 Hello and welcome. This is Active Inference guest stream number 35.1. It's January 24, 2023. Today, we're here with Jordan Hall and Matthew Prakowski. We're going to have a very interesting discussion, so thank you both for joining. We will begin with a hello and introduction from Jordan. Matthew will then set some context that will launch us into a dialogue that will take us on through. So, thanks again, and Jordan, please. In terms that I've lied in the preamble, so a little bit of introduction I'm noticing, and this is I think part of the real interest of having a conversation with Matthew, is something like it'll be nice, I think, and plausible for us to actually produce something new and useful in this 90-minute time span. And I expect that we'll want to be using something like a transparatigmatic method, so we should be grabbing concepts from a variety of different disciplines and frames and applying them in the area of inquiry and endeavoring to use that to actually identify something that is specific and perhaps hasn't been as articulated or deeply investigated, at least to my awareness, of course, before. And so the end result hopefully will actually be worth actually having been done and to have been participated in. I mean, I hope that at least this recording in itself as an artifact will be something useful for a number of people who might have been paying attention to the initial context and that we can bring together, as we typically do, the many types of frames that we've been exploring in between our conversations that are quite fertile and often times very fruitful in conversation. So I always look forward to our conversation specifically for that reason. Why we are here this morning, or I guess what did catalyze this initially was a tweet that I kind of randomly sent out the other day as I had a network of concepts floating around in my head around emergence, governance, the tendencies toward which that pattern flows. And so the tweet maybe the best just read it. So because that all forms of governance trend toward parasitic corruption should be the first quote unquote law of political quote unquote science. The only questions are how long before this becomes unsustainable? Does it also generate valuable byproducts? And will it fail catastrophically or adaptively? And so just the general frame for the conversation is something along the lines of as we move through the world together and attempt to identify points of tension in terms of the relationship between our communities and the embedding context in which they exist and attempt to navigate the world such that they can retain their ability to function, to cohere, to generate new solutions that help them mediate the tensions in the world that are constantly attempting to or constantly acting as a force against those structures as we come together to try to network ourselves such that we can function adaptively to create systems for doing so. And that's evolved quite a bit over time from informal systems at the tribal level at smaller social scales with respect to structures that had much greater coherence just as a function of the fact that everyone knew each other, everyone was around one another in a daily context, had a deep history in terms of their relational contextual knowledge of those interpersonal relations, these lineages. And so you didn't need a great deal of abstraction in the quote unquote political domain. You didn't need to conceptualize an abstract structure and then attempt to convince people that this was the legitimate structure to buy into as a stewardship mechanism for themselves. But as we scaled up, we started to introduce these sorts of abstractions. And we are certainly in a time now where it's worth asking this question as we create abstractions that are into which we pour our political energies. For example, the idea of democratic governance or the sort of republic that we live in in the United States. To what extent is there a tendency of those who are given stewardship over that, given their placement, given their necessity, necessary placement within this mechanism, but also animus destiny of the mechanism, but also just the structure of that mechanism being responsible as a small subset of the population for a steward in this large abstraction and this large degree of attention and this large degree of responsibility. Is it possible for that to be resistant to corruption across the long periods of time? Is it inevitable that that corruption will exist? And this was the claim in the tweet that people will fundamentally begin to make choices that direct all of that attention energy toward their own ends as opposed to the ostensible ends of the collective. And then if that is a given, what frames can we hold despite the fact that this is a given that can still act as a value to criteria and so a useful value to criteria, which is what sort of those three ideas that I provided related to in terms of the degree to which that can be an unsustainable or a sustainable structure to the extent that it still generates valuable byproducts even though that corruption is necessary or inherently emergent within it or whether it will fail catastrophically or adaptively, will it essentially undermine itself entirely or will it actually within itself despite that corruption be able to surface new patterns into which itself can fail as a kind of lifeboat that increasingly expands its own capacity. So that was, you know, I'll kind of step away now and just give time for reflection and analysis on y'all's part. But that was just sort of the initial frame that I think catalyzed some conversation here. All right, well, there's a whole bunch of different things that are, I think, implicated. And I noticed that one is kind of put a put a variety of different plates on the table without having to understand exactly what meal we're eating just yet. So, and no particular order. One thing that comes up is, I feel like there's an invocation of a frame that I've used a lot. And that is something along the lines of like major eras or apocs in the arc of evolution, specifically in the context of humans. And so the first era, which I refer to often as unconscious evolution, or ordinary evolution is the is the period that I think you were referring to be something like lineage, where there's the binding constraints, the various kinds of characteristics of behavior that steer the collective choice making of a group of indigenous humans was largely a consequence of a very long time and iterations under the ordinary constraints of what I'll just call ordinary biological evolution. So lots of trial and error and conservation of relatively fit behaviors, very tightly knit, and with all the various advantages that are associated with that modality of exploring possibility space. The second era, the second APOC would be conscious design. And I think this is the domain where we see most of the problematics and all invoke people like Tainter and Coon, as other individuals who've pointed to the problematics that seem to be intrinsic to the APOC or the modality of conscious design. And of course, one of the sort of most fundamental challenges is that it exits us from the equilibrium or the homeostatic feedback loops that are characteristic of unconscious evolution. So humans are able to operate in the mode of conscious design, we begin to create novelty in the environment that produces asymmetry in relationship with all the other feedback loops that we happen to have been embedded in contextually, but we don't actually fully know the consequences of the asymmetries that we're producing. And this creates a whole series of cascade effects. So Tainter explores that in the context of how a designed social infrastructure produces an arc that has a built-in closure, because as we sort of play out the concept that was built into the inception of that social infrastructure, which may take generations or even many, many generations, we find ourselves collapsing back