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Jim: Today’s guest is Bonnitta Roy. Bonnitta is a deep interdisciplinary thinker who blends rigorous academic philosophy with practical frameworks designed to help people and organizations navigate complexity, build emotional awareness, and engage with the world more holistically. She’s probably best known these days for her Pop-Up School, which is an innovative online learning program and community focused on post-conventional thinking. She’s also launched the Divinity School, a leadership program designed by Bonnitta to forge transformational leaders who can see deeper into reality, make holistic decisions, and align systems with natural intelligence. The Divinity School will be having an event in Cambridge in May. Check out the episode page for links to more information. Welcome back, Bonnitta.
Bonnitta: Welcome, Jim, to my house.
Jim: Thanks for having me. Very much appreciate the opportunity. Bonnitta was one of our very first guests back on episode 17, back in, I guess, must have been 2019. We had a very interesting session called “Process Thinking and Complexity.” I think she was on once again with Evie Ionova, where we talked about collective intimacy. That was a really good conversation.
Bonnitta: I think you had picked up something I wrote on Twitter. I think Evie kind of reposted it, and then you got the two of us together. That was really good. Anyway, let’s hop into this worldview podcast.
Jim: This is another in my series of worldview podcasts where I talk to leading thinkers and doers. And instead of focusing mostly on what they’re actually doing and building, I try to get behind that a little bit into what is their worldview. What is the world that they see? What is the philosophical basis for what they do? Where does meaning come from? And all those kinds of interesting things. So I’m going to start where I always do in these worldview podcasts. You wake up this morning — let’s assume from a deep sleep to make it simple. Who is this Bonnitta Roy that wakes up, and what is that thing?
Bonnitta: Oh, wow. So if I watch — if I watch as I wake up, which is different than all of a sudden waking up and the dogs and the coffee, etcetera — I notice myself composing itself back together. And I’m just going to use ordinary language, so people have to give me a break because there’s a lot more complexity in these steps. But I notice, for example, that I have a sense of a body, a sense of weight, a sense of gravity, let’s say. In this time of year, it’s always the bird songs. We have a lot of birds here. And I think that sometimes when I die, I’m going to be laying here listening to the birds wake up. So I want to die in the morning. And so then the birds give me a sense of world. I have to admit, I think I have a sense of gravity first, and then a sense of world, and then the sense of a self or an “I am” or “who is.” It coalesces into a being called Bonnie.
Usually, it doesn’t have the word Bonnie in it. I’ve been practicing appreciation, so I always like to appreciate that the bed feels nice, that the birds are singing, that the dogs are anxious and they’re around. So every morning I feel this kind of composition, like almost like an orchestra that starts just with the flutes or something and builds into this kind of symphony. I have to admit, for me — I talked to Bob Kegan about this — I don’t have a very strong third-person perspective of myself. So when people ask me to give them a bio, it’s very difficult for me to stand outside myself and see myself as a public person. I’m not sure if this was true my whole life, but I did remember when I started to notice that.
So I start to feel the world being composed. We love our house. We love the ranch. We love the horses. We work with birds, bees, flowers, and trees here, and we say everything else comes from that. That’s how I wake up in the morning. I feel nested. Or lately, because I’ve been spending a lot of time taking care of my mom, I kind of missed the early spring. And lately, I walk out and the gardens are popping up. And I’m like, gee, how did all of that happen?
So who is Bonnitta Roy? I really experience myself as a stream of participation. I also experience a two-way street everywhere. Like, if you go down to the barn, the pigeons are around. We don’t have a lot of them, and they have babies there. And then pretty soon you find, oh, you’re making sure they have water. You’re making sure that you throw out a little of the grain for the pigeons. And then you realize you’re being trained by the pigeons, and you’re being trained by the horses. And when you go out to the garden, you’re like, oh, I’ve got to remember that. And you realize that you’re being trained by your garden.
A couple years ago, we noticed that we had these rusty blackbirds. And I’m like, where did they all come from? And I realized I had a lot of squash that year and that they have a relationship. And then I learned that the squash — these big Hubbard squash — they only get pollinated by a certain bee called the squash bee. So this is how I experience life. It’s obvious why I’m trying to find some kind of sensibility in process philosophy, because there’s always this embeddedness. And then maybe, like today, I made sure that I remembered, what am I doing tomorrow? Okay. It’s Jim Rutt. Another part of me would have this to-do list. I have to go to the bank, or a little errand. I don’t use electronic calendars because I don’t want them messing with my sense of time.
That’s the best I know. If I ask myself, do people think I’m cranky? Some people tell me they’re afraid of me. Some people think I’m cranky, and some people think I’m an airhead or a galaxy brain. All this stuff doesn’t make sense to me. If I try to think of myself from the outside in, it doesn’t compute for me.
Jim: Yeah. It sounds like the word you use that fits best is “embedded.”
Bonnitta: Yeah. That’s really good.
Jim: I’m fortunate enough to also live way, way out in the country. Our nearest neighbor’s a mile away, and my wife is a really accomplished gardener. So we have — in fact, the lilacs have just come into flower. And we’re sitting in the living room yesterday and that smell of the lilacs and the spice bush both coming through as we were eating our dinner. It was like, woah. This is just amazing.
Bonnitta: It really is. Smelling the environment is very — you know, smell and touch, they’re the contact senses. They’re the bridging senses. Whereas with perception, you always think the world’s out there somewhere. If you can live like that, I think you’re very fortunate. I think that I would say that’s more real. That’s what your first question is — what is real? And I would say this sense of bidirectional participation. In my work, I call it covariant motions. So I’m moving in a certain direction. The plant is moving in a certain direction. The instruments I use are covarying with each other. The seasons covary with certain insects and bee activity. The dogs are playing over there — hopefully you can’t hear them — they’re covarying as they wrestle.
