The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Brendan Graham Dempsey. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim Rutt: Lately, several folks have asked me, so, Jim, what’s your worldview? And being kind of a demure and quiet guy, I didn’t feel like just coming in and bloviating. So keeping with our interview format, I asked my friend Brendan Graham Dempsey to guest host today’s episode with me as the guest. Brendan has been on the show before both as a guest and as a guest host and has thought a lot about the question of worldviews. Indeed, a conversation with him on the topic was one of the inspirations for the worldview series.
Brendan, tell the crowd a little about who you are and what you do, and then let’s get down to it.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Sounds good. Thanks for the invitation to come back, and I’m looking forward to this. Yeah. I study worldviews essentially, and I study meaning making. I’m a director of research at the Institute of Applied Metatheory, and we have a dedicated worldview studies initiative and are also doing work in terms of meaning making and faith development that is really all about worldviews.
I’m working with my colleague there, Nick Hedland, on actually writing really extensive paper on the nature of worldviews and synthesizing a lot of the literature on that. So very steeped in worldviews. I’ve been enjoying your series with folks. And, yeah, this seemed like a really fun opportunity to put you in the hot seat.
Jim Rutt: Have at it.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Great. Well, so maybe I’ll just contextualize this a little bit. You’ve been doing your own kind of interview format and formula. What we’re going to do here is what’s called a faith development interview. And before you get your metaphysical pistol out at the word faith, I’ll clarify that faith here just means essentially meaning.
This comes from the tradition of faith development research by James Fowler. And what he meant by faith was something like, you know, how we situate ourselves relative to matters of ultimate concern and meaning and purpose in life. So in his faith development theory and in this interview that was the instrument for that, these are questions that probe that construct of faith as meaning and purpose.
And so there’s already kind of a set 25 question interview here ready to go. And I’m excited about this because I’m actually doing research into faith development. I’ve been doing a lot of scoring of these, and so this is an exciting opportunity to do this with you. So, yeah, that being said and all that out of the way, let’s just dive into it.
This interview has a couple of sections. There’s a life review at the beginning, gets into questions of relationships, and then the real heart of it is the present values and commitments section and religion and worldview. So the first question, Jim, is, question one, reflecting on your life thus far, identify its major chapters. And kind of sub question is if you were to think about your life as a book, how would you name the different chapters?
Jim Rutt: All right. I guess the first part would be growing up, you know, from two where we moved to where I grew up to going off to college. Then I’d say college years and a few years thereafter. Then I’d say work for another 25 years. Then I’d say complexity guy, and then Game B guy. And then I would say add on to Game B guy, podcaster guy.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: All right. That sounds good. And another kind of follow-up there is, are there any marker events that stand out as especially important in there?
Jim Rutt: You know, there were, you know, obviously events,
Jim Rutt: in each of those. You know, the one in, in growing up was when I about halfway through age 11 when I had the epiphany that religion was bulk, basically. It was very fundamental to who I am and has, only some nuances been added to that, but not a whole lot. In the young adult phase, meeting my wife was huge, probably the most important thing that happened to me in my whole life. So that was cool. You know, making my first fuck you money, that was probably the most important thing in my business career. You know, fortunately, we’ve always lived cheap, so it didn’t take that much to have minimal fuck you money, which was always a great weapon in my later stages of my career because, yeah, I could be as much of an asshole as I wanted. If somebody wanted to fire me, go right ahead. Nobody ever did. They never had the nerve. I’m sure they thought about it, though.
And then during my business career, when I was absolutely in the belly of the beast, when I was a senior executive at a multibillion dollar multinational, I had another epiphany, which is exponential growth on a finite planet is a bad idea in the long term. And, I got pulled into the sustainability perspective initially. And then I had another very closely related thought that our economic system was the driver of this evil, and in particular, the way advertising creates needs and status hierarchies and things of that sort.
Next, towards the end of my working days and then into my ten years at Santa Fe Institute becoming complexity guy, understanding that we are grossly overconfident in how much we know and how much we can control the unfolding of the universe, that there are a number of aspects about the nature of the universe, its emergent aspects, deterministic chaos, a bunch of other reasons. We must have considerable humility about what we know and what we can do. And in many cases, we may never know the answer to certain questions, call it the limits of knowledge.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: And then game b world was, hey, it’s possible to change all this.
Jim Rutt: Awesome. Yeah. Right. Thorough. And, anticipating things to come, are there past relationships that have been important to your development as a person?
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Oh, yeah. Certainly, my parents, they were really good. They came from, you know, real low income, low socioeconomic status folks. My mother, grew up on a beat ass tenant farm in Northern Minnesota with no electricity, no running water, and no central heat. Left home when she was 14. My father dropped out of high school when he was 15 when his father died in the depths of the depression, and they fell from lower middle class into impoverished. But they did really well in life. My dad became a cop when they moved to a post World War Two suburbs. I’d say they had amazingly good values, which they passed on to us.
In third grade, I became friends with a new kid who had just moved to our school. And, unlike most of the people in our neighborhood who were in our area who were upper working class or lower middle class, by weird coincidence, mostly because his father was a kook, his father was a PhD physicist and his mother, a master’s in mathematics. And I got exposed to a whole another way of thinking about the world, and that was extraordinarily helpful.
Had a couple of good high school teachers, made some good friends in college, one of whom in particular opened my mind up to literary fiction in a broader way of, kinds of music, which are still amongst my most favorite music, of outlaw country, et cetera. One of my early bosses was a great guy. In fact, had dinner with him Monday night, a couple nights ago, along with some of our other a couple other guys from our publishing company way back there in the seventies. And he taught me you could be a hard ass businessman and an absolutely ethical guy. That was that was kind of cool. And of course, I mentioned before, nothing compares to my wife who’s been just a monster of an influence on me. God knows what will become of me if I hadn’t met her when I was 22.