into the complex domain of the unconscious evolutionary basis that we have a reset. I think Coon more or less explores the same basic dynamic within the particular domain of science. And I think there are largely, if you look at them as being examples of a more generalized problematic, you can then, or even dynamic, create a meta theory. Similarly, I'm not sure exactly who studied this most carefully, perhaps Hayek, looking at it in the context of businesses, which have a very similar and very well-studied dynamic, the S-curve, the business structure where an entrepreneurial group, usually one or two or five founders, like a very small group, operating in many ways, principally from the unconscious evolutionary stage, like operating in very much a human indigenous modality, using a lot of the basic human dynamics to be in deep relationship with each other and form a very fluid, open, coherent governance. Highly generative produces a large gradient or a large well of potential. But then as it structures itself into the conscious design mode and starts creating an organizational structure, it plays the various tools and in many ways kind of replicates the arc of social structures in general, recreating the rise and fall of civilizations, and then forms some form of closure that eventually dies. This is, I think, been studied pretty thoroughly in a number of different locations. And given that language, and I haven't actually brought in parasite, which is a very good, you know, so let's just bring in parasite and the notion of niche. And so a general principle of evolution is that every niche will be ultimately explored. And there's something about both the presence of entropy in designed constructs or actually any kind of gradient or any kind of gradient has a dynamic of entropy, but it also has the dynamic of once a gradient is produced, that gradient represents a niche and the exploration and exploitation of that niche of which parasitism is one fundamental strategy. Seems to be something that needs to be, we need to be aware of and think about how that's addressed across different APOCs. And then the last piece I would throw out is something like, okay, if we're endeavoring to move into a third mode, which would be something like the APOC of conscious evolutionary approach, which is able to sort of combine the best of the both and perhaps avoid the negatives of both. By the way, entirely by hypothesis, I have no reason to believe this is, I have no compelling reason to believe this is actually plausible. One of the things that might be interesting is to look at the phenotype genotype dynamic, i.e. evolution seems to have woven at a very deep level, what I'll call a modal, a very profound modal shift, which is that all phenotypes die. But there's continuity in the fact that the phenotype produces a embodied version of the genotype. So the genotype has continuity exclusively however mediated by the phenotype. And the phenotype has a kind of continuity that exclusively mediated by the genotype. And the two are very, very distinct in terms of their physical characteristics, right? The things that are associated with energetic gradients are qualitatively distinct. And the shifting back and forth between the two seems to be a solution to the kind of problem that we're actually talking about. Okay, so that's what I'm putting into the mix, into the stew. Number of ingredients to work with. Yes, so beginning at the beginning of your statement with respect to the introduction of Kuhn, Hayek, and Tainter. So this is going to be some grammatic work I think you have to do as well here because there's, you use the word closure a couple of times. And the manner in which you used it was sort of an epoch ending book end context in a way. Is that a fair characterization of how you thought you were using it in a way? Is that sort of the closing of an era, the end of an era, the end of a phase? I think even more pointedly to the notion of a thermodynamically closed system. In these kinds of systems, the proposition I'm making is that they are closed systems. And so therefore they have a finite time until they achieve something like an entropic equilibrium. And that sort of does that arc of the playing out of that time is the story of their particular escrow out of the post. Okay, interesting. Yeah. And I mean, so there's always, there's always, there's a fascinating tension along the lines of sort of stable, unstable equilibrium or if you want to layer in another. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the work of Terence Deacon, but he's quite interesting in so far as he provides thermodynamic frameworks around the ideas of different emergent behaviors that flow from sort of this first homeodynamic level, which is systems that tend to be, tend to essentially equilibrium. So he introduced a little bit of language called ortho grade as a sort of abstract general term of like a number of systems that tend toward a more homogenous state, let's say, or a more stable state. And then contra grade, which is essentially the capacity of any system to give in an ambient ortho grade context to sort of act against that in some way. Continuously or with some degree of stability and he builds a framework of, you know, actually showing that certain types of structure itself and this kind of resonates with a lot of Kauffman's work in terms of the origins of order, looking for non evolutionary just physical constraints that give rise in processes that interact with those physical constraints that themselves give rise to certain forms of order in the world. So Deacon's claim is something along the lines of two types of systems that might themselves tend toward stable, dissipative structure, if put in relationship in a particular way with one another, can then give rise to at that sort of frustration boundary, flow through that frustration boundary, give rise to some sort of actual structure in the world or pattern in the world. And the people example he uses there is something like a Rayleigh Bernard cell, which is heat trying to our energy trying to flow through water or oil at a particular with a particular viscosity. And the first thing you get is the actual bubbling of the heat rising, but at a particular point the energy can escape efficiently enough. So it actually takes on this hexagonal structure, you know, hexagonal lattice, so you get these little cells, right? And if you've ever been to like Pacific Northwest or other areas with like basalt rock with these hexagonal columns, you can actually see this exact thing embody when lava cools, and then cools and tries to cool release that energy in the same way and forms these giant hexagonal hexagonal rock structures. In any case, my whole point of introducing that line of thought is that I think that there are, with respect to, you know, homeodynamic systems, this idea of closure is an interesting one because people are researchers such as like Montevil-Mossier Kaufman as well with his work cycles, and Montevil-Mossier, they have this idea of constraint closures, which is why I went in this direction, which is deeply tied into the question of, in their idea of their conception, they use the concept of a constraint as sort of a symmetry across time. And so that symmetry across time, I think of something like an enzyme, right? The enzyme has its own structure that is maintained across time, but in its interaction with some other process, it sort of locally breaks that symmetry to produce a transformation, and sort of acts as a sort of, you could look at it as like a functional or dynamical boundary that also changes what bounces off of it. And then if you order these boundaries in a particular way, you know, and close that loop, which is where you get this closure, which is in many ways the way that I tend to use the word closure these days. The reason I'm laying this groundwork is just because this idea of closure is very fundamental, the kind of ways I've been thinking about this