So for me, it’s not like I’ve tried to really make contact with process philosophy. I really like this notion of covariant motions. Everything is trying to negotiate covariant motions with everything else. And if you can, then you get a schema or a pattern or something that exists. So embeddedness is what we can say — the pattern of embeddedness — but the process term would be: everything’s covariant with everything else. Everything’s trying to negotiate some kind of successful motion schema that works, I think, at all scales.
Jim: And of course, most of the time, that’s in a complex domain, which is way beyond computational rationalism. We have to deal with it in different ways.
Bonnitta: So this is an interesting question. I talk about — especially what we’re doing at the Divinity School — I talk about how, like, this bench scientist is sitting down and trying to create hypotheses and design experimental situations, and then they get data. But then they have to interpret the data. So as soon as they go to interpret the data, they’re no longer bench scientists. They’re some kind of metatheoretical thinker or theorist or something. And I find it fascinating that in quantum mechanics and biology, there are interpretations that are still unsettled after hundreds of years.
So this is a good question — you’re asking about this kind of reality. How can science approach it? And so I’m interested in what we’re working on: what is a science of interpretive science. Michael Levin, for example, is a pioneer in this because he’s like, well, traditionally, when you try to hunker down in explanations in biology, you get to physics. So we use the language of physics. But he’s like, why shouldn’t we use the language of behavior? He’s very transparent that the interpretive lens that you take on is a tool. It’s not the be-all and end-all.
So we’re looking at what are the standards of interpretive science. You could either under-narrate the story. You can read all these chemistry books about human embryogenesis, but you don’t really understand what is happening. You just have all these terms, all these chemicals — the detail is too much. The story is under-narrated. But then there’s over-narration. Like, this is the New Age problem of saying, oh, you know, what the bleep do we know? You can walk through walls. So that’s over-narrated. So what can we investigate at this time in history when you’re exactly right — we’re up against scientific questions that are not computationally simple, let’s say. That’s another thing we’re kind of working on.
Jim: Yeah. I often talk about the fact that especially late-stage game A has really gone very far to what’s colloquially called left-brain — analytical, linguistic, etcetera. And we have failed to maintain our skill set in the so-called right brain. You can look at McGilchrist. I’ve done several podcasts with him. They’ve been very good on that distinction. He does not do the dime-store version of left brain and right brain. And I think of the right-brain part as where rationality doesn’t currently have traction. Like, how do you relate to the woods? I live next to really big woods, and I go in to go for a walk in the woods. I don’t sit there and rationally calculate, oh, I get this stimulus from that tree, and then the cool air, and I saw this little skink run by. It’s much more holistic — to use the word you do. I just think of it as complex rather than complicated.
Bonnitta: Yeah. And you’re absolutely right. Because early on when people started talking about complexity, they just saw these network diagrams where the relations — where the arrows were curved. There’s a sense that we can still lay it out, and at least theoretically, if you have a large enough compute power, you could lay out all the relations. But I would disagree with this because the relations are — in process terms — until the relations establish themselves, then they fix the causes. So you have this open future with all these possibilities. And then the ant stumbles in this direction, not that direction. Both of them were possibilities. You could say it’s stochastic if you want. And then you can say why the ant went in that direction — you can retrofit a causal explanation.
So the question is — and I think this is an important question — what we’re saying is that there is something weird about humans approaching reality and assessing the future through predictive compute. And this is exactly what we’re doing. We’re putting all our eggs in the predictive compute basket, and a case could be made that the approach is entirely wrong, entirely delusional.
Jim: The tool I like to use to summarize this — and I know Michael Levin strongly disapproves of this — is emergence. I’ve lately been coming to the realization that the thing that makes emergence so difficult to get one’s head around is that there’s also a tree of causality since the big bang. You can add stochasticity maybe, but quantum mechanics is still not clear whether the world is stochastic or not, despite what some people think. It’s still an unsettled open item, but it doesn’t really matter as it turns out. You can still have emergence in a deterministic universe. And so the tree of causality and the tree of emergence have to basically be co-resident with each other. Emergence doesn’t require violating causality, but causality can’t predict emergence. That’s the whole idea — that emergence is a mechanism of being that downwardly modifies the train of causality.
A very simple example is a traffic jam. Cars have their affordances — they go at certain speeds, certain braking, etcetera. And all’s well until a traffic jam forms. And then suddenly, the degrees of freedom of the cars is massively reduced — the speeds, the maneuverability, etcetera. The traffic jam is real. It’s as real as a rock, even though it is merely a pattern of interactions at the causal level. And this just seems to be a really hard concept for people to get their heads around.
Bonnitta: So maybe we should talk about this because I’m actually a critic of emergence, or I would like to expand on it. Oh, this will be fun then because it’s one of my areas. The word “emergence” is meaningful and helpful, just like you said in the traffic jam. So it has meaning. It’s not one of these meaningless things. Michael Levin’s critique is about explanatory work, because you just say, well, it’s emergent. And so this is what he and I are after — can we make that word do more explanatory work?
My go-to easy, simple example is those vibrating plates where you have sand or salt on them. The frequency is raised continuously and the patterns are emergent. There are discrete patterns. So I believe one of the things we can do if we’re a little skeptical about emergence is ask the question: what is the continuous gradient beneath the phenomenon, which is such that when a threshold is breached, you have an emergent pattern?
You can see this entirely in quantum mechanics. The electromagnetic field is continuous, but then a threshold is breached and then you have quantum emergent properties. In normative systems and human systems, the same thing. It’s not like big apocalyptic change all of a sudden happens. But the question is, what thresholds are breached? The financial system — there’s all this continuous activity and then a threshold is breached. And we say, yes, the behavior is now discretely different.
