The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show, Zak Stein, or Marc Gafni. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guests are Zak Stein and Marc Gafni. Zak’s a writer, educator, and futurist working to bring a greater sense of sanity and justice to education. Marc is a philosopher, writer, and former rabbi, and together Marc and Zak are co-presidents for the Center for World Philosophy and Religion. Welcome Marc and Zak.
Zak: Yo. Good to be here.
Jim: Zak’s been on the show lots of times and both Marc and Zak have written books. And as always, there’ll be links to previous appearances and books on the episode page at jimruttshow.com. Today, we’re gonna talk about a new book, Exit the Silicon Maze, volume one, which I believe, correct me if I’m wrong, guys, is gonna be published under the pseudonym of David J. Temple. We’re also gonna reference the previous book they wrote—I think Ken Wilber helped you guys on this—First Principles and First Values. I went through and read it in part and scanned it in part, and there’s a fair number of places in the Silicon Maze that refer back to it, so I went and checked.
I’m gonna invoke the Game B protocol called Rule Omega, which I think was invented by Jordan Hall or Daniel Schmachtenberger, one of them, and used from time to time in Game B world. The idea is when you’re talking to somebody that you think is smart and in good faith—and I’ll give these two guys credit in advance for those two things—and you think you have a fundamental disagreement with them, slow down. Don’t just assume you have a disagreement and start a big old fight. Give them the benefit of doubt. Listen for the signal in the noise, if there is noise. Ask questions and try to work for constructive interpretations with them. See if maybe you can cocreate and learn something together. Probe for deeper meaning. And while doing so, cultivate empathy and humility and honor the difficulty of the subject.
So the area I wanna probe on—and it’s either definitional or we have a huge disagreement about the nature of reality or both—is the claim that you guys make that consciousness and attention in particular are woven into the fabric of the universe. Tell me what the hell you mean by that.
Marc: Sure. One thing, Jim, before we jump in—David J. Temple is a form of collective authorship of myself and Zak and Ken. David is writing a whole series of books, and the idea is to recreate this notion of collective authorship as both an important literary form and almost a political form. It’s not about one author making a claim. It’s about a broader kind of move. So that’s David J. Temple.
Jim: That’s kinda cool. I like that.
Zak: For me, it’s like a band name. You know? It’s like a band name where you’ve got a band. You can change guitars and drummers, and at what point is it still the Red Hot Chili Peppers or not? So David J. Temple has that vibe. These first canonical set—
Marc: Are involving Ken and us. So on attention—it goes, Jim, to a very basic question, which is how we understand reality in general. Which we may have a foundational disagreement on, actually. As we were talking to our mutual friend, Alexander Bard, who we all expected to come in swinging fists in the first couple of minutes. But it turned out that if we avoided superficial either theological or materialist simplifications, and we just talked in the phenomenological realm, there was actually an enormous amount we had in common. There was actually much more shared language than we thought.
So with that in mind, one of the ways we understand reality is as being animated by what we would call eros value or someone like Whitehead would call prehensive unification. Meaning in reality, there is a quality which inheres in the structure of evolution itself, which desires deeper contact. There’s a dimension of attraction or allurement, deeper contact, and moves reality gradually over long periods of time to ever greater wholeness. So we go from quarks to culture. We go through a physiosphere, a biosphere, a noosphere, and each of those, there are different, very clearly ascending or complexifying levels. We move from simplicity to complexity.
Now this desire for deeper contact is a quality of eros, eros desiring, moving towards ever greater value. So with that in mind, we then introduce a principle of continuity and discontinuity. We don’t think that two atoms pay attention to each other in a chemical elemental structure or that subatomic particles pay attention to each other to create an atom the way that Zak, Marc, and Jim are paying attention to each other right now. That would be silly. That would be some sort of animistic, weird, messed up retrojection, which would make no sense and would ignore the structure of science and emergence. So we, of course, don’t think that. And I’m sure you don’t think we would think anything as crazy as that.
Jim: Hence why I want to evoke Brule Omega. I figured there’s probably more to it than was on the surface, right?
Marc: But what we do think is that there’s what we call a principle of continuity and discontinuity. So there’s both continuity—there’s a coherence to cosmos, and there is an emergence, right, of one level that then bursts the next level and then bursts the next level. And there is a meaningful way in which we can talk about value and first principles and first values, including attention, right? That operates both in the world of matter and in the world of biology, and in the self-reflective human world.
The notion that eros is the placing of attention and that attention itself blooms reality—there’s a turning towards, there’s a desire for contact. There is a quality of, let’s say, two subatomic particles. Let’s say we’re 380,000 years after the Big Bang, and all of a sudden, you’ve got this electron floating there and you’ve got the nuclei, you’ve got the proton and the neutron, and there’s this kind of profound and strange allurement between them.
Our friend Howard Bloom, who calls himself a stone-cold atheist, describes in lyrical scientific detail this moment of the electron and the proton-neutron coming together. And then there’s this insane emergent called an atom. And the atom is, as we all know, not just three quarks up and down, proton or neutron. It’s some entirely new emergent, this kind of crazy fairy dust of science.
So the electron and the nuclei, they’re in some sense placing attention on each other, not in a first-person Jim Rutt sense, but in the sense that Richard Feynman or Stuart Kauffman might talk about when they talk about a kind of proto-interiority, or what Whitehead meant when he talked about proto-prehension. That goes all the way down. There’s a kind of aliveness, a turning towards that then blooms a new emergent.
That’s what we mean by this quality of attention. Different schools of thought fundamentally make category errors in either overemphasizing continuity, which becomes preposterous, or overemphasizing discontinuity, which becomes non-coherent. So there’s this very finely calibrated dialectical movement between continuity and discontinuity.
Zak: The Whiteheadian tradition is one that is known in the discourse. But it’s a fairly long-standing view, which is usually debated about how far down to push it. When we were co-writing here, Ken was one of the people who was really questioning the use of this language down below certain levels, whereas we’re trying to say we want to push it down as far as we can.
It’s worth mentioning—gravity, allurement—what’s the difference between those two terms? Why would it be the case that gravity is a fine thing to postulate, period? Just postulate it, there’s nothing behind gravity. What it’s describing is the coming together of these things and the relationship between them where they’re co-tracking each other insofar as the field requires the weight of both of them and the velocity of both of them.
What we’re doing here is intentionally trying to redescribe and reread science in a way that allows for the human not to feel like an alien within the universe. Scientific language has been crafted intentionally against the prior worldviews, which did try to say we’re at home in the universe. It’s okay to think the animals are our ancestors and are like us. And the other world was like, no, the animals are automata, we can torture them and nobody cares. It’s a very humane view within the West now to push down the idea that there’s an interiority to animals. We’re starting to do that. So we would probably all agree here, don’t torture the cows. Even if you want to eat them, be nice to them because they’re like us enough. And then if you go down to a dog, obviously, don’t torture your dog. You go to jail for that.
Jim: Unless you’re in Korea or someplace, right?
Zak: That’s what I’m saying. But here, you go to jail for torturing a dog, not for torturing a cow. Right? So there are huge places where they torture cattle—don’t go to jail for doing that. So we push down the dog, push down to a squirrel. People push it way down. So there’s this question of where do you stop pushing it down and why? And then if you push it way, way down, and then it flips to a language that actually presupposes the nonexistence of the whole rest of the thing—it’s a strange thing for even just humans to orient around.
So there’s something about the work of philosophy being different than the work of science, and the work of philosophy having a lot to do with the reconstruction from science of what is being said about the universe in a way that’s coherent with all of the rest of the discourses that say things about the universe. So that sense of trying to have—you know, how do we actually have that ability to not have science be continually undermining places where common sense suggests something completely different?
The question of free will is interesting here, which we try to take on. It’s related to this question of attention. Because the whole point of attention is, is the violation of your attention a moral concern? And we argue yes, it is, because it’s a fundamental and viable aspect of reality that you don’t want to mess with attention anywhere. That’s why it’s so crazy to keep the cows in these cages because they can only look right ahead.
Jim: Let’s regroup. We’ll get to all this later. Let’s focus on—
Marc: Let me add one thing, Jim, and then back to you, with permission. It’s interesting that I was just looking at some work by Philip Goff, and then by Annaka Harris, who published a book a couple of years ago on consciousness. Just a couple of months ago, I’ve been reading through this 11-part audio series where she’s fundamentally shifted her position. I think she just did an interview with Sam about it. She’s saying, “I started with a dogmatic position, which is the classical position that consciousness must emerge out of complexity.” But she realized gradually that it was actually kind of a dogma. As she’s gone through and done the work, especially over the last couple of years, she’s coming to about an 80 to 20 position that consciousness is fundamental. That’s an interesting switch.
