The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Jordan Hall. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: This episode is one of a series I’m doing on the worldviews of thinkers and doers. The premise is simple. I want to map how they actually see the universe and their place in it, not just dig into their latest book or project, but explore the scaffolding underneath. Enjoy this opportunity to look backstage at the minds of some of my favorite people. Today’s guest is Jordan Hall. He is one of our regulars here on The Jim Rutt Show, where we’ve talked about Game A, Game B, complexity, meaning, Simbium, the church, the commons, etcetera. Today, we’re going to try to dig in a little bit behind all that and see what it is that is Jordan Hall and that he brings to bear on these kinds of questions. As always in our worldview podcast, we’re going to start with a scenario. This morning, presumably, unless you raved and partied all night, you woke up. Who is this, and what is this Jordan Hall thing? And one of the, I believe, important attributes of consciousness, which isn’t focused on enough, is that it comes and it goes. When you sleep, it’s gone. General anesthesia, it’s gone. Coma, it’s gone. Death, maybe gone, maybe not. So who is this Jordan Hall that woke up this morning?
Jordan: Nice. It’s funny. You were both, as you mentioned for yourself, ancient, and I’m kind of pushing elderly. And this has the feeling of the kind of conversation you’d have in the dorm room when you’re 19, 20, freshman sitting out between the dorms.
Jim: I always say that despite the fact that I’m chronologically ancient, I’m actually only 19.
Jordan: And everybody who’s met you knows that’s the case. Really nice question. Well, you know, you notice a couple of things. You notice that there’s a sense of continuity, that there’s a sense that you are in fact the same person that you have been. It’s almost like a very particular subtle sense of coming into an awareness, but the awareness is arising from a deeper place prior to awareness, but nonetheless has a feeling of continuity, even recognition.
Then there’s of course the particularities, some of which are sensory. And as you knew, I went on a road trip recently, so you have that nice feeling when you wake up in an unfamiliar place. The disorientation of not having sensory recognition produces a sensation of, okay, where is the grounding? Interestingly enough, there’s a certain instrumentality of the answer to your question — that being disoriented in your body orients you towards the deeper answer to that question.
Certainly, there’s memory that begins to line up, but it’s interesting because the memory is, by definition, disoriented. You’re not remembering anything in particular. It’s more like there’s a holding of, almost like a context, or the latent potential of all possible memory that are tied to that underlying continuity. In other words, it’s not yet the case that I know for sure that I can’t remember your childhood, but nonetheless, there’s something about my own childhood that is just beyond the horizon that nonetheless is sort of present. The presence of the whole story.
I think, by the way, and I’m riffing here because I haven’t delved deeply enough into this, that’s something of what’s meant by the concept of soul. That’s something of what’s meant by the trace or the carving of the harmony of something like the eternal in its relationship with the imminent or the incarnate, and that the relationship between those two — the actual reality of how your life has unfolded, the possibility of who you are — that is the thing that I think is called the soul. And I apologize for those who are better at this metaphysics than I am.
Jim: Now as a student of consciousness, I tend to focus on the imminent only. I don’t believe we need to bring in anything supernatural to explain the fact of memory. You hit right on what I believe to be the center of advanced consciousness, which is it’s a fusion of external perception — things we see, hear, and feel — interoception, which are signals from our body and our gut. I think the signals from our gut are particularly important, and our memories. The memories are accessible by our conscious frame, but in a weird way which we don’t really understand all that well. We can force a memory — okay, remember in first grade, when you went into school for the first time and the flagpole was to the right. If you work at it, you can make that happen. But often most of the memories that are driving consciousness, I believe, are unconscious and are involved in things like driving the steps of attention, etcetera. So I’m not sure that we need — well, we can call it the soul, but is that what you’re pointing at, or are you pointing at something deeper?
Jordan: Well, that’s a very difficult question to answer. I suppose I must be pointing at something deeper because I am invoking the idea of the eternal and the idea of the infinite. So to the degree to which — let’s just say posit it, or it’s funny, I’ll use posit for a moment, this may be an epistemological step that might be useful for us to take — to the degree to which you posit that the notion of the infinite is not merely conceptual, it’s not merely the multiplied by negative one of the finite, but rather is real. It’s not supernatural. It’s just part of how reality works. Then the question is, how in the world do the finite and the infinite come into any relationship at all? You can’t actually think about that. You could try it, but if you try, you’ll notice that you’re doing a very bad job of it.
And so this thing, the ligature that combines — I think, actually, technically, that’s called the spirit. Again, here I’m making a bit of a hash of the metaphysics, but the binding, the way that the infinite and the finite come into relationship. You know what? We can actually make it very concrete. We’re back to freshman college. All the various categories of the Platonic transcendentals — we could just use the classic triangle. There’s something about the triangle that is not entirely consumed by any given drawing of a triangle, or the total set of all possible drawings of triangles, that enables us to perceive that they are part of something that is more than just — you could say the pattern. There’s a pattern, and we can recognize that pattern.
The proposition is that there’s something to that pattern that is not created in the causal environment. There’s no moment in the relativistic story of creation, Big Bang on, whereupon the collapsing of the quantum field produces triangle. No, that’s not it. Where simple chemistry becomes organic chemistry and the triangles emerge — nope, that’s not it. There’s no particular location in the causal field that enables the triangle, quadrangle to be in that category. That thing that I’m pointing at is the transcendentals, the transcendent. And so if you posit the being of the transcendent, then the relationship between the transcendent and the imminent — the fact that that can happen at all, the fact that the particulars have some ability to be in relationship with the transcendence — produces that wherever that is, that particular relationship. That’s the thing that I’m pointing at.