Jim Rutt: All right. Question three. Do you recall any changes would be the major point here? Changes in relationships that have had a significant impact on your life or your way of thinking about things? And some of them you’ve already alluded to already, but anything else that you’d like to add?
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Not really. No. Because most most of them were positive. I can’t say I had too many negative relationship things in my life.
Jim Rutt: Okay. Cool. This gets a little bit more at the worldview question. In particular, question four, how has your worldview changed across your life chapters? Now a little follow-up there. How has this affected your image of God or of the divine or what is holy to you?
Brendan Graham Dempsey: This gets a little bit more at the worldview question. In particular, question four, how has your worldview changed across your life chapters? Now a little follow-up there. How has this affected your image of God or of the divine or what is holy to you?
Jim Rutt: Well, you know, obviously, that one pivot point is key to that. When I was a kid, I was raised a Catholic. My father was a Catholic, sort of devout, but his mother was a “go to mass every day” Catholic, as was one of his sisters. And so there was a lot of Catholicism on that side of the family. My mother was a deist. She, you know, basically a Voltairian, Jeffersonian deist. She believed there was something that created the universe, but basically left shit alone afterwards. But she had agreed to raise the kids as Catholics, as was required in those days for a so-called mixed marriage in 1950. And she did take it seriously. As I said, she was a highly ethical and efficacious person. So she made sure we went to Sunday school, which the Catholics called CCD, and went to mass most Sundays.
And I actually kind of got into it. And I would say in fourth grade, we had a CCD teacher who had a significant influence on me, Mr. McMillan. And this was right after Vatican Two, where Catholics became encouraged to read the Bible. Prior to that, they were strongly discouraged. Yeah. That’s what you got priests for. Don’t be reading that shit yourself and coming up with screwball ideas. But Mr. McMillan actually took Vatican Two really seriously. Had us all buy Bibles—of course, the official Catholic translation, none of this goddamn King James Bible or anything. And what was it called? The Douay translation, something like that. And it wasn’t bad. Wasn’t as good as the King James, but it was all right. Not my favorite, the NIV. That’s the one I use when I’m doing any research.
But anyway, you know, he encouraged us to read the Old Testament. I read the whole Old Testament relatively rapidly. I fell into all these screwy stories and amazing density of the storytelling and how amazingly honest the Jews were about their own failings and all this sort of stuff. Because, oh yeah, we fuck God over. Oh, he smote our ass again. Like, I mean, that’s the leitmotif of the Old Testament. You know, they get the divine instruction for a while. They’re good. And then they go off in some harebrained direction. Then God whacks their ass. And then they come back to following the rules for a while. But the fact that they were just so honest about it all was really great.
So I kind of fell into it. As I described to people subsequently, I’m really a sucker for intricate storytelling in the same way I love the Lord of the Rings. Read it 39 times, most recently about two months ago. And while the Lord of the Rings is nowhere near as detailed and intricate as the Old Testament, it has that same kind of cool depth to it. So I was really quite into the Old Testament. New Testament, I read that too, and it goes, all right. That’s nowhere near as cool from a literary perspective, but, hey, you know, now I know a little bit more about the story about JC and the gang and what have you.
And I believed it more or less, but I was also always into science from a very young age, five or six. And I read almost exclusively science other than, you know, a little of this, a little of that, but that was most of it. And for a long while, I didn’t see any particular contradiction between science and religion. And in fact, that wasn’t actually what caused my fallout from religion, though it did cause me, I think, to at least question it.
And so when I was 11, in the summer between sixth and seventh grade—that was a big time in our style because we went to elementary school through sixth grade and then you started in junior high, which was way too much like high school, as it turned out. They gave you way too much freedom way too early. And we misused it tremendously. But anyway, this is a considerable growing up period, supposedly, back in the day.
So that summer I went to the county library several times and decided I was going to research religion, find out what this is about. And I wish I could recall the name of it, but it was a book about three inches thick with a blue cover, light blue cover, which was kept in the reference section of the library. Couldn’t check it out. And it was a book about all the religions of the world. Well, actually, it wasn’t obviously all of them, but it was a few hundred. You know, page, page and a half glosses on them. Well, I didn’t read the whole book, but I read a good chunk of it, maybe half. And then I marked down some of the more well-known religions to go research in more depth. I read detailed articles from two encyclopedias so I’d have some parallax on them. And I go, okay, this is interesting.
And then walking out of the library one day, it was, you know, an epiphany from above, which said, religion is obviously bunk, was created by humans for the purposes of controlling other humans. How could there be so many of them and them be so entirely different? And even three close ones—one of the little studies I did was Presbyterianism, Methodism, and Catholicism. And my takeaway was the Presbyterians believed in predestination. The Catholics believed in magic, but no predestination. And the Methodists didn’t believe in magic or predestination. I go, so these are considered neighbor religions, and yet they have three separate universes. You know, they couldn’t exist in each other’s universe and be true.
The only change I’ve had in that view since when I was 11 is I no longer believe that religions were founded to control people, but rather were founded typically by insane people who were very charismatic. And in fact, the ones that survived, the ones we’ve ever heard of, are probably one in a hundred at best. There’s always been ravers everywhere. There were a hundred people claiming to be the Messiah at the time of Jesus. But Jesus happened to be, you know, an above-average raver, and probably a lot of it was pure luck. And his story was the one that, you know, even as late as 100 AD, there were only a thousand Christians. So it was a near-run thing that Christianity came on, you know, having Saint Paul, the patron saint of aluminum siding salesmen, as the number one disciple—certainly a lucky break.
