methane, let’s say. And yes, there are plausible but maybe a bit of a stretch geological ways to produce that. So we send a probe and look and see if there’s something alive there. And who knows, we may find life on Mars or at least that life was on Mars. And then of course, there’s the interesting question, is life on Mars the same life as us or different? It’s quite possible that our life evolved first on Mars and then came to Earth on a meteor impact that carried very early, very robust micro life across the gap of space and landed on Earth and seeded the Earth.
And then there’s also some possibilities on some of the Jovian and Saturn moons that there could be life, including very radically different life. Titan has methane liquid seas, right? And we don’t even understand what chemistry might operate in a liquid methane sea since it’s really hard to have liquid methane seas here on Earth.
So these are all very interesting questions that will be answered probably in the next ten thousand years and we’ll probably have some answers in the next hundred years. But until then, necessity or contingency, we don’t know. It may be that we just lucked into life and it’s the only example in the universe. And you could run this same universe a million times with the same starting parameters and you would not get life. And when you’re thinking about this and something like, is there an ultimate teleology? You have to take that until we know more – some epistemic humility about whether it’s a necessity or contingency.
And if we quickly determine that one out of every 10 stars has at least bacterial level life, then that’s a very different story. Then this is a universe that’s extremely generative of biological or biological-like things. Or it just could be a complete fluke because life is very peculiar. It’s really very peculiar. There are some parts of the evolutionary journey which are just inexplicable. My favorite is – I had a four-hour conversation with Stuart Kauffman about this – there’s an evolutionary mathematics, there’s a thing called an error catastrophe. If the mutation rate is too high, then evolution can’t get very high because the errors, the mutations break it down too fast. And in any given system you can calculate quite crisply where the error catastrophe lives. And in naked DNA the error catastrophe is way too high. You need some machinery to do error detecting and correcting. So how the hell did we evolve error detecting and correcting before we had error detecting and correcting?
It may be that that’s an almost impossible evolutionary knife’s edge to get up. And without that, we would not have anything like the elaborate life we see today. We might see something like an RNA world where little pools of scum come and go, but they don’t even organize into cells. That one question has always bedeviled me since I learned enough about this stuff to know.
So anyway, that I think is really important – big question mark to put around this question of whether the explosion of emergence in life, which is way greater than any emergence before. I mean, it’s been said that a single human brain is at least as complex as all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, which is pretty mathematically complex. Stars are more complex than clouds of hydrogen and helium, but they’re nowhere near as complex as even the simplest life – a bacteria is more complex than the Sun, for instance, which is a bizarre thought.
And one final thought before I turn it back to you, which I think is really important when you’re thinking about this, is I’ve come to borrow our mutual frenemy Alexander Bard’s idea of emergence vectors, right? That emergence has happened one after the other up a chain. And Harold Morowitz’s famous book on emergence lays out 28 to 29 emergences from the Big Bang to human social psychology. And then he even adds spirituality as the last one – goddamn it, Harold, why did you do that? But anyway, there’s a stack and as Bard would call it, an emergence vector. That’s actually really good terminology, which I’ve taken to use.
And here’s the interesting thing about an emergence vector – it can end, right? There is no guarantee at all that this emergence vector that produced life on Earth and then mammals and then primates and then proto-humans and then humans and then post-humans, that doesn’t end sometime fairly soon. The Sun will go supergiant in a billion years or so. And if we don’t get off our solar system, then all of our life will just go poof. It’ll just be a little blip in the universe.
And of course, there’s lots of ways it could end earlier than that. We could fuck up big time. Nuclear war, while it wouldn’t end life on Earth, would destroy civilization and maybe Homo sapiens, good chance of it. Nanotechnology goo, super biological weapons, dinosaur killer-sized asteroid – there’s many, many ways that this emergent vector could end and not have any impact in the future of the universe. And it may be that it’s the highest rising emergence vector in the history of the universe, and there will be no more.