Jim: So it’s not exactly pure Platonism, but it’s in that direction. I might say it a little differently: that once we get objects, or coordinates, or whatever, once we have three of them, we have a triangle, irrespective of any transcendent idea of a triangle. Triangles just are once there are three points, essentially. And do we discover them or are they always there? I’m not even sure those are useful questions. They just are. You can measure their angles and they will add up to 180. The lengths of the ratios — one will be longer than the other, or they’ll all be the same. The basic facts are essentially the nature of reality, irrespective of whether they’re discovered or already there, which I find to be essentially a meaningless question.
Jordan: Yeah. I think the phrase “they are” and the phrase “transcendent” roughly collapse into each other, just sort of looking at it. If you’re looking at it from the point of view of wanting to put a label on a category, we could call it the transcendent, because of course there are many things that aren’t of that kind. If I take a given drawing in the sand, that given drawing in the sand is not of the category of just “are” — it’s clearly created, in this case by me, at a given moment in time and particular location. But there are things that are in fact, as you say, just “are,” and there’s an “are-ness” about them that is different from other things that exist.
I’ll use Forrest Landry’s distinction, actually. He makes that nice distinction between being and existence. There are things that exist, and the point is things that exist — I can trace the causal chain until I find the moment where they went from not existing to existing. And there are things that just are, and with them, the notion of causation enters into a very different relationship. We can always point to examples of the fact that they are, and as you said, anytime I’ve got three points, I notice. But the noticing makes the question “did I discover it, did I create it?” fuzzy. And I don’t consider that to be throwaway. I consider it to be curious.
This is a part of my worldview. When I find something that is of that sort, I tend to look at it and be curious. I go, that’s interesting. That’s a different kind of thing. It’s subtle. I can’t really identify exactly what’s going on there, but I’m curious about things that have that subtlety. And of course, sometimes you open up the box and there’s nothing in it. Sometimes you open up the box and it’s Pandora’s box, which I’ve had plenty of those. But sometimes you open up the box and you notice that there’s a change in the world that you’re living in, and that change has a deepening, or enriches your experience of reality, and we can expand on that arbitrarily. So a part of my worldview, to keep with the theme, is something like an orientation towards those kinds of questions that is a just-at-the-edge-of-reckless curiosity.
Jim: Interesting. Let’s drill into that a little bit. So you’re in the world, you’re young, you notice that three points always define a triangle. And you now have a new concept, which perhaps you didn’t have before, and you can use it for all kinds of things — not only identifying triangles, perhaps more usefully, defining what are not triangles.
Jordan: Yeah. Well, as you recall, there are all kinds of things you can do. You can start thinking about how you can grasp the ratio between the angles. You say, hey, for reasons that are very difficult to fully grasp, there’s always going to be 180 degrees when these things show up. Obviously, I’m importing the definitions of degrees, but that turns out to be irrelevant — you could do the translation on that in any way you want. And so if I’ve got sixty-sixty, I know what the next one’s going to be. And what’s interesting to me is not so much the particular practical utility, because I was never a carpenter or a mason, but the fact that you could know that with certainty. There’s a very different quality of experience. There are things that you can know with confidence, and there are things that you can know with certainty. That was something that I actually did notice early. I had a strong orientation towards both the distinction and the exploration and then the relationship between those two.
Jim: That’s very interesting. Let’s say more about what you can know with confidence versus what you can know with certainty. Dig into that one a little bit.
Jordan: I’m going to do some aesthetic riffs. Several years ago, probably 2022, somebody asked me a kind of a Game B update question, which was more or less: are we going to make it? You’ve been talking about the metacrisis. Clearly the metacrisis is real and accelerating. Are we going to make it? And so I thought about it for a little bit and I said, well, it’s kind of interesting. The version of me that engages that question from the point of view of confidence says the likelihood is diminishingly small. But the version of me that observes that question from the point of view of certainty is actually absolutely certain we’re going to make it. And that was just the answer to that question.
So it’s something like there’s a way of being in relationship with events that is governed by a deep logic, and even a certain set of faculties and dispositions, and of course qualities of experience that are distinguished between these two, certainly for me. We can say something like — do you love your wife? You can kind of do the evidentiary thing and go, I’ll do a forensic analysis, what does it mean, what are the characteristics? Like those poor rationalists. And you’ll come up with a probability confidence interval. Well, we’ve been through a lot of difficult times, and I’m still hanging around, she’s hanging around, I guess the answer must be yes. But there’s actually a — and I’m going to say it’s a deeper register. It actually is deeper, and it’s more fundamental and more profound, and the kind of thing upon which you can make choices, the basis upon which you make the most meaningful choices, where you’re like, yeah, the answer is yes. I don’t actually need to even think about it. I just know that it’s for sure yes. And it’s deep enough that I know that there’s a lot of other stuff to build on top of that. That’s a good example.
Jim: I like that. That works. Another sort of basic ontological question before we go down to the next level of epistemics. What is your view on the reality of the universe, as opposed to, say, you’re a brain in a bucket someplace with fake perceptions and fake memories that have been implanted, etcetera. And of course it’s always important — I make this point repeatedly — that we can’t know for sure. The universe could have flicked into existence five seconds ago with all our memories in place and airplanes flying and all that stuff, and then the universe could flick out of existence in five more seconds. It’s logically possible. But we have to make commitments of some sort if we’re going to get on with our life. What is your commitment with respect to that thing out there in the world?