But later, of course, Christianity got captured by the powers that be, the Roman Empire first, and then lots of other entities, and became a really powerful way to control people. I would say the same is true for Islam. I would say Hinduism, Buddhism. You go down all the major religions and probably a charismatic leader by one in a hundred or one in a thousand chance survived, and then the powers that be took it over.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Wow. Comprehensive. A quick follow-up.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: though, clearly, there’s much to discuss on this, but we’ll also come back to this in future sections.
Jim Rutt: So there was this question about your image of God or the divine or what is holy to you. You can interpret that in those various ways. The last follow-up here is, what does it mean to you now? I’ve come to develop with some input from and encouragement from friends as to use the word sacred again, which I used to go, don’t say that word around me. That’s the S word. Right? That and spirituality. Right? Both of them S words.
But now I think there is something that we can usefully say about the sacred, and that is those parts of our experience in the universe, which are so high dimensional that they’re at least at our current level of intellect, science, math, et cetera, we really can’t say all that much about. You know, for instance, why does going into mature Eastern hardwood forest seem so amazing? Right? You know, I spent a fair amount of time in the forest. Have a farm, which is about 60 percent relatively mature Eastern hardwood forest. Very few things light me up, like just wandering around in there. There’s no simple way to work your way through that mathematically or scientifically. So for now, I will call that a sacred experience. A person in a woods wandering around.
You know, I would say that, you know, what is human nature? You know, we know a little bit about it, but probably not all that much. And, so I take that as a sacred space for me. That which is so high dimensional, you have to experience, not explain.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Wow. Glad I asked. Okay. Question five. Have you had moments of intense joy or breakthrough experiences?
Jim Rutt: Moments that have affirmed or changed your sense of life’s meaning? Oh, absolutely. Like, sort of laid them out there that in that, catalog of, epochs and the list of events. So, yeah, I’ve several times had, you know, sudden insights, typically built up from years of prior thinking and reading and such that fundamentally, changed my perspective.
The last one, I guess the last one was really understanding the complexity point of view. That was huge, you know? Like most nerds, right, I would describe myself at age 14 as a naive Newtonian, right, who who thought that the Laplacian hypothesis might be true, that if I knew where all the particles were and all their motion, I could predict the future forever. Turns out total bullshit. Right? And, almost all technologically oriented people, even though they know about that Newton was wrong. And but they’re still naive Newtonians. They think the world is billiard balls and machinery, and it ain’t. So that was my last fundamental breakthrough with that.
And the one before that was understanding that exponential growth in a finite planet is a terrible idea and is being driven forward anyway by our economic system.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Next question and the last of the life review, it’s kind of the opposite. Have you experienced times of crisis or suffering in your life? Times when you felt profound disillusionment or that life had no meaning?
Jim Rutt: Always been an optimistic forward looking guy. And if you’d asked me what’s my meaning, I would say, oh, fuck. I know. But I’m out there doing stuff. Right? And, headed towards someplace. I now know I think where that someplace is, by the way. But we’ll save that for our future questions here because, you know.
But yeah. And I would say I never I don’t think I’ve ever been depressed in my life. I’ve had shitty fucked up things happen to me as we all have, but I picked myself up, dust myself off and move on. Right? Even my biggest business debacle, I kind of felt bad for about ten days after that. And then I got up on it and off to off to teach myself something entirely new. So yeah. No.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: All right. Next section is three questions on relationships. Question seven, focusing now on the present, how would you describe your parents? And how do you see your current relationship to them? Or if there have been any changes in your perceptions of your parents over the years?
Jim Rutt: They’re both gone for a while. My father since 2003 and my mother since 2017. So this is clearly looking back, and I would say, you know, when you’re a young kid, you know, you kind of have probably over much respect for your parents. As I said, my parents were good parents. They knew how to parent. They really did.
And as a teenager, you thought your parents were idiots. You know, I can’t believe they’re so old. I mean, what do they they hate the Beatles. How can anybody hate the Beatles? Right? And my father was one of those ones that didn’t long like long haired hippies and, you know, a bunch of backwards sons of bitches. Right?
But then by the time I got into my even quite early twenties, I came to understand my parents really quite well. And I think from that point on, my view of them really didn’t much change. They continued to be quite exemplary people who had really built their own life from nothing and always, you know, were very social with other people and kind and service to the community oriented. You know, even at 80, my father was doing volunteer work for the local police department in the retirement town in Arizona that he lived. My mother was still active in politics, which had become her love for many years up until her eighties. And so, yeah, mostly good stuff remembering my parents.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Gotcha. Question eight, and this is kind of a strange question, but it reads, are there any other relationships that are important to you? And you’ve already covered a lot, but feel free to say anything else about in the present any relationships,
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Question eight, and this is kind of a strange question, but it reads, are there any other relationships that are important to you? And you have already covered a lot, but feel free to say anything else about in the present any relationships that are important to you if you have not already mentioned them.
Jim Rutt: Yeah. I have got lots of friends from every aspect of my life, including my old hometown. One of my best friends—we have been friends since we were two. I had dinner two nights ago with five of my friends from various—they all overlapped in different parts of my business careers, and they all knew each other. But it was fun to have them all come down and have dinner. And then I have got another group from my old neighborhood that we still go out from time to time hunting and fishing, that kind of stuff. I have other friends from other aspects of my business career, various places we live. So I have got a quite extensive friend network, I would say, which I am very glad of and probably at least the Dunbar number’s worth. And, you know, I mentioned earlier, my wife and my daughter, now my grandkids.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Awesome. All right. And then last question in this section, question nine. What groups, institutions, or causes do you identify with, and why are they important to you?
