The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or by Forrest Landry. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Today’s guest is thinker, writer, and philosopher Forrest Landry. This is the third time Forrest has been on the show. He also appeared back in Ep. 31, where we engaged in a pretty broad survey of his thinking on various topics. Forrest was also our guest on Ep. 96 back in November 2020 when we began the discussion of his Immanent Metaphysics. That’s immanent, I-M-M-A-N-E-N-T Metaphysics, which we will continue today. We’ll be doing enough review up front so that listening to Ep. 96 isn’t necessary. For those who want to dig deeper into Forrest’s ideas, I can recommend it. I recently reviewed it as part of my preparation for this episode, and I can say it’s a classic Jim Rutt Show episode. So, feel free to check it out.
Jim: Now, a final preamble. Forrest’s work that we’ll be discussing today is most accessibly laid out on his website, which you can find the Table of Contents and the various underlying documents that we’ll be talking about on mflb.com/1296. You can also go to mflb.com and it will prompt you to enter a number, in which case you enter 1296, and you’ll get the Table of Contents for the stuff we’re talking about today and you can pull the documents up and read them. Well worth your while if you really want to go deep. We’re going to start off, as I said, with a few minutes of review from the previous episodes so that folks can follow what is to come.
Jim: Let’s start out with, essentially, the beginning at what we’re trying to get at here, and this is a quote from the work: “Metaphysics begins as an inquiry into the nature of the relationship between self and reality. It is this relationship which is the essence of the study.” What do you mean by “self” and how do you mean that it’s separate from the world, or do you mean that it’s separate from the world? Or, should selves be thought of as part of the world?
Forrest: In this particular case, we are actually referring to a sort of a historical notion. So, there’s this idea called the plane of perception and it’s kind of a rhetorical device. On one hand, you have everything that we perceive. And on the other hand, we have the self that is doing the perception. So, the notion of the subjective or the notion of consciousness, the sort of first-person perspective that we have, is all sort of wrapped up in this concept of the self. And so in that sense, we are really looking at the plane of perception using the notion of self and using the notion of world as a kind of method by which we can really understand what is perception as a concept, what does it mean to cross the plane of perception.
Forrest: So, one way we could sort of do this is you imagine a kind of an envelope, you put a sort of a bag over the person and you say, “Okay, everything that crosses through the bag,” so from the surface of the skin to the world. So, in this sense, we are looking at what crosses the envelope. And whether we regard the interior of the envelope as being part of the real objective world, or whether we regard it as in some way other than, is an assumption that we can make later. We don’t have to make it at this particular point.
Jim: Yeah [inaudible 00:03:25] obviously that’s something we talk about in some of the other episodes with other people on our scientific study of consciousness theory. Many people would say that the self is part of the world, but I see your distinction, and for this purpose let’s go with that. In our last episode, you talked about the notion that relationship between the subjective and the objective is ontologically real and worthy of study. Could you say a little bit more about that? Because it comes up again and again, that relationship is very significant in your work.
Forrest: So in a lot of ways, we’re looking at the relationship between the measurer and the measured. So, for instance, when we think about the scientific method, we have a hypothesis and then we actually put it to test. And the testing process, the way in which we actually make measurements, the notion of measurement itself is treated as a fundamental concept. So, in other words, that we impute the thing that we’re measuring and we impute the notion of what is doing the measuring. So, in other words, we have somebody reading the dial on the Geiger counter and we impute that from the reading on the dial that we think that there’s radiation present. But the actual objectivity is through the instrumentation, it’s through the measurement itself.
Forrest: So, in this particular sense, what we are effectively getting at is the idea that the ontological process of making a measurement or making an observation is essentially the grounding basis by which we can identify that there is something. So, in other words, we have the notion that there is a measurement, and then we have the notion that there is something measured and there is someone measuring. And again, this is really just a sort of a formality because we’re trying to just sort of notice the order and the degree to which we are introducing concepts.
Forrest: So, for instance, what assumptions do we have to make? So, this is a little bit of a kind of a fine distinction. Because on one hand, we could talk about something which exists and we can say, “Well, how do we know that something exists?” What is the epistemic process that we would use to establish that something exists? Well, in this case, it’s relatively straightforward. If I can have an interaction with it, if I can measure it in some way, if there’s some, at least possibility, of engagement that would be confirmable that there was kind of an observable aspect and [inaudible 00:06:00] there’s even a repeatable aspect, that with those things we can basically assert that something exists or that it’s [inaudible 00:06:07] or that it’s real. And in this particular case, we can get into the distinctions of those concepts later, but I just wanted to point out that in every one of these cases the notion of interaction is taken as a prior concept in order to establish things [inaudible 00:06:21] exists or to be real or to be objective.
Jim: I think I won’t go into it, but you also talk about the perceiver, the perceived, and perceiving. Seems very similar. So, any little bit of additional color you want to add to those three distinctions?
Forrest: Well, they overlap. So, for instance, the idea of the observer as the perceiver, perception as a process itself, and then the perceived would be the content of a perception. So, in other words, we have a process that basically associates a content within a context. In this particular case, we’re talking about a subjective context that is receiving content from an objective context. So, in effect, we can sort of use the notion of information theory and entropy and things like that as part of the description. You can model it as a kind of communication channel, that in effect there’s a signal-producing world and the signal travels through a communication channel and is received by a self. So, in this sense, the perceiver is on the receiving end of the communication channel, the communication channel has some sort of dynamic associated with it, and then the content of the information that’s flowing through the communication channels is taken as representative of the perceived.
Jim: Next, something that you talk about a lot, very near central to your work, as I take it, is the idea of choice. You compare choice in the subjective realm to causality in the objective realm, if I got that more or less right. In fact, you think it’s so central that you said, “If we want to understand the nature of the subjective, we need to think about choice. The notion of self is characterized in terms of choice.” So, maybe unpack your meaning of the word “choice” a little bit. Maybe, if it works, a little compare-and-contrast with causality.
Forrest: There’s actually a couple of other terms that come up with this determinism and indeterminism. So, for instance, when we think about the relationship between, say, mathematics and scientific knowledge, and I know this seems like a little bit of a digression but it’s kind of important to the grounding of the notions. So, for example, when we think about knowledge in a mathematical sense, it has a kind of absolute character. So, for instance, the equations are considered to be the, defining nature of the equations is down to the scale of infinitely small, in other words that 2 = 1 + 1, and you could assume that there is a decimal point with a whole bunch of zeros to the right for each of those three numbers. So, in effect, the numbers are fully specified down to whatever level of detail. And so in this sense, mathematics has a kind of deterministic characteristic.
Forrest: When we think about science, the knowledge that we have in a scientific world is of a causal nature. And it doesn’t necessarily require a kind of infinite degree of specifications. So, for example, if I have an email application and I’ve typed in an email and I type the “send” command or I move my mouse point and I click on the “send” button, then there is a series of things that happen that result in the email that I have printed on my screen resulting in something that’s displayed on your screen. And I don’t necessarily need to know in microscopic detail all the things that happen between my clicking of the “send” button and you’re seeing my email. There’s a lot of electronics things that happen in the background, electrons moving on wires and so on. And from an operator’s point of view, we just need to know that when I click on this button that there will be this outcome.
Forrest: So, in this particular sense, the difference between determinism as a way of thinking and causality as a way of thinking is basically that the same sort of difference that we would have between, say, indeterminism or perfect randomness and choice. And they show up to the same degree. So, one of the things that has come up a lot in philosophy is the idea that if the mechanical universe or if the entire universe is in some way perfectly predictable, then there’s no real room for phenomena like free will, for example. And so in a sense, the distinction that basically is between determinism and causation is also a distinction that exists between perfected hard randomness and choice.
Forrest: One way that this shows up is that when we think about hard random, we think of that as being meaningless. Whereas, when we think about choice, we think about it as being meaningful to the person that’s making the choice, even though it might not be evidentially meaningful to anyone else [inaudible 00:11:28] just witnessing whatever the expression is that that particular person may make.
Forrest: So, when you think about computer science, for example, we have a process, information compression, you put a file into a zip utility and it’s going to factor out all of the stuff that could be predicted and leave you with just the sort of unpredictable residue that effectively comprises the fundamental structure of the file itself. In the same sort of way, if you look at neural process, for example, there’s a lot of stuff that we could predict based upon past neural states. We could predict future neural states. But it turns out that with any complex system that the capacity to predict the future is going to be quite limited. If you look at weather phenomena, for example, there’s a lot of sensitivity to initial conditions, there’s a lot of dynamic process that essentially amplify subtle differences in the beginning so that they become very macroscopic differences later on.
Forrest: So in effect, when we’re looking at something like what’s going on in our brains as a kind of dynamic process, it has tremendous degree by which it amplifies sensitivity of initial conditions to wildly different later states. So, in this particular sense, if we’re looking at the degree to which we could predict a person’s future comments based upon our ability to know them, our ability to understand what their motivations are and things like that, we would be able to have a pretty good hypothesis of what they might say or do next. Whereas, the more that we sort of get into the process of trying to predict that, the more that we notice that our capacity to make such predictions is actually going to be quite limited, and that there’s a lot of stuff, a lot of [inaudible 00:13:14] information, for example, that we wouldn’t have been able to predict on the basis of anything we previously knew.