And of course, Sam’s trying to figure out whether he can agree with that and still get dinner—who’s making who dinner. So they’re trying to work that out. But the point is, does it really make sense to talk about a universe in which we have ultimate reductive materialism and there’s a fundamental split between matter and what matters? That’s obviously a deep question, and it’s interesting that in the last few months, a bunch of thinkers that were on the other side have begun to move. They’ve begun to say, actually, when we look at the hardcore material—we’re not going to spend the entire conversation today on the hard problem, obviously, although that would be great—but that’s obviously related. Because once you assume that Annaka Harris’s new conclusion makes sense, that consciousness is indeed fundamental and Planck wasn’t completely crazy, then consciousness and attention, as you correctly indicate, are very inherently and intimately interdigitated.
Jim: Alright, well, let me give you the Ruttian perspective on this, which is as a complexatorian and also a consciousness science guy to a degree. I’ve had many of the leading consciousness sciences people on, people like Antonio Damasio and Christof Koch and Bernard Baars and Emery Brown—very interesting guys, an anesthesiologist, et cetera. Some other ones too, like Joscha Bach, Ben Goertzel. I’ve been involved in this discourse for at least fifteen years.
I don’t know if you guys have picked it up, but I recently took a new position as chairman of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness. Which is a very well put together startup research institute that does not take a position whether machine consciousness is possible but is going to try to demonstrate that it is—from first principles and in a way that is demonstrable. Big challenge, right? The answer might be it can’t be done, and we’re open to that.
Anyway, it’s gotten my head deeply back into this space. As an example, I’m currently reading of all things a book on the philosophy of attention by Christopher Mole. Not the kind of thing I would have ever read before, but since attention is so closely related to the kinds of consciousness that we’re talking about at the Machine Consciousness Institute, I figured it was best to see what the philosophers were saying about this.
But anyway, my view—this is long standing—is that consciousness is a biological phenomenon, and basically one of the key lenses to think about consciousness. A lot of people in consciousness sciences are over-indexed on humans, I believe. But Dobzhansky’s famous quote: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” As you look at consciousness, you can track back. Okay, we have human consciousness, which has some new things compared to chimpanzee consciousness, which has a few things compared to monkey consciousness, which also go in a different direction.
Zak: Discontinuity and continuity with that.
Jim: Yeah, exactly. You know, the famous bat, Thomas Nagel’s—
Zak: Right.
Zak: Discontinuity and continuity with that.
Jim: Yeah, exactly. You know, the famous bat example from Thomas Nagel.
Zak: Right.
Jim: What’s it like to be a bat? Very radically different, orthogonal to the rest of the mammals because they have echolocation. Our beloved dog, he’s got a great nose. Us humans don’t. His eyesight’s not so good. And so we have different kinds of consciousness. And you take it back to farther down to the earliest pre-mammals, and then you say, what about the common ancestor with birds? Birds seem to have something like consciousness. We don’t want to torture chickens unnecessarily, probably—certainly not parrots. And so you go to amphibians. There’s actually been a fair bit of work on amphibians, and they seem to have a very rudimentary conscious scene. They seem to have a very rudimentary attention mechanism. Basically, all they can do is detect or not detect a fly in their visual field. If they see a fly, their tongue comes out. You could prove this by taking the outline of a fly four times the size of a fly and hold it four times the distance that a fly could be had by a frog and its tongue will leap.
So from this school of thought, at least, we would suggest that consciousness as we experience it—or anything even vaguely like it—is a strictly biological phenomenon. Some people argue it goes further back, all the way back to insects, some people say to fish, et cetera. But no further than that. And attention, at least in the meaning I would use it in and Christopher Moll would use it in, is part of the process of consciousness.
Consciousness in this view is not a thing. I can’t put my finger on it and say, “Well, there’s your consciousness.” I like to use John Searle’s comparison, which he compared consciousness to digestion. I can’t say, “Hey, Marc, there’s your digestion right there.” No. It’s your tongue, your esophagus, your stomach, your appendix, all that. And in fact, the Rutt corollary to Searle’s comment about digestion and consciousness is, yeah, the end result’s often the same.
When I think of consciousness and attention, that’s what I think about. The other end, the Rutt minimal viable metaphysics, which I’ve been working on for a year or so now, basically says there is a lawful realm—at minimum, the forces of nature and the physical constants. And then there’s emergence, and emergence stuff very close to the four physical laws. Like, for instance, the great example you gave of the days when the universe became transparent, when the ions became atoms, was like a first-order emergence from the four physical laws. And then molecules formed, which were also pretty close.
But as you get further and further away from that, it becomes more contingent. For instance, galaxies had to do with random fluctuations, we think, in the very early universe. Whether it was actually a singularity or not, don’t know. But certainly appears the universe was very dense and very hot in the beginning. There appears to have been some nonhomogeneity which led to galaxies, which then led into one of the most important emergences: stars. Without stars, we wouldn’t be here. We are stardust, as some rock and roll song said—Joni Mitchell, that’s right.
The sun is now thought to be either a third or fourth generation star, where the material ejected by supernova or red giants gets re-aggregated, recycled by the evolving galaxy, and stars that have higher concentrations of metals and silicon and stuff end up with planets like Earth. Probably not possible—certainly not possible for the first generation stars, doubtful for the second.
All those things are series of emergence. Our mutual friend Alexander Bard has created terminology which I really like. He calls them emergence vectors. They’re branching continuously: Big Bang, galaxies, all different branches, different galaxies with different statistical attributes, have lots of stars, and the stars vary quite a lot based on a number of things. And then various things happen in the stars. They have planetary systems.
And then one weird planet out in a suburb of the Milky Way, something strange happened, which we think might be strange—we’re not sure. Life came. Life is very different than nonlife, especially the kind of life that we are. I call it LUCA life. We are every one of us, including the fungi in your backyard, the pigeons shitting on your car—we’re all descendants from a single microorganism, probably something like either an archaea or a bacteria about three and a half billion years ago, plus or minus.
Every single living thing today has not failed to reproduce. I always find this a staggering thought. Every single piece of life is this very odd contingency that your parents never failed to reproduce for three and a half billion years. And the graph of the things that could happen and didn’t is way larger than the graph of things that did, which is us.
But anyway, it’s kind of a long metaphorical and scientific story. Somewhere along the line of this emergence in this particular neighborhood of the Milky Way, life got to be more complicated. It went from prokaryotic to eukaryotic, and then it went to various forms of multicellular—more than one as it turned out. But one of those was very puissant, the one around the Cambrian explosion, which combined multicellularity with neurons, which were actually invented slightly earlier by evolution. And that led to this explosion of competition through predator and prey, where the first mobile predators came along. Rudimentary consciousness and preconsciousness turned out to be a competitive advantage. Keep in mind, nothing makes sense except in the story of evolution. So this process had to pay for itself in evolutionary terms if it was going to be fixed for as long as it’s been.
When I speak of consciousness, I speak of this thing. Now, of course, because I’m also interested in machine consciousness—and this is also very subtle—I don’t believe that machine consciousness anywhere near day one is gonna be anything like animal consciousness. Searle has another excellent analogy which I like, which is back to our digestion story. In the drug world and pharma and some parts of the chemical industry, there’s a technology called digesters, which are big stainless steel tanks. Put raw materials in microorganisms, acid and heat—very similar, very rough sketch to what’s going on in your digestive system. And it takes raw chemicals and turns them into higher value chemicals, and they call it a digester. Yet it’s different in every kind of material, every kind of process, than animal digestion.
I suspect the very first machine consciousnesses, if we are capable of creating them, may be that different from animal consciousness. But if we’re smart and figure out what are the attributes of consciousness, I argue that there’s two: one has to do with access consciousness, and then the second part—this is the part more interesting to you guys—is the phenomenal aspects of consciousness, that it is something to be that thing. And that phenomenology is the thing that really matters. And I think when we get to the rest of your story, whether consciousness actually comes in the fabric of the universe or came through this evolutionary history at some specific point in time, to my mind, the payoff is phenomenology. Once something is around that can be, that has a sense of itself, that can have emotions, can suffer pain, et cetera, we’re in a different wild realm.
Marc: Right. It’s worth saying a couple of things. One, we can’t talk about evolution without allurement, without attraction. That’s the quality of attraction, whether it’s electromagnetic or gravitational. The four forces are plays of attraction and repulsion, or what we might call proto vectors of autonomy and communion. The very nature of any relationship, whether it’s ions becoming atoms or that monumental leap to single-celled, multi-celled, prokaryote, eukaryote—although those are not precisely overlapping. The crisis generates these new configurations of coherence. The whole structure is based on some sort of proto placing of attention.