Jim Rutt: I would say the complexitarians, because that is the proper lens to understand the world. The Game B crowd, because we have kind of a whole bunch of history with our working on the ideas of Game B. And then I would say the broader liminal crowd, including the metamodernists and the ecologists and, you know, that world—people who may have different perspectives on the exact details of the road, but all have the same kind of smell in their nose on where humanity needs to go if it is going to make it through the next hundred years or so.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Okay. Now we come to present values and commitments. Here is where a lot more of the deep worldview questions start to really emerge. So question 10. Well, here is a heavy one. Do you feel that your life has meaning at present? And if so, what makes your life meaningful to you?
Jim Rutt: Well, it is meaning in the sense that I am continuing to do things. And I am doing things from a perspective of some sense of trajectory. Basically, for me, there are three things which I think are important right now. And a lot of this goes to my deep understanding of the history of life and humanity, et cetera. And that indeed exponential growth in a finite planet driven by an economy that wants more exponential growth is a bad thing and has taken us way off track.
And so, actually before that, I am going to give the third piece. I normally do it in the other order because of the nature of the audience. I am going to do it in the third one first, which is, as far as we know, we are the only intelligent life in the universe. Not intelligent because a bacteria is intelligent, but have reached the level of general intelligence who are—given enough time and enough resources—we can solve many, many, many problems. We can surely get to the stars. We could probably even get to other galaxies, give us a million years or so. So the possibilities of the first—or first on earth at least—general intelligence is almost unlimited, though there are limits in a number of domains.
And for us to fuck up that possible trajectory onto everywhere, as I say, bring the universe to life, would be a tragedy of huge proportions. On the other hand, it may turn out that life is relatively common and a technological life or true general intelligence is common. In which case, if we fuck up, oh, well. We should do as well as we could. But I strongly believe that until we know otherwise, we have to assume we are the only ones, that this is a truly sacred obligation to essentially protect the future of the universe.
And the way we do that is we pay attention to two things, and we reorganize our social systems around these two things, which is one is human well-being. People who are living good, rich, happy, non-exploited lives tend not to want to build Ebola plus the common cold in their basement. And at the same time, I have this worship of life, you know, life is so fundamentally different than non-life. Even though we do understand approximately how life works—not magic, we don’t know how it got created, which is interesting—but it is a whole huge step above pre-life in terms of the interestingness of its unfolding.
And I think we have been very foolish in killing off a lot of the complexity of life on our planet. One of the most horrifying statistics I know of is of the biomass of birds in the whole world, 80-plus percent is human poultry. And humans plus our stock animals is a similar number of all the mammals or maybe more than all the mammals in the world. And this is horrible. And we should gradually, so we can do it humanely, reduce the human impact on the biosphere and become a custodial species as Tyson Yunkaporta likes to say, and help nature come back to its full richness. And I think that will make us saner also. It will also provide alternatives to humans.
My favorite candidate to be the next general intelligence on earth would be the raccoon. If you ever tried to keep raccoons out of your trash can, they are smart little motherfuckers. They have got quite little hands and they stand up partially. You know, give them another 30, 40 million years. No telling what might come out of those guys. So, we have got to treat nature as sacred. We have to work towards human well-being so as to keep this pathway to the future open.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Great. Question 11. If you could change one thing about yourself or your life, what would you most want to change?
Jim Rutt: Well, I wish I was less fat. Oh, I’ve always had more weight than was good for me, at least since I was 18. So, yeah, it would have been nice to be a skinny guy. What the hell? Right? Well, otherwise, not all that many things. I mean, obviously, made some decisions that might have been better made the other way, but none of them were disastrous. Some of them were really good even though a lot of people thought I was nuts at the time. So yeah. So overall, no. Not really.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Okay. 12, are there any beliefs, values, or commitments that seem important to your life right now?
Jim Rutt: Oh, I would say those three. A rich and improving natural world, a focus on human well-being for all people on earth, not just people in the West, and having a path to the future for humanity. Of course, that’s above that’s in my personal persona, but also my public persona. And then, of course, I also believe it’s very important for me to invest in my friend network, my family, my wife, my daughter, my grandkids, et cetera. So I spend at least as much time on that.
Say a little bit more about values specifically, if there are particular values that are important to you. Values. Life is better than nonlife, first and foremost, that informs all the rest of them. Fairness and nondomination are really important to humans. We know from how the foragers lived, if our 95 percent of the history of humanity, we lived in small groups, less than a 150, a lot of times around 50. One of the things we’ve learned about how those people lived is they hated to be dominated, and they built a social operating system, both most of them, to make sure they were not dominated by the big men who wanted to boss them around. And some percentage of men just want to boss people around. And if you look at chimpanzees, they have a as a species, our closest neighbor, extremely rigid hierarchy of dominance. Right? Bonobos have a different but also kind of dominant hierarchy, structured differently, more coalitions of females, but it still ends up being a dominance hierarchy. And humans, even though those are our two closest relatives, were able to defeat the dominator operating system for most of our history until the invention of agriculture. So those are key values to me.
Question 13. When or where do you find yourself most in communion or harmony with the universe? In nature, for sure. You know, walking in the woods, paddling in a canoe on a totally empty lake way up in Canada, more socially, sitting around a campfire, particularly in the winter where the sky is so clear. You look up at the Milky Way, you look like you could fall into it. Those to me are where, you know, I feel most resonant with whatever is so high dimensional that we can’t speak of it, so therefore sacred. Right.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: 14. What do you consider mature faith or mature ways to handle existential questions?
Jim Rutt: I think first is humility. Your chances of being right may be a lot smaller than you think. And in fact, that was probably the gateway to my rejection of religion was how the fuck could 10,000 religions be correct? Right? They can’t. They’re all wrong. At most, one of them is right. Probably zero. So whatever commitments you make, make them relatively lightly. Don’t go kill people about it. Right? Because you’re probably wrong in lots of ways. I mean, science is wrong in lots of ways. And when they look back 500 from now, what we thought was correct, they’re going to laugh. They go, holy shit. They believe that? So but unfortunately, it does seem to be a human failing to want to hold on to your beliefs dogmatically and kill people about them. Don’t do that.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Anything else besides humility in terms of mature ways to handle existential questions?