Jordan: I’m actually a very simple realist. Exactly as it appears. The way that my almost one-year-old son perceives it, the way that my seven-and-a-half-year-old daughter makes sense of it, is accurate. The Coke can that you just picked up is really actually there in any meaningful sense of the term.
And I guess that’s part of it — I notice that there’s a band, and these are kind of like the clever adolescent band, which oftentimes for Boomers lasts until well after death, ranging from around IQ 115 up to around IQ 145. These are the ones who are consumed by questions of brain in a box, because of course in some sense they’ve turned themselves into that. They’ve become separated, body and mind. They’ve noticed that their mind can do a very large number of things that are distinct from what their body can do, and then they’re like, oh my gosh, wait a minute, what happens next? But I think that if you think it through very, very deeply, you will recognize — I’m interrupting myself. Forrest Landry, for example, who is not in that category — he’s to the right side of that band, maybe a lot — went to great effort to explain that the simulation theory is actually incoherent if you’re able to go all the way down to the very bottom of it. Which is to say that if you’re a brain in a box, that means there’s a box and there’s a brain, and there’s something that puts brains in boxes. So there’s a reality that is the kind of thing that has to be more or less like the reality that we’re aware of. Doesn’t mean necessarily that that reality consists of Coke cans and computer screens, but the reality consists of things like perception and things that have subjective experience and things that have objective existence, and there’s a relationship between them — all the basic characteristics of what we perceive as being real have to be present. Any version of it involves an infinite regress that lands on that.
And then what happens is you start to collapse everything into — well, almost the inverse of your previous point — for me, the notion that perhaps I’m in a simulation actually doesn’t matter at all, because every single choice that I would make is isomorphic regardless of which version of that I take. There’s nothing about my choices that would change at all, even in the smallest possible amount. And so therefore, the concept has no value, and therefore I act on the basis of the actual reality that I perceive, knowing importantly that doesn’t mean I’m locked into a kind of solipsistic phenomenology, but rather I’m locked into an all-in, full-stake engagement with the reality that I’m engaging with, focusing on, say, the meaningfulness of it more than on the surgical slicing and dicing of the particularities.
Jim: There’s a lot there. As I’ve posited in my essay “Minimum Viable Metaphysics,” I make the same metaphysical commitment of reality and lawfulness, because if you don’t, how the hell do you get started investigating the world? So I don’t even bother. It seems to be almost meaningless to try to prove behind it, at least at this stage of our existence. Maybe someday we’ll have the intellectual and physical tools to understand more fully the relationship between reality and brain and consciousness, etcetera. But today we don’t. So accept reality — though I would say with the Kantian caveat that the reality we think we’re experiencing is probably not exactly the real reality out there, but it’s something that we synthesize as a useful approximation of the reality out there.
Jordan: This is a conversation that I actually had recently online, when I made a distinction — well, I didn’t make a distinction, I just called ideology out as being a certain kind of thing. And some people thought that I was saying that one could have direct, unmediated access to reality. That’s a key thing: unmediated access to reality. And my basic sense of things is that that is actually an incoherent notion. That mediation and reality are so deeply intertwined that the idea of an unmediated relationship with reality is actually not a real thing. It’s like a square circle. You can say it, you can grammatically construct it, but it lives at a level of incoherence — the idea of relationship implies mediation, and the idea of reality implies relationship. And so we’re always engaging in mediation, always engaging in relationships, and in some sense that’s what reality is. So it’s not like there’s a super special objective out there that in principle could actually exist separate from mediation, but rather the qualities of mediation, the qualities of relationship, are what we mean by the word reality. And so the question actually dissolves.
Jim: Yeah. If we consider the classic examples — our vision system, when we see, we aren’t actually getting a raster image of pixels. We have saccades, where the eye looks here and there across quite a small arc length, and then the brain synthesizes from that plus its memories of what it’s seen recently into this view which seems continuous and pretty much like a movie. So I think what we’re trying to get at, though not necessarily simulation, is that with respect to the interface to our consciousness, there’s a lot of synthesis going on that may not be fully congruent with the reality out there, but is related to it. And I will say that the reality out there is real. And this mediation, as you say, I think is a good term, is how we experience it in our conscious frame.
Jordan: Yeah. And I guess the key thing is to say that raster images and pixels is also a mediation. So we know — this is actually where the imminent-transcendent distinction becomes very nice. We can say that there is something, some pattern, that we relate to through the way our visual cortex mediates relationality. A camera relates to that transcendent in the way that it relates to reality. In both cases, they’re mediated by all the different ways that mediation occurs, and the reality is the actual relationship. It’s not the transcendent. I guess that’s kind of the key thing.
This is actually a very important shift recently. Bear with me for about three minutes here. Two years ago, I was at a conference that Jonathan Pageau put on in Florida, and a gentleman I had never met and never heard of before, Father Stephen DeYoung, gave a really amazing ninety-minute lecture on something like life after death. And what does that mean? He’s an extremely erudite Orthodox priest. And one of the points that he made is that in the West, we’ve inherited this unusual idea of who we are, our basic identity, as being actually nothing. Meaning, we have this idea of accidents. Well, Jim Rutt is not the hat he’s wearing. Jim Rutt is not the suspenders he’s wearing. You just keep stripping away the things that are the accidents, and you notice that the thing that is in fact essential is indistinguishable from nothing.