particular topic of emergence and governance. If, you know, once that becomes closed, then you can start talking about these patterns of autocatalysis, whether that's a self-reinforcing loop and what it actually self reinforces, and to the extent that we're talking about governance, I think it's relevant because of the fact that at each one of those points, there are aspects, there are side effects of that function that are the inputs of one of these other functions, but then there are also side effects that can have other functions in the context in which this closure might exist. And I think when we're talking about governance and the life cycle of governance, we might be talking about something like that initial closure coming into being functionally, such that its overall net byproducts might be adaptive, but to the extent we become reflexive in understanding this to that conscious evolution, this conscious management, to the extent that we can identify the closure and start mapping it and actually analyzing the points and the flows within our own minds as individuals, we can start playing games with it to the extent that that closure and its side effects shift to a point where, you know, it actually shunts perhaps some of that energy that should be going to the adaptive capacity of the overall closure into sort of sub games of people's individual political dynamics, personal lives, well-building endeavors that are within their own frame of reference, but not represented in that closure that they are now able to see and take advantage of, which you might also introduce later, things like the Cantillon effect where it's like if you're close to the money spigot and you see the game that's being played, you are more capable of taking literally that energy that's being released into the market and directing it into places that, you know, might be more to your own interests, even if you are saying and claiming that they're in the general interest of that broader collective closure that we've created supposedly in the economic sense, by the Fed, to maintain homeostatic or homeo dynamics stability at this financial level. So, you know, when you kind of bring in those concepts, they're very resonant with the way I've been thinking about it, but I just wanted to sort of establish that context for grammar with respect to closure, because I think it's quite critical to the way I've also been thinking about these tendencies. Yeah, that was great. Thank you. So, with regard to that last point, when we're looking at the particular phenomenon or in human endeavor of governance, we have a special case, and I think it's very interesting to be able to focus. So, the general case we could talk about in the context of folks like Tainter and Kuhn and Hayek, which is just things that happen in human built kinds of organizational systems that have these various dynamics built in. Governance is particular because it's of that sort. However, the whole point of governance, it is in fact designed to be the thing that addresses the problematic you were just discussing. And so, the whole point is actually the recursion or the microcosmic boundary where governance is itself subject to its own, I'll call it right now, I guess we'll use closure. I'm not quite sure if I've been using it right, because that was a lot you just put in there, but the sort of the failure conditions that we're talking about. And of course, you can then imagine kind of an infinite regress. Okay, we'll do the governance on governance, and then the governance on the governance on governance. Is there a reason to believe that there's actually a way to find a loopback whereby that actually, that whole meta system actually has something like a higher level of stability. And you raise a lot of different points in the very beginning in terms of the three basic questions of what the word stability might even mean. It might not mean that it lasts forever. In fact, rarely would it, but it might mean that it fails really interestingly. So that, you know, like the biological organism, I die, I don't live forever, but my life might be part of a larger arc that has a completely different continuity process. And that's actually the thing that we're thinking about. So I might die interestingly. And so that's a very different solution to the basic problem. Right? Okay, what else was in there? There was something really, really interesting when I kind of tried to, okay. So I noticed also that this, I'll call it geometry. So almost like the third mode. So we discussed, you discussed the, you know, the characteristic and dissipative systems where relationships between two different structured possibility spaces produces a new architecture. It actually produces order at a purely physical level. And I would say this is something like there's principles of physics or principles of nature that are as fundamental as thermodynamics. And because they're as fundamental, they constraint the playing out of thermodynamics. And that's important to recognize. We actually have that. That's in the toolkit. We can use this. And one of the things that I was thinking about is that one of the things that oftentimes shows failure conditions in human design systems is vertical or horizontal asymmetry. You know, so for example, if I have like one person endeavoring to govern, well, let's just use it actually in business. We get to the ordinary sort of business organization, the notion of span of control in military and in all bureaucracies is pretty well understood. But if I have a manager or a business governance function, they generally can't actually govern more than a small number of other people. So if I have a single manager when governance function and they're endeavoring to govern and say 500,000 people, that asymmetry in terms of information, like I think in terms of information theory, perception, sensemaking, and effective choicemaking that can be actuated down will create a wide variety of gaps and niches for parasitism. But maybe there's something to be found in the context of a proper geometry where the information asymmetry is inside of some sort of conscious boundary. We can even think about in terms of what's actually possible in terms of the space of consciousness, how we can produce larger spaces of consciousness, and then how we can actually design information flow within that space so that every flow is actually held within a governance envelope that doesn't produce these niches for parasitism. Yeah, yeah, I mean 100% that very resonant I think that in that context. So to pick apart this this asymmetry asymmetry question a bit more. This relates to sort of a long line of undercurrent of political science is not that not as popular that sort of flows through, you know, Machiavelli, Mosca, Burnham, that vein of just pointing out the side effects of this kind of asymmetry with respect to the idea of leadership or sort of the reification of any system in so far as it must take place within a subset of the population. It can't be like even the idea of democratic governance itself has to be acted out on the day to day by a fraction of the entire group on behalf of which it's being played out in theory. And so that that subset of people who are identified are then, you know, they become responsible for enacting that game with a particular degree of integrity. And I think that that concept of integrity this is really this kind of relates to the maybe the quality of those governance envelopes you're talking about in the structure, but also the scope and scale over which perhaps responsibility is one way of thinking about it but then also accountability, because I think to some extent that accountability transparency game to the extent more and more people are playing off out their lives. While trusting you to do the right thing, especially you know, part of that is going to mean that more of their resources are pulling into you with that trust, which increases the incentives for you to potentially