Jim Rutt: Closely related. Continue to grow in how you think about ultimate questions or questions that are bigger than any one person can possibly figure out, and never stop growing. And again, very closely related. Don’t hold on to some rigid box of doctrine. Continue to be thinking about it for yourself, probing, asking questions, comparing and contrasting.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Okay. Question 15. When you have an important decision to make, how do you generally go about making it? And can you give an example?
Jim Rutt: Give one example. When I left the book publishing business and joined the technology field,
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Okay. Question 15. When you have an important decision to make, how do you generally go about making it? And can you give an example?
Jim Rutt: Give one example. When I left the book publishing business and joined the technology field, I had three offers that had different attributes. I went and studied the companies, made some, but I didn’t overstudy. This is the key to the Ruttian approach. I did enough study till I thought I had a good bullshitter’s understanding of the dynamics, but was by no means an expert. Kept it all in my head, and then I went for a three-mile walk.
And when I have one of these key decisions, what I tell myself is I will make the decision before I put my foot back on the front porch. And in this particular case, the answer came probably a quarter of the way through my walk, where I took the research I’d done, which is enough, but not too much, with a well-formed question. In this case, which of the three do I accept? And a process that was bound by about 45 minutes, the time it would take to walk two miles. I’ve done that before and afterwards, though that’s probably the cleanest example.
The time we sold our first company, kind of similar. Me and my CEO sat there and jammed at the whiteboard for, I don’t know, an hour. And, you know, we knew our business quite well, but we didn’t necessarily know what the rest of the world was going to be like. That’s okay. What’s our company going to be worth? Oh, okay. This is our best guess after an hour. Ping. And what’s the offer from these guys? Boing. On a risk-adjusted basis, is it better to take boing or bing? And we said, risk-adjusted basis, boing. Right? So, you know, that was a huge life decision. So I got my first fuck you money. You know, made the decision in an hour, basically.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: So think, study, don’t overthink, don’t overstudy, and then make the decision. Nice. And then a follow-up is if you have a difficult problem to solve, to whom or what would you look for guidance?
Jim Rutt: I would look the what. I would look for information first. And I got to tell you, I’ve never been all that much for consulting random people on decisions. Right? I feel myself competent to make decisions, and if I am going to do it with other people, to be with other people who know as much about the situation as I do. So I’m not the kind that would go to my uncle and ask him, should I sell my company or not, for instance. Some people do that, and, you know, some people come to me and ask questions like that, right, fairly often, which I’m generally happy to do, but I’ve always been a pretty confident self-decider as long as I have the information.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: All right. 16. Do you think that actions can be right or wrong? And if so, what makes an action right in your opinion?
Jim Rutt: That’s an interesting question. Very interesting question, and I would say it’s all contextual. Trying to put ethics into an iron box is usually wrong. Because again, it is high-dimensional. You can’t actually do a calculus of ethics, at least I don’t believe you can. And you have to kind of do a similar thing to what we do for other decisions. How does this fit into what we know at the present time about the context that I’m in? Will this make the world better or worse?
So I guess that says I’m like, well, I should actually gloss this because this is something I thought about and argued with people about. So that basically says utilitarian. Right? But I’m also kind of a utilitarian deontologist, which is I do believe, even though I can’t prove it, that there are some patterns which are almost always good, like free speech, I think is huge. I think freedom consistent with nonharm to other people is really important. Can I prove either of those two? No. Do I believe there are exceptions to both of those? Yes. So I would say that those deontological, like, views are based on a guess that they’re utilitarian.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Well, the next question is related, which is, are there certain actions or types of actions that are always right under any circumstances?
Jim Rutt: Probably not.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: And then a follow-up to that one is, are there certain moral opinions that you think everyone should agree on?
Jim Rutt: No.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Anything you want to say more about any of those? Or—
Jim Rutt: Again, because what I said earlier about it being contextual and kind of this odd hybrid of deontological and utilitarian, you can make some principles and groundings, but there’s going to be corner cases where they’re not right.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: And one last quick follow-up clarity point there. So in saying that’s all contextual, I don’t hear you saying that it’s all relative, but just that all of this other contextual information needs to be considered. You say that there is a better or worse outcome. So you’re not saying that—
Jim Rutt: So maybe just speak a little bit more about the difference between those possibilities of contextual versus just it’s all relative. Yeah. And I would say that it you might say it’s meta relative. Right? For instance, when I’m talking about, does it make the world better or worse? I take it from my values. My values of human flourishing and well-being, ecological richness, and a path forward for humanity through the bottleneck, to a glorious future of bringing the universe to life or meeting the other galactic citizens. Right?
And so without those values and then I would say other people could have other values. I don’t believe people have to have those values. But if I have those values, then I can make right or wrong decisions. But whether the values themselves are right or wrong, I can’t prove. They’re just the ones I happen to like and I think are right.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Gotcha. All right. We’ve come to the last section, which is the religion and worldview section explicitly. Question 18. Do you think that human life has a purpose?
Jim Rutt: Well, I think human life is like all life that currently exists on Earth is a leaf node on a very, very bushy branching tree of emergence. So at some sense, we’re equal to every other bit of life, including yeast and bacteria and things like that. We are descendants of Luca, the last universal common ancestor about 3,800,000,000 years ago. And so in that sense, we’re just yet another emergence from the Luca branch of complication and division.