Certainly, if we’re willing to use the word consciousness to talk about machine consciousness, which I think there’s a lot to take issue with, that’s a place where it’s important to maybe take the gloves off and look at. But why would we want to talk about attention all the way down? Not just because it’s the best phenomenological description of reality, but because it actually gives us the possibility of feeling at home in the universe.
The universe is coherent, but it has to be coherent in a non-fundamentalist way and a non-regressive religious way. Science dreamed of a certain kind of coherence initially and then lost access to that vision. When I begin to understand—if I define my terms properly—there’s no consciousness without attention, and there’s no consciousness without value. Not values, not human values, but value beneath values. That’s what Whitehead was talking about when he talks about reality having an appetite for value.
If you read the interior sciences, there’s this sense of—let’s take Abhinavagupta, whom many scholars consider one of the early atheists. He’s core to Kashmir Shaivism, and he writes probably the first religious atheistic philosophy, almost like a material mysticism. What he’s talking about is a world suffused with value. It’s not neutral. It wants to go someplace.
Chemistry means attraction. When we say there’s chemistry between human beings, we mean they’re attracted to each other. Science accurately describes early reality as being chemical, but we hide the fact that chemistry implies phenomenologically, scientifically, empirically attraction and allurement. Although chemistry between Jim and his wife is fundamentally different than at the molecular level, there’s a continuity—a quality of chemistry in the cosmos which allows me to experience the basic scientific intuition that there’s a coherent cosmos.
Jim: One thought I had this morning as I was pondering this: one difference that seems distinctive is that our attention—and I think I coined the expression that attention is the cursor of consciousness—as you said, without attention, you don’t have consciousness. I believe that’s true, though to add a little spin to it, I don’t believe it has to be single-threaded as it is in animals. All animals in the mammalian and bird branches, at least, are single-threaded attentions as far as we can tell. Might not be true of cephalopods if they turn out to be conscious. It may not be true of machine consciousness, but they’re clearly very tightly interwoven.
This is what makes consciousness and attention interesting—it’s highly contingent. You didn’t have to pay attention to the wife when she yelled from upstairs. You’ll get in trouble if you don’t, but it’s contingent. As a person who believes that there’s this middle level of causality that is neither strong nor weak emergence, something in between, I believe that there’s a lot of contingency in these upper levels of emergence, which there is not in chemistry. If you put the right chemicals together at the same temperature and pressure, exactly the same thing will happen every time. For that reason, I think the analogy gets stretched to the breaking point when you start to talk about the interaction between electrons and protons and call it attention, let alone consciousness.
Zak: And this is kind of our point because we’re talking about people like Alex Pentland and B.F. Skinner. And Skinner and Pentland are basically saying, no, Jim. The rules of chemistry and physics apply all the way up to social systems. That in fact, we could engineer social systems as precisely as you can engineer a chemical reaction.
Jim: Obviously, horseshit. Right.
Zak: Obviously, horseshit. But based on, strangely enough, a materialistic reading of the same type of continuity-discontinuity dynamic that we’re looking at here, which is to say that instead of us pushing things all the way down, they are pushing what’s down there all the way up.
Jim: I think you’re both wrong. That’s an easy one, right? Their mistake is so obvious—I call it naive Newtonism. And I can give you one quick phrase that just proves it’s utter horseshit, which is deterministic chaos. No magic necessary. The universe is uncalculable in any realistic term. You don’t even have to go into Turing’s halting problem or Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Even if you assume neither of those is true, the fact is you can’t calculate anything about complex systems. One of the main things you get from being a complex systems student is a huge sense of humility about how little we’re ever going to know about all this sort of stuff.
Zak: And yet the designs to replace politics with the science of behavior control predicated upon a metaphysics that’s reductive still move forward. So the argument is, is that just an epistemological mistake or also an ethical mistake?
Jim: It’s certainly an epistemological mistake, and it’s probably an ethical mistake as well. So with this, I think we’ve probably reached the end of a useful conversation, at least within this context.
Marc: Let’s just talk just for a second about contingency and design. Without double-clicking on six scientific pieces of information, let’s just talk about it in what we call the anthro-ontological sense, meaning the immediate direct access that you have to the nature of things.
I’m thinking of a person that I have studied with for the last twelve or thirteen years, and we’ve done a meeting once a week of deep dive intellectual exploration conversation. We’ve never planned the meetings ever. There’s never been a plan or design. But actually, post facto, at the end of each meeting—we started in February 2009—we’re kind of blown away by how elegant and gorgeous and coherent the strains were, much like you must experience in the podcast.
So on the one hand, there’s no design. On the other hand, this enormous coherence emerges, and there’s obviously radical contingency and choices being made throughout the entire process. The split between contingency and design is actually phenomenologically in part a false split. The way we’re understanding first principles and first values is as plot lines of cosmos that are inherent. Just like you have mathematical value, musical value, molecular value, metabolic value, and moral value, you can actually draw a line between those. That’s not just a semantic field—there’s something more essential in that larger field.
Zak: This is one of the deepest philosophical issues that you can discuss. I would say that technically our position is that value is more primordial than even consciousness. This is also a position that you find elsewhere in the field. This is McGilchrist’s position basically, metaphysically. He said value consciousness is more primordial arguably than spacetime matter. And so there’s a deep desire here to find a way to articulate these discontinuities in such a way that we don’t confuse people into dismissing this view in a knee-jerk way. This is what McGilchrist was trying to do, what we’re trying to do, what others are trying to do—to say wait. To have a coherent cosmos that actually allows us to not make insane mistakes like treating people like they’re chemistry experiments, how do we have a coherent field of language that allows us to speak of the continuities and discontinuities? That’s part of this broader project here to reconstruct your project to try to piece back together a coherent view of the cosmos. And then from there, you can start to critique things like the techno-feudalist rollout of large-scale behavior control to replace political practice. How do you critique that if what you’re ultimately saying is that the universe is meaningless and this is all chance?
Jim: This is a horrible mistake. We’ll get into this later, though. I’m going to just assume that your use of consciousness and attention is highly, highly metaphorical. Okay. I barely see it, but it is not of the same class as a mouse’s consciousness or a dog.
Marc: Given. That’s a given.
Jim: Anyway, I was going to assume it’s a metaphor and analogy of very long distance. Continuity and discontinuity. And the big difference being contingency and necessity. If I ever write a science book, that’s what it’s going to be called—contingency and necessity, which will explain everything. But the other thing I’m going to suggest is that trying to find firm foundations or continuity from top to bottom may well be just a fool’s errand. Not that you guys are fools, but my view is that we are thrown in the middle between the Planck length, which is 10 to the minus thirty-fifth meters, vastly smaller than a proton, vastly, vastly, and the universe, which is 10 to the 26 meters across, approximately.
We’re in this middle range. It used to be we were between millimeters and kilometers. Now with our instruments, we’re between angstrom units and light years, but it’s a tiny, tiny little piece of the universe where neither quantum mechanics nor special or general relativity have more than minor effects. And that middle ground doesn’t have any firm foundation. It’s just there. It’s in this world of emergences, and the emergence can never violate the fundamental lawful layer of physics, but they’re extremely unbounded in what they can evolve to. And so when I hear people pushing for top-to-bottom foundationalism—not that I’m calling you guys foundationalists, but maybe you are—I go, nah. It’s five bridges too far. We’re in the middle. All we can do is make the best of being here in the middle and have some fun while we’re here.
Marc: Right. It does go to a broader conversation, and we will follow you here in this omega unfolding, but it does go to a certain anthropological question. In other words, if we locate ourselves in the space-time continuum as, let’s use your word, the foundational reality, then your description is phenomenologically, empirically, scientifically accurate. But if I locate myself in the realization—let’s say, we would hold, the interior sciences would hold, Peirce would hold, Whitehead would hold, our friend McGilchrist would hold, et cetera. And by the way, Alexander, when you catch him at the implications of what he’s saying, I think actually shares interestingly. He can express it in both ways that actually value is primordial. It’s not coprimordial with space and time, but actually space and time emerge in the context of a field of value. And that field of value is the innate intrinsic field of reality out of which in this particular blip moment as you described it, this particular manifestation emerges in the way that it does, but space and time emerge out of the field of value and not conversely.