do something that they will not see while their eyes are directed elsewhere. It's kind of like I like to use the game of, you know, if there's a, the more money that's in the pot on the table, right, the more you have to be careful going to the bathroom during the game. If everyone leaves the room and you leave one guy in there, you know, you got to be a little bit careful because even if that's a very trustworthy person at that table, you know, the larger that pot gets, you start beginning to trust to test that, that degree of integrity. And that's kind of that, that same asymmetry is like the better system of governing the best systems of governance that create the more of the systems we create to generate value if they are actually successful. It is exactly that value that's created by them that becomes the temptation for defection. And, and, and so this is very interesting with respect to this envelope question. Because it transforms into this accountability and representation question, I think, and to the extent that we are forced to represent these systems or to have accountability with these systems. I think we live in a very interesting time because we are beginning to be able to have representative granularity and transparency in ways that were never before possible. And using those to sort of act as proxies for maintaining integrity and binding constraints on people's behavior. And it's an interesting balance because we obviously, if someone is a representative, we want those people to enact the highest ideal in theory of their representative position. That being said, we also need to have that position be somewhat attractive. And to the extent that anyone is looking to act out that position, if it is fully constrained and surveilled, they might no longer be interested in taking on that position. So you might have to, you know, one solution to that might be something along the lines of like, well, automate the whole thing. But humans don't like, as embodied beings, humans don't tend to respond well to the idea of an abstract entity that they don't really fully understand the internals. And that kind of aren't actually hitting our mirror neurons in the right way either. Like we're not getting that reflected property of like, yes, I intuitively understand this thing. I think we get also natively suspicious whenever the idea of some sort of abstract system, you know, acting as our representative or acting as our governance, even if that were fully transparent and less likely to defect against us or provably would not defect against us. Like we might just rebel against it anyway. So we sort of as possible catch 22 there. So those are some, I guess some thoughts there. Yeah, that's interesting. So that one, that last piece is, let me see how that's right. The last piece, which was called the AI governance piece. It's kind of, it's not kind of worthy. It's tremendously worthy of a really serious deep dive and maybe sooner rather than later. We're actually accelerating in the direction where that kind of science fiction narrative is plausibly. And let's not say like we don't know these things happen in step functions that don't tend to go in a straight curve, but plausibly is on the event horizon. So we may actually have to wrestle with that. I would propose, though I cannot prove it with adequate rigor. And so it would require a collaborative effort, but I propose that is in fact, that idea can't work. And there's actually, I believe an actual rigorous proof that is available, that the notion of a fully automated governance system is intrinsically unstable. But that doesn't mean that we won't try to do it and trap ourselves thereby. So let me let me back up a little bit before we get there because we can talk about the stuff that's sort of in between. And this is very much the tainter, the tainter story more or less right so we get we get the idea of So the first movement is relationship between contextualization and decontextualization, which may be the thing that humans specifically most fundamentally do is the ability to decontextualize we can pull the salient elements of some particular landscape out as we see fit right not just by virtue of evolutionary fitness we can actually fluidly identify characteristics that we'd like to pop into the foreground and sort of reified down into principles, and then most specifically endeavor to govern I to optimize for or against or modulate according to our own preferences. And of course one of the things that we can do with that power of decontextualization we can then design architectures on the basis of that decontextualization which is the the term technology that's what that means right technology is a the ability to decontextualize use decontextualization to design in nature phenomena that are specifically optimizing for particular principles that we've been able to pull out of what is otherwise a larger larger million. And I propose that this is at the basis of both the strength and the weakness of the design like the epoch of design and the limitations of decontextualization are very deeply woven into the fragility or the problematic of say Tainter style curves like all the things that we're talking about. So, of course, in the process of decontextualization on the one hand, we're able to identify is called the most the most relevant or the most salient characteristics of some system, and then we can begin to control for them. I want I want more calories per unit yield of wheat. But of course, the inverse is also true by virtue of decontextualization, we move away from the ability to have high quality perception of all of the other things that are going on in that embedded system. So we lose track of them and by virtue of losing track of them to the degree which they matter and of course now we're getting into kind of like something around Heisenberg and deep chaos there. I mean, tiny, tiny differences, microcosmic differences possibly at the plank limit tend to build up into large consequences so that as we decontextualize, we render into the invisible we render out of the realm of design out of the realm of the conscious, a whole bunch of things that were in fact by definition calculated via relevance realization at the unconscious evolutionary level, just by share actual having causal effect on the system. And then of course we're setting ourselves up, we're setting ourselves up to have unintended consequences cascade out into our larger environment and then what we tend to do then this is the taint removed the thing that I want to kind of bring into the into the foreground is that we tend to double down. So what we do is we will break a large or we will collage new technologies at the edge. Oh, okay. This particular problem is showing up great. I'm going to do the same move. I'm going to look at that problem foreground or decontextualize the elements that I can identify in the problem put together a new technology connected to the previous technology. We kind of get one of these building mobiles when you're a kid and kind of add something at the balance point and it can come layers layers down. And of course, the point that somebody like Tainter very specifically makes and I think Coon also, maybe not quite as clearly makes is that we then get lost in our own creation. The machine that we have built is has so much complicatedness to it has so much. So many different things going on that we're no longer actually able to master of our own machine. And this moves us back into an unconscious design phase. And so now we're effectively maintaining something we don't understand in many cases. Our generations past its origin stories we've actually, you know, we have a tiny window of awareness in a much larger field but that larger field doesn't have the advantage of a tightly coupled deeply nuanced complex fully contextualized characteristic. Instead, it actually has lots of these little decontextualization gaps foregrounds and backgrounds, but we're super not aware