Forrest: So in this sort of sense, there’s a kind of irreducible randomness from the point of view of the perceiver, because when we’re thinking about the capacity to predict the future, what is the regularity, what is the causal process that would allow us to essentially make that prediction? That’s a kind of information compression. So in effect, we can say, okay, well, after we factor out all of the things that we could predict and we’re left with just the residual, the stuff we couldn’t predict, that’s basically like saying, after we’ve done perfected information compression, what’s left. And from an outside point of view like when, again, when you look at a compressed file, that the residual information has a character of being considerably more random or having a higher entropy just from an observational basis than, say, the original file in which certain regular patterns would be evident.
Forrest: So in this particular sense, we’re basically saying that from an outside point of view, after the information compression has been done, after the predictability has been factored out, that there’s essentially a randomness that is unpredictable. And so from that point of view, it would seem that the choices would result in a kind of randomness or come from a particular kind of randomness. Whereas, from the subjective point of view when we’re inside our first-person perspective, there’s a sense, and again, this is a felt thing and we can talk about that as another aspect, but there’s a sense by which the choices that we make have a context. They’re part of a subjective context, that we can understand why that choice was being made even though outside perspectives might not have access to what that context was, and therefore not see the connections between past choices and future ones.
Forrest: So in effect, there’s a kind of an observability of the context of the subjective such that there is a difference between the degree to which a choice is regarded as meaningful from an external point of view versus the degree to which it’s regarded from an internal point of view. And this turns out to be a pretty important phenomena to really understand. So, from a philosophical point of view, we’re not really looking at it from a kind of compatibilism perspective. We’re basically saying that the notion of choice and the notion of causation are, in effect, duels of one another. They have a sort of reciprocity to the degree that there are actual phenomena in the universe that we couldn’t predict. Maybe there’s three-body problems, or maybe there’s quantum mechanical things in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, that we would not be able to establish as fundamentally having a pattern that could be essentially identified on the basis of any prior knowledge. So in this sense, we can sort of say, okay, there’s a kind of symmetry between determinism and indeterminism, perfect predictability and perfect non-predictability.
Forrest: And then a somewhat softer version of that with the notion of causation, which basically is a sort of a mesoscopic or macroscopic perspective of regular patterns. And choice, which would effectively be, again, from a mesoscopic or macroscopic, a sort of an absence of patterns, at least from an objective point of view, though they may, as I said, be subjectively regarded as meaningful. So in this sense, there’s a lot involved in the way in which we think about how choice and subjective are co-defining of one another. In the same sort of way that we think of the notion of causation and, say, scientific knowledge or of objective knowledge as being co-defining.
Forrest: This is a relatively hard topic to get into right away because it really does require a kind of reconciliation of first-person and third-person perspectives. The degree to which, say, a measurement process or a scientific process results in objective knowledge, meaning that it’s not only observable but is repeatable, versus looking at choice as a way of essentially identifying things which are more defined in terms of continuity, rather than in terms of symmetry. So, in other words, rather than having a kind of knowledge which is a regular pattern in terms of symmetry, we’re looking at a kind of knowledge which is dependent more along the notions of connectivity, in this case, between one choice and another or between a basis of choice, what’s meaningful to a person and the specific things that they actually do.
Jim: Next in our review part, you say, I don’t remember if it was in the podcast or in the writings, “The universe doesn’t have anything other than stuff about creation, stuff about existence, and stuff about interaction [inaudible 00:17:57] we say that interaction is in some sense more fundamental than the notion of existence. And from there, it isn’t hard to say that the notion of interaction is actually even more fundamental than the notion of creation.” Now, that was all your words, kind of rocks one’s intuitions about reality at some level. And in fact, you then go on to say, “It turns out that the relationship between realism and idealism is itself considerably more primal than both the notions of realism or idealism.” Wow. There’s a lot there. Unpack that for us.
Forrest: Okay. I’ll do my best. There is a lot there. So, for instance, when we think about these concepts, for example, when we think about the concept of universe, there’s a series of assumptions that we sort of tag into that. And part of the discipline of doing this sort of thinking is to notice the assumptions and to sort of account for them. In this particular case, when we think about universe, we tend to think about existing stuff in a kind of container. So, matter in space. And the universe would be the totality of all the matter for all of the space that we conceive of, at least, or maybe get to [inaudible 00:19:19] I can talk about time light cones and things like that.
Forrest: Nonetheless, it turns out that there’s another way to sort of appreciate the concept. So, for instance, instead of thinking of the concept as being a concept which is referring to a container with things in it, we can think of the concept in terms of, say, a question like, “What would we need to know in order to understand all that could be known about this concept?” There’s a different orientation. So, for instance, in the first case, if I wanted to say, “What would I need to know in order to understand the universe?” Well, I’d need to know about all of the stuff that’s in the container.
Forrest: But on the other hand, that doesn’t really quite cover it because there’s things that happen in time. So, for instance, we could say the container is all of time and space, but then we wouldn’t really be able to talk about the possibility of things. So, for instance, somewhere along the way, the notion of, in quantum mechanics, for example, that things could happen or might have happened. And so taking kind of a general relativity perspective of all of time and space might factor out the notion of process. But if we have a notion of uncertainty, then we need more than just time and space, we also need a dimension of possibility. So, all of the possible things that could happen, for example, as being another dimension in which to think about this notion of container.
Forrest: But if we’re going to go that far, then to some extent we’re needing to actually account for the notion of interaction as being in addition to the notion of just thingness, i.e. that there’s existing stuff, and now we have that stuff kind of bumping into one another that there’s a notion of process. And moreover than that, there’s a notion of the counterfactual, what could have happened rather than what actually did happen. So, in this sense, we find ourselves having to expand the notion of what we’re thinking about with the concept of universe to include these other aspects.
Forrest: And so, in effect, we can sort of jump to the conclusion a little bit and we could say, “Okay, well, if I wanted to understand everything about the notion of universe,” rather than thinking about it as a container and then saying, “Well, this container has three aspects, it has a space and time and possibility,” and then when we think about the content of it, we can think about the content as being matter or forces or probabilities, then, in effect, we can just say, “Well, let’s look at, if we knew everything there was to know about existence, matter in space, and we knew everything that there was to know about interactions, i.e. forces in time, and everything that there was to know about creation, which effectively would be sort of a proxy for potentiality or the notion of probability over possibility, then, in effect, if I knew everything about existence, interaction, and creation, then I would know everything that there is to know about universe,” i.e. that the concept of universe is subsumed by the combination of the triple concepts of existence, interaction, and creation.
Forrest: And so, in effect, we can sort of double-check, “Is there anything that I would not know about the universe that was not covered by those three concepts – creation, existence, interaction – taken as that everything that was possible to know about those things was fully known, is there anything left?” Well, actually there isn’t. This is sort of an exercise, but the idea here is, can you think of anything that would be knowledge about the universe that isn’t itself a strict subset of knowledge about existence, creation, or interaction? So in effect, what happens is, is that we end up upgrading our concept of universe. It’s now a concept that is understood in terms of three component concepts, which themselves have any number of aspects.
Forrest: Obviously, we don’t ourselves know everything there is to know about any one of these things – creation, existence, or interaction – but if we did know everything that there was to know about them, then we would know everything that there was know about the notion of universe. And so this is sort of a formality in that sense that it moves the notion from a dual one, i.e. stuff in a container, to a triple one in terms of these underlying notions of existence, creation, and interaction. And so in effect, we’ve partitioned the problem on a different basis. Now, we can start to look at, “Well, what are the concepts that are intrinsic to existence? What are the concepts that are intrinsic to interaction? And what are the concepts that are intrinsic to creation? And what are the relationships between these three concepts themselves?”
Forrest: And it turns out that once we’ve done this sort of reification on the notion of what the concept of universe means, then we can start to think about the relationships between these component concepts. And this is where the axioms and the modalities can come to play. So, in effect we can say, “Well, is there any notion of existence that doesn’t somehow imply both the notion of interaction and the notion of creation?” And it turns out that there is not. And the same could be said for each of the two others. Any notion of interaction that doesn’t imply both creation and existence or any notion of creation that doesn’t imply both interaction and existence. So, in effect, the three concepts of creation, existence, and interaction are seen to be as distinct, inseparable, and non-interchangeable concepts. And this is essentially the concept of Axiom 3 in the Metaphysics.
Forrest: Then we can say, “Okay, well, having established this distinctness and separableness and non-interchangeableness, is it the case that one of these concepts has a sort of basis by which it…” In other words, of the three concepts, is there one that seems to have a kind of a reciprocal relationship with the other two, and the other two themselves in a reciprocal relationship with each other? So, in other words, we’re starting to see a little bit of structure that occurs between the defining concepts of the domain that we would call the universe. The notion of interaction effectively is, again, from a definitional basis, and we’re not looking at it in the sense of embodied in time and space, but in the sense of the idea that if I think about creation and the concept of existence, they have a kind of a back-and-forth relationship, and that the back-and-forth relationship is a kind of interaction concept. In other words, that the notion of interaction is something which allows for us to find the concept of existence so that the concept of existence is defined in terms of the notion of interaction.
Forrest: And the same is true for creation. In other words, when we think about what does it mean to say that something exists? Again, as we mentioned earlier, we had to have an observability, we had to have some center interaction with it in order to validate the hypothesis that something exists. So, in that sense, the concept of existence depends upon the concept of interaction. When we think about creation, again, we can probably get a little bit past the notion of creation from nothing, but in a lot of cases, we think about the degree to which one domain of activity emerges from another. So, the way in which the magnetic emerges from the electric or the electric from the magnetic. In other words, that there’s a kind of a co-emergence phenomena that occurs, and that if we were to consider the notion of emergence itself, it would itself be dependent upon the notion of process, which is itself a proxy for the notion of interaction.