Now from the perspective of the eye of value, if we would kind of empirically, we’d have an eye of the senses and we’d have an eye of the mind and we’d have an eye of value, or what Ian calls value-ception. We came up with those terms independently. But value-ception or what we call the eye of value, my actual experience is not, “Hey, let’s just have a good time.” And actually, I would argue that phenomenologically, ethically, Jim Rutt has not lived his life that way. I actually listened to a couple of your podcasts before, and I never listened to podcasts. First of all, I had a blast. But two, you were radically principled, arguing passionately for truth, taking hard-ass clear stands in a beautiful way. So you weren’t just having fun. You were standing for, in a wildly passionate way, a kind of vision of the universe and a kind of clarity. And there was actually a moral sense to your argument. You were outraged by bullshit things. There’s like, that’s a violation. That’s not just a mistake. It’s not just an offense to my fun. That’s nonsense. Stop that. So there’s a fabric, an ontological fabric of it mattering, which comes out of the field of value, which is primordial to space and time. So the notion that, okay, let’s just hang out and have some fun in this kind of weird space in between is actually not the experience that you live with every day.
Jim: It is true. But I would argue that there are no foundations for my fairly intense morality. You are right. I have very strongly stated senses of right and wrong. And under the right circumstances, I’m willing to kill people about it.
Marc: Ain’t that crazy though?
Jim: But I believe that these are things that we have worked out and we all have worked out with other humans and have decided that for this pod of humans, this feels right. This is not in violation of our human nature. This is not in violation of some thoughtful consideration of game theory. This is right, for us, but doesn’t mean that other people can’t come up with other ways of living. And if we look at anthropology, humans have found thousands of ways to live. Some of them would be extremely horrifying to us. You know, the Aztecs. The Carthaginians.
Marc: Now it gets interesting.
Jim: The West, just before the West. Voltaire, La Infâme. We all have horrific predecessors, and some of it was great, some was terrible. And humans in the middle here without any foundations figure out a way that they think is right and will fight for it. And I would say that’s what we got, guys.
Marc: Now it gets interesting.
Jim: The West, just before the West. Voltaire, La Mettrie, and the like. Right? We all have horrific predecessors, and some of it was great, some was terrible. And humans in the middle here without any foundations figure out a way that they think is right and will fight for it. That’s what we got, guys.
Zak: I would counter by thinking about the work of Lawrence Kohlberg, the great moral developmentalist. Because what was implied in that was that the learning that takes place when you are morally socialized is not arbitrary. Just like the learning that takes place when you are in a sensory motor situation or learning how gravity works and you’re learning how to circumnavigate a three-dimensional space and all of that kind of stuff, that’s not arbitrary.
When we have a conversation with someone who’s throwing a football or building a bridge, and we debate about whether it’s faster or slower in terms of it being thrown or the bridge will stand or not, we don’t see that as an arbitrary conversation. We actually see that as a conversation tied into something that’s universal. I mean, that bridge would fall down anywhere, any culture would say that was a slower pass than this dude’s pass who threw it much faster.
The underlying assumption here is that there’s a realm in which humans have done a tremendous amount of work and actually made progress in understanding in relation to a reality that resists misinterpretation. This is my view. I’m a moral realist. This was Kohlberg’s view. He ended up being a moral universalist arguing against the anthropologists who said the anthropological evidence suggests moral relativism. He said, actually, that’s not true. You guys are just too stupid to see the underlying universal thing that is actually occurring.
Jim: Right? Nothing personal.
Zak: And so this is the issue with the moral realist claim—all of the psychological evidence, if you run it right, suggests that this is a reality that resists misinterpretation in the same way physical realities resist misinterpretation, except that the field is not obviously visible physically. The field is interpersonal.
For example, lying to the people who depend upon you and who you depend upon—which is to say lying to your family—is pretty universally not accepted. Now why is that the case? Why would that be true that lying to your family is wrong? It’s not just my opinion around here, and it happens to work for us around here that we build a bridge this way. No. This actually is a bridge that will stand.
If you want to go to the mat and say that whole domain of human learning, both at the individual and the cultural level, is ultimately an arbitrary conversation, but this other sciency stuff, which gives us the Max Planck and all that stuff—do we know that more than we know that lying is wrong? I don’t know because I’m taking a scientist’s opinion about all his measurement instruments. If you’re going to say that conversation is non-arbitrary, which is actually in some cases going to be true in all universes, as the analytical philosophers think about it—that to me seems odd to disqualify this entire realm of human learning as arbitrary. And as an educator, it’s actually performatively a contradiction, meaning you can’t actually teach kids to be morally socialized into a universe of norms that you say is ultimately arbitrary. This is postmodernism’s problem.
Jim: Well, of course, I did not say arbitrary. I said two things. One, it’s constrained by human nature, and there is a human nature somewhere down underneath.
Marc: Oh, shit. Whoa.
Jim: And second, I said it’s constrained by game theory, essentially. Right? So why do you not lie to your family? Because it decoheres your family. Your probability of successfully raising offspring goes down, and our good friend Darwin’s Reaper makes sure that that’s not a strategy that pays off, and that probably gets then reinforced in evolutionary biological terms so that we don’t do that or at least have a tendency not to do that.
Jim: Ah, well, of course, I did not arbitrary. I said two things. One, it’s constrained by human nature, and there is a human nature somewhere down underneath.
Marc: Oh, shit. Whoa.
Jim: Second, I said it’s constrained by game theory, essentially. Right? So why do you not lie to your family? Because it decoheres your family. Your probability of successfully raising offspring goes down, and our good friend Darwin’s Reaper makes sure that that’s not a strategy that pays off, and that probably gets then reinforced in evolutionary biological terms so that we don’t do that or at least have a tendency not to do that.
Marc: Go to the first one, though, but just notice, just in this phenomenological moment, you couldn’t just do it on game theory. You—I’m just citing Jim Rutt. Right? I’m a Jim Rutt citer—said, “Well, actually, there is human nature, somewhere deep down.” Right? And now put that together with what Zak was talking about when actually there is a process of gradual clarification where we begin to understand something of a shared field of value.
Just stay with me just for ten seconds. I’ll just give you a sentence. So there’s the guy who wrote kind of the most popular contemporary populist historian in the mainstream of Silicon Valley, my friend from Israel, Yuval Harari. Right? So Harari will say—Yuval will say—”Any meaning you ascribe to your life is mere delusion.” Right? Then he’ll go on to say—and 50 million people buy the books, and Gates and Obama and Bezos, et cetera, all say this is the book. And he’s writing children’s books, to be clear. He’s writing children’s books to make sure children know that all of our stories of value are purely fiction without any inherent value in them at all.
Now that’s a kind of major dogmatic claim. What he’s right about is that there’s lots of bullshit stories of value that need to be rejected. There’s lots of fictions. We all agree on that. The question though is—and even a guy like Sam Harris, who’s kind of done his against-faith thing, is in the last year or so saying, “Uh-oh, actually,” as he’s talking to Iain McGilchrist trying to have dinner, he’s saying, “Actually, there is a shared deeper truth.” Because he’s actually realizing that you can’t actually cohere society or educate your children, but not just on a game theory level and a sense of your own coherence of yourself.
So I would just put the following proposition on the table. Either Jim Rutt’s description of himself is accurate—meaning he would totally kill for what he actually understands to be ethical value, but it’s completely made up, meaning he’s a batshit crazy motherfucker—or my view of Jim Rutt, which is that actually he has a deep sense of epistemic humility. He refuses to overclaim. He correctly lambasts and rejects, as Voltaire did, the cruelties of the insane premodern religions. And yet he has an embodied sense anthropologically that actually there’s some shit we’re standing for, and you’ve got to draw that line. And that’s an expression of noble Jim Rutt. So I go for noble Jim Rutt. You go for batshit crazy Jim Rutt. Take your choice.
Jim: No, I don’t think necessarily batshit crazy. I said the Jim Rutt that’s willing to kill comes from values that I’ve adopted from my family, from my neighborhood, from people I’ve worked with, and no doubt significantly informed by the fact that I’m basically a killer ape wearing clothes. Right? So this is the human nature aspect.
And this is a funny little business story. I’ve mentored lots of young business people over the years, and when a very 23-year-old person goes to their first fairly high-stakes business meeting, they come back and go, “Jim, I didn’t understand a fucking thing that was going on there. That was the weirdest thing I’ve ever been to in my life.” And I go, “Next time you go to a high-stakes business meeting, just put the following lens on: imagine all the people around the table as apes wearing clothes. It’ll make 100 percent sense.” And they inevitably come back, “Holy fuck, what a powerful lens.”
Right? And so you can’t forget the fact that we are apes and, you know, fairly vicious killer apes at that. And that’s very—and this is everything makes sense only in terms of evolution. We’re, you know, one and a half percent away from an extremely nasty species, the chimpanzee, about the same distance from a somewhat less nasty species called the bonobos. And so it’s not surprising that we have this agitation about ourselves, especially when we add all these new linguistic semantics and syntactic layers, which these guys didn’t have. And we don’t know what the hell to do with it. We’re just making this shit up as we go the best we can together as clans and as families and as groups and as companies. And I think that’s all there is going on.