And the point Father DeYoung was making is that this is actually a mistake that is grounded in the prioritization of the transcendent combined with an epistemological prioritization of the imminent. In other words, we’re saying that reality lives somewhere — this is maybe the Kantian confusion — reality lives somewhere in the absolutely essential, non-accidental transcendent, and our only ways of perceiving live in the absolutely embodied particulars of the imminent, and there’s something like an uncrossable chasm between those two. And his point, which I agree with from the point of view of geometry and in life, is that it’s actually the inverse: that reality is the relationship. When we say reality, when we mean reality, when we participate in reality, we’re actually not talking about an infinite regress towards the transcendent. We’re actually talking about the lived presence of reality, of experience, of relationship. And once we grasp that relationality is what we mean by the word essential, then things start getting really, really interesting. We’re able to participate. And a lot of the questions that we’ve struggled with in the West for about the last fifteen hundred years, we discover are actually rooted in a deeper misunderstanding, a kind of substantive essentialism that has this epistemological separation baked in. Once you get rid of that, a lot of things begin to be — yeah, I’d say just sort of easy. It feels simple, and that’s okay. Simple is okay.
Jim: Why don’t you dig into that a little further? This is really interesting. Let me say how I might see it, and then you can respond to that. I don’t see the two as quite so commingled. There is a frame which does commingle them, but there is a continuous reality — say the books on my shelf behind me. And then there’s the construction, the real-time construction going on in my consciousness, which brings them up into my awareness, which makes them part of my current working set, which at some level, probably very minimal because it’s not very salient at the present time, influences my behavior. But both the books on the shelf and the dance of neurons which is my consciousness are both real and have internal relationships within each other. Van der Waals forces holding the books together on the shelves, and the amazingly complex dance of the neurons in my head and in my body, which give rise to this conscious entity, Jim Rutt.
Jordan: Yes. So I think the move is similar to one I made earlier about the camera and the human visual cortex, which is to say something like — not only are both of these ways, these qualities of relationship, the books on the shelf in the physical sense, and the neurological phenomena (which as it turns out in this case is also the physical sense, and by the way, the phenomenological experience of the neurological phenomena, which I’ll put brackets around because we’re not going to dive into that distinction) — the key proposition I would make is something like: these are all real, and they’re also all real in the same way. They are not in fact real in a different way. The books on the shelves are not more real than the neurological correlates. Rather, there’s something going on where these are — it’s really hard to say — exactly the same. In other words, there’s a possibility of relationality that is mediated by a diverse set of particular mediations. Van der Waals forces are a class of mediations, and the photons bouncing off of your retina which excite neurons are a different class of mediations. But the point is they’re all mediations, and there’s nothing about them that prioritizes them as being more or less real mediations. They’re all just mediations.
And to the degree — this is very Bonita Roy, by the way. I don’t know if we mentioned her in this conversation or prior. Oh, by the way, folks, the just-previous worldview podcast to this one is with Bonita Roy. She introduced me to a way of thinking about it, which I hope she still sticks with, that we can talk about what is real on the basis of what is shareable, and so it’s participatory. When you share with me a book — like you just shared with me Couples by John Updike — you’re actually realizing that book. Isn’t that interesting? The reality of the book is an ongoing participation in unfolding relationships, and there’s no sort of privileged position that you can point to and say, well, it’s actually the original manuscript that John Updike scrawled — or whatever, we’ll do a Kerouac-style methamphetamine-frenzied typing — that was the “real” book. It’s exactly the inverse. As Jim Rutt shares with me his experience of this story, the book is being realized. That actually is part of the realness of the book, and it just grows. There’s no end to that. As the book participates in more and more relationality, the realness grows in all the different qualities of particular characteristics.
I’m reading the book in hardcover, you’re reading the book on a Kindle — those are distinct mediations of the unfolding realization of the book. I like that actually. We just kind of move it towards a verb. You say, hey, the reality of a book is an instantaneous clipping of the unfolding realization of the book and includes all of it. And then the distinctions we make end up being pragmatic — Michael Levin’s epistemology, which is quite nice. It’s like, okay, if I’m concerned with being able to make a new physical copy of the book, I’m going to orient myself more towards something that is governed by Van der Waals forces than by something that is governed by the photons bouncing off the back of Jim Rutt’s retinas. But that’s because I have a purpose in mind, and that purpose collapses the reality of the book down to a slice of that reality that makes it tractable under that purpose. But the reality includes all of it. And by the way, it’s unfolding in all the different ways that it can unfold.
Jim: Yeah. Let me touch on that because I just had a thought as you were saying that. Before the show started, Jordan and I had a little chat, as we often do, about what we’re reading, what’s interesting, and I suggested Updike’s Couples. And so in some sense, one could say that the book — the physical artifact, the Van der Waals forces, or in my case the Kindle representation — interacted with my cognitive architecture, the neurons, all the internal and external things that caused my particular dance of consciousness. It processed the reading of that book, and then it output — I did not dictate the book to Jordan. I gave him a two-minute description of what the book is about and why I thought he might be interested in it.