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Brendan: Well, yeah. So there’s a lot that you just brought up there. I’ll try to work backwards real quick and then maybe add some more things in. I totally agree that there’s no guarantee. And I don’t think there’s this would be the real problem of a certain kind of teleological thinking because certain kinds of teleological thinking almost have a deterministic flavor to them. Like, “Oh, well, it’s all going somewhere, we can’t avoid it, and that’s just what it’s gonna be.” And that’s not, I don’t think, the right way of looking at it at all.
I don’t think it’s deterministically a given, right, in the same way that you might have laws of nature and you might have a second law of thermodynamics and this sort of thing, but there’s still deterministic chaos and evolution and all these ways in which in that set of constraints, you get radically novel and creative kind of phenomena. And to bring Whitehead back into the conversation, that kind of creativity, I think, is absolutely essential for appreciating the specific way that evolution has unfolded in a rather unpredictable, inherently sort of way. And of course, Kauffman talks a lot about those kinds of dynamics as well.
I think we can talk about a cosmic or an ultimate telos without trying to smuggle in some kind of deterministic notion that this is a given. And I think if anything, we should emphasize what you’re underscoring, which is the precarity of all of this, right? Complex things are in some ways, yes, antifragile, they’re adaptive in that sense, but they’re also fragile in the sense that there’s a lot of complexity that goes into maintaining these, and we shouldn’t take that for granted.
I also say that an emergent vector can continue. And maybe we are a part of an ongoing emergence vector that is just getting started. There’s a lot of good reason for thinking that as well, particularly if there are trillions and trillions or at least billions and billions of years to go. Even in a heat death scenario, there’s a lot that can continue to evolve and emerge in that time space, and we might just be the infants rather than the apex.
I also want to underscore this notion of epistemic humility. I’m not saying, “Oh, this is an obvious way that we need to see this.” This is a very compelling and I think in many ways, as valid, if not more valid story to tell than the one that is given as just the standard story. We take it in our kind of culture as being a given, at least amongst people who are scientifically literate, that something like a heat death will occur, and that is sort of the canonical story amongst most physicists.
I’ll cite Chaisson again, who in his book “Cosmic Evolution,” on page 29, talks about the heat death hypothesis. He says that “a modern analysis is not so dire, suggesting that the maximum possible entropy will likely never be attained. In an expanding universe, the actual and maximum entropies both increase, yet not at the same rate.” He says a gap opens between them and grows larger over the course of time, causing the universe to increasingly depart from Clausius’ idealized heat death scenario.
We need not be so pessimistic. Indeed, it is this inability of the cosmos to ever reach true maximum disorder that allows order to emerge in localized open systems. Kauffman himself says it in his own way in his book “Humanity in a Creative Cosmos.” The notion that if we live in an expanding universe, then this notion that all free energy will get used up and that we’ll reach maximum entropy – that narrative actually is undermined by an expanding universe.
We came up with the laws of thermodynamics doing things with train engines and such, right? Closed systems or isolated systems. We do not empirically know whether the universe is such a system. It’s actually a theoretical leap to move from studying things in these isolated kind of thermodynamic systems at our scale to the universe as a whole.
Recent Webb telescope findings suggest our model needs to be updated. It seems to be possibly the case that the universe is expanding, but it’s also expanding at different rates in different places. This is, if true, a very revolutionary finding. The significance relative to what I was just saying about an expanding universe and the lack of heat death is really compelling. Not only does it suggest that universal expansion process is underway, but actually that there might be gradients in the very degree of expansion rate. And all you need is that gradient to get that kind of energy to do work and ultimately to generate complexity.
One last thing to briefly mention is this kind of cosmological natural selection model, which again, some of the Webb data might be pointing us to. Is our universe in a black hole, in which case there is this kind of evolutionary selection process going on throughout the multiverse, or at least a broader universal space in which we’re a part? And if so, does that account for the evolutionary dynamics that we see creating the constants that form our universe?