Zak: Again, it’s about how do we orient as a species to what we’re learning about our origins evolutionarily? This has been the question since Darwin. Is the reading back through evolutionary history the fact that we are violent monkeys, which is obviously part of what needs to be read back through history? What’s also interesting is the long-duration mothering activity of primates, and the evolution of that into the joint attentional situation of the human, and then in the context of that, the evolution of value.
So the question is, yes, we inherited crazy stuff from monkeys, but we also inherited this thing which David Attenborough usually doesn’t focus on because it doesn’t read into the dog-eat-dog narrative, but a whole bunch of what’s called cost signaling. Cost signaling in game theory—and we talked about this with the attentional system, Jim, when we talked about the AI thing—goes back to Kropotkin. Have we misread evolution as a process that would have us only be able to understand ourselves as stupid violent monkeys when in fact you could read evolution as we’re trying to in some ways as also prefiguring the other qualities that are good in humans? Which is useful because otherwise, the human impulse to do good and not to murder seems like something that is not supported by the evidence of nature. Where in fact, there’s a lot of not murdering that goes on in nature. It’s called mothering.
Jim: I mean, even our killer ape, chimpanzees, they have bands. They go to war together. They have coalitions. They have love. They have pain when their baby dies, and they’re not just—and this is again this Pentland error—they’re not isolates. They are heavily constrained by the context of their social systems, and all these things are true at the same time. That’s why biology is so cool. It has all these games being played simultaneously. Yes, there are chimps that are freeloaders. Yes, there are chimps that are sociopaths, just as there are humans of both those, but the majority of chimps are cooperators at least within the game theory of the chimp social operating system. And group selection, I will say, is real. I mean, there are definitely some evolutionary theorists that say it’s not, but I’m on the other side of that one.
Marc: I’m on the Sloan Wilson side as well. Maybe last piece on this—I actually, one of the guys who did a lot of work in group selection was our friend Howard Bloom, who had a lot of early conversations with Sloan Wilson twenty years ago. I remember this anecdote—I’m talking to Howard a bunch of years ago, and Howard says, “Listen, Marc. It’s always fucking in-group and out-group. You can cut the bullshit. It’s always in-group and out-group, and the in-group is always taking care of itself and slaughtering the out-group. That’s just the way it is. Stop talking.”
So I said that’s true. It’s always in-group and out-group, but notice there’s always an in-group, and that’s just as important. Meaning, there’s always a sense that the in-group has coherence and that there actually are evolutionary obligations between the members of the in-group, which would mean that the issue is not the in-group out-group. The issue is a false boundary problem. The false boundary problem is, I’ve drawn my boundary in too narrow a way. So then the evolution of that term we were using earlier, consciousness, would mean I move the boundary. We actually get to a place where there’s no in-group out-group.
But actually, just like there’s always in-group out-group phenomenologically, historically, we know there’s always been an in-group. So that notion of a coherent group that loves support, however we want to tell that story, is a phenomenological scientific story, and it’s an utter mistake to dismiss it by the in-group out-group problem. When you make the materialist “we’re just having fun here” view, we get sadly to insane Skinnerian and Pentlandian conclusions, which actually violate the empirical reality of this contingent self-reflective human that clearly is not subject to social engineering. So we need to create a new model. We need to reject both the fundamentalist bullshit models and also the kind of reductive materialist models and see, is there something new? Can we get out of that old conversation and actually go someplace else? That’s what we tried to do with Bart. That was that conversation.
Zak: Yeah. And I would argue if you think about, again, the very moments in that fictional scene back on the savannah when the Homo sapien kind of emerges, there’s a bunch of other bipedal, cerebriated things with big brains. But the Homo sapiens started to do this specific thing, which is this long-duration joint attentional situation with the youth in particular. This is related to fire and a few other things. And what they’re doing is they’re telling stories eventually. First, functional for use in the hunt, but what you’re also doing is clarifying value, I would argue, because we’re expanding the tribe. Eventually, the tribes get really big, and we do this urbanization thing. And that has to do with Harari’s point—the ability of us to share attention about a particular story and to refine our understanding of why this way, why is this valuable? Why is this way of doing the hunt better than that way of doing the hunt? All of the instantiation of ritual, what Habermas calls the sacred complex, is about clarifying value. More than clarifying the state of the world objectively, we don’t tell some of the hunting stories about where to find them, but a lot of it is: What do you do with the meat when you come back?
Jim: And as we know from anthropology, a lot of it is frozen accidents. You know, the famous story of the woman who does this, that, and the other thing while she makes pancakes, and then her daughter says, “Well, why do you do all that?” “Well, I just used to have to watch me one day when I did that,” and then it got passed on as a family tradition. That’s not normally how I do it.
Zak: Exactly. So there’s that sense of, like, what’s called the ratcheting effect where the value is passed on, the value of use of technology, value of use of ritual. The value is passed on, and then it’s improved. The value is evolved by the next generation.
Jim: Or randomly drift. Or bigger. Or—
Zak: Randomly drift.
Jim: Or get worse or both. All the above.
Zak: The goal of the culture is to evolve it. Like, the goal of the culture isn’t “let’s make our culture progressively worse.” It’s either to maintain it, to preserve it, which is we found something valuable, keep it, which is the default position—Chesterton’s fence or whatever it is. But then the other one is, if we’re going to change it, we want to make it better. So there’s this question of collaboration in the evolution of value. When we speak of universal value, when we speak of first principles, first values, always as evolving over biological and cultural time. And so that notion of love—you know, monkeys love. You said it, Jim. I didn’t say it. I would say they do something else, but they love. And so we love in a different way. And the way modern humans love is different than the way, let’s say, cave people humans loved. And then, of course, humans will love differently in the future than we love now. Even with digital intimacy, it’s completely different. So there’s a very complex evolution of love that has been part of—
Marc: Be able to firmly not get entrenched in any of the modern reentrenchments of the old religion. That’s dangerous and messed up. But we also need to equally avoid the glib dogmatism of—not of science, science is awesome—but of a kind of reductive scientism that is doing sleight of hand moves and is actually being anti-empirical and non-phenomenological. There’s something new that has to emerge, and that’s both an existential need in terms of the metacrisis. What I’ve been talking to Daniel about for the last decade is we’re just not—when we talk about superstructure, we say infrastructure is not gonna get us there, and social structure won’t get us there as important as they are. We need actually a new story of value, which is not on the menu now. We literally need to cook new food, which is a new emergence, which is precisely what we mean by cultural evolution in that best sense. And that’s the order of the day, and that’s crazy exciting, actually.
Zak: I mean, I wouldn’t see us as critiquing science. I would see us as critiquing nihilism, and it’s just that those two have been cozy since that’s emerged.
Jim: Well, I do also think you guys are rightly critiquing what I call naive Newtonism. Which most of us nerds fell into when we were 13 or 14, and the smarter ones of us got out of it by the time we were 17 and 18 and started understanding things like quantum mechanics and relativity, and then later complexity and systems dynamics, et cetera. But an awful lot of people—I don’t know if they’re just bad scientists or what—they could even have scientific careers and remain naive Newtonists. Though not very many physicists do that, like zero. Some social scientists who just have a kind of weak understanding of the physical sciences will sometimes fall into that category. And of course, the postmodernists and the nihilists, who none of them know any science, in my opinion—at least certainly not biological science and probably not physics either—fall into this idea that everything is pointless. I was, you know, no. It’s not pointless. But my point would be we make the value. We create the value. And whether it evolves from the fabric of the love of the proton and the electron, I very much doubt, but it’s not pointless.
Marc: Right. But that’s huge—that’s already way beyond the dogmas on either side. And when you say we create the value, it’s not just that we live in a universe which is filled with value, that value is the primordial ground. We don’t just live in that universe. That universe lives in us. So in other words, obviously, the notion that we live in evolution is absurd scientifically. It all lives in us. Every muon, proton, lepton, hadron, the whole thing, molecular, mackerel and molecular.
Let me give you one example. Let’s take biology, which is clearly a place that we’ve touched on. If you read Kaufman—and I’m sure you guys have probably had him on the show many times. I actually don’t know him, but I’ve read him. He’s great.
Jim: Yeah. Stuart’s a good friend. He’s been on the show many times.
Marc: That makes sense. So if you read him, he’s got one passage I’m remembering right now, page 164, I think it is, where he describes the intensification of the autocatalytic cycles, which move the macromolecular world into the cellular world. And he talks about it in a bunch of passages.
In some sense, we could—if I can just throw a crazy big thought on the table—we could actually posit what Zak and I call an intimacy equation. Now I know you’re going to say, “Intimacy, stop! Stop! Stop!” But think about intimacy as continuity and discontinuity. Not as you and intimacy, but intimacy. Let’s actually create a kind of interior science equation. And by equation, obviously, I mean equation in a literary sense, not in a formalistic sense.