Jordan: Yeah. And the image here at the very high level of reality is something like birth. In the Christian metaphysics, we’d actually use the concept or the term “begottenness.” Meaning, there is something about you, Jim, and there’s something about John Updike, and something about the mediation of this entire field of the realization of the book, that actually cleave together and produce something that is new and also continuous. So your daughter is new. She is in fact a unique singularity, an absolutely unique beingness and reality, and also is a continuity — has both physical and spiritual and cultural and psychological continuity with you and with Celia. And the point is that that’s not a unique thing in biology. That’s actually just how reality works: that relationships have generativity, and that generativity has this continuous distinction between the degree to which the generativity is lineage and continuity, and the degree to which generativity is distinction, difference, differentiation — to use the postmodern term that makes me sound sophisticated in French.
Jim: Interesting. Yeah. So in one sense, one could say that my gloss on Couples was a descendant of the original book.
Jordan: Yep. Exactly. And so therefore both different and connected. And notably, by the way, it produces or affords a quality of relationality that had not existed yet. You’re realizing the book because you’ve made it legible to me in a way that I might begin to participate, and now by my participation, the reality of the book — in this case, by the way, also the reality of Updike, who clearly has his beingness mixed into this very colorfully — has more descendants. It is fruitful and multiplies in a deeply profound and meaningful way.
Jim: Interesting. Alright. Let’s skip back to something you mentioned earlier, which is a very deep question. And I’m sure we won’t answer it on this show, but let’s take a whack at phenomenology. The work I do with the California Institute for Machine Consciousness — I’m not that interested in the hard problem, why the redness of roses, but I am very interested in the question of phenomenology. What is it to be something?
Jordan: What’s interesting is that for me, I’ve noticed that I tend to be grounding phenomenology. I’ve been using a term — and I don’t know if I’m stealing it, well, if I’m stealing it I’m stealing it not knowing that I stole it — which is this “onto-epistemology,” which actually is onto-aesthetic-ethical-epistemology, but that’s a mouthful. Meaning that the distinctions that we’ve made, certainly in Western philosophy, between these kinds of relationship with reality are useful. There is a difference between epistemology and ontology, and yet also there’s a way that there’s a deeper register before they are distinguishable. And the reason why I say that is that I do the same thing with phenomenology.
I’ll give you a concrete example. Recently I was present to a conversation about, actually, God, and a gentleman was making the argument of the classic God of the philosophers — the kind of infinite regressive causation, and if you sort of think about that through the lens of logic, you will notice that there’s either an infinite regress, which renders logic incoherent, or you have to posit an asymmetric thing that is a cause that does not have a cause. Okay, I don’t want to argue that. The point is that was there. And what I was noticing is that it is impossible for him or anyone to make that argument but for importing a certain foundational phenomenology. Meaning, back to this idea of the confident and the certain — there are things that you will notice that you find to be so clearly present and so clearly real that you make your choices on the basis of them. So in this particular gentleman’s case: logic. It’s like, I noticed that I experienced — notice I’m now using phenomenological language — I noticed that I experienced in my life that logic is. Not only that, I noticed that it recurs in a particular way. It keeps showing up as the same. And I noticed that on the basis of how that experience makes itself present to me, there’s a bunch of consequences that follow. And I can’t even in principle propose the absence of logic. It is simply present in a way that is so low in the stack for me that nothing is really, in some sense, lower.
Okay. I take that as being a very nice way of grasping phenomenology. It’s something like the things, the qualities, the experience, the ways of being in relationship — unfortunately at this point the metaphysics has to get extremely simple — that are so foundational that everything else must depend on them. Everything else is upstream of them, and if you’re very careful, you can notice that you can dig deeper and deeper. We actually did this on a very long and somewhat detailed conversation about the Trinity, until you get to what ultimately is, for you — because that’s as deep as you can go — the deepest possible location upon which you’re just going to say, well, I’m not sure that anything below that makes any sense, and certainly I’m not interested in trying to go any deeper.
And then what you notice is there actually is an orderly build. So you can take, as I described, the phenomenology of waking up in the morning. There was a noticing of this seems-like-a-not-yet-nameable-or-particularly-graspable field of memory that precedes any particular memory and seems to constrain those memories. In other words, it isn’t necessarily the memories themselves, but nonetheless precedes them in some very subtle way. That’s an example of what I mean by phenomenology — meaning, as I notice in my experience the quality of waking up, I pay close attention to what that is like, the likeness of it. I can become more subtle and notice, okay, wait a minute, there’s an arising of a memory, but I actually notice that that arising comes from somewhere. And the somewhere it comes from, I can’t quite go any deeper than that, but I can definitely notice that that’s real, and it has a quality of realness. It’s not indifferent. It’s not random. It’s not chaotic. It has a certain orderliness to it, and that’s sort of as deep as I can go.
So, yeah, I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that when you orient towards the likeness and you orient towards the foundational ways that precede your concepts, that precede your way of understanding, but just try to be very careful to slowly go into the things that are actually really arising before — I would call that the category of phenomenology.
Jim: Now earlier, you — I don’t recall if you’d exactly equated that with the soul. And as is well known, Jordan is a recent adopter of reasonably orthodox — not in the Eastern Orthodox, but in the canonical sense — Christianity. And of course the soul is a major part of the Christian story. So either distinguish those two or stitch them together.
Jordan: By the way, I will formally use the Jamericho to express the neologism of “smorthodox,” which is small-o orthodox. Okay. Exactly janky and lo-fi enough to be the kind of word that I would use.