But I think for science, we can start to try to ask the question: what is the continuous variance behind the emergence? I just saw a little animation of exactly the traffic jam problem. And they were saying that the problem behind traffic jams is that cars are not accelerating constantly with each other. So somebody gets too close to a car and so it over-brakes, and then the person behind them has to brake even faster. What’s happening is that the gradient of flow is disrupted. So that’s an interesting question for me. I’m trying to suss out what kinds of gradients are being evaluated to produce emergent phenomena. We’re trying to start from there and then ask this other kind of question.
Jim: You know, I see that you can’t just say “emergence.” Each emergence is different. I’ve come to that conclusion. So the traffic jam has one set of affordances that when they interact, produce things like traffic jams. In fact, my formalism has some traffic going along an interstate, then going up a hill. And the mix of trucks and cars causes variable turbulence in the flow, and you can just dial in these things. And yet as long as it exists, the downward causality is there. And that’s what I look at as the sign of a real emergence — that there is a real downward causality that is not implied specifically by the lower-level affordances.
Bonnitta: Yeah. Just translating that for you — the lower-level affordances for me is: what is the deeper process or gradient that everything has to be gradient-similar to, your asymmetry, which is responsible for these effects or these patterns. There’s a threshold because obviously in the driving situation, a little bit of stopping and going won’t produce an actual — is manageable. But then there’s a certain threshold where the asynchronous driving becomes a real traffic jam.
Jim: I’ll have to build that simulation because I’m with you. Most likely, there is a bifurcation state such that when the mix is thus and such, traffic flows laminarly. But when the mix of trucks and cars and hills reaches some threshold, then it starts to break down. And most importantly, it amplifies. There are cycles.
Let me give you my other example of emergence, as homey as I can think of. I’m sitting in the front yard in a folding chair, and let’s imagine two different versions of me. One is the regular old gnarly-looking Jim Rutt. The other is all my chemicals reduced to their molecular state and put in a 55-gallon drum. I guarantee at a high level of probability, the 55-gallon drum of Jim Rutt chemicals is not going to get up, walk down the street a block and a half, and buy a six-pack of beer and come back. While the regular gnarly Jim Rutt is likely to. Therefore, we can say that the biology of Jim Rutt and the emergence state of Jim Rutt — from all of my worldly experiences, but particularly driven by the biology — means that I am capable of making a higher-level decision. I want a six-pack of beer, and that cascades down and causes me to drag all my molecules down to the local corner store and buy my six-pack, while the barrel full of chemicals is never going to do that.
Bonnitta: There are a couple of things in here. I mean, these are all unanswerable questions at this stage, but they’re ripe for our time. At some point, the chemicals did stand up and become Jim Rutt, because the egg and the sperm — which you could describe at a chemical molecular level — did somehow stand up and become Jim Rutt. So it is also the case — even though we can get into morphogenesis and embryogenesis if you want — I want to acknowledge that at a certain level of development, things that grow biologically or organically or emerge become modular. So like, my heart grew from stem cells that migrated to different positions and through bioelectric gradients and more of a genetic gradient, differentiated, etcetera. But then once I’m Bonnitta Roy, once I’m a human being, my heart can be treated somewhat modularly, and my limbs can be treated modularly.
This is something that I think is noteworthy. So let’s just put a pin in that. But the fact that we can be treated modularly after the fact shouldn’t prioritize our interpretation of the development cycle. But this is also interesting — if you’re a Jim Rutt sitting there and you want to get some beer, where does that impulse to get beer come from?
Jim: Presumably for me, it’s going to be a brain-body system. My stomach will send one signal going, hey, I think I want some liquid carbs. Another part of my brain says, I want a buzz. And all those various bodily signals are processed — yeah, by chemicals in the nervous system, by chemicals in the brain. And then eventually out pops, hey, get up, go down the street and get a six-pack.
Bonnitta: Yeah, we could go through the whole thing. You know, you’re feeling a little whatever, and then your nervous system, your dopamine, cortisol, and that sends a signal to this. And then part of the habitual schema in your nervous system says, oh, I know how to fix that — when you drink beer. And then you imagine beer, and that imagination is like, oh my god, I know that’s going to feel good.
But in a sense, you could tell the story this way — and again, interpretive science — you could tell the story that you’re not the one driving, that your chemicals are driving you versus you are driving your chemicals. And the way I talk about this is a famous Buddhist thought experiment called downward causation. And so upward, downward — I think we have to be careful. We say, okay, if I get up, I can get up and walk across the room. My cells have no choice. That’s downward causation. But in real life, if you’re sitting there and you’re feeling antsy — do you ever sit down, you want to relax, and you’re like, oh, maybe I should get myself a cup of tea? Because you have an image in your head that, oh, if I was sitting here with a nice book and a cup of tea. But where did that come from? And then you go down and, if you notice this fidgetiness, it comes from below. It comes from beneath.
So if you investigate, why did I get up and walk across the room in the first place? This gets very, very tricky. And so I would say that I don’t think — I think it’s again the system covarying. It’s establishing schema above a certain threshold, which means I do get up and cross the room, or below a certain threshold, I don’t. That I get quieted inside my body. And so for me, it’s like I think my whole system has evolved so that my cells can enjoy the power I have to get up and cross the room, because they no longer can make a sandwich for themselves. They can’t go out in the pond and find food. So to me, it’s not like my cells have no choice and I supervene on them. We enjoy each other’s powers.
And I think that is like another thing I say — the Earth is whizzing us through space and around the sun. Do we feel like the Earth is supervening on our freedoms? No. I think we enjoy the fact that the Earth is moving and we share an inertial framework with it. So for me, I just like to expand these traditional thought experiments because I think they can be a little bit like a magic trick, depending on how you frame them.
Jim: Yeah. That’s the thing. How do we keep it from being a magic trick and yet still be true to the world? It’s a very difficult problem. This is one of the most difficult concepts to really get our hands tightly around.