Forrest: So, in that sense, both the notion of creation and existence depend upon the notion of interaction in a way that is not a mirror image. So, in that sense, we end up establishing a kind of Axiom 1 perspective of the relationship between those three concepts to say that interaction is more fundamental, again, from-
Forrest: Those three concepts to say that interaction is more fundamental again from a definitional basis than both existence and creation, which kind of gets us to the sort of process of how the axioms works into the thinking of the notion of universe again at a conceptual level. From a practical level of things actually happening and stuff like that, then we need to shift our orientation a little bit, and this is sort of the subject of axiom too, which is probably considerably more difficult to describe without a fair amount of preparation.
Jim: Yeah, we’ll get into that in a few minutes. Now, what about the distinction between realism and idealism? You said that the relationship between realism and idealism is more primal than either idea itself, which kind of is a head twister for me, who was a confirmed naive realist. I want your riff on that a little bit.
Forrest: Sure. So in this sense, we’re going back again to a sort of philosophical tradition. So in other words, there’s a lot of thinking that has been done by people in Western philosophy and Eastern too I’m sure. But the idea here is that when we have a notion of the subjective and the objective, that there’s a sort of dualist perspective, and this is going back to the cart, for example, mind and body and so forth. One way to sort of establish a sort of philosophical system is to presuppose that there is stuff. And then to think about the interactions between that stuff. And this would be a sort of realist perspective, ie, based on causation and so forth, as more or less what we’ve done to develop our science and technology.
Forrest: The other perspective is to basically say, and this is the idealist perspective, is that the notion of the subjective as an observer is a primary thing. And that in effect, we have the idea that there is something out there that something exists at all is to some extent contingent upon the capacity for some observer to sort of project out the notion that there is something there that in effect we can’t ever really have a direct interaction, this is going back to a cart, for example, but the thing in itself is not something that we can know directly. We can only know it indirectly through the capacity for us to apprehend it, and that if we take that principle or that idea to its sort of ultimate conclusion, then the idea is that, well, we know that we exist I think therefore I am.
Forrest: So there’s a kind of primacy to the notion of the subjective and that therefore everything that else that we know is effectively in doubt. And again, this is not the only way to describe this, but it’s sort of an idealist perspective is that first there is mind and then we can maybe know that there is matter. Whereas obviously the realist perspective would be to say, first there is matter and then maybe there is mind as a kind of epiphenomenalism emergence from brains and things like that. And in this sort of orientation, there’s a whole lot of people that have discussed this and really gone into this.
Forrest: And so what I’m basically describing is essentially a different way of thinking about that, which is just to say, so far as we’ve noticed that interaction as a process is more primary than both the perceiver and the perceived or the observer, that observations more primary than both the observed and the observer. And in effect we therefore have to take the notion of interaction itself as a kind of primary thing, that the idea that the epistemology is the basis of the ontology and that in the degree we’re really looking at, well, what is the relationship between epistemology, which is essentially how do we know anything and ontology, which is why does anything exist or what does it mean to be at all, right?
Forrest: So in effect, what we’re basically pointing out is just that there is a relationship between epistemology and ontology, that there’s a kind of dynamic that connects those two concepts. And that, that is essentially the way in which we come to have the concept of, there are real things where we come to have the concept, that there is a self observing. And that if we’re going to take measurement as being a kind of basis of whether or not there is something out there and whether or not there is an observer, then to some extent we’re looking at the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity or relationship between anything derived from subjectivity or anything derived from objectivity.
Forrest: So in effect, if we look at the notion of realism as being based upon the notion of objectivity, and we look at the notion of idealism as based upon the notion of subjectivity then anything that relates subjectivity and objectivity, fundamentally again, this epistemic process is itself going to be the basis of the ontological nature of both the subjective and the objective, and therefore the basis of both realism and idealism. So in that sense, the notion of the interaction between realism and idealism is therefore more fundamental than the notion of realism or idealism.
Jim: One thing that I like about it is it doesn’t make us choose, right? There are so much ridiculous argumentation about, are you an idealist or are you a realist when your perspective said? [inaudible 00:32:28] Both.
Forrest: Yeah, it’s kind of convenient, it’s sort of basically saying that this is a little bit like asking how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. You have to make certain assumptions to even have the conversation. And in this particular case, the idea is that by being really aware of what those assumptions are, we can notice that we can actually be agnostic about them.
Jim: That’s good. I got a couple of other review questions, but in the interest of time, I think we’ve covered enough with one exception. I had noticed when I was reviewing the previous episode that you use the word process a lot and you use it in a way with a specific color to it. So when you use the word process in the context of these discussions, what do you mean?
Forrest: That’s actually a really hard question to answer. Part of the reason that I use the word process is specifically, so that I don’t have to answer that question. It’s funny, the notion of process in this particular case, and it’s good that you call this out because the way I’m using the word process actually includes a little bit more than the way that term is normally used. So when we’re thinking about process in ordinary sense, we’re thinking about changes of state. So for instance, say there’s a time element involved in the sense that you have the state that was, and then the state that came afterwards, you have a kind of patterns in space or mass and space sort of relationship in the sense, what is it that characterizes the pattern in the first place and what does it characterize as the pattern of the subsequent state?
Forrest: But there’s also the notion that there could have been something else that happened instead. So in this sense, the notion of process is usually taken with the assumption of a kind of determinism. Ie, like with computer science perspective, for example, if I have this conditional statement and I give it, this is a true thing, then it’s going to do this branch and if it’s not true, then it’s going to do this other branch. And in that particular sense we sort of as a computer scientist, we think of processes as being deterministic. Whereas in the actual case, we don’t really know for sure, because it could be the case that somebody unplugs the computer at that exact moment, at which point it’s not going to go into either branch, it’s going to do something else altogether or nothing at all.
Forrest: So in other words, the notion of the hardware as effectively being contingent on an environment and the software is running inside the hardware, as long as the sort of causality of the hardware is taken as a foregone conclusion, then we can say that the thing is going to run in a specific way. When we look at the actual universe and such like that, well, we never can predict anything perfectly. We can only say that given these assumptions that such and such is going to occur in such and such a manner.
Forrest: So in effect, as an engineer, for example, I try to set up environmental circumstances, such that the things that I want to have happen must happen, but as anybody who’s actually spent time in a shop, building things, things don’t always go as planned. And so when I’m thinking about the notion of process, I’m not just thinking about forces in time or patterns in space, I’m also thinking about probabilities and possibilities. And so in this particular sense, the notion of process has kind of indeterminism built into it that is not necessarily spelled out in an obvious way most of the time that people use the term process.
Jim: That’s good, that helps me understand it a little bit better. It’s certainly a big concept and let’s see, we’ll come back to it I’m sure one time and again. So now let’s actually jump into the new material in the table of contents that we referenced earlier, the document called the statement of the axioms is where we’re going to go next. It’s pretty intense stuff. So I’m going to ask for us to go slow here and to degree he can to give us examples and metaphors to try to pull some of these pretty pure language of philosophy into a domain where people can maybe get their hands around it a little bit better.
Jim: I’m going to start off with reading something from that document. That’s quite a mouthful. So I better read it then rather than just try to paraphrase it. The philosophical development metaphysics has has its basis two ideas, that have foundational triplication and of type isomorphism. The idea of foundational triplication is modeled to all that is real and particularly the foundation of each and every domain in terms of at least three essential concepts, which although inseparable are always mutually distinct. The idea of type isomorphism is to consider that the essential concepts of each domain are those which have similar patterns of correspondence. Again, a huge mouthful, but what can you tell us about that? And one thing don’t go into, because I do have some questions about it specifically is what is a domain?
Forrest: Okay. So don’t go into what’s a domain, but a cover the basis. Okay, I’ll try my best. That’s actually helpful, it saves me a considerable time. And also just as a manner of preface, let me just say that many of these things are actually quite abstract. I mean, this collection of concepts having to do with the axioms and the modalities and foundational triplication type isomorphism is effectively like as close to the perfected abstraction is as is possible to get. So when we use concepts like the notion of process, I’m effectively trying to make it easier for people to understand these abstractions. But when we get down to this level it starts to get to the point where we’re looking at claims which are being made from a vast amount of background information. And it’s a little bit like a mathematician may explore a whole bunch of cases and then come up with a generalization, but then when they’re presenting the paper, they present the generalization first, which is probably the hardest thing to understand without all the examples and without all of the background.
Forrest: So this is that same sort of way that the imminent metaphysics is a little bit like a math paper in the sense that it describes the abstractions first and then shows examples rather than the other way around. All right. So having said that preface, when we look at Western philosophy and we look at the concept of dualism, which is the idea of there’s a mind and there’s a body and of course this was eventually supplanted by the notion of physical monism, which is essentially to say that there’s a physical universe and the mind and consciousness are epiphenomenon, the brain basically makes mind happened as a later development. In this case, what we’re basically saying is this, that in a general way, that whenever we’re looking at a field of study, that there is going to be a collection of terms that are defined within that field. And that those terms themselves have patterns of definitional relationship between them.
Forrest: So one word may be defined in terms of two other words, and then one of those to other words is defined in terms of something else. And we can trace these patterns down until we eventually get down to what are the more basic concepts, what are the most abstract concepts that are relevant to that field of study. The metaphysics having explored, or myself as a person having explored a huge number of here’s that word again, domains of study, fields of study, have noticed that there is a sort of a pattern to the primal concepts that occur within each of those fields of study. So in effect, if you do this sort of semantic analysis to say, okay, what are the most primal concepts of each field of study?