If we say that evolution is not just simplicity to complexity, which is an exterior description, but evolution is the progressive deepening of intimacies. Then we would define intimacy as: intimacy equals shared identity in the context of otherness. Zak and I, and then Schmachtenberger kind of popped in, and we formulated this equation about a decade ago. So intimacy equals shared identity in the context of otherness times mutuality of recognition times mutuality of feeling times mutuality of value times mutuality of purpose.
That’s a kind of equation. Now, you look at that equation and given continuity and discontinuity—obviously, radical continuity and discontinuity, just like physics and biology are discontinuous, but they’re also continuous. That intimacy equation applies all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. This movement towards intimacy, meaning towards coherence of shared identity, new wholeness in the context of otherness, where there’s a play between autonomy and communion.
In some sense, there’s mutuality of recognition between these subatomic particles. They obviously feel each other. They have shared mathematical values, and they’re now an atom, which has a new mutuality of purpose. That applies at the subatomic level. But then if you go to Internal Family Systems theory—Dick Schwartz’s work that’s popular today—internal family systems is about how you’ve got all these sub-personalities that aren’t talking to each other. One is optimizing while the other is being sub-optimized. You need to have shared identity between all your parts, shared identity in the context of otherness between your controller, your protector, your seeking child, etc. The parts need to recognize each other, feel each other, have shared value, and have shared purpose.
Or if you look at divisions in a company—Peter Senge opens his book “Presence” with this kind of story of divisions in the company that actually can’t create coherence and intimacy. Whether it’s me and my partner, whether it’s a family, whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a league of nations, whether it’s subatomic particles, whether it’s internal family systems—there’s actually an intimacy equation of continuity and discontinuity that is a value of cosmos that creates the play between the whole story.
What we’re looking for is something which is nondogmatic on any side, which is phenomenologically descriptive. It’s anthropologically accessible. What we’ve tried to do with all the first principle and first value equations is say that uniqueness, intimacy, eros value, transformation—these are structures of cosmos, not in a fundamentalist way, but in a fabric way. That’s a field of value that’s constantly evolving, and actually science assumes them all the time. There’s no reason not to explicate them because there’s nothing more beautiful than science, but not in a way in which science becomes the dispeller of the mystery. None of this makes sense unless we shut up and bow before the mystery because there’s a mystery. We get that. And then Harari concludes that only third person is real, and human rights are complete nonsense.
Jim: Quick question. Actually, you’ve used it several times. Want to make sure we understand it more sharply. When you’re talking about continuity and discontinuity, unpack that a little bit.
Jim: Quick question. Actually, you’ve used it several times. Want to make sure we understand it more sharply. When you’re talking about continuity and discontinuity, unpack that a little bit.
Zak: Yeah. So this is what we’ve kind of been circling around. If we say something like intimacy, the connotation you have in your mind is probably a romantic relationship or something like that, or a best friend relationship. Like, phenomenologically, it is that. But you can be intimate with your dog, and you can see other dogs be intimate with other dogs. So we’re willing to apply intimacy to other mammals. Then there’s this question of at what point do we start using a different word when we’re looking down the chain of evolution towards less complex organisms. At what point do we say that’s no longer intimacy? That’s a physical process which should not be described in any way that would allow us to confuse it for a process that involves interiority. That’s the question. We’re saying continuity is we want to push it all the way down as far as we can, and discontinuity is “no, you can’t push it down beyond this level.”
Jim: Yeah. Let’s stop here, because another one I actually had in my notes when I talked about the show, an early definition is—and I think I understand what you’re saying—but let’s make it explicit, the distinction between interiority and exteriority.
Zak: Yep. Totally. This would be also thought of in terms of first-person and second-person and third-person perspectives. I can take you, Jim, and this is Harari’s example, and I can cut you open, and I can point to your brain and say, “Don’t see Jim. Where’s Jim?” Or I can point to your brain and say, “Where’s the guy who’s choosing, or where’s the thing that has dignity and should be protected by human rights?” There’s nothing there. I cut it open. He’s not there. That’s exteriority. Jim’s exteriority, which we can look at.
Jim: Let me squash Harari once and for all. I was an early fan of his actually because he was just so much smarter than your usual popular book writer. But then after I read a couple of his books, I said, “Wait a minute. This guy is making the same error.” And cutting the brain open is just the classic error. The Rutt metaphysics is what I call naturalism, which is essentially materialism plus deeming emergence and dynamics as real as the material. So for instance, the dance that’s going on in my brain is every bit as real as the neurons. You cut my brain open, the dance stops. You have missed the whole point. And so, I would say that these naive Newtonians—this is even beyond naive Newtonian. This is essentially assuming statics is the only thing that matters. The actual atoms where they sit at a given point in time is the only thing that matters. Or, you know, the stupidest thing ever said by a smart person, Laplace, who said, “Give me the positions of all atoms in the universe and their vectors, and I can predict all of history backward and forward.” You can’t for a bunch of reasons.
Zak: That’s a sheerly exterior perspective. And then interiors, we talk about phenomenologically, it shows up as your own self-reflection, but also second person, I assume, Jim, that you are conscious and have many interior states.
Jim: In my world, I would call that phenomenology. If there’s a phenomenal sense of the Nagel sense, there is something to be that. And most consciousness science people would say, there is a line beyond which it’s not reasonable to say something has phenomenal experience. A lot of arguing about where that line is. As you know, people used to say, only humans. And I think very recently, almost every reputable consciousness science person signed on to a letter a few years ago that said, no. Lots of animals.
Zak: Historically, it was actually everything that’s conscious. And then slowly, we degraded the universe to the idea that somehow only we are and maybe we’re not. And then it starts to move in this other direction where now we’re trying to reclaim more and more of the universe as having value consciousness interiority, but it’s a counter revolution. The revolution was the group that said there’s no interiority anywhere—that’s the historically novel and statistically less popular view overall in terms of humans that have existed. The overall dominant view has been it’s everywhere, and we are an instantiation of something that’s everywhere. So it’s important to know.
Jim: Yeah. It was a key question. Right? Very key question.
Marc: What you’re calling phenomenology and naturalism is very close to what we’re calling the field of value. They’re not unrelated because you’re not taking a kind of reductive materialist stance. You’re actually taking phenomenology seriously.
Jim: And to tie the two pieces together, I would say that the phenomenology is an emergent result of the dynamics. Right? So I take dynamics seriously. Dynamics, patterns are as real as atoms and electrons in our universe.
Jim: Yeah. It was a key question. Right? Very key question.
Marc: What you’re calling phenomenology and naturalism is very close to what we’re calling the field of value. They’re not unrelated because you’re not taking a kind of reductive materialist stance. You’re actually taking phenomenology seriously.
Jim: And to tie the two pieces together, I would say that the phenomenology is an emergent result of the dynamics. Right? So I take dynamics seriously. Dynamics and patterns are as real as atoms and electrons in our universe.
Marc: Now it’s getting clear. This is great. So what you’re calling dynamics and patterns is what we’re calling first principles and first values. Very, very close. So actually, it turns out, in that game—Brie Principle Omega, right, that you entered—it works. Because only now, around 2022, we got to this dynamic patterns thing. That is very, very close. And now what we’re doing is we’re doing a little bit of an in-your-face thing intentionally—we’re not using a word like dynamics and patterns. We specifically chose the word value, but not to do values, but to liberate value from the kind of hijacking grip of fundamentalism or a kind of reductive materialism that says pointless and there are no dynamics and patterns. No. There are orb patterns. There are first principles and first values. And when you go back to morphogenesis—and this is your field, I shouldn’t even quote it, but I was stupid enough to try and read it—Turing’s trying to figure out how complexity, coherent complexity emerges. And if I could say it like an idiot, way out of my field, but there’s simple first rules. Right? And they iterate again and again and again. So there’s first principles and first values, there’s dynamics and patterns that are phenomenologically real. So all of a sudden, these two disparate positions were both rejecting the kind of dogmatic stances that live at the edges that actually dominate the mainstream of both religion and pointless reductive materialism. We’re both saying there’s a third possibility that actually is empirically far more accurate. I mean, that’s interesting, I think.
Zak: I would add also that from our perspective, one of the things we’re doing is clarifying that what’s sometimes called selection theory at the high end of evolutionary theory is a value theory. So if there are designs and patterns that have existed in the universe for a very long time, they have been selected for. Right? And insofar as they have been selected for, they have been deemed to be of value by the universe itself. I’m not saying that universe, like, chose—some white-haired god, like, this is good, this is bad—but I am saying that the continuity of certain things, the first principles and first values, there’s a reason that integrity, both in its physical sense and then up and into the social and interpersonal dynamical sense, that there’s a continuity here that it’s always been selected for.