So let me go back to something you mentioned earlier, which is modularity, which I also see as part of emergence. There was a time when the ancient ancestors of Bonnitta Roy did not have hearts — when you were an amoeba or something, an early eukaryotic cell. Somewhere along the line, evolution discovered that an animal with a heart could operate faster, eat more, avoid predators, etcetera. And that semi-randomly initially evolved, semi-hard heart — it probably wasn’t a very effective one — got locked in genetically because it worked. And then over time, the heart got better and better because those offspring that had hearts did better than those that didn’t. And whether you take the fully genetic story or the bioelectric story doesn’t really matter. They’re just different weights. Still a progression anatomically.
Bonnitta: Yeah. They’re both answering the same question in reality. As most such things, the answer is probably both.
Jim: So that’s another form of emergence. So I talk about the stack from physics to chemistry to biochemistry, to cellular metabolism, to tissues, to organs. And then the organs operate as systems, and all those things are part of the emergence of complexity in our universe.
Bonnitta: Yeah. So there’s something really interesting because we have the evolutionary story. I’m going to tell the developmental story. And the way that they talk or don’t talk to each other is very interesting. So one of the fascinating things that I like to talk about is: at some point in the development of the embryo, some cells are destined to become bone cells. So you’ve got the parent bone cell or whatever, and they go to different parts of your body at different phases and for certain well-known reasons. They start to take advantage of parts of the DNA library, and they read the books and read how to become bone cells.
Now, from that one small population of cells that are going to become bone cells, they have to, you say, become more modular. Because some of those cells — their children — will become skeletal cells, will become bone. And the interesting thing is it’s not like they’re bricklayers who go find calcium and make bones. They literally have to turn themselves into bones. So they no longer have a full capacity. They can heal themselves, I think, though they get healed by other cells. So they become bone. They become more structural.
Other parts of that lineage become bone marrow. And that also bifurcates because some of the bone marrow children will become red blood cells, and they can’t divide. They are just Amazon packages. They are limited. And others become white blood cells. And white blood cells are like their ancestors. They live in pond life. They move around. They find things to eat. They adapt to threats, like that. So there’s kind of an evolutionary recapitulation when those cells become white blood cells and other kinds of cells.
Do you see what I’m saying? So there’s something — to me, that is a way of narrating that opens up some really interesting questions about what’s going on. It’s not as modular as you said. But to me, these are — if you take a look, it just becomes really fascinating. You have these original lineage cells going to be part of the bone system, and then the children go off and have completely different kinds of destinies.
Jim: Yeah. That would suggest that that was a series of emergences deep in time. There was a time when there were no bone cells, and there were nothing even like bone cells. And then there were things like the cartilage in sharks, which is sort of like bone, but not exactly. That was at an earlier time. And so these emergences of kind are another form of emergence, which brings us to where we are today — the gradual accumulation of pieces to recombine.
Bonnitta: And then recapitulate something very old. I mean, the white blood cells are a very ancient form of life, but now they live inside the habitat that is the person’s body. So to me, there are all these threads that are still somehow interwoven — these threads of evolution are somehow interwoven in the capacity at the developmental level. And I’m not going to tell you what should stand in place of the word “emergence.” But I think that if we are curious, I think it leads to really good science that we haven’t done yet.
Jim: Yeah. It’s right at the cutting edge right now. And nobody has a crisp view of emergence, in my view at least. But I do know there are a lot more people talking about it than ten years ago, which I think is a good sign. And the same is true for consciousness. So let’s go way back to the beginning. Bonnitta wakes up. What is this thing that is Bonnitta? Consciousness — do you have a view on the nature of consciousness?
Bonnitta: It’s going to be a little different. Okay? And of course, we’re at a time in history where all these terms are up for grabs. What is intelligence? What is consciousness? What is agency? What is biology? What is physics? And so I think it’s important not to argue over what is consciousness, but to try to be as precise and concrete as possible about your definition of consciousness. Because if you have one definition and I have another definition, then we’re just sliding past each other.
So I’m going to say: what is it to be conscious, to be Bonnitta? A single, seemingly separate organism that moves through my house. You know why I said “seemingly separate.” But at some point, that sense of being — and I think it’s a useful perspective — the sense of being a single person with my own thoughts and my own work and stuff like that is a way to interpret reality that’s very useful and fun, actually. But I think that it is a second-order activity of the organism. I think it’s a simulation.
For example, I have this whole story of being conscious at these different levels. And so you can see, for example, the point at which internally monitoring can give you a map, a concrete map of the external environment. And then you start to see at certain levels, you have animals that can simulate environments. A New Caledonian crow can be shown a puzzle, and it goes through its mind some of the steps. So it doesn’t have to actually, through physical trial and error, solve these problems. It’s the same with, like, plumbers. If we’re plumbers and I’m like, oh, let’s run the main line here and then put the two inside lines like that. So then you get these levels of simulation.
But no way do I think the crow thinks, oh, I’m a New Caledonian crow, I have to solve — there’s not this secondary loop. Now we know that rats can simulate novel environments. So here you have some kind of increased capacity. They mash up parts of mazes that they’ve run before — not completely novel — and they run hybrid mazes in their dreams. So now this is an evolutionary advantage because maybe they got stuck in that tree root. Now they’re like, oh, well, this completely accelerates learning in animals because you’re pre-trying potential experiences.
So then you get to the point where people can simulate environments. They can simulate novel environments, and then they can simulate a self. They simulate a self inside a novel environment. So they’re like, oh, when I go to the wedding, what am I going to do? And the other thing is we can directly simulate a simulation into other people. So, like, the two plumbers — let’s go here and there and there.
So I think consciousness at the level of “I am aware I’m Bonnitta” — and I don’t just mean the linguistic convention — is subtly a simulation. I’m referencing the simulation I have of myself. Now, we know, for example, that the introspective nervous system has two modes: a first-person mode, and you’re always running a third-person perspective on yourself. This is why you could dream in third-person perspective. When the first-person perspective — this is just straight neuroscience — goes away, you feel like you’re having an out-of-body experience because you see yourself walking. But that’s always online. And that’s a simulation that’s running as a simulated part of your waking state all the time.