These are super big questions. Without getting into all the details, I just want to raise them because the point is the jury’s out on heat death. I’ll say that and I’m welcome to be proven wrong. If people want to disagree and say, “No, I think that the preponderance of evidence says otherwise,” I’m very happy to hear that. But these are at least some meaningful arguments that should make us epistemically humble before we jump to that conclusion. If that’s the case, again, I think that this is, to use Chaisson’s terms, “we need not be so pessimistic.” There could very well be the case that we are in a complexifying universe that hypothetically can continue complexifying by the very laws of nature to some kind of exponential singularity-style rate omega point, whatever that could look like. And that’s a viable option. I’ll pause there, and there’s other things I’d like to bring up before we start to bring this to a close though.
Jim: Okay, yeah, the open universe versus closed universe – you’re right, no solid consensus on it, though the standard model would say closed. The universe started thirteen point six billion years ago, but has been growing since. It’s size X today – it’ll either keep growing or it’ll turn around and contract. For a long while we thought it might contract or reach an asymptote. You know, the current kind of hand-wavy dark energy model says probably it accelerates, but we don’t really know. Is our current light cone of visible universe all there is, or is this part of a larger domain that we can only see part of? We don’t know the answer to that either.
Lee Smolin’s evolutionary universe is with universes being birthed out of the back end of black holes. Maybe that’s the case. I don’t know. I don’t care, frankly. And then further, there’s a very interesting book, which I wish I could remember the title, where the guy goes out and figures out how long advanced information processing technology could survive as the density of the universe gets lower and lower, and he even talks about when protons break down. Currently, we don’t think they break down at all, but we don’t know what the error bars are. Maybe they do, but it’s really, really long. I think he came up with a hundred trillion years that at least some small pod of information processing could continue to go on, but it wasn’t forever.
And so my conclusion on all that is, frankly, I don’t care. Is it a hundred trillion years? Does it eventually run down at the end of a hundred trillion years? Does it run down after ten trillion years? Does it run down after one trillion years? Does it even run down after a hundred billion years? I don’t really care. But I do think that what I take away from this kind of thinking is that it is headed towards probably running down. But the interesting part is the running up that’s going to be happening for a while unless we break our emergence vector. And if there are many, many, many emergence vectors that are all rising up, that’s frankly much more interesting, but we just don’t know the answer to it.
I’m not very heavily invested on whether there’s heat death at the end or not. I think it’ll be far more interesting somewhere in the midpoint long before the heat death when we’re at the maximum rate of complexification because the energy fluxes will still be strong. The energy fluxes will be going way down in hundred trillion year time to almost undetectable. Not quite zero, but almost undetectable.
Brendan: Well, I think there is a meaningful cosmological perspective shift if one does or does not embrace the notion of heat death. If one has the shape of a universe of a sort of exponential increase towards complexity, towards an asymptote of something like an omega, there’s a different story told there. Right? And in the context of talking about ultimate telos, that’s what we’re debating.
Now I agree, we don’t know, but that’s kind of the point. Right? And I would say that rather than say, “Well, we don’t know, so I’m just gonna assume that there’s a heat death,” I’m at least trying to make the case almost from a metamodern perspective here of just being like, well, choose the better story, you know, Life of Pi style.
So there’s something to be said about that. But again, it’s not just that. I think that there are some real reasons to critique and to undermine that general model. And what I just read from Chaisson sort of gets at that. As long as we’ve got gradients to work with, we can keep having this complexification unfolding. And if that’s the case, then that’s a very different telos to this whole system than just some kind of vast bell curve that eventually evens out towards nearly nothing.
I do think it’s possible that we could have localized complexification increasing indefinitely. And what does that even mean? I mean, we don’t even know what it means over the course of a trillion years, let alone beyond that. But again, I think that there’s a different shape and there’s a different story here. And I think that brings with it a different orientation, different sensibility, different sense of sort of cosmic optimism versus pessimism.