What Father DeYoung was talking about, in terms of who we are, is not a substance that could be reduced ultimately to nothingness. He’s talking about the soul. And by the way, he’s talking about that which survives death. And here I’ll also reference Zak Stein, who uses the phrase “ensoulment” as a quality of experience. There’s a certain way of being that has to do with, let’s just say, understanding. And there’s another way of being that has to do with ensoulment. If I do the metaphysics — I’ll almost use it as a placeholder — that which participates in the actual relationship with reality on the basis of meaningfulness is the soul.
Now I say that, and I need to be careful, because I am pointing at something which is in the category of relationality, not in the category of a zero point, like an infinitesimal Leibnizian nonexistent ontology. But nonetheless, that which participates in reality on the basis or in the category of meaningfulness is the soul. And so when you have profound experiences — experiences of profound joy, experiences of profound grief — you notice, if you pay any attention, if the grief is deep enough you can’t help but pay attention, these are definitely not the kinds of things that you engage with understanding. And yet they’re real, in some sense super-real, and they do something to you, which means that there’s something to you that can have something done to it. And this is what Zak calls ensoulment. As you have experiences, all experiences produce ensoulment. The most profound ones are the ones that we can’t help but pay attention to. And that which is the you-ness that is participating in reality on the basis of that profundity, on the basis of that meaningfulness, is the soul.
Jim: How does that — because I could easily imagine something that fit all those criteria but was imminent in the world, and when it was done, it was done. Where do you stitch that to the Christian concept of the immortal soul?
Jordan: Oh, that’s a really good question. Well, one step that I would say is: notice that it is that which participates in reality, which means that it can’t be strictly identified as any portion of reality. It’s the quality of reality that has the ability to be meaningful. And I guess we don’t have three hours, unfortunately, but what I would point to there is back to the previous distinction of the transcendent and the imminent — that the soul is where the transcendent and the imminent relate. And so it participates in the transcendent, and it participates in the imminent, by virtue of actually being the place, or the how-ness, in some sense also the who-ness, of that relationship. Now it’s a big question of what it means when we die. How does that relationship continue to maintain?
Jim: Or does it? Because I would say the things you’ve put on the table so far don’t seem to require a permanence to the thing that is doing those actions in the current frame.
Jordan: Right. Well, the transcendent side clearly is indifferent to life and death. The transcendent side is of the eternal. And again, I can erase an arbitrarily large number of triangles and have no effect whatsoever on the pattern, the “are-ness,” the beingness of triangleness. And so from the transcendent side, the side of the soul that is in relationship to the transcendent can’t possibly be bound to the finite. From the finite side, it of course is completely gone as soon as — well, as soon as I erase the given triangle, it’s just no longer participating in triangle. It’s not a triangle anymore. It’s whatever. In my mind, for whatever reason, it’s always sand. I guess I spent a lot of time at the beach.
And so the question is — and this I think at the end of the day is a question that is actually deeper than reason — but it’s something like: when I wake up in the morning, or when I slow down enough to really be perceiving things between heartbeats, very, very slowly, what I notice is — how funny — space-time is secondary. That’s what I notice. I notice that the paradox that you pointed to, the fact that you can’t actually really know that everything wasn’t created an infinitesimal second ago, is actually both true and false simultaneously. That there really is a continuity of reality that has a real reality of the past. The past has a reality to it. And also, there’s something about the moment that is real, that is not at all absorbed by the past and the future. And these are both just true. And by the way, I can logically notice that they’re necessarily true, but that’s a long story. But I notice it, let’s say, existentially or phenomenologically.
And so therefore, what I notice is that there is something about the quality of death that is not that different from the quality of being asleep. It’s different in a lot of ways, but we notice — you’re dying constantly. Every moment that you’ve ever experienced is in fact irrevocably no longer in the present. And yet it’s also — the category of memory is interesting. It’s possible to represent it in a way that is quite interesting. I can say that for sure, the moment of my daughter’s birth — or I’ll use the moment of my son’s birth because it was recent enough to be extremely rich — is absolutely not here right now. I’m in a different moment in time. And yet at the same time, it’s absolutely present right now in a way that is maybe even more meaningful because it’s deep.
If I allow myself to be led by a series of commitments to a priority of certain metaphysics — well, I’m going to go with the metaphysics of space-time as being more fundamental than meaning, I’m going to go with the metaphysics of causation as being more fundamental than participation, all these different things — then I would be forced by that set of commitments to say that the pastness of his birth is more real, and that the memory is something like a causal eddy that I can stitch together. But certainly, I don’t. Christians don’t, and I personally don’t make that priority. My priority is to say that meaningfulness is more fundamental than existence, that reality includes but is not entirely captured by the material, by causation, and that the presence of his birth and the aliveness of that reality is distinguishable from, but closer in terms of a deeper reality than, the absolute pastness.
And the point being that, therefore, if I take that entire architecture, what I notice is that this applies then to all possible moments and all possible notions of death — that a given death is for sure real in the register of causation, and yet at the same time, the meaningfulness of the who and the what and the how is somehow participating in a register of reality that is not ever going to go away.
And this, by the way, takes us back to Updike’s book. Updike, as far as I understand it, passed away in some very important way — maybe even before I was born, but certainly more than ten years ago. And yet — and this is the key thing, and this is absolutely not superficial — I propose that this is more meaningful than the opposite way of thinking about it. In a very profound way, he is still alive. It’s so hard to say this. Precisely in the realization. The realization, the constitution of reality on the basis of the relationships that are not merely causal eddies in a meaningless universe, but the actual embodiment of life itself. As you introduce Couples to me, there’s actually life to that. That’s actually what life is. It’s not just an image of life — that’s actually what life really is. And when you share that with me, and there’s a richness to that, I’m not just consuming the dead corpse of Updike’s genius from decades ago. I’m actually participating in the aliveness of Updike’s soul now. That’s the way of thinking about it that I’ve come to.