If you’re ever in a flow state, like if you play sports — I’ve had this experience many times — you kind of can’t believe what you just did. You stole the ball and you made the winning basket. And then you watch it on video and you think, oh, now I’ve got a third-person perspective on it. So I think if you take consciousness — not basal consciousness, but consciousness of a person being conscious of themselves as a person — I think it’s a simulation.
Jim: And of course, a lot of leading consciousness theorists agree with you. Like, Anil Seth has recently come out quite strongly that consciousness is a hallucination of sorts. And of course, we also know that our perception is a hallucination. The way our eyes don’t actually see pixels — they have saccades. They look here and they look there, and they synthesize a visual scene, which is to some degree a hallucination.
Bonnitta: Okay. So this is where I would say that word is over-narrating the situation. The word “hallucination” means we’re out of touch with reality. That’s why I would insist on the word “simulation.” The inherent advantage of simulating instead of working exclusively in — you know, plumbers, we’re not going to set it all out, then yours, like, no — it’s stupid. So is that a hallucination? No. I think it’s an affordance. A simulation is an affordance.
And now here’s the other problem with calling perception hallucinations. Obviously, no perceptual capacity exhausts the real. It’s always a subset of the real. But these people that say it’s a hallucination — I mean, I wrote my thesis on this — and then they’ll say, well, look at this visual illusion. You simultaneously know it’s an illusion by using your eyes. You know it’s an illusion. So at that level, it’s not a hallucination.
And the other thing is, you don’t just see with your eyes. You see with your body. You see with your ears. My husband went deaf, and his visual system had to recalibrate what three-dimensional space was like. And you ever see guys do this when they’re working on their cars and there’s a nut that’s hard to get? And women do it when they’re trying to — sorry for the stereotype — but when you’re trying to thread a needle and if you really try, especially if you’re older and you don’t have really good eyesight, you can’t see the hole. And then you use your mouth like this. And then you use the haptic feedback. So my point is that when you isolate a single perceptual organ — the organ of visual perception is not your eyes, your retina, and your brain alone. All of them interweave. We know this. They all feed into a holistic understanding of the world.
Here’s another thing. When you have a phone like an iPhone, and at first it’s kind of lousy and it doesn’t adjust for light and it doesn’t adjust for movement and stuff like that, you say it’s lousy. But once the same people make it so it adjusts for lighting and adjusts for this and that, they’re like, oh, it sees better. And so the same people are saying, oh, the visual system adjusts for this and adjusts for that, so it’s a hallucination. And I’m like, no. It’s complex to live perceptually in a world and you need all these modes. Is it perfect? No. But I wouldn’t say it’s a hallucination. Now you could run a simulation as an incorrect perception — that would be more like a hallucination. But I don’t think the embodied perceptual system is just a series of hallucinations.
Jim: Well, it’s certainly not ungrounded. It’s grounded by reality, and it’s an approximation of reality, as we’ve known since Kant, basically.
Bonnitta: Exactly. No organism can perceive the whole. And in fact, that’s a theological argument for, like, the mind of God — that he can open his consciousness long enough and attune to everything perfectly enough so that the whole is seen. And again, about participation — when you use a spear, if you put a stick in the water, it refracts. So you’re not — this is why it’s hard to go spearfishing, because where you see the fish and where you think the spear is are different. But people whose cultures spearfish all the time, they actually see where the spear is better, because part of seeing is practicing throwing the spear. This is what I’m saying. But all these experiments to show that vision is a hallucination — they amputate ninety percent of the visual system and say, look, it’s just a hallucination. It’s just bad science.
Jim: Yeah. When people — you can overload it for sure. And in reality, it is a highly complex system that self-regulates over time. And we know the examples that different cultures see different parts of the spectrum.
Bonnitta: Exactly. Like, some societies don’t see yellow. Or Eastern Europeans have two different colors of blue, for instance. So let’s get into why does it matter. What is it about a culture that teaches their kids generation after generation that you just hallucinate reality? First of all, it’s bad science. And is this good pedagogy? No. It’s horrible. It’s horrible to repeat those things. Just as much as New Age over-narration — saying you could walk through walls — this is also over-narrated. And I think it gets readership or gets people up in tizzies or something. I think it’s irresponsible.
Jim: I think it’s — yeah, overdone. To say that there is no reality — that’s the postmodern move. There is no reality. And that’s hugely dangerous. But yeah, let’s move on from this because there’s a lot of nuance here we could talk about all day.
Let’s go on to the next thing. One of the things that you’re known for is your idea of complex potential states. In our complexity world, we tend to use something which I think is similar — I’m not sure. We should have a discussion about this, which is the adjacent possible. The idea that at any given time, a system — typically a complex system — has a whole series of moves it can make from its current state, but it can’t make all possible moves because it has to move to another state first. And I assume that this is not too different from your complex potential states, but I think it is different in some subtle ways.
Bonnitta: Once you try to narrate what potential states are without appealing to Platonic forms — this is kind of getting popular — but neither do we want to make it an Eltonian world. So the potential is only there because this billiard ball can hit that billiard ball, can hit that. Something in the middle of this is what I’m trying to narrate. So let me give you an easy example. And then if you want, I can give you some more rigorous terms.
Let’s say you’re working with a team. You know, these people that put out these GoPro videos and they want to show you something amazing they do. Maybe there’s this unskiable hill or something, but this team wants to ski it. And so the potential for that hill to be skied is real, but not real in the way that the snow on the mountain is real or that the skis are real. But the potential is real. The potential has to be fulfilled by certain schema working out certain conditions. So maybe they take temperature recordings — the snow has to be just right. They modify the skis. They look at the weather. They train the skier so she’s really got whatever special talent she needs. And eventually, they create a state where that potential can be enacted.