And to the degree that for some people, these kinds of stories, cosmological grand narratives in some way, depending on how you kind of slice that pie and how all that shakes out, this can lead people into kind of nihilism and a life of meaninglessness. Or at the human level, to situate yourself as being part of an emergence vector heading towards a cosmic singularity – and we are currently, as best we know, the kind of apex complexity in that current vector – that’s a different anthropology. That’s a different way of seeing the human in the cosmic story. So these things I think have real profound philosophical and dare I even say spiritual implications for how we land on these issues.
I also want to emphasize the kind of background cultural milieu that leads different demographics to privilege certain kinds of “just so” stories versus others. It’s historically the case that the sciences had to do so much to extricate themselves from the religious narratives and religious oppression and institutions that there’s continuing to be this residual tension between these different magisteria that colors the kinds of stories that scientists feel comfortable talking about.
Neil deGrasse Tyson or Sean Carroll, they’re gonna tell you the story that we’re all just blips on a cosmic whatever explosion here and all this will end and nothing really means anything. And so I don’t know, go enjoy yourself or something. Right? That’s kind of the best we get from the metaphysics and the big story of our greatest physical scientists of our day. But I think that there’s a lot of metaphysical smuggling going on there, that they’re telling a story that actually might not be the best story, either from a scientific perspective or from a philosophical perspective. And so I just also want to say if this is a valid – somewhat at least, and I think it’s a lot more than that – viable narrative, yeah, we should really take that seriously.
Jim: Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m thinking about that. Was gonna say it must be a very strange human that decides whether to live nihilistically or not based on what’s gonna happen in a hundred trillion years. I would say their discount rate must be so amazingly low that there is no such animal and that Darwinism would have wiped them out a long time ago. You know, my own, as I said, I don’t really care. I take as, you just do the math and say, yeah, eventually it all runs down.
I did quote in one of the little posts back and forth, I did quote Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” which is a very elegant little science fiction story written in the early fifties. And I won’t give away the punchline, but at the very end, after eons beyond count, the late descendants of humanity figure out how to reverse all that entropy and start all over again. But, and maybe we do, but I don’t really care. My discount rate is I think lower than most because I do care about humanity more out more than a hundred years. But what happens in a trillion years, get two fucks about.
What I do think is interesting is going up the emergence vector, and to your point that we have an obligation until we know further to really treasure this unique and high emergent vector. I bring this up in every single conversation about origin of life and why it’s so important to know whether we’re the only one or there are many. It would be a shame if we blew ourselves up if there were a hundred thousand other similar emergence vectors in the galaxy, but it would not be that big a catastrophe, right? On the other hand, if we’re the only one, a fucking disaster from a, you know, I don’t know what, some kind of artistic aesthetic perspective.
Robin Hanson summed it up very nicely where he said that life is more interesting than dead matter, period. Right? You know, it just is. And, you know, it’s a life-centric thing to say, but hell, I’m alive. At least I think I am. Let me pinch myself. And so, you know, whether is it a bell curve and then it runs down to my mind is of infinitely minor interest to me, at least because I can see that as long as we don’t fuck up, which we have a high chance of doing, we got at least a billion years to increase our complexity just around the sun, let alone going out and exploring the universe, which I think we’ll be quite capable of doing within ten thousand years. So I see lots and lots and lots of fun of exploring the increased emergencies for a very long time to come, if not forever. And so I don’t really give a shit about what happens way out there on the left tail.
Brendan: Yeah, well and someone like John Vervaeke would, I think, also say that there’s a wisdom in that. Right? That some of these nihilistic anxieties that emerge for people about, you know, what’ll happen a trillion years from now are caught up in sort of broken relevance realization. Right? It’s like, that’s not relevant to you at all.
Jim: So, you know, zero.