Forrest: We noticed that there is essentially three primal concepts at a minimum that are necessary to have that basis. So in effect, this becomes the first abstraction, which is to say that for every domain of study, that there are at least three such concepts. This is the foundational triplication idea that there’s, for anything that I consider, so for instance, if I’m looking at say language as a concept, right, as a field of study, well, there’s semantics, there’s statements, and there’s syntax. And if I really want understand language well, I really need to understand these three concepts, I need to understand, what is an utterance? What is a statement? What is a paragraph? What’s a word, but basically I’m looking at the relationships between not only the words as a compositional process that makes statements and statements as a compositional process to make paragraphs and so on. I’m also looking at the ways in which words refer to things or the ways in which statements refer to things or the way in which paragraphs describe ideas.
Forrest: And so in effect, we’re looking at a kind of within the field, what are the concepts and how do they work together in order to create a concept of communication and language and so on. In music, for example, we might say that in order for us to even have a piece of music, well, you need to be able to hear something. So the notion of how loud it is, the notion of, what does the instrument sound like and what pitches it or what pattern is it playing in? So melody and harmony and intensity would be effectively the three concepts of music. And of course these are really, really basic things it’s so taken for granted, for example, that we don’t usually notice that we can vary the pitch of something or the pattern of something independently of the tonality.
Forrest: We can always tell the difference between, say a violin and a flute and a piano, even though they may all be playing the same note at the same loudness. So we can vary the notion of intensity, we can vary the notion of pattern and structure, and we can measure, vary the notion of tonality independently. But if any one of these is absent, is completely absent then the other two are also absent. So again, any field of study, we see three concepts and that’s the foundational triplication idea.
Forrest: What happens next, which is, was actually quite surprising to me when I was originally doing this work, was that those three concepts or whatever the concepts are, that are at the foundation of a domain of study, that the patterns of the relationships between those foundational concepts is itself consistent with the kind of underlying template pattern. Ie, that we can look at the relationships between the concepts in one domain and we can see that the pattern of those relationships is also the same pattern of relationships for the concepts of the foundation of some other domain. And that that pattern can effectively be described in an abstract way. And that’s what the axioms are.
Forrest: So the notion of a foundational triplication allows for us to essentially have this notion of type isomorphism. So when we say isomorphis, we’re saying one shape, that’s what iso morphos is, morphos meaning shape and iso meaning the same. So in effect, what we can do is we can say, okay, well, if the pattern of the relationships between one domain and another is the same then we can start talking about the types of the individual concepts in those patterns. So for example, we can say, okay, with this concept in this domain maps to this other concept in that domain, and in effect, those concepts have a type with respect to the other concepts in that domain.
Forrest: So for instance, we mentioned earlier as an example the notion of universe, we said, okay, well, there’s three concepts that are composing of the notion of universe. If I understood everything about those three concepts, existence, creation, and interaction, then in effect, I understand the concept of universe. Well, if music, for example, if I knew everything that there was to know about intensity, pattern, and tonality, then in effect I would know everything that there was to know about music. Now, obviously this assumption that these kinds of things about what is possible to know and so forth are taken as extreme cases. But the idea here is this that if we were to say, okay, well, I these three concepts in one case, and I have these three concepts in another case, or another example that we used was with language, statements, semantics, and syntax, that in effect we can now start to develop correspondences between the concepts of the foundations of these domains, one of language, one of music, and obviously the universe.
Forrest: So what would that mapping be? Now I can skip ahead a little bit here and basically say, well, after you work out a lot of things and you start to really understand the patterns of relationships, rather than just naming the concepts, we start talking about their typology. Then for example, you might notice that the notion of intensity in music corresponds to the notion, that of statement in language, which corresponds to the notion of interaction and universe, and again, right now, it might sound like, why would you associate it that way? Well, again, this depends upon axions and a whole lot of other knowledge being applied. But the idea here is just that the type of the concepts in each of those three cases is what we would call imminent. So the notion of imminent, omniscient, transcendent are in effect, a reference to the types of the concepts, the much the same way that we would say in computer science, that a given number is an integer, or might be referring to a string of characters, or might be referring to a binary pattern of some sort or another.
Jim: Let’s pause right there. Because to my mind, we’re getting very close to the center of what we’re trying to get at here. And these three things that you just referenced, the eminent, the omniscient, and the transcendent you call the modalities, as I understand it. And let me play this back to you and tell me if I got it, because I’m not sure I did, but I do feel like we’re getting very close to the center here. And you basically said the names given to the three roles modalities that domain primal concepts have with respect to one another are eminent, omniscient, and transcendent. I assume they’re when you’re talking about domain primal concepts, you’re talking about these examples you just gave and that these primal concepts, which are essential to the definition of the domain can always be sorted into eminent, omniscient, and transcendent. Is that right? Or is it the relationship amongst them? Yeah. So let’s go into that and give some couple of examples if you could because I think getting this clear is really important before we move on to the axioms themselves.
Forrest: So well, this is the idea of type isomorphism. So for instance, I can take the like, okay, the domain primal concepts for the domain. So the notion of universe is a domain it’s a kind of container. But rather than containing stuff, it contains three concepts. So we’re considering a concept in terms of other concepts and creation existence interaction are the specific primal concepts for the domain concept universe, with language, the domain being language, the specific primal concepts are statements, semantics, and syntax. Now in so far as these primal concepts compose the domain. In other words, if I think about that relationship, I have a notion of foundational triplication. Whereas if I start to think about the relationships that the primal concepts have to one another that creates a pattern, that’d be the pattern of the axioms. Then I can basically use the axioms to identify the types of each of the primal concepts in each of the domains.
Forrest: And then I can start to say, well, if the types are identified for one domain, say the domain of language, and they’ve been identified for another domain, the domain of say universe, then I can start to look at associative patterns between the concept implementing that type in each domain to the other. So for instance, what can we learn about creation, existence interaction, if I model them using the same sort of structure of relationships that occur in language between statement, semantics, and syntax. So in a sense, and at first you might say, well, that sounds ridiculous. Like why would anybody do that? Well, it actually turns out to be really quite powerful because in this specific case, and this is a little mind-bending, but bear with me here. When we look at what is actually going on and say statement, semantic, and syntax.
Forrest: Well, the statement is kind of like the unit, it’s like the unit of meaningfulness. The syntax essentially is sort of a compositional thing within that unit, right? So it defines the various words, relationship now and subject and objects alone as being a pattern of relationships that compose in a sort of structural way, an individual statement. Whereas when we’re looking at semantic, what we’re basically looking at as a kind of referring relationship that this statement points to something points to an idea, or to an object in the world of reference or something like that. So in one sense, and this goes back to sort of philosophical concept, or maybe a mathematical one that there’s a difference between saying something is valid, ie, that if you start with certain premises, you end up with certain conclusions versus that an argument is sound, ie, that once I’ve developed an argument that I can say that this argument refers to or connects to a particular situation.
Forrest: So for example, as an engineer I might be building a bridge and I have a series of mathematics that describe whether or not that bridge is going to be able to resist a particular truck driving over it, [inaudible 00:50:39] whether or not the thing has enough strength to actually bear the weight of that truck. It’s going to be really important, not just that I did the mathematics correctly, but that I did the right mathematics. If I’m using statistical theory, but it’s the wrong model of statistics, then I might actually be wrong and have the bridge fall down because I was essentially using the wrong math. So in effect, there’s a thing here where we want to ensure that the engineering calculations are not only taking the right input and producing the right outputs, but also that the inputs are coming from the right thing and are going to the right sort of notions.
Forrest: So in effect, the validity would be, did I do the numeric computation correctly? And the validity, I’m sorry, that would be the validity. And the soundness would be, did I input the right numbers and did they actually represent the right things? And then when I look at the results and I interpret the results in some way, that’s meaningful to what matters to us in this case that the bridge still works. So when we’re looking at, say, for example, semantic relationships in the domain of language, we’re looking at a kind of a referential field that has a kind of transcendent character. Ie, it goes beyond the domain of language and points to something which is outside of the domain language. And that’s a soundness concept. Whereas if I’m looking at semantics, I’m looking at a sort of structural concepts.
Jim: You mean syntax?
Forrest: Yeah, syntax, sorry.
Jim: Yep.
Forrest: Corrected. So in that sense, what we’re basically looking at is, is that when we say, okay, well, creation as a concept has a kind of reference, it points to things which are outside of our immediate field of experience. So for example, the idea of that could have happened or the possible thing that didn’t happen or might still yet happen, but has not yet, the idea of there being a kind of reference to something which is outside of the domain of what is currently observable. Whereas if we’re looking at existence, we’re looking at a kind of structure, the idea of the shape of something or the shape of the component parts and how those component parts compose the aggregate object, ie, the degree to which say an apple will be made out of atoms.
Forrest: Now, when we’re looking at say interactions, obviously we’re talking a kind of relationship between the component parts and the possibilities. And so in this particular sense, we can say, well, in the same way that we have a statement as the unit of something, and the apple is being a unit of something, we can say, okay, well, the notion of process, the apple isn’t just a discreet thing, it’s a continual interaction, we can see it, we can touch it and so on and so forth.
Forrest: The idea of an apple as it exists in time, at a certain point it grows on a tree and then it has a change of color. It goes from green to red, for example. And then over time, if we just leave it sitting on a shelf, eventually it will decay. So in effect the notion of the apple as a process and the notion of statements in the context of language have a certain correspondence to one another. In other words, we can think of the apple as being like a paragraph describing its overall transformations, the same way that a unit of text could be treated as a paragraph or a narrative. And the idea of the co-
Forrest: In the idea of the component interactions, the syntax would therefore refer to the existential aspects, i.e., the interactions between the component parts causing in the first case growth and then change in color and then eventually decay. And we’re thinking about that in terms of say, protein interactions or particle physics or something like that.