On the other hand, there have been a couple of emergencies in human maybe more now within humans, which feel like big transitions in the state of the universe. Language being a key one, because it allows the preservation of information over multi generation so that the buildup of knowledge can and how to do things and ethics and everything else can build. Right? And then the other is science, which is how to actually approximate justified true beliefs. You know, they’re often wrong. They’re always approximate. They’re always tentative. But if you look at the history of the world before 1700 and after 1700, it’s night and day. And we may be creating a third one here with artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence. So I think those three things will do say that the branch of humans is about to jump off the biology tree and is starting a new has already started a new tree, based around information processing at an unprecedented level, starting with language.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: And would you say that that’s the purpose of human life?
Jim Rutt: No. I think it’s we’re just we’re the next obvious steps for humanity. We say purpose. I mean, did someone when Homo sapiens came into being 300,000 years ago, said, oh, the purpose of Homo sapiens is just to invent language, take the science, and then artificial intelligence. I say, hell no. You know? Everything that makes sense within biology only makes sense within the context of evolution.
So it turned out there was an evolutionary gradient towards those things. But the most important one, probably language, may well have been selected for its ability to seduce the other sex or to manage gossip and things of that sort. And so the other follow-ons were essentially unseeable by evolution at the time it was working on evolving language.
So I would say that what we see is an exploration of the adjacent possible, and a lot of it’s accidental. You know, nobody stamped a purpose on humans when they were created. We had certain capabilities and some we have not actualized, some and some we have. And we’ve taken a trajectory through adjacent possible space to be where we are, where we then are to some degree are stepping off biology into the next thing.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Do you think we are affected by a power or powers beyond our control?
Jim Rutt: Yeah. The weather. But in terms of supernatural, no. I am a strong disbeliever in supernatural anything. On the other hand, my mind is always open. Give me the evidence, folks. For instance, one of my good friends just retired as a Presbyterian pastor, and one day well, she loved and she loves to argue. She’s a former lawyer. Right? And we always have fun.
So, anyway, one day, said, Jim, what would it take for you to become a believer? And I said, I got an easy answer for that. Give me two weeks notice so I could round up a thousand witnesses and five video crews to surround the Washington Monument. Then I want the Washington Monument to rise 300 feet in the air, rotate three times around its central axis, set itself down on its base without damaging itself. You do that, and I’ll bend the knee, take off my hat, and say, I was wrong. Gotcha.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: All right. Question 19. What does death mean to you?
Jim Rutt: I did meditate forty days before I did my ten hours of episodes with John Vervaeke just so I would know a little bit about it. I used the Sam Harris meditation app, which I still have on my phone, but I just find it modestly interesting, but, you know, nothing that was able to get me to continue doing it.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Maybe as an extension of that question, you know, you mentioned this idea of the sacred earlier. Do you are there any practices that you do in any degree of regularity or irregularly that you feel like are a cultivation of that or a pursuance of the sacred broadly conceived?
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Maybe as an extension of that question, you know, you mentioned this idea of the sacred earlier. Are there any practices that you do in any degree of regularity or irregularly that you feel like are a cultivation of that or a pursuance of the sacred broadly conceived?
Jim Rutt: Nope. It happens when it happens. I don’t think of it as a practice or something to be scheduled. I go for a walk in the woods today. It’s more like that. So it’s just probably—it’s funny in our Game B world, I strongly recommend an ecology of practices, à la John Vervaeke for communities. And I also recommend that, well, if you want to, you can add some metaphysics, but it’s no real necessity. The practices themselves are shown to work, and I probably should do practices, but I don’t just by nature.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Next question. Are there any religious—and this is kind of a mouthful, so I’ll break it down. But are there any religious, spiritual, or other ideas, symbols, or rituals that are important to you or have been important to you?
Jim Rutt: Well, not since I was 11.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: And now there is an “or other.” So, again, read that as you will. But I think the focus here, symbols or rituals that are important, however you want to construe—
Jim Rutt: Yeah. Nah.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Question 23. What is sin to your understanding?
Jim Rutt: That’s a good question. Well, sin is doing things that versus my values impede the unfolding of the values in what I think is the right direction. So somebody gratuitously chopping down a forest and just letting it lay—that would be a sin for sure. Killing somebody would certainly be a sin. That certainly does not help human well-being.
Though, as the Texas Rangers used to say on the frontier, the first question they’d ask when they came to investigate a murder was, did he need shooting? So I would say murdering a good person would not help human well-being. You know, murdering a bad person might be fine.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: So actions that run counter to your values, is that sin?
Jim Rutt: Yeah. So things that would appear to be a negative current against my values would be my definition of sin.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Penultimate question here. Question 24. How do you explain the presence of evil in our world?
Jim Rutt: Game theory. One of the deepest things that people need to understand to understand humans and other animal life, but particularly humans because we’re so social, we operate in big groups, is there is an inevitable conflict between the good of the group and the good of the individual.
The classic example from the literature is a battle team in a forager epoch. Those suckers fought a lot as it turns out. So all the men under the age of 45 go out in the middle between the two forager groups and fight a battle, and whoever wins kills all the men and kidnaps all the women. That’s fairly common. Chimps do the same thing actually. It’s quite interesting.
It turns out that the probability of your group succeeding has to do with how cohesive it is and how brave everybody is. If all the fighters go up to the front lines and fight their heart out, your probability of victory is highest. However, it’s also dangerous as hell. So from an individual perspective, your best strategy is to hang back, let the other guys fight, let your team win, and you get all the benefits.
However, it fails Kant’s categorical imperative that if everybody did that on your team, you’d lose and you’d all get killed. So therefore sneakiness evolved, which is how do I free ride on the work and bravery and whatever of others while not being detected essentially and make sure not too many other people do what I do so we don’t lose too many battles.