of lost track of it a lot. And now this is part of the niche environment. Everyone for those gaps becomes a niche for various forms of parasitism or become places where local entropy is collected and can't be addressed because they're effectively in various kinds of blind spots or in what with the Santa Fe people would call frozen accidents of our own complicated machinery. It's just a gap that arose because the way that we built the control system. And for us to actually this address the gap we have to deconstruct the control system, but the game theory doesn't work the cost of deconstructing the control system is something that we're not willing to do. So the local entropy just gathers and gathers and gathers until it festers and it eventually creates a breakage that we sort of unconsciously just accept it is what we're what's going to happen. Okay, I think that sort of played out what I had there. I can hear you by the way I'm just going to get some more water. Okay, yeah, no problem, no problem. Yeah, and and so I mean that that obviously ties into the dynamic of, you know, sort of at the more colloquial level, the fact that that humans don't act in general creatures, biological organisms, but especially humans that are in theory through one lens, known to be the kind of creature that attempts to to look into the future, the horizon of possibility and and attempt to act in line with a manner in which that that feature remains habitable, let's say. But then there's always this long term short term tension with respect to at what point does the do the do the possible to the potential threats start to realize themselves or actualize themselves at levels that generate sufficient sufficient. You get to call entropy or suffering or something that sort of shakes you strongly enough to actually or deeply enough to change behavior or your frame of reference at the appropriate scale to produce transformation that can respond to whatever that blind spot that you're mentioning by the process of decontextualization, whatever that whatever has been manifesting in that blind spot that is then threatening the integrity of the process or the capacity of that process to to maintain its continuity across time. One thing that really struck me that interesting as well and I think I guess I've been playing around with a lot of these types of ideas lately in terms of with respect to words and the sort of inversion capacities or cyclic capacities of taking a concept and flipping it and seeing what happens. This idea of decontextualization is fascinating to me because you know when you're discussing it. In my mind something that's popping up is is another way of looking at this very phenomenologically is that if you if we look at ourselves as categorizing beings attempting to attempting to. And to me what categorizing beings tends to mean is having a functional attractor of some sort that we're binding representations to with this sort of agglomerative tendency of more and more things that have that likeness or sameness or are associated with that network of building over time. One of the essential characteristics that we can't focus on everything at a given point in time and therefore we have to live inside a given framework that mediates facilitates and hones our attentional capacity to actually navigate that process of using this category structure to relate to actualities and possibilities continuously across time. And so interestingly enough that the context of that ambiance in one way of looking at decontextualization might also be a process of hyper contextualization in the sense where we are taking a very small representative subspace. We're identifying a particular set of concepts like you know I think abstraction is a way of looking at this right like you're saying there's a set of similarities here and they're graspable enough within my mind at the moment. So I'm going to take those and then begin to act as if I'm living inside those as the full context right and so like through that zooming in to the abstraction or to that to that subset of the possible pattern space. I begin to act as if that subset is the entire ambiance and therefore become blind to everything that is not inside that subspace. And so you're sort of living inside the micro niche this micro gradient because you identified a useful gradient inside that abstraction for some perhaps instrumental or even you know even something that was truly convincing like the idea of calculus is extremely compelling and we got a great deal of adaptive utility out of that concept. But does it hit a limit at some level in terms of like the metaphors and the way of seeing the world through the lens of calculus. Does it start to break down I mean I would argue yes I think there are boundaries when you start to see the world as a set of instance. And with respect to my studies in consciousness and like the emergence of consciousness and topology consciousness. I think one of the things that actually has done inhibits us quite a bit is trying to think of it as an instantaneous property of a system something that could in theory be pointed out as a point on a tangent curve somewhere right. So in any case like this recontextual decontextualization frame I think is a very deep frame and part of this phenomenological tendency we have to see patterns and then start living with inside those patterns as an adaptive framework. And then just to close this off I guess with respect to the Coonian take on that as well you know he's well known for structure of scientific revolutions but my favorite essay by Coon is an essay called the essential tension which is like the essay in which he kind of responds to the public response to his structure of scientific revolution speaking in front of I think it was the APA or something like that at the time and you know saying I essentially I've been largely misinterpreted by people who want to use that work as a justification for throwing off all constraints but in reality what he was saying is the central tension was like there's a frame that's established a very formal rigid frame and the point of that formal rigid frame and discipline is to move to a point of convergence not because of the convergence point is the transcendental ideal that we absolutely must get to but because by acting as if that convergence process is worth moving toward as we converge we will realize what is outside of that cone of convergence so to speak it will start showing up as aberrations and then by collecting those aberrant pieces of information we can begin to realize oh okay this is how we can print in a principled and structured and continuous manner once again open that framework frame back up recontextualize the decontextualization or like zoom back out of that hyper focus contextualization and synthesize a new frame that doesn't just jettison the value of the previous frame arbitrarily but that also isn't myopically focused beyond a point of critical collapse let's say on pursuing that singular interpretation of the old frame. And so I think to some extent like this is the set of patterns that we're that we're trying to work with when we talk about and we're trying to one I think we're in the structure of the structure of scientific. Revolutions were like beginning to see, you know, is it we're beginning to see the traces of like the necessity of that analogous process occurring at the structural level of governance and this is sort of the zeitgeist of our era with many people attempting to place ideas place new frame possibilities and what how should we direct our attention into the space of public discussion and hopefully experimentation and try to figure out, can we get some positive signals so that as this prior frame begins to disintegrate. Are there are there lifeboats that are actually capable of carrying more than one to five people at a time. Yeah, so it's notable that the tainter referred to it as the collapse of complex societies. And I think the proper