Forrest: Whereas in the larger sense of the semantic, we’re basically saying, “Okay, well, what is the meaning of that story? What does it in terms of a metaphor or a model or what is the potentialities that can come out of this?” So in this sense, we’re essentially showing that there’s a way to understand the domain of language in terms of the concepts of creation existence interaction. But we’re also showing that we can understand creation existence interaction in terms of the concepts of statement, semantics, and syntax.
Forrest: And this example is a little contrived just to try to show you the way in which that concept of type isomorphism shows up. But the thing is that as you start to do more of these, you start to look at all sorts of different domains of physics and mathematics and human conception in any number of different fields. Then these correspondences start to become stronger and stronger and eventually it allows you to basically understand almost any topic from almost any other topic, as long as you really know what the connections are and you understand at least one of those fields really, really well.
Jim: So let’s go one level deeper here, which is to tie these back to the modalities.
Forrest: The modalities refer to three words, imminent, omniscient, and transcendent. Those three words are abstractions. They refer to types. So in this metaphor before, I basically said I could have an integer or a string or a number, floating point number, and that those represent different types. In this sense, it’s basically like saying, “Okay, well I have a category or a number system that really only has three numbers. It has a zero, a one, and all of the other ones.” So, in effect, there’s a sense here in which once you understand the notion of measurement as basically having a basis, a unit and an extent, then you can pretty much begin to understand the concept of the modalities as a kind of abstraction. So in effect the idea of zero, the idea of one, and the idea of extent themselves having types. The ideas themselves have types.
Forrest: So in this sense, what we’re basically saying is that, in the same sort of way that for numbers, for example, we have a person when they’re in maybe grade school or kindergarten or something like that are being taught how to do counting. So you might put three pencils in their hand and say “Three,” and then you take the pencils out and you put three glasses of water on the bench in front of them, and you say, “Three.” Or you take one of them away and then you point to it and you say, “Two.”
Forrest: And the idea is that eventually the student learns that the notion of number doesn’t refer to pencils or to glasses of water or to people, but that the notion of counts as one and two and three is essentially an abstraction that doesn’t refer to any particular instantiated concept, but refers to a general class, all things which can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with the set that has one in it, one element, and, again, without trying to get into foundational mathematics here or anything like that. But the idea here is that the modalities are the abstractions of what are the most primal concepts of what a concept is.
Jim: I maybe got this wrong, but if I’m right, this will help people understand it. If I’m wrong, it’ll help me understand it. When you gave it these domain primal concepts for the universe and for language, it seems like existence and statement are similar. Can we say those are imminent, is that, are these modalities…
Forrest: You have the right idea, but it happens to be the case that those two would be omniscient. The concept of statements and the concept of interaction would be imminent. And the concept of creation and the concept of semantic would be transcendent.
Jim: I got the pairs right but I got the labels off by one.
Forrest: That’s right. And there’s specific reasons why those particular concepts would be labeled that specific way.
Jim: This was good. This is good. We’re almost there. We can almost go onto the axioms. Let’s play that game of calling out three domain primal concepts, and then labeling them with the modalities for another field or two to help people get an intuition for this.
Forrest: Well, okay. So we mentioned choice and causation earlier. The third concept would be change. So choice, change, and causation is a triple, is a set of three concepts that show up a lot. And the domain that we’re considering here would be the notion of real. And just to sort of really identify these things.
Forrest: So for instance, if we’re looking at choice, change, and causation as being the elements of the domain of what is real, what would be the modalities? Well, the notion of change has the modality of the imminent. The notion of causation has the modality of the omniscient. And the notion of choice has the modality of the transcendent. And again, I’m just declaring this at the moment, but as you get more familiar with these materials, particularly, you get a kind of understanding of what the notions, what the typology notions of imminent, omniscient, and transcendent are actually referring to. So then the correspondence has become a lot easier to pick out, but at the moment, I’m just going to declare them and leave the figuring that part out as something that becomes easier a little later on.
Jim: Yeah. That’s where a lot of examples could be helpful, but we don’t really have time for it today, unfortunately. But this is helpful. It’s helped me get the sense I was on the right track, but wasn’t quite right. So maybe just a short sidebar before we jump to the axioms themselves, a little bit easier to understand than change, choice, and causality are statements, syntax and semantics.
Forrest: We’ve mentioned several. So for instance, we talked about perceiver, perceived, and perceiving. Objective, subjective, and the relationship between objective and subjective. So let’s do those two just because they’re already part of the model. So perceiver would be transcendent, perceived would be omniscient and perceiving would be imminent.
Forrest: Well, this is again, a forward pointer to information we haven’t had yet, but basically we can start to notice a few generalizations, right? So for instance, why is one, one or two, two or three, three? At a certain point, you begin to recognize that there’s a sort of contextualization that happens. And in this particular case, everywhere that we’re talking about a relationship between two other concepts, that’s going to be an imminent concept or where there is essentially zero or a one context to understand that. Whereas if I’m looking at omniscient, I’m looking at something which is essentially one framework removed.
Forrest: So for instance, rather than having the first person perspective of, “In this moment, I’m having a conversation with you and we’re both in this now,” whatever that means, right? The here and now is sort of this first person perspective. Whereas if I were to take a photograph of us having a conversation in a restaurant or something like that, the photograph would be a frozen moment in time. And myself looking at the photograph is not the same as myself sitting in the restaurant, having a conversation with you. So in effect, there’s a framework removed, created by the photograph as an object that I’m perceiving that has content which can define itself a kind of series of relationships or patterns.
Forrest: So in that sense, the notion of omniscient, again, these terms were chosen partly because the English language happens to have them, and they are constructed in the right sort of way to create a metaphor for what we’re getting at with these types. But the idea here is that when we’re looking at, say, a static pattern in space, and we’re looking at it from a framework, which is not those things, but is essentially observing them from a remote position, then that’s going to have a sort of omniscient character, i.e., we know about all of the aspects of that, even though we are not that ourselves.
Forrest: Whereas transcendent is going to be more removed again, it’s going to be another framework removed even more farther away. In other words, transcend is to cross over, it’s a relationship between domains of context altogether. So an example here would be something like, we took a photograph of ourselves while we were walking in Paris. We went on vacation and we had a grand time and we come home and we have this photograph of ourselves in Paris. And then we put it up on the board and we say, “Oh, wow. There’s this other photograph of ourselves at this restaurant.” And you might observe for example, “Hey, in this photograph, your beard was longer than it was over here.” Or, “You were wearing this in this case, and you were wearing that in the other case.”
Forrest: The correspondence between the two photographs and saying that they are of the same person, is something that is not dependent upon the position of the photographs with respect to one another. One photograph could still be in Paris and the other photograph could be somewhere in the United States and the fact of their separation doesn’t change the fact that there is two pictures of one person. And that that person may be at different times, and different spaces, and different situations, but the semantic content of same person is something that is an abstraction that is beyond just the event of my perceiving either photograph as an event in itself.
Forrest: So in effect that notion of same person as a transcendent concept, which is itself not grounded within the same frame of reference as that of myself looking at one of the photographs. And so in that sense, the idea of transcendent is in effect going to have a more remote character than even the concept of omniscient does. And the concept of imminent is going to have a very direct character, very much immediate first-person processed notion.
Forrest: So if we were to, say, think about, going back to a way of thinking about language again, you have first person relationship, you have third person relationship, and you have second person relationship. First person would be imminent. Third person would be omniscient, and second person would be transcendent. And again, these correspondences are things that become more apparent in time. But for example, if knowing that these correspondences of first, second, and third person have imminent, transcendent and omniscient respectively, then in effect, you can look at a particular series of things and you can say, “Okay, well, how does that underlying model help us to, in terms of first, second, and third person, for example, help us to understand, say, a thing like space, time and possibility?”
Forrest: Space would be omniscient. Time would be imminent. And possibility would be transcendent. So in this particular case, if we were to use the metaphor of the photographs, I experienced time in a first person sense. If I’m thinking about space, I’m usually thinking about it as either I’m outside of it, or I’m a member of it, but either way, there’s a notion of that I at least could be outside of it and treating it as a totality. I perceive the photograph as a totality. Whereas if I’m looking at the notion of, say, with possibility, it’s either the case that it’s the same person in two different photographs, or it’s not the same person in two photographs, i.e., what are the facts of the matter with respect to this sort of abstract semantic conception?
Forrest: The notion of possibility is not something I’m ever going to be able to measure directly. It’s only something that I can impute as a kind of semantic notion or a kind of reification within a domain of mathematics. So in effect the abstract world of mathematics is a different kind of space. We’re thinking about Hilbert space and stuff like that as a different kind of space than, say, real space. And that that framework of conception that I’m using to consider real space using Hilbert space is essentially more removed from the here and now in a very, very deep way. So in this sense, we can use the concepts of say, first person, second person, and third person or these metaphors of firsthand experience, photograph of that multiple photographs with correspondences in terms of their content and get a feel for what the notions of imminent, omniscient, and transcendent actually mean.
Jim: This is great. This helped me a lot, understand this. A suggestion I’d give you from a presentation perspective, particularly for kind of tangible kinds of guys like me, who can follow the theory if they have to, but it kind of hurts our head, enumerating, just a shitload of examples would be really handy to put in another document. Here’s imminent, omniscient and transcendent. Here’s 27 domains, here are their three domain primal concepts. And you can induce the meaning of imminent, omniscient, and transcendent by the examples. I would find that helpful and I expect a lot of other people would too.