Jim: That’s very Greek, actually. The people were utterly consumed with their legacies and their perception of honor and all the social continuity after their death.
Jordan: Well, almost. And of course in some sense it’s got a lot of Greek to it because I live downstream of the Greeks profoundly, and I’m noticing the self-referentiality and even the recursion in that. But the key thing is something like, you just have to be able to take that all the way to the infinite. To the degree to which the legacy — I must talk with Brett Weinstein. He and Jonathan Pageau came here, and they stayed here for like four days with their wives, of course, which is critical. Always notice the wives are more important than the guys who you think are important. And we had a beautiful conversation. And one of the points I made is that Eric — Brett’s brother Eric — makes a category error, in that he very much wants to participate in something like legacy, or more particularly in a quality of immortality. Like Einstein or Newton. He wants to be remembered for a thousand years. And that’s so close. It’s actually very close. But I think it’s also completely wrong. Because again, it’s in some sense captured by the causal. It’s captured by the idea of a standing wave that happens to maintain — what are those called? You know when you move your hand in the water in the pool and it creates a whirlpool, a vortex?
Jim: Solitons. They’re called solitons.
Jordan: And you say, the soliton that lasts two minutes is somehow more important than the soliton that lasts eight seconds. And I go, well, no, that’s not quite right. It feels weirdly absurd. It’s also neat — yeah, okay, it took more effort and more care to make one that lasts longer, but from a very particular point of view, two minutes and two seconds is absolutely indistinguishable. And the same thing here. If you were forgotten entirely — let’s say you’re some sort of medieval peasant forgotten within minutes after your death — and you were remembered for a thousand years, that’s real, but it’s of the same sort for me as the memory of my son’s birth being consigned to a past, and to the degree to which it’s able to sort of force itself into the present through its causal force, like the force of its will, it’s alive. I don’t really mean that. I mean something more like — I guess the only way I can come up with it, it’s weird, it’s very basic — is love. To the degree to which the quality of love that is your unique signature gives life, actually gives life to the present, then you are actually alive. You are not remembered in a computational, memory-registry, causal sense. You are actually present in a real sense, in the same way that you’re present now. And so the quality of love that you’ve put into the world is participating in the constitution, the realization of the world, in a way that is completely distinct from the causal participation in the world that you may have also been part of. And that’s where real legacy actually lives.
And if you’re yearning towards that, you notice a bunch of stuff go away. You’re not trying to achieve greatness. You’re not trying to achieve long-lasting parasocial relationships, which is what greatness means. What you’re trying to achieve is a profound depth of ensoulment for yourself and for everyone who encounters your soul. And we notice this. When you read Moby-Dick, or we read Tom Sawyer — my Vanessa, I don’t know if you’ve ever had a chance to hear her read something, but her participation in reading is beautiful. We’ve been reading Tom Sawyer out loud with our daughter, which is pushing the edges because she’s only seven and a half. And I tell you what, Mark Twain is not dead. There’s an aliveness to that that makes me feel like he’s in the room. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. He’s in the room — not in quite the same way that I’m in the room, but in the same way those books are real, and your memory and your image in your mind of those books is real.
As soon as you start to slice these metaphysical commitments, the prioritization of causation, and say, no, that’s a way of looking, that’s a certain set of purposes that allows me to collapse reality in that way — but as soon as I shift my purposes and orient them to a different place, I notice the reality collapses in a different way. And if I say, well, what are the set of purposes that are most meaningful, and I govern myself by that, then I begin to notice that propositions like “Mark Twain was in the room” is not a metaphor, but is a better way of articulating reality, because of course he touched my soul.
Jim: He still has impact in the universe downstream from his biological life. He is realizing reality.
Jordan: Right. He’s participating in the actual unfolding of reality — that realization, that participation.
Jim: Yeah. And though after his biological homeostasis has unwound. Which is interesting. It is funny — grandeur, status in memory, to me that seems irrelevant. It’s the impact, if any, that you might have. My father, for instance, a great raconteur and easy-chair philosopher who had said some absolutely ridiculous things — call it 49 percent — and 51 percent either hilarious things or statements of great wisdom. And he still lives on in me and my brothers and my daughter and everybody that knew him. He knew hundreds of people. We say, I hadn’t heard him say that, right — either the ridiculous or the sublime. So he’s still ticking along, how many years? Twenty-six years after he passed away. He probably gets mentioned at least once a month.
Jordan: That’s beautiful. And you notice as you get older — at least this is my experience, and I imagine what I just heard from you is exactly the same — you notice those moments where you begin to have a certain turn of phrase that is clearly like, oh, that’s my dad’s turn of phrase. And sometimes uniquely, I have no idea where he got this from. My only reference is literally him. And at a certain point in time, like that transition from adolescence through to whatever it is these days — mid-forties, I assume — you may be a bit bugged by that. Like, oh man, I’m turning into my dad, or I’m copying my dad. But at a certain point, you realize that’s actually the sweetness, and you’re like, wow, I so deeply appreciate the reality. And now what’s happening is the impermanence of it, the ephemerality of it — you notice — is not separable from the richness of it.