Jim: And now this is where I can push back maybe a little hard, which is that I think we both understand the concept of emergence, I think. Right? That the universe started relatively simply and has added complexity, particularly in the presence of nonequilibrium systems, as Prigogine and the dissipative systems as perhaps the fuel that has grown complexity as the universe has aged. As far as we know, the human brain is probably the most complex thing in the universe. It’s estimated by actual quantitative complexity science people that the complexity of a single human brain is greater than all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, or at least on the same order of. The other interesting thing, I just went back and confirmed this this morning, is the energy dissipation of a human brain per pound is greater than the sun. Ain’t that interesting? Right? So we’ve ratcheted a very, very, very long way.
However, the other thing we know about emergence is that if you take it seriously, which I do, is that in the layer beyond an emergence, a new set of rules apply. I try to avoid laws because they’re not as precise as say the laws of physics or the strong force or the weak force. But we can talk about things like group selection. You can’t really talk about group selection of a bucket full of atoms. That just doesn’t really apply. But when you get creatures that have social behavior—and most animals, by the way, do not have social behavior. Right? Only a relatively small number have any significant amount of social behavior. Once you’ve reached the point of social behavior, then something like group selection would seem to be a logical result of that. And then of course, whether it is or isn’t is an empirical question.
You know, then things like attraction in the romantic sense—let’s go ahead and make it more explicit, the sexual sense. Right? Sex didn’t evolve instantly. Sex came along somewhere along the line. And once we had sex, suddenly sexual attraction made sense. There was an emergence of this dynamic of x and y that come together. And before that, the idea of sexual attraction literally made no sense because there was no sex. And so that’s why I think you have to be very careful about pushing things down below the emergent level where they make any sense.
Marc: Yeah, but this is—everything you said is absolutely right and limited, which I think you’ll agree with in one second. If not, you can shoot me, but don’t kill me. But in other words, if you take, let’s say, sex. So there’s twelve billion years of fucking eros before there’s any sex. In other words, you’ve got a cosmos driven by eros value or Whitehead’s prehensive unification or whatever you want to call it. But you’ve got this movement that does move us from quarks all the way till we get to sexual differentiation. But sex doesn’t just emerge. It’s a unique disclosure of a progressive deepening of intimacies. And then we get to a certain point where we need this new emergent in order to generate new—you know, Whitehead’s creative advance of novelty. We need this new emergent. We’ve hit the wall, and now reality discloses sex. But sex isn’t born in a vacuum. It’s an expression of this larger process that’s at play.
Jim: So I would say the universe doesn’t call it forth. And then this is, I think, hugely important, at least my perspective, is that the universe has a tendency towards more complexity when it’s in out of equilibrium situations. For instance, the rate of emergence in interstellar space is very, very slow, close to zero. The growth of emergences on Earth in this perfect sweet spot that we are lucky enough to be in is pretty amazingly fast right now. And as these things happen, they happen or they don’t happen, and they aren’t called into being by anything. The evolution, particularly in biology, and whether we even want to apply evolution to the prebiotic is another question. Sometimes I use the word unfolding there. It’s unfolding. It’s like evolution, and we don’t know exactly how it’s going to unfold, but it doesn’t have copied information and then offspring that compete in some dynamic. So it’s a different dynamic before life. But even when we get into life, these things aren’t called forth. They happen, and then either they are useful or they’re not by the iron sword of evolution plus luck. You know, in the most modern thinkers of evolutionary theory, drift is always a huge thing. Stuff just happens, particularly when there’s small numbers involved. This bunch would have been really fit, but they were really unlucky. A drought came and they all fucking starved. Oh well. That’s just the way evolution is. And so, I don’t tend to think of a telos beyond a weak vector towards more complexity when the situations are correct. And we have to be careful not to over-teleologize the universe.
Zak: This is where it becomes interesting to think about rather than a telos, something like a grammar. So this comes back to the point about the relationship between design and contingency in a conversation. So in the conversation, anything can happen, but if we start both speaking without grammar, the conversation will end really quickly. Charles Peirce talked about the emergence of cosmic habits, and the first habits that get laid down are basically causal. Now his work in probability theory and the laws of errors and metrics made him realize early—before all the crazy physics stuff—that at the lowest level there was actually indeterminacy. But then he said, no. The habits start to compound, and you get exactly what you’re calling these kind of probability waves of habits that start to get locked into place. And what’s interesting is the habits form along these vectors of what we would be calling first principles and first values, and it’s the iron sword of evolution as you called it, which is an interesting metaphor to bring in to describe the process that’s essential to the whole thing, which is why is something there and not there, which I’ve referred before to as value. Meaning, oh, the habit emerges, is selected for, or not selected for. So there’s this compounding choice towards these things. So the survival of patterns is as interesting as their emergence. And the iron sword of evolution is a sign from the universe that’s not—sometimes it’s luck. But on the broad arch of things, I don’t think you can say that the overall selection process was luck. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be the sword. It’s not arbitrary.
Jim: It’s a mix of contingency and necessity, right?
Zak: That’s exactly.
Jim: The poor dinosaurs didn’t do anything to deserve the asteroid, but it happened.
Zak: So it’s important to get—we’re speaking of this set of interdigitated equations that form a grammar of value, which is trying to be similar to the way you’d have a set of physical forces and other things where it’s like, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We just know that value is very real and value is in play. Like, the laws of physics are very real and the laws of biological selection are very real and those are in play. We don’t exactly know how it’s going to turn out. That would be absurd. But the idea that there’s a place where we can have non-arbitrary conversations about the structures and processes and universals. But then there’s this other place, which is ethics, morality, value, where now we’re in an ultimately arbitrary conversation in the way that we aren’t in these other domains. So if you’re willing to say, no. Physics and all that stuff is as arbitrary and, like, we create mathematics, we do, but mathematics is also there before us.
Jim: The plot thickens with this argument on mathematics. Is math found, or is it built?
Zak: Exactly. I’m saying both. We’re saying both.
Jim: And I would say both also.
Zak: Exactly. So both.
Marc: Irreductive materialists sneaking Platonism around the back of your mouth.
Jim: The plot flattens this argument on mathematics, right? Is math found, or is it built?
Zak: Exactly. I’m saying both. We’re saying both.
Jim: And I would say both also.
Zak: Exactly. So both.
Marc: Irreductive materialists, you know, sneaking Platonism around the back of your mouth.
Zak: Exactly. So we’re saying with value, it’s similar in that it is, of course, our creation, and yet there is something there that is the malleable material from which we can create. Right? So the field of value is more like a field metaphor. It’s not a specific thing. It’s collapsible in terms of the evolution of our choice-making and the evolution of the materials around us. And so the grammar allows for the evolution of value in a very open-ended way, actually infinite combinations of all of these diverse values which have been selected for by the universe. They’re present in our phenomenological experience, not because I chose them actually. That’s what’s so weird—you say we create them, but I actually didn’t create them. Like breathing is super important to me, not because Zak decided breathing is super important to me. Right? And the love that I feel spontaneously—my nervous system loves, not because I decided, “Hey, love nervous system, it’s what I value.” It just did that right away with mom instantly because it’s built to do that. So value precedes us. We step into a world already valued.
Jim: There’s a trajectory. And wherever we are, we are the inheritor of the trajectory that came before us.
Marc: And that trajectory comes from inherent dynamics and patterns, to borrow your phrase, which we would call a universal and evolving grammar of value. And here, it’s maybe worth it just to see where did the value thing get messed up. The value thing got messed up in the claim of eternal value. Right? The claim that basically value is eternal and unchanging was obviously wrong, and it was held across the board. And the assumption was that evolution’s now emerged. Right? The eternal value people denied evolution not because they were making a scientific argument, but because they wanted to protect value. And the assumption was that eternal value and evolving value contradict each other, and that assumption was wrong.
Jim: I like this. This is good. This is good. So, you know, most tribes in history had a Yahweh type figure, right, who just arbitrarily created the universe the way it is, and there’s consequences if you violate the rules he laid down, and the assumption of any given tribe at any given time is they’re static. But you can even if you just read the Old Testament—you’re a rabbi. You know that the presentation of Yahweh changes radically from—
Marc: I got the books behind me to prove it.
Jim: Even, you know, I actually one time read Genesis in side-by-side English and Hebrew. I barely know English, I don’t know Hebrew at all, but it was fun to discover there’s two gods in there. Right? And so even within what we think of as a canon, these ideas are evolving. I like this. I mean, maybe we actually agree after all. Let me ask the question I wanted to ask before to see, to let’s try to define value in a way that we both can agree with. So let’s think what constitutes value in pre-life but late organic chemistry?