Forrest: I definitely agree. And the notion here is to have lots of examples. And in the back of the imminent metaphysics book, you’ll see, there’s a section called the table of correspondences, and there’s literally dozens, if not hundreds of examples of triple concepts, where they’re known, and the correspondences that are more commonly identified for them.
Jim: Ah, that’s the downside of using the website instead of the book, because those lists are not on the website.
Forrest: Well, I guess that’s a good excuse for me to find some time to put some up.
Jim: I would find it useful. And I expect other folks who struggle with philosophy like myself, would find that very helpful. Now, finally, we make the turn. Now, interestingly, you also say that these concepts are a little tricky. I’m going to read something from you talking about the modalities. “Therefore, no exact and final closed complete definitions can be given for the modalities, aside from those which are implicit and inherent within the axioms and all of their pure theorems, in whatever language they are expressed. For this reason, the pattern of the meaning of each of the three modalities must often be expressed in a metaphorical character.” I think that caught a good sense of the fact that examples would be great and that these three ideas are kind of hard to nail down with great precision.
Forrest: Yeah, it is. I’m tempted to go into category theory as to explain why that…
Jim: Not today, maybe in the third episode and folks, we have decided we’re going to do a third episode here because we’re not going to get through all this amazing material. So now finally, we go to the axioms. This is now about as deep as it gets in this material, at least that I was able to get to. Number one, axiom number one. The eminent is more fundamental than the omniscient and or the transcendent. The omniscient and the transcendent are conjugate. Unpack that for us.
Forrest: Okay. I’ll probably start with the conjugation thing, since that’s a term most people are not likely to be familiar with, and it’s actually not a common concept in typical parlance, but it is something that shows up in a number of areas of mathematics and physics and other domains as well, but mostly in those places.
Forrest: So for example, if we know about, say, electric fields and magnetic fields, that something that happens in the electric field will induce a phenomenon in the magnetic field. And something happens in a magnetic field will induce a phenomenon in the electric field. Those two domains, the domain of the electric and the domain of the magnetic, the contents of those are in a conjugate relationship with one another. It’s a kind of hyperbolic relationship. Another example would be the relationship between the time domain and the frequency domain.
Forrest: So if I’m doing a 48 transform, for example, I might have a sine wave in the time domain, I’ll end up with a pulse in the frequency domain. Whereas if I have a sine wave in the frequency domain, I’ll end up with a pulse, a single impulse into in the time domain. These are unfortunately abstract examples, but I’m wanting to elucidate a little bit about why the notion of conjugate comes in. In other words, the more that I have of one, the less I’m going to have of the other, but it’s not so much a more or less as it’s a kind of dynamic of one creates the dynamic of the other. So if I have a lot of dynamic and one, it might show up in a localized way in the other. Or vice versa.
Jim: Maybe, the language example here.
Forrest: Well, in this case, the relationship between syntax and semantics. If I spend a whole lot of effort in designing a language, for example, say I was to create a language, and I spent most of my time thinking about the semantic aspects. I might not have spent that much time thinking about the syntactical ones. Or I might have a harder time constructing a consistent syntax for all of the different things that I can refer to in the real world.
Forrest: Whereas if I spend a lot more time thinking about the syntax, I might come up with this really elegant structure, but then discover that when I try to create semantic relationships to things in the real world, that I actually have a hard time because the real world is not regular in the same way that the syntax is regular. So in effect, there’s a kind of a trade-off involved. If I basically spend a lot of time on the structure side of things, I might not get the correspondences right. Whereas if I spend a lot of time in the correspondences, I’m going to have lots of examples or exceptions in the structure side of things.
Forrest: So in this sense we’re observing that there’s a kind of general pattern, that in all the cases where we have a domain and we identify which of the concepts at the foundation of a domain have the omniscient character and which other one has the transcendent character, that we’re going to notice this sort of reciprocal relationship in the degree of definition that these concepts have with respect to one another.
Forrest: So, in other words, if I spend a lot of time being really, really clear about the definition of one and its use in the domain, I might not have as clear a notion as to what the definition of the other one is going to be, but that any degree of clarity that I have about the two of the concepts is in effect, going to be created in terms of this relational concept that effectively is this notion of conjugation.
Forrest: So that relational concept itself is the third concept. It’s in this case, the imminent concept. The idea is that the reason of conjugation is one which is itself, a entity within the domain. It’s a, we used the word process earlier, but if I really want to understand, say the structure of matter in space, I need to look at the relationship between possibility and probability. Whereas if I really want to understand the relationships between what the probabilities are over the things that are possible, then I’m going to define those in terms of patterns of mass in space.
Forrest: And we see this in things like the shorting error equation and the Dirac equation, and so on. So in effect, what we’re getting to here is the idea that the relationship between, say, the observable world and the conceptual world of the evolution of say a quantum mechanical system is effectively going to be more primal than the real world or i.e., the actual observations that we make as a concept versus the potential observations that we could make and the dynamics of those potentials.
Forrest: This is as you may have noticed a really mind-bending concept. But on the other hand, when we look at what is it that these theories of physics and things like that are talking about, again, we’re looking at signals, we’re looking at measurements, we’re looking at a kind of causal process. And the degree to which say antecedents allows to predict consequences is a kind of thing. The antecedents would be omniscient. The consequences would be transcendent. And the notion of causation itself would be imminent, would be the idea of process. And so in effect, the notion of axiom one is like a hyper generalization of these fundamental dynamics of the relationship between concepts as they occur in the foundation of domains.
Jim: Again, let’s tie this back off with the language example, if statement is the eminent. And so, in what sense is statement more fundamental than syntax and semantics?
Forrest: There’s a trivial way to describe this, which is to say, I can’t talk about semantics, and I can’t talk about syntax without also making use of statements. In a certain sense the idea is that in one sense, we could be talking about language in the sense of defining it or creating it or using it. And in another sense, we could be looking at the conceptual relationships between these concepts, both in practice and in theory.
Forrest: So in effect, there’s an idea here that when we look at what is the unit of meaningfulness. Language is mostly going to be important to us, to the degree that it provides for communication, i.e., that meaningful ideas are exchanged through a kind of conversational process. And that language effectively as an enablement of that conversational process is effectively going to be, the notion of the unit of meaningfulness is at some point going to become apparent.
Forrest: So in effect, the idea of semantic is essentially meaningfulness in the sense of reference. And the notion of syntax would be to create meaningfulness by starting with component meaningfulness, as i.e., words and assembling them into statements. But the interesting thing to note here is that to even think about words as being meaningful, I have to use statements to do so. So in other words, a definition of a term is itself a kind of statement to say, this word is defined as being this is to actually have a subject, a verb, and and object. So, in a sense, the idea of statement as the unit of meaningfulness is becoming apparent and the notion of the process of having a dictionary at all.
Jim: Mm. Yeah, that’s very good. That’s very, very tangible. I like that a lot. I think it gives me an intuitive sense that this makes at least some kind of sense. Now let’s go on to axiom two. This is the real head hurter. I’m still not clear on this whole bit I’ll tell you that. So we’re going to have to work on this a little bit. Do you have it off of your tongue because I have it written down here. I can read it off.
Forrest: Yeah, I can read them off. I know them so well, it’s by heart. “A class of the transcendent precedes an instance of the imminent, a class of the imminent precedes an instance of the omniscient, and a class of the omniscient precedes an instance of the imminent.”
Jim: What the hell does that mean?
Forrest: Well, a lot of things. I will preface this also by saying that understanding axiom two is probably one of the single most difficult aspects of this metaphysics. So don’t hold yourself to the fire trying to understand it in one pass. But the idea here is that if we were to look at the notion of process and really try to understand what process is as a dynamic in the first person sense.
Forrest: So, first of all, in order to make the transition from axiom one to axiom two, we have to go from the domain of theory to the domain of practice. And that basically means that there’s going to be at least as far as ourselves, you and I are both fairly intellectual people so we tend to think in terms of theories, we think in terms of models or a hypotheses, or heuristics and things like that. But the idea is, is that that’s all still third person perspective.
Forrest: To get to the notion of process, I can’t think of it in terms of the third person. I have to think about it in terms of the first person. So there’s going to be a little bit of a shift in terms of how this needs to be described. But to give some notion of this so that you have at least a feel for it, let’s go back to the notion of choice, since you asked about that earlier. In order to have a choice, I need three things. I need a range of things to choose from, an actual selection event, and a consequence. Now, on one hand, I could basically be saying, “Okay, well, we’re looking at this in an axiom three sort of way.” I said, in order to consider choice as a concept, I needed to consider a range of potentials, a selection, and a consequence, i.e., three things that are distinct and separable and not interchangeable.
Forrest: Can we validate that? Well, we can say to some extent that if I don’t have a range of things to choose from, then it’s not a choice. If I don’t actually make the selection, then I didn’t actually choose. And if I can’t distinguish between having chosen and not having chosen, then I also don’t have a choice. There needs to be, there’s this thing called principle of identity, that which is indistinguishable must be the same. So I need to be able to distinguish between a choice and a non choice. So if there’s no consequence, if there’s essentially something where the choice becomes irreversible, i.e., that the outcomes are manifest in the real world in a way that I can’t completely undo, then to some extent, the choices completed it’s now a…
Forrest: …Extent the choice is completed. It’s now an event that has happened. So in effect, if I could undo it, and I wouldn’t be able to tell whether that event occurred or not. So there needs to be a consequence in a kind of indelible way in order for the choice to actually be a choice. So you see this relationship between choice, change and causation coming up, and that the notion of consequence, the notion of change, i.e. the selection, is also as much a part of the notion of choice. And this goes back to the inseparability of those three concepts. But anyways, let’s get back to the notion of choice itself. So for example, I’m sitting here today and tonight my partner could come back and I could decide to have dinner with her or we could go out to see a movie, although obviously in COVID, that’s not so likely, or we could take a walk or we could stay home and just read a book.