And so you can’t point to what the potential state was made of. It’s not made of the skis, not made of the snow. It’s not made of anything. It’s the ability for certain relations to create successful schema. They have to be successful. So it’s not just about running the simulations. How do these come together so they create successful schema? And to me, that’s what a potential state is. If the snow can never be the right temperature or if the conditions can never be right, those are constraints. Not everything is allowed. But so for me, it’s a bunch of potential relations. They’re right there. They’re possible, but they need to covary. They need to become covariant schema so they can work together to become the result or the thing.
Jim: I often will say that it has to work.
Bonnitta: Yeah. It has to work. There are certain things. If the simulation realizes that you have to work at negative 22 Kelvin, and then you realize that that’s not in the potential state.
Jim: So how would that differ from the adjacent possible? Because I consider that also constrained by what works. If the next move of a given system is to some other state, that state has to work.
Bonnitta: Well, they’re very similar. I’m not sure. I think the term “adjacent possible” is interesting, but I’m not sure it has any explanatory power. I mean, what do you go looking for? What is the adjacent possible? I would go looking for what relations can this thing or this organism establish that are in the system and that can create covariant schema successfully. When you say “adjacent possible,” it doesn’t really — it seems too abstract to me. What is the adjacent possible? How can I define or identify the adjacent possible without doing that retrospectively?
Jim: I didn’t mention this — one of the parts of the idea of the adjacent possible is pruning rules, that as evolution and emergence continues, there are things that are no longer possible, or there are things that are not only possible but highly salient, and they tune the gradient of the adjacent possible. For instance, in our current society, is activity X likely to be profitable in money-on-money return? That adjacent possible is going to be upregulated relative to other ones, irrespective of its global value. And thinking about how we tune the pruning rules around the adjacent possible, I think, is how you bring it to life and actually make it worth thinking about in some planning sense. So that’s certainly a real process model, let’s say, that says there are multiple possibilities. They don’t happen until the right constraints come in. And then they make what is salient adjacent.
Bonnitta: Well, it was adjacent before. But the reveal of the effect or the result is made by constraints. Okay. So that is one interpretation. It does real work. I agree with you. But we tend in our society to see all complexity as evolving constraints and not evolving potentials or possibilities. And this is not possible — you cannot have the universe we have only by evolving constraints. It would wind itself down. So complex potential states says, in addition to adaptive states and constraints, we need to be able to have this idea of potentials that are not revealed by constraints, but revealed by establishing new relations and new schema.
You can’t account for the novelty. The universe would run itself down where everything’s adapting to everything else, which is what the financial market is doing. It’s running itself down. Everything is leveraged against everything else because of all the constraints. And so I think we need a theory to balance that. I think it’s what’s hidden or occluded by complex adaptive systems thinking, and that’s these potentials. There are constraints in my ski story, but the potentials — in identifying what can be possible that’s sitting there in plain sight, we just haven’t identified it yet — it’s a more proactive, participatory way to bring potential into process versus just constraints.
Jim: Dig into that a little bit more. How would you tune that story about the ski on the very steep slope from a constraint view to something else?
Bonnitta: Right. There are constraints, but okay. So let me change the story because I just got this thing that you might think of. Like, Elon, I think, works in — he understands constraints, but then he’s like, but what does that make possible? He’s like, okay, well, the cost of the rocket is this and that. Most people think this and that. And they do the math and it can’t work financially. So then he says, well, what if we just build cheap rockets and learn from them, and it only costs us so much? He understands there are constraints here. But instead of working with them, he sees that over here, the whole state of questions and designing and engineering can change by seeing things in a different light.
So in the skiing thing, people are saying, well, no one’s ever done anything at that level when the ice is a certain kind of ice, there’s no certain kind of snow, and the incline is this and that. And then all of a sudden, someone realizes that, yeah, but given that the ice and the incline have this relationship, what if we tweak the skis so it takes advantage of the fact that those relations are constrained? You’ve introduced something completely new into the system rather than just working with the constraints.
So it’s this notion of instead of feeling leveraged into an action, you say, what am I not seeing? There are multitudes of stuff. There’s energy for free in all systems. There are relations you can make that people just don’t see because you can’t see them until you enact them. And so complex potential states invites us to see systems in this other kind of possibility.
Jim: You’ve been fairly famously a critic of stage theory. And one of the examples you used is what you call post-formal actors. Why don’t you first tell us what post-formal actors are and how your experience thinking about those has led you to become a critic of stage theory?
Bonnitta: So all my friends are developmental stage theorists or social stage theorists. Big love to all of you. So development is a stage process, but it’s quite trivial. Like, you have to be two feet tall before you’re three feet tall. You have to have abstractions before you can have systems of abstraction. So I’m not saying that development is not a stage theory. It’s when you expand it to claims that are not true.
So currently, we have people that follow a certain trajectory of values. I don’t think values development is stage-like. I think society shows you values. I mean, you live in a society where they put you from first grade to second grade to third grade. And then you’re like, oh, look at how these kids develop — when you basically have a single-phase pipeline, and that’s how they develop. So I think some of the claims are overstated.
So then after I left my landscaping business, I started doing organizational development with agile companies, mostly in Scandinavia. And I realized that these people were approaching the world and work in this kind of — what do they say? We always bias for action. And they were getting results that one would think were results only people who had developed, according to the stage theories, at a high level of systemic understanding. But when I first started working with them, I’m like, I don’t think they get what I’m talking about. They had enacted, they had acted their way into better results in complex situations. They didn’t have to first be Newtonian and then be this and then have complexity and then deconstruct complexity. They weren’t those kinds of thinkers. They weren’t post-formal thinkers. They acted like they were post-formal thinkers, but they weren’t.