You know, same is true of people at work, right? At an office, there are people who try to do as little as they can get away with, but they do so knowing that most of the people at a company are working hard and the company will succeed and continue to pay their paycheck. So this tension is something you can’t get rid of. It’s fundamental. And I believe it is one of the bigger drivers of what we would call evil—the attempt to exploit the group for the benefit of the individual. The group that you belong to, that you’re supposed to have solidarity with. So that’s number one.
And the second is just plain genetics, like psychopathy. I think there are one or two percent of people who are born without empathy and without any concern for their impact on other people so long as it’s good for them. And so I’d call that evil by nature essentially. And again, it’s a very important thing. The forager operating system had a very good way of dealing with the psychopaths, and we do not. In fact, I would say that Game A, our current civilization, is the opposite.
From my days as a corporate executive, I’d say ten percent of corporate C-level executives are psychopaths. In some industries might be thirty percent, and that’s compared to the number of psychopaths in the general population of one percent. So the levers of power, particularly in business, attract psychopaths, and in fact, psychopathic behavior is well rewarded in the business world. I think that’s a goddamn shame. Indeed.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Down to our last question here. If people disagree about issues of worldview or religion, how can such conflicts be resolved?
Jim Rutt: Well, you go back, unfortunately, to degree one is dogmatic, they can’t be. Right? If you’re a Presbyterian and talking to a Methodist, I don’t think you’re going to convince the Methodist that there’s predestination, nor are you going to convince the Catholic that their priests can’t work magic. Right?
So unfortunately, when people hold these kinds of beliefs rigidly, there is no resolution. The best you could do is take the Jeffersonian, Madisonian turn and agree to tolerate each other. Right? That’s about all you can do.
But if you take my perspective, which is, don’t hold those things rigidly. Don’t believe in some hard-nosed fashion unless you have proof that you can convince other people of. And then which case you are, at least in theory, open to changing your views. So, if you’re going to be able to, you can either not be dogmatic and be open to changing your views, or if you are dogmatic, which is like 80 percent of the world, then you better go with tolerance so you don’t kill each other.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Well, Jim Rutt, you have won the faith development interview. That brings us to the end. Wonderful. Thank you so much. That was incredibly rich, and I think we did that in just about an hour’s time. So, also efficient. How did that land for you? Anything else also that you’d want to throw into the mix after any of that?
Jim Rutt: Yeah. One little thing. Just sort of a framing thing about my worldview at the macro level, and it speaks to how little we can know, but we can know a fair bit, which is the universe seems to have a scale from so-called Planck level, which is so small, it’s unbelievable that we can’t come within many, many, many orders of magnitude of looking at what’s going on at the Planck level, but that appears to be kind of the fine granularity of our universe. And then the universe, as it seems to exist, this thing that came into being 13,800,000,000 years ago, that’s a scale. Those are two scales.
We’re in the middle. We are a mesoscale entity, and, you know, we have no real intuition about things smaller than about a millimeter, nor any real intuition about anything bigger than a few thousand miles. And so we live in the middle. We’re caught in the middle. And our ability to go up and down from that has been improved by our scientific instruments and stuff, but there’s still a long way from either end.
And that alone ought to give us some humility when we make pronouncements about anything is that we’re a very long way from the largest or the smallest, and we are highly biased by the scale at which we exist, and of course, our senses and things of that sort.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Yeah. I’m glad you added that. That also makes me think of the work of Nancy Ellen Abrams, I think her name is. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her. She wrote a book called A God Who Could Be Real, and she takes a complexity approach and an emergence approach to kind of, you know, the question of the big questions.
Anyway, there’s a whole section where she kind of makes that whole point. She calls it Midgard in kind of drawing on sort of the Norse kind of map of where, you know, we’re in the center. We’re in the middle. Anyway, also someone who if you’re doing more worldview interviews, she’d be probably someone interesting to talk to.
Jim Rutt: Email that person’s name to me. I will check that out.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Well, one last thing I will be interested for you to say a little bit more about, and I think this is a really interesting question because I think maybe because there’s so much of what everything that you’re saying that I profoundly resonate with may have been, you know, very influenced by a lot of the ideas that you’ve put forward in your work and stuff and your podcast and all that.
But it does come down to this question of meaning and purpose. So on the one hand, there’s a sense of, as you were talking about, the sense of your life having meaning and sort of, you know, following this trajectory and not letting sort of the ball of complexification drop, you know, and carrying forward the bringing to life of the universe and all that.
And on the other hand, there is also this highly contingent, maybe random way in which this path-dependent thing emerged and we’re just kind of doing things. And I was curious if you have any more things you’d like to say about that seeming tension of, like, is this something—is this worldview one in which you feel like you are contributing to part of, like, a broad universal design in some meaningful sense that you’re, you know, making your sort of small mark on? Or is it ultimately kind of something that, wow, it’s really cool and beautiful and interesting, but it is also kind of just a cosmic sort of whoops or, you know, interesting accident? Those seem like kind of two major different ways of interpreting some of the same ideas that you’ve shared.
Jim: Yeah. I think my view is somewhere in between. I believe that the settings the universe happens to have, the lawfulness at the bottom layer, happens to be very congruent with emergence. Right? And there’s a lot of the talk in the literature often from a religious perspective is the fine tuning issue. That the settings of things like the weak force and the strong force and electromagnetism and gravity, if they were much different, stars wouldn’t form for instance, or the whole universe would become a big black hole very quickly. And so I do believe that the universe is set up. I’m not going to say design. I’m going to say is set up. Could have been designed. As I said, I don’t know. You know, maybe we’re running on the PlayStation of an 11-year-old in a higher realm. I personally don’t believe it. I don’t got any proof. And so the universe is fine tuned not only for stars, but also for emergence. So therefore, the answer is kind of both, right? Which is this intricate path through all these unlikely emergences can happen relatively easily, then something like that could be expected to happen in this universe.