way of describing what Kuhn was describing was not so much a paradigm shift is a paradigm catastrophe. And I think there's a very specific point there where we're actually looking for paradigm shift, you know, it's okay, I got a paradigm. And I would like to very much invoke here the cognitive science notions of opponent processing and how the brain very specifically in, you know, all the way down to the most basic animals uses modal distinctions specifically when I was thinking about is a very much the dynamic where okay, it's time to focus on a very localized task. But there's something happening at a meta level that allows and requires in fact a shifting back to diffuse and then moving back and forth right and that that notion of modal distinction right right brain left brain distinction are qualitatively different in how they go about orienting towards where to allocate attention even how to do sense making in the relationship to perception and then there's a metodynamic that moves back and forth between them. So that kind of a tricameral structure at a very, very deep modal distinction or qualitatively distinct level seems like it's the proper design for any kind of new kind of collective intelligence. And I was brought to mind of the distinction between thinking and simulated thinking that I was trying to make gosh about five years ago. And I think that was that was oftentimes also not fully grasped. So if you wouldn't mind I'll just recapitulate because the point is very specifically the point that we have we have very we have two modes, at least definitely two modes of thinking right one mode that I call habit mode one mode that I called explore mode and that was not necessarily trying to say that I invented any of this and there are many people I'm sure have done a much better job that is trying to point out the thing I'm trying to point out is not that. But the idea that habit mode like paradigm is able to take advantage of a variety of different frameworks that are relatively well designed for particular domain, and therefore quickly and accurately and predictably be able to make sense and select appropriate choices in the context of a certain domain right that's a very functional thing to have. Explore mode is a mode that is modally distinct has a more diffuse awareness much more contextually aware is oriented towards things like insight i.e. breaking existing assumptions and very very oriented towards the subtle things that may not ordinarily be noticed in habit mode, but may actually be relevant. And that's why we have to have this different explorer right so the the meta process is okay which mode should I be in right now. And I am in a context where explore mode is the most adaptive mode or my context for habit mode is most adaptive mode and can I fluidly move back and forth right so that's that that third right so I've got 123. And the premise of this notion of simulated thinking is that there's something about habit mode where we can get stuck in it so it somehow habit mode breaks this third governance layer that allows us to fluidly move back and forth. And then gets us more and more stuck in habit mode in particular where we begin to build a habit that simulates governance and then and then we're in trouble because at that point we can't actually make proper use of explore mode. Because we actually haven't got the capacity all we can do is when the governance system is saying hey it's time to move to explore mode habit mode says oh I've got and then produces something vaguely like explore mode but still within the fundamentals of habit. And you can you can sort of extend that to all the different examples we've used right this operates in every dynamic you know so in Coon's model and be anomalies are being thrown. And the largest system is saying hey there's something wrong with our paradigm but but the paradigmatic mind says well I'll just produce a more complex version of my existing paradigm to absorb those anomalies into it. Or I'll use the function of ignoring in other words I'll put them into a low an area of local entropy and just kind of let them sit forever long maybe forever ideally right. And the you know the meta premises that's the problem that is the problem of conscious design is that getting stuck and not actually having the opponent processing built robustly enough that we can move from habit into explore without having to go through a crisis. Right the problem is is not that we sometimes our habits aren't functional we have to move to a different mode. The problem is sometimes we get addicted to our habits and the only way we can get out of them is actually to go through hitting rock bottom and that's a very very un adaptive way of solving that kind of problem. So yeah yeah and and just sort of like to test the language a bit and make sure that I'm with you here and also use it potentially to synthesize some of the topics that we've been talking about. It's fascinating to consider this in light of this question so in terms of parasitism that we've been talking about and also the question of the benefits of parasitism. Possibly right because you're talking about this this catastrophic or this catastrophe which is in your dynamical systems in many ways analogous to to falling up a cliff like in the math it is actually exactly like that. And so it could be it could be the case right that one way of looking at parasitism if you can if you can endogenize it or if you can actually internalize some amount of it or look at it as a property of systems is potentially as a smoothing function for that cliff. In so far as you know this gradient that we were talking about before in light of the language you're talking about in terms of this habit mode right and exploration mode with respect to collective governance or collective systems used for simulating this adaptive process as a collective. That collective process of governance can at times be in that exploration mode potentially discovering some new form so if you look at like the inception of our you know the nation of the United States and there's a lot of synthesis is happening a lot of different ideas you know from a lineage extending thousands of years into history drawing from all that to try to synthesize as a particular novel framework is very conscious hyper conscious hyper synthetic exploratory. But it created something that in its stability and efficacy became so functionally stable that more and more people were able to move into habit mode with respect to that as a foundation. And as that happens interestingly enough it opens up little exploratory niches for actors to go in and say are there micro gradients in that system because of the fact that all these people are inhabit mode no longer their attention is focused outwards. It's no longer you know attending inwards and so they actually go in and start siphoning energy perhaps in their own explorer modes as perhaps parasitic behavior from this governance loop. But interestingly enough that can focus that can function as a way of testing the stability of that loop to some extent like they are. Forcing that fundamental functional closure of governance that people have stopped attending to on mass generally. They're forcing it to operate under additional constraints under additional load even though that load like that's an internal load that it might not have necessarily been formally designed to bear. But that parasitism you know like a parasite load on any animal is forcing that animal to operate over and above what they would have to do otherwise without that parasitic load. And so it's actually building some slack into the system perhaps such that when people when people when we start when things start getting shaky and people turn their attention back into that system see the parasites and potentially get rid of them. There's still a lot of slack left in that mechanism hopefully to navigate the cliff or to smooth the cliff. So that's like a possibility. I'm not really I'm