And something in the Agile Manifesto — those people came out and they realized the complexity built into Microsoft, the complexity built into the world, this complexity is not higher on the action logics. It’s in the way. And so you have this whole generation of people that I call post-formal actors. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I mean, post-formal actors are ruling our world today. They’re just a bunch of people that know the digital world. They’re engineers. They don’t have a lot of training in this other kind of cultural or whatever you want to say. But they have these action logics that are very powerful.
So for me, it’s a call to educational systems to see — why burden kids with all that complexity? Why do you have to learn about the atom going around the nucleus and then only to learn, well, that’s not really true? I’ll give you another example of what is wrong with developmental stage theory. I read this from David Bays — it’s a really good book. He’s a mathematician. So he starts his book where he says, imagine an x-y coordinate and imagine two x and two y. You can see where that is. He’s like, four hundred years ago, that was what Descartes was bringing into the world, and no one understood him. And if you were a kid, or even an intellectual at the time, it would be very hard for you to understand what Descartes is saying. Now anybody, any kid, can understand this level of abstraction. Why? Not because you taught it to them. They didn’t develop it. Our brains didn’t mutate, but they can understand this.
So this is not Piagetian. This is some kind of evolutionary leap in capacity that is culturally bound. And there are some theories of why kids can imagine this. Basically, we’re getting better and better at running simulations. And then of course we get our screens and they run simulations. So this aspect of cognition that I trace from the early animal phases — I think that’s what to watch: the power of simulation. That doesn’t fit with developmental stage theory. Kids can learn this level of abstraction before they go to school and learn math. How does that happen?
Jim: I don’t know. Nobody knows. Yeah. I have my own suspicions on this. I have not really studied stage theory, though. I have an innate suspicion of it. And I suspect that instead, there are many human capacities — maybe hundreds — and that there is some graph connecting these capabilities, that you do need to understand integers before you understand fractions maybe. But there’s a complicated connection and prerequisite graph, and they don’t actually divide up into nice, smooth levels.
Bonnitta: I mean, there are definitely dependencies. Can’t have systems of abstractions if you can’t do abstractions.
Jim: Exactly. So there are prerequisites, but there are not really levels.
Bonnitta: Correct. Those are trivial relations. And I agree with you. David Bays’s book — I wish I could remember the title — but he’s trying to say, I’m a mathematician, I struggled with math. And I realized that the stories that you tell each other as mathematicians were holding me back. And he’s like, some people see everything through topology, and then they can make a bridge to other kinds of complex algebra. Some people go the other way around and really struggle with algebra. And some people, when you give them complex algebra, they do these little topological simulations in their head, and then they get it. And so you’re right. He was saying this is the problem with math — because if you happen to be a person that sees everything in topology, but you have to get through algebra first, then you’re going to say, oh, I’m not good at math. So I think dealing with what is the case and investigating this phenomenon of abstraction is, again, another new science that we could be working on.
Jim: That makes sense. Alright. Let’s go on to the next — maybe the last. We’ll see how long we run. You’ve said that you recently have started moving away from inner development towards agency. I’ve got to say that resonates with me because I have to admit I scratch my head a little bit about all this interest in inner development. I’ve never done any. I’ve never been to any courses. I’ve never been to any therapy. I’ve done a little meditation, done a little psychedelics, but I find it sort of interesting, but no big deal. I’ve kind of been scratching my head about why all this interest in inner development. And I’ve always been happy with the way my brain works. I don’t feel any need to change it. So anyway, tell me a little bit about how your relationship to inner development — and you have done a lot of work there — and where you’re going now and what you think the limits might be to inner development.
Bonnitta: So again, all my friends are in that. So we know a lot about it. And so we’re not going to be naive here. I don’t think you’re naive either. You know, when you’re a young kid and you think everything bad that’s happened to you happens because the world is bad — like external causes and conditions. I can’t get a job because the guy’s an asshole, and I can’t this and I can’t that. There’s a certain point at which you have to realize your attitude and what you believe about yourself is the problem. And that is introspective. So there is a time when this is actually necessary. Because all of a sudden, you realize — if you’re a young guy and you start to develop this attitude, all women are assholes, and they just want to be like whatever — then all of a sudden, you realize how much that was your stuff that you were holding. And then all of a sudden, you’re like, wow, women are beautiful or something. The breath of fresh air you get from releasing these limiting beliefs. So we have to look at our own psychology. And this is very important. So I’m not saying that’s not true.
However, it is my experience after doing basically two or three years of experimenting with top-developed people who facilitated top developmental circles, that this is the problem. Our mind — we have two modes in our mind. It’s also in animals, and it’s neurodynamically and anatomically understood. We have an egocentric mode, which is my, me, mine, things that belong to me. It’s like a dog — my bone, my blanket, my offspring. We have an allocentric mode. The egocentric mode references all our perception to me. An allocentric mode references perception to the environment. So that tree is this far from that tree, which is over there from that tree — not like how far it is from me. And so these are very well understood animal modes of perception.
In the human, these turn into the psychology — the simulation of the self, the “me,” and what I call the Jamboard, the mind. So if I ask you to recite the alphabet backwards, you probably have a little visual blackboard here. There’s the Z and the Y and the X. So that’s the Jamboard. That’s the allocentric virtual simulation of a piece of paper. And then when I ask you, you know, why did you do that? — the mother says, why did you do that? — we look in here. And we create this little conscious, this little shame self.
And what these people are doing, in my opinion, in a lot of these collective circles, is they’re going inside and they’re asking questions. And just like your mind — as long as you keep asking it questions, it will give you some ideas. As long as you keep asking your psyche questions, it will generate new stories. There’s no end to it. They become simulations. And then simulations — I know people who do parts work, and then they’re like, oh, the parts have parts, and the parts have parts. So these capacities of mind are self-generative. I remember one point I had three animals — a dog, a duck, and a horse — die at the same time. And then your mind is like, maybe it’s the water, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. It’s trying to be helpful. But the problem is there’s no end to it.