Forrest: And the notion here of those are the potentials that I could select from, at some point or another, there could actually be a selection I could say to her, “Hey, I have a preference to this,” and we can negotiate a little bit, but maybe I just, from my own part, decide to do one of those things. And having made the selection, I decide to stay home and read a book. There’s an experience that I had and a whole lot of other things that have changed. I might know something different about the world, if that book happens to be non-fiction or if I had some dream as a result of a narrative that was told to me. There’s going to be an ongoing series of future events that are in a sense contingent upon the act of that choice.
Forrest: So what we’re thinking about here is the actual process. It’s the flow from probability and possibility, a selection that makes one of those possible things, presumably one of the more probable ones, but not necessarily so, actual. And then the actuality having essentially a consequence in the world, i.e. that the actuality becomes objective. So in effect, when we’re looking at choice, we’re looking at something which is roughly analogous to creation itself. There’s an emergence that goes from the potential to the actual. And so if we were to go back and again, we can do these correspondences now that insofar as the notion of choice changing causation is the basis of the real. Then we can basically say, well, to the extent that we regard the universe as being real, then the notion of choice connects to the notion of creation as the transcendence. The notion of change connects to the notion of interaction as the immanent, and the notion of causation and consequence connects to the notion of existence as omniscient.
Forrest: And if you think about this, it actually makes a lot of sense. You begin to all of a sudden be able to understand the notion of creation, existence, interaction in terms of the concepts of choice, change, and causation, or vice versa. You can understand choice, change, and causation in terms of creation, existence, and interaction. Now, the dynamic here is the important part though. So rather than thinking about the correspondences under a type isomorphism basis, the real notion here is that the idea of going from potentiality to actuality is a kind of process. It has a kind of emergence. There’s an event of measurement, or there’s an event of selection. And so in one sense, the measurement could be a notion of a flow from the objective to the subjective, whereas the notion of choice would be a notion of flow from the subjective towards the objective.
Forrest: And again, these kinds of correspondences allow us to clarify these concepts quite well. So in effect, when we’re thinking about the notion of choice, again, as I’ve described it here as a metaphor of a range of potentials, a selection event and a consequence, that it’s not the abstract notion of, I could choose these things. It is the actual embodiment of I make this selection right now. So in this specific moment, I’m choosing the words that I’m going to speak next. And to some extent, I don’t necessarily know what I’m going to say. The instant before I say it, I have a general sense of what it is that is important to communicate. I have a propensity, I have this huge field of experience and knowledge that informs my speaking. And I more or less just trust that one I’m going to say is going to be the right and appropriate thing so that you would be able to understand.
Forrest: And the fact of you’re in this moment, hearing these particular things, is something which is to some extent, indelible. I can’t erase your memories. I can’t undo a particular thing. Occasionally I might say something which is wrong, or just inappropriate or whatever, or mistake, just flat out I didn’t mean that. And at that point, I have to do a kind of damage control and hope that people will be forgiving of my errors. So in this sense, the idea of in the process of communication, that there’s this ongoing sequence of choices, I can pick any word out of the English language, I can assemble any statements that I can conceive of, and then I can speak them. And then the action of speaking them becomes essentially the way in which the manifest world goes through a dynamic of again, the possible things I could have said into the actual things that make it to this recording.
Jim: Okay. Well, that helps a bit. I assume it’s no coincidence that you use the words, class and instance, which are seemingly being used in ways that are at least similar to the way they’re used in object oriented programming.
Forrest: Let’s make the connection. So taking choice, in relationship between choice, change and causation choice is transcendent. But then choice has these three components, a range of potentials, a selection and a consequence. The range of potentials is multiple. So we’re basically saying that there’s a concept, a class of potentials, right? The idea of I could choose this, I could choose that, I could choose this other thing. Going to a movie is an instance of something I could do. Reading a book as an instance of something I can do. But the class is I could choose one of these things.
Jim: So it’s the class of choice. But once you actually collapse it, it becomes an instance of the immanent. Now of course, this is a little confusing because in object-oriented programming, when you create an instance from a class, it’s an instance of the same class.
Forrest: Well, in this particular case, there is a difference. So we’ve gone from the class of the transcendent to an instance of the immanent. So the instance refers to the selection and the class refers to the potentialities that I could choose from. So I go from transcendent to immanent, the transcendent being the class and the immanent being the instance of the selection. Now what’s interesting here is that the notion of consequence is itself not contingent upon any single choice, but is actually contingent upon a whole series of choices. So for instance, for me to choose to stay home and read a book, it isn’t a nuclear choice. There’s actually a whole bunch of component choices. So for example, I have to pick which book I’m going to read. I pick which chair I’m going to sit on, which side of the house, or what time of day, whether or not I wrap myself in a blanket because it’s chilly or whatnot.
Forrest: There’s what page I go to, whether I’m going to read fast or slow. There’s a hundred little choices. In fact, every muscle motion that I make to turn a page, for example, it isn’t just, I’m going to turn this page now. It’s a choreography, a symphony of neural signals activating muscles in a particular sequence and pattern so that my body and motion of bones is such that the mechanical action of my hand being in the right place to grab the page and to turn it happens. So when we’re looking at consequences, we’re actually saying that there is a multiplicity of choices. Every single one of these details has to, in effect be selected, right? Which chair, which book and so on, all of these things are necessary in order for there to be consequence of, I had the experience of reading a book.
Forrest: So by the time I go to bed and the consequences are showing up, then in effect, there’s again, this multiplicity relationship, a class of the immanent, a class of selections, results in a singularity of consequence, i.e. I go from a class of the immanent to an instance of the omniscient. I have a memory of reading a book and of the narrative that if it was fiction or something that I learned and therefore a change in the state of myself, if it’s nonfiction. And in this sense, we’re basically saying, okay, we now have this idea that for any consequent, if we’re looking at causality, causality is never from a single antecedent to a single consequent. It’s always a plurality of antecedents to a plurality of consequence. And in effect the idea of the universe, as essentially having this sort of relationship of many to one as a way of understanding the transform of causation.
Forrest: So in effect, there’s a idea here of that if I’m going to even think about, like to go all the way around. So Axiom tubes, you notice, is a sort of ring. It goes from transcendent to immanent to omniscient, and then back to transcendent again. So what does it mean for me to basically have the notion that I could choose to read a book? Well, that potentiality is itself contingent upon a whole lot of consequences from all sorts of things. So for instance, to have that as an option, I have to actually own a book. Presumably, I need a house and a chair to sit on, or at least some place that is at least not so loud or there’s a huge number of things that are assumed. I’m basically assuming that I’ve learned the English language and that I can actually see the typeface on the page, that it’s not raining on my book at the time that I’m reading it or any number of other things that would allow me to understand and actually appreciate the content. I have time to read it and so on.
Forrest: So in a sense, the idea of having the possibility of reading or of going to a restaurant or eating at home, or seeing a movie or any of the other things that I could choose to do in a given night, each one of those possibilities as a single possibility is contingent upon a multiplicity of prior consequences, prior outcomes. So in a sense, we have this flow of plural to singular, plural to singular, plural to singular, as we go around this dynamic of this ongoing process of making choices.
Jim: Okay, now I got it a little bit better. I think my problem was I was leaning too heavily on the object oriented programming metaphor. And that was what was throwing me off because the moving from class of omniscient to instance of transcendent, what the hell does that mean in terms of object oriented programming. But now the way you’ve explained it this way, it makes a lot more sense. So I wouldn’t say I have mastered this one, but I am on the road.
Forrest: Well if you’re wanting to use computer science metaphors, we can look at say, I author something in source code, I compile the source code and then the source code can then run and can provide the capacity as a running program to be an editor, to edit more source code, which I can then compile and then can run to be a compiler, which I can then use as well process itself. So for instance, in this case, the modalities would be shifted a little bit. So yeah, editing source code on a computer is essentially an omniscient operation. And when I compile the code, the compiler is essentially executing a transcendent process. It’s effectively moving things from the source code domain to the runtime domain or the executable domain, i.e. its machine code and a byte code or something like that, that the computer can actually run with an interpreter, or on a CPU or something like that.
Forrest: And then when it’s in that domain and can actually be launched as a process, the process itself is essentially a different world than the world of the source code. So that’s why we think of the compiler as being a transcendent operator. It’s going from the world of source to the world of bits and bytes in the machine, as electron patterns and a physical wiring substrates. So in effect, there’s a series of events that are involved in that transformation, but then once it is in the runtime, there’s a series of patterns that emerge there that a result in say a screen that I can use as an editor to write more source code on. So in this sense, we see a kind of Axiom II dynamic, but it isn’t going to be understood purely within the concepts of say the typology within the language of the source code itself.
Forrest: And it won’t be understood within the typology of the compiler, as the process itself, or even as a typology within the runtime itself, as a process executing on that machine, creating the illusion of World of Warcraft as a game or other things like that. So in effect, what we’re seeing here is that in order to understand Axiom II, we have to actually think in terms of multiple overlapped metaphors, that cross domain relationships in idiosyncratic ways, and that manner of understanding that gives us a deep insight into the fundamental nature of process itself as a concept.