Brendan: Yeah. And I hear that. However, my qualification of that is I do think as part of this universal learning process that we’re engaged in running through the dynamics that are a part of this universe that we’re describing, we have an impetus or a desire or its own kind of meta-teleology to maximally map our understanding of the universe as accurately as possible. Right? We want some kind of mental model that can allow us to optimally navigate our reality.
And so to that degree, I think that cognitive light cone of ours is always pushing outward because the more we can extend ourselves into the environment, and in a sense, kind of push back the horizon of where that boundary is between entity and environment, which again seems to be an evolutionary dynamic that we’re a part of, then there is going to be as soon as you get the ability for abstract conceptual thought to push that cognitive light cone out into the furthest expanses of temporal and spatial distance.
And so to that degree, that same kind of way of thinking, that’s what allows us to go out and put probes on Mars and potentially explore the universe. It’s also what allows us to engage in the kind of religious and grand narratological thinking at sort of the broadest scale. And I think that there is an evolutionary advantage to thinking at those scales in a way that we’re orienting towards ultimate meaning, ultimate telos, to bring it back to the discussion. So I’m also sympathetic to people for whom what happens in a trillion years does seem to impact them directly. And I think that there could be some good justification for those sorts of feelings as well. And I might part with the Vervaeke a little bit on that.
But before our time runs out, and our heat death occurs or whatever, I did also want to make another point here, which is really important, which is in the context of trying to think about the notion of a telos. I think we share the conception that this is not some predetermined kind of goal set out at the beginning of things – that the universe is open, that it’s creative, it produces novelty, and that we will be somewhere, but we don’t know exactly where that is.
I would say all that’s true. But I do think that we can look at what has been and assess: What are the big patterns? What are the trajectories? What do we see as being characteristic of how this has unfolded to date? And how do we use those as patterns to extrapolate into the future based on them? Right? And we’ve been talking about complexity and that’s one really important metric that we can see – things are increasing in their energy rate density, in their information processing capacity, and all of that, which again, I think are very revealing.
But I think we’d be remiss if we didn’t also speak to some of the deepening of the interiority that’s also a part of the story. I mean, you and I have these little mushy bits in our brain or in our skulls rather in the forms of our brain that are somehow relating to our conscious experience at the moment. That is this sort of weird three-pound ball of mush that is greater in complexity than all the suns in the Milky Way. That’s happening for us. But it’s not just energy rate density. It’s not just information processing, right? It’s the sensitivity that we both feel in our interior phenomenological experience of reality. It’s the nuance and the level of emotion that we’re able to experience. It’s the uniqueness of our intersubjective forms of relationship that are possible.
It’s the depths, I guess, is what I’m getting at. This is a really important part of the story. And to bring back Teilhard de Chardin, this was a very important part for him too. Right? It was the kind of law of complexities he talked about – that there’s a deepening with structural intricacy, a matching degree of increase in interiority and depth and in consciousness. Now, again, however we want to interpret all of that, in light of all the new science around consciousness and whatnot, there’s a lot that could be said about that.
But it does seem to be undeniable that as we follow that emergence vector that we are a part of, we can track that with increasing degrees of conscious awareness, rising intelligence and rising sort of emotional depth. And again, that’s something that I try to track in my work in the Evolution of Meaning series, as you move from matter to life to mind to culture, you have this progressive deepening. So by the time you get to humans, you’re able to expand your cognitive light cone out so far, and you’re able to go into such rich interiors of your emotional and psychospiritual existence that this is all tied to complexity and information processing. That’s significant.