Jim: Interesting. And this will be the perfect transition to our last topic. Although I suspect that this particular phenomenon differs tremendously if the person that we’re remembering is a basically good person versus a basically bad person. Suppose your father was abusive, drunk, gambled the family money away, had hundreds of girlfriends, gave your mother syphilis — you’re going to have a very different relationship with your father’s memory than someone who had a father who, for all of his faults, was basically a good and wise person.
Jordan: Well, yeah. And it’s interesting. What I’m noticing is something like the possibility that it could have been otherwise. Because you can always feel the reality that there was something that got destroyed in that badness. But the badness is a denaturing or a disordering of a more fundamental goodness that could have been but wasn’t, and the horror of that loss. And then you can say, okay, well, that’s actually universal. My life has been a life where so many things have not been properly realized. So many possibilities that could have been more beautiful, more rich, more meaningful didn’t happen. And for whatever reason — how much of your life was just wasted doing nonsense? We’ve all made bad decisions. How much of our life is just twisted by bad decisions?
And so you’re like, what is this word? Is it atonement? I can’t remember. Consecration. Right? To take the memory of anyone and to be in a quality of relationship of saying, okay, the part of you that gives life — which may be a very small part in your hypothetical — but the part of you that was potentially life-giving and was thrown into the sewer, even that gives life. Because I can be in relationship to that. Even if you’re like — you can remember a response of growth and love, though there’s a love going in the other direction of saying, I love the soul of the father that could have been and was destroyed and never was able to be in the world. Which is a very real thing. That’s a very real thing.
Jim: It’s like the second company I worked for. Through the rest of my business career after that, I would say, what would they have done at company X? Ah, we better do the opposite.
Jordan: Yeah. And who was it? I think it was maybe Dostoevsky, or maybe Nietzsche, or possibly both, who talked about that experience you have when you’re witnessing a baby being born and a person who is literally just dying right before you. I think Nietzsche was talking about coming across a man who had fallen on the street, and the neighbors, the people who were around him who had perceived him an instant before as an arbitrary stranger, couldn’t help but be connected to the universality of the moment of his death. And same thing — the moment of the birth of a child, you’re witnessing utter possibility, and the tragedy of the destroying of some of that possibility instantaneously, and the beauty of the realization of some portion of joy as you’re unfolding. So yeah, I guess that’s that.
Jim: Alright. Here’s our last topic, and it relates to the tale we just told about the good father, the bad father, the indifferent father, etcetera. And that is the notion of values and virtues. Where are they? Where do they come from? Are they absolute? Are they entirely arbitrary, or are they something else?
Jordan: Nice. They’re a part of reality that is real. Let’s put it this way. They’re as real as the laws of nature. They’re actually of the same fabric. So courage is non-arbitrary and constrains behavior, and it lives in a hierarchy of virtue. So let’s go with bravery — perhaps bravery is less fundamental than courage, because bravery denatures into recklessness more easily than courage, and orients towards certain qualities of experience. So someone who is courageous can do things like tell the truth to his wife, whereas someone who is brave can fight a bear, but maybe won’t be able to tell the truth to his wife about his own weakness. And you could do this in both the subjective and the objective frame, and the union between the two.
So the standing wave of culture is the progressive discovery in the life of a given group of people, and the progressive realization — sorry — and the progressive discovery and embodiment in the life of a given person, of the implicit reality of — I’ll be very nerdy about it — virtue space. And I’m somewhere between confident and certain about this, because it lives in the ambiguity between those two.
We notice that different cultures have a different stack of virtues, but we notice two things. We notice that there seems to be a progressive discovery of the stacks of virtues that has a directionality to it — that the virtue of brutish violence doesn’t get conserved as you move forward in time. Or it gets ennobled. We see the brutish violence turned into the chivalric knight who can master and contain and shape brutish violence in a larger context that makes it actually more — and by the way, on its own terms. The brute who is bested by the master realizes that the master is up-gradient of him even on the basis of the deployment of power. The knave, by the way, may resent that, but that’s a different regime.
And so there’s a hierarchy of values, and there’s a hierarchy of virtues that are the nature of reality, and we can participate and perceive this, though it is by no means simple, and by no means uncomplicated. Because the crab-in-the-bucket problem is super real. There are a lot of things that are part of our fallenness — I could just use the Christian metaphysics — a lot of things that are part of our relentless tendency to optimize for the local at the cost of the global, that produces pseudo-virtue and pseudo-value.
So you can have — we’ll go all the way back — shitbirds and dirtbags. There is something like a shitbird virtue, and the shitbird needs to have a certain cleverness. He needs to have a certain kind of courage. There are certain qualities of virtue that are the characteristic of the shitbird.
Jim: You’ll have to explain to others what you mean by those terms.
Jordan: But the shitbird is categorically less virtuous and categorically participates in a lower regime of values than a person of true honor and integrity and nobility. And this reality is of the same sort as certainty, and of the same sort as phenomenology, like the lowest register of experience. And the shitbird knows this as well.
Jim: I’m not so sure about that.
Jordan: I wish I was, but I’m not. I’m confident of that, but I am not certain of it.
Jim: Interesting. Any other final thoughts before we sign off here? This has been an extremely interesting conversation.
Jordan: Well, to maybe use the method of grounding in reality, my final thoughts are just that it was truly an honor and a privilege to know you, my friend.
Jim: I will say the same. One of the most important people in my life.