Forrest: And I suppose I should actually give a little bit of a warning here, because the thing about these things, this metaphysics and effect, I usually issue this disclaimer before getting into this material, but at this point it’s unfortunately a little too late. But the idea here is that when you’re understanding this metaphysics at first, it’s treated as a theory, as a model, as a sort of description of how things might be conceived of. But once you begin to understand Axiom II directly, and you begin to understand the process, the process itself. You begin to recognize that this isn’t something which is a theory anymore. It’s something about the relationship between your personal subjective and the actual objective of the world. And it moves from the domain of just epistemology into an actual firsthand ontological experience. And if you happen to be too firmly reified in say just a realist perspective, the experience can be a little bit uncomfortable. So again, there’s a little bit of a disclaimer with that.
Jim: I’m a realist, but I haven’t found it uncomfortable, just confusing. But now I’m getting it clear, and that helps. So let’s move on from Axiom II, which it was clear to me it was going to take the longest amount of time because it was the, I’m not sure if it’s the deepest, but it had the most moving parts. The last one, much simpler in its statement. Probably had some great depths, but probably doesn’t require so much explication. So the third Axiom is the class’s instances of the immanent, omniscient and transcendent are distinct inseparable and non-interchangeable.
Forrest: Yes. So we actually covered this a bit earlier when we were describing, say the degree to which you can’t really understand any one of the fundamental concepts of a domain without actually implying, or at least incorporating some understanding or some assumption of the other two. So for example, when we were looking at creation, existence, interaction, and we were basically saying, well, I can’t really understand the notion of universe without understanding all three of these concepts, but it’s also the case that I can’t understand any one of those three of those concepts without understanding the other two of those concepts. So in effect, the idea of foundational triplication and the notion of Axiom 3 are very closely aligned.
Forrest: The concept that may be a little trickier that is maybe I guess, well, we’ve gone and we’ve thought about this as a kind of metaphysics. And we’ve shown that there are essentially three modalities and I’ve talked about three axioms. It turns out that there’s a mapping between the modalities and the axioms themselves. So in effect, there’s a kind of reification that can occur in so far as the metaphysics can be self-describing through the connection of the axioms and the modalities.
Forrest: And this is probably one of the single most important aspects of this particular theory of conception, as anything that is possible to know. It has been, in historical terms, treated as essentially a criteria of correctness, or at least a criteria of quality for a system of metaphysics to be able to describe itself. What’s interesting about this particular thing is that it is not only the case that the metaphysics can describe itself, but through the dynamic of Axiom II, it can describe the process of describing itself. In so far as description is a process, the same way that choice is a process, or causation is a process or change is a process. That in effect we can say, when we’re looking at the metaphysics, it’s not only the case that it can describe itself in theory, or that the theory can be self-referential, but that the closure of the theory closes over itself at a process and ontological level, rather than just at an epistemic one.
Forrest: What this essentially means is that in the same way that we can consider the relationship between realism and idealism as being defined in terms of the axioms and the modalities and the dynamics of those things, right? If we’re looking at originally this being an inquiry of the relationship between the subjective and the objective and that the axioms and the modalities are closing over the relationship, that insofar as that relationship is fundamental to both the subjective and the objective. The axioms and modalities close over the subjective and the objective inclusively. So in this particular sense, the process of the description, the metaphysics of itself ends up including the describer as well as the thing described, and obviously the process of that description. This is one of the deeper aspects of the metaphysics.
Jim: Yeah. See, I’m not there yet, but I will keep that in mind as I continue to dig. So the last thing we’re going to talk about today, and this is the one that I haven’t a clue what it’s about, and that is that what you just alluded to a minute ago, which is the association of a modality to each Axiom. You say that Axiom I has the nature of the omniscient modality. Axiom II has the nature of the immanent modality and Axiom III has the nature of the transcendent modality. Now I understand what those words mean. I even have a little bit of a sense from reading and now doing this work here with you. I will have to admit, those three sentences have me scratching my head. Tell me what they mean.
Forrest: When we think about theory as a process like a mathematical theory, or an idea of patterns in space, the narrative is something that exists in a domain that’s different than the perceiver. Usually there’s, if I’m describing a field of mathematics, I can treat it as a object of my perception. I am not the mathematics myself. I am merely the mathematician. And in this specific sense, when we say that one term is defined in terms of other terms, we are neither the term defining nor the term being defined. We might express the definition as a thing, but the definition can be written down, put in a book, the book can be closed and stuck on a shelf and is going to sit there as a static thing for however long until someone else picks the book up and reads it.
Forrest: So in this particular sense, the statement on the page, it’s one framework removed much the same way that what if I’m looking at a photograph, I’m not the contents of the photograph. I see the whole photograph from a framework that is different than firsthand perspective of the people that are being photographed at the time the photograph was taken. So in this particular sense, Axiom I in so far as talking about definitions, or essentially the relationships between concepts, it’s looking at it from a framework removed perspective. So therefore Axiom I has, as a statement, the character of the omniscient with respect to Axiom II, which is process. And Axiom III, which is this, again, a transcendent notion. It’s an altogether other than notion.
Forrest: So in effect, when we’re looking at Axiom I, we’re basically saying, “Okay, what is the structure of the concepts in the domain? What is the theory of their relationships?” Whereas when we’re looking at Axiom II, as I mentioned before, in so far as it’s processed, it’s not something that I can think about from a theoretical perspective. I can’t think about it in terms of a third person perspective as I can with Axiom I. I have to think about it in terms of a first person perspective. Choosing is a process that actually involves a subjective and not someone else’s subjective, but my personal subjective. So in effect, for every person that’s conceiving of these things, they are themselves in a first person relationship with the universe. They are having perceptions and expressions. They are in that moment in a first person perspective. And if we were trying to characterize the nature of that process, we’re going to talk about it in terms of Axiom II dynamics.
Forrest: So in effect, there’s a sort of transformation between the notion of theory and practice, in so far as, well, there’s this quip in theory, theory and practice are the same. And in practice, theory and practice are different. So how are we to make an understanding of this? How are we to conceive of both of these things as being practically and evidentially true, right? And in a sense, this is a little bit of what the Axioms themselves are, that the notion that in theory, that theory and practice are the same is a bit like an Axiom I way of thinking about the world. Whereas the firsthand experience of the practice, the actual action of being in the shop and doing something where you notice, well the theory said the measurement was going to be this, but when I actually check it with my calipers, it turns out to be this other thing, it’s a little off. Maybe the person that was cutting the part wasn’t quite exact.
Forrest: Nonetheless, the idea here is that when we’re trying to do something in the real world, we occasionally have to account for the fact that theory doesn’t predict everything perfectly, which we already knew to be a case. There’s enough randomness in the universe that some things don’t go as planned. Plans are not always going to happen exactly as they are conceived to. In fact, they almost never do. So in effect, there’s this firsthand experience, which is described by Axiom II. And then we can say, okay, well, if the third person perspective is Axiom I, and the first person perspective is Axiom II, then obviously the remaining case of the second person relationship is Axiom III.
Forrest: Well, in one sense, we could think of Axiom III as being the basis of the mediation between Axiom I and II, i.e. what is it that allows us to have a concept that every world is going to have this primacy, that there are certain concepts are going to have primacy and that this structure of this primacy is in relationship to other worlds, which also have fundamental concepts on the structure of privacy that happens to be the same one.
Forrest: So in effect, it’s the soundness relationship. It’s basically saying that the foundation of this domain and the foundation of this domain, this other domain, are in a kind of peerage relationship with one another. So when we describe, say the relationship between choice, change and causation or statements, semantics and syntax, and then we mention things about say universe is having creation, existence, and interaction, and we can say, okay, well, the patterns of the relationships between those three concepts in each of those three cases align with one another in a sort of peerage way, that there’s no fundamental language, there’s no single embedding context in which all of these contexts are embedded. But that we can understand each of these embedding contexts by understanding other embedding contexts, which have been brought into relationship with that.
Forrest: So in effect, there is a second person relationship whereas when we say second person, we’re basically saying it’s like a conversation between one person and another in a generalized way. So in this specific sense, the three axioms naturally corresponds to the third person, first person, second person sort of perspectives. And in that way, they also correspond to Axiom I being omniscient, Axiom II being immanent and Axiom III being transcendent.
Jim: That works. I got it. That’s good. Okay, good. Let’s wrap it there. I think we covered a tremendous amount of material and pretty good depth here’s.
Forrest: Just one last little piece just to truly tie it off.
Jim: All right, one last word. Last paragraph, in your case.
Forrest: Well, tiny, tiny paragraph. To the extent that the axioms are now in a one-to-one correspondence with the modalities, the idea here is that if I have a correspondence between the axioms and the modalities, and insofar as the axioms are describing a relationship between the three modalities, then the axioms can describe their own relationships. In effect, the axioms can describe the pattern using the pattern. And this is a sense of which the axioms can describe themselves.
Jim: I think that will be the final word. This has been really wonderful, a really deep dive. It’s been great to have you on. I look forward to having you back next time.
Forrest: Glad to be here. Thank you so much for your patience and a willingness to endure all that.
Jim: It was fun, actually. Believe it or not, I enjoy this kind of stuff.
Forrest: Well, that’s super cool. I’m glad. I definitely have enjoyed speaking with you and have gotten to really appreciate your sensibilities.
Production services and audio editing by Jared Janes Consulting. Music by Tom Muller at modernspacemusic.com.