So if we’re talking about telos of the universe, I want to extrapolate from all of that and say, well, where is this all going if this continues, right? How do we think about the stages if it’s only gonna be, let’s say, another ten thousand years or a trillion years or maybe indefinitely? Where does that asymptote singularity go to when that’s a big part of the process? So I wanted to throw that in because I feel like…
Jim: Oh, I love that. That gives me lots to grind on. First, though, I’m gonna go back and suggest that let’s not get over full of ourself on the optimistic always up curve. We gotta remember that human complexification has reversed on several occasions. The famous Bronze Age collapse, where the Greeks lost literacy for four hundred years. Holy shit, right? The Dark Ages where the people in England, 300 years later, walked around looking at these Roman ruins while living in mud huts with thatched roofs and assumed they were made by giants. Right? In Gaul, current France, sixty percent of the Roman citizens in the third century Common Era were literate. By June, the king was illiterate. So things can run in reverse, there’s absolutely no guarantee they’ll turn around.
In fact, I’ve read a very interesting book a few years ago – forget the name of it – where the author claimed the only thing that saved us from the Dark Ages was the translation of Lucretius’ “The Nature of Things.” He made it – you know, it’s a hand-wavy argument – but there was one copy found in an abbey under a pile of skeletons or something. And he tracks this tale from like the twelfth century when it was discovered, and that was what triggered the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment on.
So, you know, there’s a lot of contingency perhaps in this story. But now let’s go on to the next part. This idea of depth may actually be fallacious. One of my favorite writers, thinkers, scientists, a guy named Nick Chater over in the UK, who wrote a great book called “The Mind Is Flat” – and we did a podcast on it, so you can look it up. He makes a pretty good argument backed up by a lot of papers and research done elsewhere that all this depth we think of, it’s all confabulation. Basically our brain is a great teller of tales and strives for some form of consistency. And we know this, that people just make shit up all the time and don’t even know they’re making shit up because they wanna have a coherent view. And that’s all that we are, basically. I think that’s a little strong. He claims that we have a memory system and we have a confabulator and that’s what we do, right? And I would say that it’s worth reading that book as a counterpoint to the idea of depth psychology. He writes the book explicitly to expunge the idea of depth psychology. He does it with in a jolly kind of way.
Brendan: Just a clarifying point there. Depth psychology can refer to a very specific kind of psychology, and it’s getting at the psychoanalytic tradition with Jung and this sort of thing. And that’s not precisely what I mean by depth. I think something that I’m referring to is a lot harder to reduce to confabulation, which is the feeling of being – you know, and the unique rich feeling that we have as human beings in social context using language – that like, I can feel shame and guilt and elation and ecstasy and all these different things. That’s kind of the depth I was referring to, just to be clear.
Jim: Yeah. And, you know, I guess we’re not really sure how much our depth is greater than, say, a chimpanzee’s depth. Right? We know that chimpanzee mothers mourn the death of their children and that chimpanzee alpha males celebrate their victories of tearing someone’s testicles off and all that shit. How’s that any different than Elon Musk? I’m not sure.
I’m going to now take though, I’m going to save the day by saying, even if the mind is flat, even in some deeper sense, where the real interesting stuff isn’t inside, it’s outside. We mentioned intersubjectivity, one of my very favorite topics. In fact, I define the proper – that’s not the only, but one of the most important methods of building knowledge – is the intersubjective verification of the interobjective.
As we’ve known at least since Kant, we don’t actually experience reality. We have probes into reality, we have perceptions, we have our models of reality, and we could be deluded. And there’s lots of cool little psychological tricks that show how easily we are deluded. But if we’re talking to all of our friends and neighbors, and we’ve all got up and kicked the same rock and it all hurt our toe, we can say at a pretty high level of confidence as intersubjective verification of the interobjective, that that’s a rock and it’s solid and it’ll hurt your toe if you kick it. So kid, don’t do it.
And so this intersubjective is how we actually build knowledge. A single human by himself, put them in the woods, they die. You know, we’re not like a solo hunter, like a cougar that can be self-sufficient. Without a community around us, we die pretty quick. I don’t care if you’re the greatest survivalist known to man, you’re not going to last too long on your own.