Brendan: Yeah. Well, I guess I probably take a similar view myself, but it is an interesting thing to try to give words to because, you know, like with Stephen Wolfram’s Ruliad, for example, there’s a sense in which you can kind of run all of the things, but certain things are going to cancel each other out. You’re going to be left with a particular set of constraints that is just going to be the one that has sort of established itself through kind of a natural variation selection process.
But then once that is the case, it does seem that those sets of constraints take on a kind of quasi teleological importance that it’s like, alright. Well, if this is the way that this is all set up and these are the constraints that have sort of been selected for, then there’s more than just, I don’t know, random stochasticity or something to what’s going on here that I think imbues this notion of a kind of complexification arc and trajectory with something, I don’t know, with an aura beyond just sort of like a kind of radically Darwinian, you know, oh, that was a chance fluke that, you know, was nice. And I find that an interesting tension in there that it’s a both and in some interesting way. Yeah. That is a very interesting question.
Jim: And, you know, one at the present time, I wouldn’t say we have the standing to answer definitively in any sense, but it is true that—oh, yeah. This is actually, I think interesting, is that the prior trajectories constrained the future trajectories. Right? You know, for instance, no time soon will humans fly, for instance, while birds fly. Because our particular branch developed a mass and a strength profile, which is incongruent with our flapping our arms and flying. And so the past has pruned the adjacent possible in a very significant way, but not forever.
If we wanted to genetically engineer humans to be tiny, light, and be able to fly, give us 10,000 years, we could probably do it. But it’s not going to happen next year or the year after. So I think there’s another way to kind of say both and, is that the universe had the right settings for emergence. There’s been lots and lots of emergencies. Each one of the leaves at the node is constrained on its next steps by where it came from and what its history has been.
Brendan: Yeah. I guess I’d also like, for me, this comes to a big normative question as well, which maybe is ultimately a philosophical one that just, as you say, you kind of have to just, you know, affirm or assume something. But another element that I see in this big story, that doesn’t necessarily come out as much in the way you articulate it is this way in which as you follow this whole evolutionary complexification process, it does lead to consciousness, and it does lead to then the expansion of the ability to experience this universe more richly and in more nuanced ways.
And also, arguably, it moves along a trend of sort of increasing concern for others and well-being and a kind of increasing cognitive light cone that wants to take into its scope more of reality and thus know more and care more. All of that starts to sound very normatively weighted to me in a way that, like, to just speak of it only as some kind of flowering that happens and it happens just because it happens is not quite adequate to capture something that also seems very beautiful and even good in some kind of, you know, axiological way. So I don’t know if you have any thoughts about that element as well.
Jim: Let’s see. I guess I would say that it’s a matter of capacity for information processing. Without language, you’re not going to find Kant’s categorical imperative. Right? Imagine chimps sitting around going, right? Not going to happen. Going for his walk every day, right, that Kant famously did in the—the housewives. Was it Königsberg? Would set their clocks by the time he walked by their house, which was exactly the same time every day.
But without the, I think the ability to do that higher level cognition, the questions of subtle ethical distinctions aren’t possible to make. So if you want to make high level ethical distinctions, you need something like language in which they have because, you know, Kant built upon thousands of years of philosophical work going back, you know, at least to the pre-Socratics and probably far before that. And before that, you just couldn’t do that work. And so that wasn’t a thing.
Now there was still evolutionary pulls and pushes, you know, to the this story I told about a group versus individuals and free riders, that certainly applies to every animal that lives in a group. So, chimps have been dealing with that in their own way, right? Punishing defectors and rewarding those who’ll cohere to the good of the group. They didn’t have language to do it, but they must have had their own ways of doing that.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Yeah. I guess I find it an interesting and enticing possibility or seeming—I mean, you can make an argument for it. I won’t call it a fact, but I believe it to be the case that there’s a meaningful way in which the same trajectory that you are describing and the one in that free energy rate density increase over time that you mentioned—that humans emit more kind of, you know, entropic heat than stars in terms of, you know, the in terms of the density per unit of mass and all that. You know, that free rate energy density curve increases.
And the fact that along that curve is the one where you see the emergence of language and then also the emergence then the ability to expand ethical regard and scope and all that. If those are that those are paired in a meaningful way, raises this question of like, is there some teleological element in ways that could be construed fully naturally that somehow bring together our, you know, ethical and maybe even spiritual intuitions about reality and the scientific and the factual nature of reality and evolutionary history in such a way that we can unite those.
Whereas I think a lot of our modern worldview tends to separate them as it’s like there’s facts and then there’s values or there’s the way things are and then there’s the stories we tell ourselves to, you know, either more, you know, effectively oppress people with religion or what have you. But there’s a there’s a different narrative there that I find very compelling and it’s interesting.
But I guess one last question I’ll ask you and then we can call it there is, in your worldview, when you view the world, when you look at life in your own life, what sort of at the end of the day, the stamp? Is it is it a stamp of approval and a yes, this is good, or is it a sense of, you know, four stars or or something, you know, like, I’ll pass on this next time if I get the opportunity?
Jim: Yeah. All things considered, I’ve had a fine life. I’ve been lucky. I’ve been skillful. I was endowed with a set of skills, and of course, I had some disendowments as well like we all do. But overall, yeah, I definitely play this game another time.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Awesome. Well, thanks, Jim. This was really great. I really appreciate the opportunity to interview you and, enjoying the series. So I look forward to who else you’re going to talk to next.
Jim: The next one will be Ian McGilchrist.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Oh, cool. Wow. Great. Awesome. Well, I’ll check that out for sure.
Jim: This was fun. I think the list of questions that you got, quite different than how I do it, but I think it was a very interesting crew.
Brendan Graham Dempsey: Good. Awesome.