And so what I think is it’s a self-defeating system. You learn something and then you go ask something deeper. It will always produce psychological material. It just gets further and further away from a real worldly question or worldly result. So it’s a trap. I’ve always been a builder — the barn, the house, the horses, my landscape firm. I think I’ve always been that. So I think that’s a critical aspect of the kind of development we need — to let the world — the world is a three-legged stool. There’s self, other, and the world. And the constraints and the affordances in the world give your internal dialogue and your Jamboard usefulness, utility. But same thing — if you had Jamboards going on and on all the time, you’re just one of these theoreticians creating theories about theories about theories. There’s no end to it. So the world is the necessary third leg of the three-legged stool, I think.
Jim: I like that a lot, actually. And I think you call it agency — at least something of yours I read. And again, that fits very Ruttian. As long as my brain works good enough to give me agency in the world.
Bonnitta: That’s something you always try to reinforce in Game B. It’s nice to have an idea — I mean, that gets you curiosity — but you’ve got to let the world figure it out. You can’t figure out the world. You’ve got to let the world figure you out.
Jim: Yeah. Particularly something like a society. It’s just way too high-dimensional to sit down and figure out with pencil and paper. And everybody who’s done that ends up with Marxist-Leninism or fascism. I was going to say he becomes an autocrat. Yeah. The only way to solve the problem by brute force is totalitarianism, rather than let it grow, let it naturally evolve.
You’ve talked quite a bit about failure modes of collective intelligence. Tell us what you see in the area of failure modes, and what do your insights tell you about how to do a better job? Because if there’s anything that’s going wrong with our society today — and lots of things are — failure of collective intelligence seems pretty close to the top of the list.
Bonnitta: So first, I want to do a caveat. This is a historical perspective. I’m not thinking collective intelligence fails ultimately. But in our times today, in our society — so first, what we have to realize is that a lot of people are saying, why can’t we become a “we”? But we are — the egregore is a hugely powerful agent. The results of our collective activity are astoundingly huge. They’re not negligible or zero. So that gives you reason to believe there’s something suspicious about thinking that we just need more collective intelligence, because you sum up our collective actions and it ends up being the world we have. This is the default. So it seems to me — and just give you a quick rubric, maybe we can end on this.
In the Divinity School, we have this little story and we say, starting in the Renaissance, the Enlightenment age, there was a time where a group of men — they were men — could get together and build Venice and build Yale and Harvard and stuff. So you had a lot of authority and potential and authorship, world-building agency in individuals — the Carnegies and the Mellons and etcetera. Then you get the postmodern world where the agency is in the collective. So you have activism and you have regulation and you have increasing complexity because there’s a lot of distributed agency, much more distributed agency. But very little of what we would like to see built in the world gets built. There’s some kind of failure mode in that.
And so at the Divinity School, we ask this question: what would it be like? What kind of leaders do we need to lead a group of free and willing participants? So you have the collective on one end — they’re free and willing. But I think we’re in a time where you need very strong leadership because we’ve eroded the natural valence of trusted leadership in society. So I don’t think it’s a matter — I mean, I was on board with that for a while, like distributed intelligence, distributed power. But I don’t think that works for the time we’re in today, which is why we decided to try to create a leadership program that looks at this.
We don’t want to become like old-fashioned Carnegie Mellons. They didn’t lead free and willing participants. But some of these old-fashioned character-building things that law schools used to do, med schools, divinity schools used to do — we don’t think that’s being done in the institutions anymore. Hence, you have post-formal actors, like the superpower types — Thiel and Alex Karp. Yeah. They have this post-formal actor power, but they don’t have a lot of character. So it’s a really good question. That’s why we feel that’s the territory of asking these questions — right there smack in the middle between being agentic and working with the world, and yet having leaders bring up a new, compelling vision for the world we want to build. I think that’s kind of lacking.
Jim: Can it only be done from the leaders? I mean, in some sense, I look at the character and virtue failure mode as more cultural than necessarily leaders.
Bonnitta: Yeah. Exactly. But I’m saying we need leaders that have character building in them. If you wanted to be a leader, you used to go to law school, med school, or divinity school, even if you didn’t want to be a lawyer, a doctor, or a priest. Or the military — you could go military. And I think literally the military probably is doing a better job of these fundamental leadership skills, these character-building skills, than law school, med school, or divinity schools right now. So it’s kind of old-fashioned in that way. I would say the leaders of our global politics and stuff — they’re post-formal actors. They do, do, do, do. But I don’t think they have sufficient, adequate character. I just don’t.
Jim: I would 100 percent agree that that is, in some ways, the biggest void in our late-stage system — not only do we not have it, but the concept of virtue is actually laughable to most people these days.
Bonnitta: Exactly. They figure you’re a sucker if you’re a person of good character.
Jim: Exactly. And that is a late, degenerate stage of a society.
Bonnitta: And that’s why it’s not going to come from the collective because it’s already eroded the collective. So again, I said it’s a historical phase. But right now, we need leaders of character that are actors, not contemplators. They want to have world-building visions. And they need to try to solve the problem of keeping the populace free and willing through inspirational, aspirational action logics versus dominating and terrorizing action logics. So it’s a big question. It’s not answered. It’s what we’re trying to answer.
Jim: So I want to thank Bonnitta Roy. And I didn’t mention earlier, she has a Substack at bonittaroy.substack.com. Check her out. She never says anything you may not agree with, but never says anything that’s not interesting. Thank you, Jim. Thanks for coming on the show, and look forward to talking to you in the future.
Bonnitta: Yes. For sure. Love to you and your family, Jim. Big hugs.
Jim: Thank you.