And so we are always building this intersubjectivity, which is greater than any of ourselves. And since the invention of writing, this was very key, we now have learned how to externalize our intersubjective processing. And so we can pass it on from generation to generation. And now we’ve got computers, we have networks, we can now propagate it at almost zero cost anywhere on earth. And so even if we as individual nodes on the network are fairly flat and fairly foolish and fairly confabulatory, it doesn’t really matter so long as the intersubjectivity, as the network phenomenon is able to understand the universe and etcetera. I said, so I think that’s how we save the day, even if there’s less going on in our heads than we like to think.
Brendan: I would agree with that. I think in the sense that, as I talk about in the book, the Universal Learning Process book, that is what in many ways makes the human experience uniquely human. It’s because of language, arguably, that we are able to engage in that intersubjective sphere. And so I make the case that as we move up those complexity levels from matter to life to mind to culture, yeah, a chimp might at the level of mind have a very emotional interior existence and celebrate when triumphant and, you know, grieve even, as you mentioned, when a conspecific dies. That is, as far as we know, it remains a subjective experience that is unable to be fully communicated because, lacking symbolic information, they’re unable to kind of get outside of the mind-body to communicate to another mind-body the full richness in informational terms of what is going on there.
But with language that humans uniquely have, a symbolic language, we are able to do that. And because of that, we’re able to experience, I think, emotions that are not possible lower down the complexity stack. I don’t think a chimp feels shame or guilt in the same way that a human does, because those things are dependent on an intersubjective social sphere in which we participate. And so I do make the case that as we move up the complexification stack, and even within the stack as, let’s say, level of culture complexifies, we get a deepening and enrichening through this process.
And so, again, to tie that back to Telos, this seems to be something that’s unfolding in the universe that has a directionality to it. Chimps feel more than plants, right? And plants feel more than rocks. And there is a kind of increased levels of gradation in the subjective sphere of phenomena as we move up the complexity stack. And so as we head into the future, however long that may be, when we presume to extrapolate that process unfolding into the future, then I think we can reasonably infer that part of that teleological thread that will continue is that deepening process. We don’t know what that will look like because, for again, all the reasons of novelty and what comes next is a little bit certainly beyond our ken in that mysterious horizon, but that there will be a deepening of some kind seems a logical inference based on where we’ve been and thus I think that’s a justifiable kind of teleology that I’m trying to describe.
Jim: All right, let me come back at that a little bit. I would say probably true if we stay organic, right, that our feelings are extremely high dimensional and our intuitive approach to complex systems like nature and friendship and family and love are able to process way beyond what our analytical skills are. And so there’s evolutionary pressure actually to get better and better at emotional accurate, emotional valence tied to provocation relevance realization. Right? So I think that I can see how that emergence factor works within our stack, how long our stack will last. I don’t know. And that’s in the biological range. Now, what about our AI overlords? Right? They may or may not be developed to have emotion. And there’s actually involved in some conversations with some people who are working on machine consciousness. And one of the questions is, should they have shame and guilt? Or was the Bible right? That was an error. Should not have eaten from that tree. Goddamn it. You should have stayed naked and shameless, etcetera.
Brendan: That’s the title of my next book, by the way, “Naked and Shameless.”
Jim: Alright. So you actually are going for the New York Times bestseller list after all, right?
Brendan: Yeah. Screw the science stuff.
Jim: Yeah. Exactly. Naked. And as I always say, people say, “Well, what’s the best subject line to put in an email to make sure it’s opened?” And I said, “Barely legal teen girls.” And I said, that’s the winner every time, right?
Brendan: I mean, certainly, obviously, this is its own thread of a conversation. But I think that real quick, I would suggest any notion such as is commonplace in so-called transhumanist circles that we will somehow give birth to an AI that will dispense with the lower-order biological organic substrate as though it could just easily do so and move on and be successful – I think that’s pie in the sky, and it’s very harmful nonsense, actually.