not sure how coherent that was if that made sense. Let me let me know but it maps to I believe pretty almost exactly to Brett Weinstein's story about peacock tails of pyramids. So his argument is effectively peacock tails and pyramids are exactly what you're talking about that affected by the peacock tails not just a pure sort of sexual display but it's actually effectively a parasitic reservoir that provides a failsafe that to the degree to which the context no longer supports it you can lose a lot of fucking tail get back a huge amount of adaptive capacity without losing any real holistic total fitness and respond to what's happening. Same thing with pyramids like if you put a lot of social excess would that be called surplus into pyramids as opposed to say for example more people. Your carrying capacity is actually buffered so that if there's actually a significant drought where food production is not as high as it was you just stop building as many pyramids and they have a cash profit collapse of the underlying deep structure. Was that in his thesis or I haven't heard him talk about that surprisingly I've heard him. So I may have just outed him I apologize. I was like yeah because in the hunter-gatherers guide that one or maybe I have. I haven't read it. I need to reflect back on it I don't it didn't it might be there but yeah that's precise yeah I mean it's certainly not surprised to be like Brett and the mind that Brett has in the way that he thinks I think you and I tend to dovetail and converge to a lot of similar frames of reference so that's yeah I think precisely that these abilities to maintain higher carrying capacities within any given system fundamentally provide slack in that system and you know we look at it. If we look at it just at the object level and through almost entirely moral framework then it can lead us to believe that there's no benefit here and to perhaps be a little bit overly acerbic in our language toward what's going on. Interestingly enough it might have been selected for. We might be selected precisely you know in the same way that it's we have some interesting side effects of psychopathy that might have overall adaptive side effects at small levels in society. Some element of sort of corruption and parasitism at a base level within even healthy systems might be optimal to the extent we can talk about optimality in such a system. And so and that might and then knowing that might might might break us against becoming overly cynical right because I think that at some levels at some level the greatest threat to our current capacity for adaptation is a abundance of cynicism and an abundance and like the innervating quality of that cynicism with respect to to sapping us of the necessary will energy and belief that that we can actually do anything that is that is worth doing. So nice. Daniel how much time do we have left 25 minutes but I'm happy to stay on anytime you want to feel free to continue this section and then we can go into Q&A. I have another piece that I'd love to drop in right here. So let's see. Yeah. Let's see. The psychological consequences of being stuck and almost the psychosocial consequences like the feedback loop. So on the one hand you have the interior psychology of being in something like simulated thinking where you can't get out of your own habits of thought and you can't escape into a higher level of insight. You can't escape back into explore mode. But also the feedback to being stuck in a collapsing complex society where explore mode is in fact inhibited because it doesn't have any place to get energy or resource for example or positive feedback energy resource and all the different human needs modalities. And so what happens when you're in there and what happens there is you start getting things like you get depressed. You get cynical. You get nihilistic. You get anemia. Okay. So let me think. Okay. I'll do it three things. First, that notion of parasitism as a as a reservoir of potential is very interesting. And I can think about that immediately in two ways, two examples that pop up. One is that the notion of like 80%, 85% of people are in so-called bullshit jobs or at least self-reported. Which I think is very, very reasonable. Particularly if you sort of think about the cascade effects. Meaning if you were to remove a whole category of bullshit jobs, you would realize there's a whole other set of jobs that are actually bullshit jobs produced entirely by the first category. So if you start unwinding them. Well on the one hand, that's terrible. That means people are wasting their lives and their energy and just spinning. On the other hand, oh, well that's really good. That actually means that I've got sort of 80% of the human population is sitting on the sideline waiting to be deployed generatively as soon as we can get our head out of our ass. That's nice. That's both ways. I also recall during the 2008, 2010 financial crisis saying, okay, well, how far down does the system actually call it need to fall for a truly robust reset? I.e. if the too big to fail system had been allowed to fail properly, which is what should have happened, what would that have looked like? It's like, well, we're probably not going to drop below like a 1972 level of standard of living. That's a pretty big fall from where we are right now. And I recall the 1972 was actually pretty nice. It wasn't a terrible style of life. And the point being that there's almost something like the, what are they called the like the F-350 hyper truck? Well, it turns out that if we have to actually give up our F-350 and just scale back down to an F-150, well, that's actually not that bad. We'll survive. That's not catastrophe. That's actually a pretty decent amount of fat built into the system that we can allow to cut back and not lose our shit. The challenge, of course, is can we do that elegantly? So then I'll get to the third piece. Everything that I'm about to say is entirely hypothetical. I am making up this story on the basis of some heuristics. But the notion is something like this kind of dynamic of modal opponent processing and some kind of system that catalyzes the movement back and forth between them is very, very old, like deeply fundamental. It's too important not to be woven in. Like obviously the sympathetic nervous system go way back. So that basic structure is super fundamental and shows up all over the place. All right. Second, humans at the kind of the first APOC, indigenous humans, almost certainly therefore would have used that at the social level. We would not have been able to achieve something like a social cultural style of collective intelligence that didn't also have this kind of structure woven in deeply. But it would have been woven in deeply using embodied cognition, obviously not design cognition, because we weren't at the design cognition APOC. So what does that mean? What does it look like? The proposition is something like when the external context, when the conditions that we're in are signaling a need to move to a group explore mode, exiting paradigmatic, obligate paradigmatic mind or stuckness, exiting habit mode into a more liminal form of collective intelligence. There's a every distinct human at an embodied level will sense that differentially and they will suddenly begin to signal that differentially back into the collective environment. I'll give that concrete. And so it's been raining less and less. We don't have concepts of rainfall. We don't have meteorology. Like there's a long fucking time ago. But we notice in a very fundamental sense. Our bodies are a little bit more dehydrated or the energy necessary to get water a little bit higher. We're noticing that prey animals are reduct or not as common. We're noticing that yield of food is decreasing, noticing at the physical level, deep, deep stuff like biological. And then there's different types of humans. We have a different typology. We have old women. We have young women. We have young men. We have