Marc: So let’s get there for sure. And again, my last insincere apology, but I just want to double click for one more split second because it’s so important. This idea of eternal and evolving value changes the game. Right? Because basically, the religionists argued for eternal value, and the Pentlandians argued for an arbitrary evolving value, which they thought the word evolving meant that value is not real. That was their assumption.
Jim: They forget the trajectory component.
Marc: They forgot the trajectory. So for example, when Skinner reads C.S. Lewis in his book, The Abolition of Man, right? And C.S. Lewis says, “We’re gonna abolish humanity because you’ve rejected the Tao,” which for him is value. Skinner says, “You’re an idiot. You don’t know science. Right? Value is not eternal. You assume value is eternal. You just totally don’t understand what a human being is. Have a nice day.” And they’re both on the wrong side. Each one’s making a wrong claim. The second you actually acknowledge that the nature of reality is that opposites are joined at the hip—that’s the very structural nature of reality. Right? Reality is always opposites joined at the hip. There’s always attraction and repulsion. So eternal and evolving value just means, let’s say intimacy or intimate coherence means something, and then that evolves, right, over long periods of time, but not in a way where the meaning becomes absurd. There’s continuity and discontinuity. There’s dynamics and patterns. Once we get this far, we’ve thrown out the superficial religious arguments. We’ve thrown out the superficial pointless arguments. And now we have a ground to respond to Skinner and Pentland. Right? And now we have some place to stand on. So that’s exciting. So now we have to define value.
Jim: I picked the spot intentionally. Right? Advanced organic chemistry sometime before life actually started. What is the value in the world of organic chemistry?
Zak: It’s a great question. So basically, whatever gets fundamentally selected for there is what shows the value that’s implicit. Right? So there are many, many, many possible chemical reactions. So there’s many possible, like—
Jim: In Stuart’s words, you know, the autocatalytic sets, there could be lots of autocatalytic sets.
Jim: I picked the spot intentionally, right? Advanced organic chemistry sometime before life actually started. What is the value in the world of organic chemistry?
Zak: It’s a great question. So basically, whatever gets fundamentally selected for there is what shows the value that’s implicit. Right? So there are many, many possible chemical reactions. There’s many possible—
Jim: In Stuart’s words, you know, the autocatalytic sets, there could be lots of autocatalytic sets.
Zak: So I’m saying there’s this huge space of possibility here logically. But actually, cosmically, historically, you’re only getting a subset of all these possible ones. So there’s something about the, again, the trajectory.
Jim: The potentiality? Is that a word that makes sense to you?
Zak: Potentiality is a perfect word, and the collapsing of the potential. And then the route towards life, what I would argue, is what you start seeing. You start seeing, oh, this thing is moving. Although it’s drifting, the overall arc of it is towards the emergence of this life thing. That’s what’s so odd. That’s why Kaufman describes it as its teleology. It’s like, well, it’s not like the things of the future reaching back, making it happen. It’s not that. It’s that there’s the first rules that get iterated, and the rules are pushing us in this direction. They’re revealing an implicit value, which is the value of life and the reason why life is value because life more explicitly pursues value. So there’s this weird circular thing.
Jim: Does it much faster?
Zak: Does it much faster.
Jim: Let’s make another little distinction here. I would say that from the perspective of growing complexity, especially looking back, we can say that this organic chemistry was doing lots of searching, and one of the places that it searched led to life. We know that for a fact. Right? One of the things we could actually say, we don’t know how, but we know there was an abiogenesis event at some point. What we do know is we’re pretty sure that it could have been different. Right? And there probably were other routes, and the first one that had sufficient purchase probably would have eaten all the other ones. At the most simple example that it could have been different, as you may well know, our life consists of right-handed sugar and left-handed DNA nucleic acids, and they work together like this. The reverse would also work just as well. And the particular one—and this is just a very simple distinction—there was some balance that at some point, the left-right this way rather than left-right that way took off, and there is absolutely zero of the obvious of the opposite chirality as they call it in organic chemistry. And so that shows there’s at least two ways, and I’m quite sure, and I think Stuart would agree with this, there was a large number of different routes that could have led to abiogenesis, but not an infinite number. It’s constrained that if you’re going to have life on the other side, you got to get through a set of reactions that have the following attributes, but their attributes aren’t tightly defined to be exactly—
Marc: That’s exactly what we mean by a field of value and a grammar of value. And if we double down on this grammar of value or field of value with this kind of constrained vector of emergent possibility, put it together with what Zak said, let’s see if we can get it down to the most basic, but second simplicity terms. So you would say desire discloses value. But desire as an elemental structure of cosmos. Desire as that which emerges from the play of the four forces—attraction, repulsion, allurement, autonomy—which are vectors of desire.
So desire at the foundational levels of cosmos is not like, “Do I desire to buy a red car or a blue car?” It’s foundational. It’s not choice in the later sense. It’s a foundational desire, just like attention is not just singular—it’s this attention field. So there’s this field of desire, and that field of desire discloses value by its very nature. And it works that way all the way up, although there’s continuity and discontinuity.
Need and desire at the foundational levels of cosmos and the aspirational levels, the highest levels, are identical. In between, they diverge. But need and desire foundationally disclose value. They disclose a rightness of possibility—not as a moral term, but as a quality of rightness. There’s a new quality possibility that has emerged which has value. An atom has value. All of this rightness actually moves towards life. There’s this movement towards life, which is innate and inherent and structural to cosmos.
Let’s bracket heat death for a second, because that’s a different conversation. But for now, we could say that the foundational structure of what Zak’s calling selection only means desire. There’s an inherent desire in reality, and in Whitehead’s appetition, the clarified appetite at the inherent structure of reality discloses value. That’s just true. It’s so simple, so axiomatic, and so obvious, and it doesn’t contradict a word in science anywhere.
Now if you go up to the human level—let’s say the human being has a desire to survive. I’ve read so many papers in evolutionary psychology where they want to say that value is real. Take Pinker: mating takes place not just for classical natural selection, it’s also sexual selection. Sexual selection is also for music and humor, how we pick our mates.
Jim: And then Pinker will say something like, “but that’s just survival.” Well, no. Survival is just a word you’re using. Survival means life. The peacock’s tail is a classic example where God knows how that got started, but it did. It got locked in, and sexual selection happens very rapidly compared to other forms of selection. So really huge peacock tails are around for a while, but I’ll be willing to bet big money a million years from now there won’t be peacock tails because it’s such an obviously stupid thing to do. And I will also predict that those influencer gals on Instagram won’t have their lips turned inside out. Disgusting trend, but for some reason, they’re in an arms race about how pouty they can make their lips. And it actually works in the competitive dynamic of the moment.
Zak: This is valueception, Jim. This is valueception.
Jim: I guess my final thought on this is where I probably disagree with you guys—and I’m glad we know the disagreement is specific—is that you guys seem to assume more inheritance of categories like value across the emergent layers. When I think of attraction in the animal sense, it is some negotiation to choose to do something or not do something. It’s the catalyst to begin the investigation whether we should do something or not. If you want to be simple minded, it’s for the guy to ask the girl to dance or vice versa. That’s the attraction, which then could lead to something else. But because that is denominated in this case by sex, which evolved four hundred million years ago or something, it is part of the emergent layer of sex. And to call the attraction between electron and a proton attraction, meaning analogous with the guy asking the girl to dance, strikes me as not honoring—
Marc: Not analogous. Continuity and discontinuity, and replace the word attraction with allurement. There’s nothing in reality that is not governed by allurement, so there’s a coherence. So radical continuity, radical discontinuity.
Jim: Yeah. And it’s clear that if you want to get the category that thin, there are things that cause things to move towards each other. And the category of things that move towards each other could include the electron and the proton and the guy and the girl at the disco.
Zak: Yes.
Marc: Not analogous. Continuity and discontinuity, and replace the word attraction with allurement. There’s nothing in reality that does not govern by allurement, so there’s a coherence. So radical continuity, radical discontinuity.
Jim: Yeah. And it’s clear that if you want to get the category that thin, there are things that cause things to move towards each other. The category of things that move towards each other could include the proton and electron, and the guy and girl at the disco.
Zak: Yes.
Jim: This was fun. Okay, guys. I don’t know what the audience will make of it, but what the hell? We’re just making a podcast here. We ain’t building a piano. Thank you, guys. This has been a lot of fun, and I will get Jess to schedule something to actually talk about your book. Fortunately, since I did all the notes, I had eighteen pages of notes here ready to go on the book.
Zak: Oh, we’ll have to talk about it then. Yes.
Jim: We can get that scheduled any time since I went and did all the work. Alright, guys. This has been a hell of a lot of fun. Bye bye.