I think that however, whether we will see some kind of integration that builds AI and LLM-style neural network processing into the existing complexity stack… I’ve made this point a number of times, I’ll be talking about this a little bit actually in the upcoming Utah conference happening in April on this topic. But yeah, I think that we can see what’s coming in terms of AI as we start to merge into that future ahead of us. These will be issues but I think that there are clear ways that these issues need to resolve themselves.
And for reasons I can’t get into now, feel like whatever builds on to this emergent vector needs to subsume what has already been a part of that vector, right? That every time that you’ve seen the complexity increase from one plane to another – life builds on matter, mind builds on life, culture builds on mind, right? It doesn’t make sense to just say, “Oh, then we poof made AI and that just got rid of everything else and can go ahead.” And there’s deep reasons that actually are all tied to teleology, at least meaning-making in the ways that we’re talking about. As I see the AI narrative unfolding, I think it’ll actually be a further continuance of this evolutionary process. To the degree that it’s successful, it will need to incorporate these kinds of things. And I think meaning then inherently is a part of that. Much more can be said about that, though.
Jim: By the way, I agree with you, assuming humanity has sufficient wisdom, but I’m not sure that it does. Part of it’s gonna be breaking the power of money on money return in time. Because money on money return will find a psychopathic, extremely powerful artificial super intelligence an extremely good thing to have for a little while until it turns on them and eats them. So, if we have the wisdom, I believe that is the correct path, but whether we’ll have the wisdom or not, I don’t know. I’m a much greater believer in contingency rather than necessity. We can easily fuck up this emergence vector and don’t take it for granted people. So defend your emergence vector. That’s the nerdy takeaway from The Jim Rutt Show today. Well, I wanna really thank Brendan Graham Dempsey for an amazingly good conversation once again.
Brendan: As always, yes. This was delightful as usual. Thanks, Jim. Really appreciate this. Appreciate your podcast for these kinds of conversations that are sort of just the norm. I guess what I’m trying to say at the very least is that when we take a perspective on the universe then seek out the kind of multiscalar processes that hold across these different levels of complexity, when we see that the universe is a story of increasing complexity that’s characterized by increasing energy rate density, information processing, and arguably, I think, a kind of conscious deepening as that unfolds in its higher levels, I think that we get a picture that is one that I find very wholesome and heartening and is rather starkly in contrast to the dominant narrative often kind of peddled by the rock star physicists that think it’s cool to just say everything’s meaningless when there is no better or worse argumentation arguably or evidence to support that vision versus this one.
And again, obviously, I wouldn’t have made the argument for this vision if I didn’t think that there was actually better evidence for it. So I want to at least raise as a very real possibility for people to entertain as a kind of cosmic vision of reality, that we are part of a billions-year-long evolutionary cosmic process that is leading in a particular direction and that we can, I think, logically expect a version of that to unfold, though not necessarily to your point, contingent factors and reasons we should be wary and in a sense have a neighborhood watch for our emergence vector. I think all those things are part of the wisdom that we need to build increasingly into this, but we need the cosmic framing first before we can even be hip to the dangers as well.
So I think that there are ways in which we can rehabilitate telos, even ultimate telos, when we take seriously the idea that the universe does seem to have a kind of groove that we are running along and hypothetically continues into the future. If they’re interested in that kind of framing of reality, there are a lot of resources out there where people are speaking to this and I’m excited because I see the kind of vice grip of the particular grand narrative that’s been kind of holding sway in sort of the major sciences for, oh, really, twentieth century starting to shift a little bit as increasingly these ideas, I think, gain prominence. And I’m expecting in a real way to see in my lifetime and feel like I’m already seeing it a kind of paradigm shift that moves the ball in this direction. So that’s my spiel. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. But this was great and really, really appreciate the conversation, Jim.
Jim: Well said. You know, I have my disagreements here and there as we heard throughout. But overall, I think we’re on the same team, basically. Team human.
Brendan: Team human. Yeah. Alright.