children. We have older men. There's all and in probably I'm guessing something on the order of like seven to 40 cognitive typologies that cover the different kind of modes of reality that it's useful to have strengths and weaknesses in. So there's a there's a the collective intelligence at the indigenous level is constructed of typological differences. Each of those typological differences will have differentials and sensitivity to the subtle signals of is it time for us to actually move to a new niche. Do we need to leave the valley and go into the mountains because the rainfall is telling us the flood time is about to come that kind of thing. Right. And that will show up in behavior. That's the key thing like actual physical behavior, physical behavior will produce a second order feedback group. Right. As I notice the older women behaving in a different way. It signals me in an embodied level to begin in the act adds additional differential signal to my own perception and then will change my behavior. Right. So when I'm noticing, for example, that the young women are giving attention and perhaps sexual access to a different kind of behavior in men. Very clearly, this will change the behavior in young men, but that also will cause to tend to cascade throughout the larger environment. It is there's something like a very, very complex set of multi typological feedback loops pulling in subtle information from the context that will eventually catalyze a pivot from tribal paradigmatic locked in very functional and effective adaptive habit mode into. Okay, it's all set around the fire. Hand off the comp from the chief to the shaman. Let's talk about the oldest, deepest mythological stories. Hey elders, are you aware of anything like very different mode? Right. The premise I'm making is that that's actually the case. I'm going to argue that we have that that a large part of what's actually going on like characteristics like depression and cynicism are. Like frustration and how frustration works right frustration is when there's a deeply felt sense that there's needs to be some change in the world that is building up energy to make the change. But the change can't the path to the change can't actually be produced and the energy effectively feeds back on itself but that's the energy of frustration which eventually will either build to a release this way or it will come to a feed it'll cut itself into a source and then we'll lead to more like depression. Right. So that's a proposed like to put out that we're in a moment a big part of what's going on is that we're all receiving the signal that we need to shift into this collective consciousness mode this liminality mode this this group explore mode. We don't know how and we're largely stuck. And so we're trying to figure out how to make that move at very macro level that there's lots and lots of adaptive stuff going on, not the least of which is the brokenness of our body mind, our bodies and our mind in relationship to just reality, ideology overriding like a body cognition is way out of whack. And a big big chunk maybe even like 90% of the chunk of the problem they're actually dealing with is the journey of simply restoring ourselves to that basic capacity. Once we get back to that basic capacity, unlocking the 80% of people who are sitting in bullshit jobs back into a coherent collective intelligence this operating in a group explore mode has enough capacity to actually navigate us to the niche we want to get to. That's a taking the problem of governance and say okay that's actually we can take a series of steps and think about how do we maybe find a way to work our path. How do we find the path to get us back to the location where we regenerate our ambient indigenous capacity to operate in this mode, from which we should unlock a vastly larger capacity to think about these bigger problems. End of point. Yeah, I mean there's there's a lot there I think I could go I could go on a quite the response I think in terms of time, though, I think Daniel, you did want to bring in some live chat questions as well, or in terms of where do we want to go here because I could I could respond to that there's a lot of really points there, or we could weave questions into that that context that frame. Where do you want to go. Matthew with a direct response, then we'll have a rapid question and answer that'll take us just around the time that we agreed upon and feel free to depart as well. And at the very end, I'll just make some reflections and connected to active inference. So first Matthew, then question and then feel free to stay or leave and they'll be a little octave reflection. Cool. Yeah, and in light of that, I was also really wanting to raise some of the active inference to semantics and context in response to in response to Jordan's points. One interesting frame that I feel it's interesting to observe that it hasn't saturated the culture, perhaps just given the memetics of when and where is introduced but sort of like ear Wilson and Edward Lumsden introduced something called dual inheritance theory. 20 to 30 years ago, I'm not sure if you encountered that they had this book called genes, mind and culture. And there's a lot of resonance with respect to the mechanisms, you know, they did a lot of work with respect to the manner in which the kind of diversity of the behavioral sensitivities, psychological psychomimetic and like cultural level sensitivities and behavioral patterns have these kind of emergent feedback loops that that essentially end up creating a emergent form of parameterization at the cultural level in the cultural dynamics. These changes you're talking about at deeper levels of reality as they bubble up through and restructure the cultural manifestations and the sensitivities and behavioral tendencies of this diversity of psychotypes. You were saying how that actually as a as a mechanism feeds back into and back down through all those other different layers of adaptive mediation selection transformation and sort of like this emergent cascade and then this essentially reflects the parameterization which many people struggle with in the past under the offices of the argument around downward causation. That's a whole slightly different conversation, but I do think active inference is very interesting. From the perspective at least from my perspective some of the work I've been doing recently, showing that in many ways active inference is in it offers a one one function in the category the necessary category of transformational mappings between perception and action that do exist at this deeply fundamental level in terms of the the sort of establishment of any causal closures either you know of any non trivially complex process any any cycle that's capable of observation and action based on perception in relation to perception. And interestingly, I think that that does by its very nature in the way that it connects to itself, give rise to this bimodal topology, like through a particular kind of non trivially. And so the reflexivity when something comes back to you has a different orientation. So you actually have an understanding of the relationship between past and present by the lens of duration, because of the need to proceed even then impose some transformation on the environment through that. I think we're just beginning to develop the capacity to work with those tools in a way that doesn't impose that that's more like surfing these adaptive waves that allows us to observe the way in which these transformations of perceptions are mapping on to actions, and using that as a tool and and a potential in a toolkit of like explicitly and consciously designing network connections between these many different perceivers and actors and their perceptual and action capacities in a way that can. I don't want to say provably, but but but Prince in a principled manner give rise to emergent systems that do have these properties built in endogenously, and perhaps the signaling mechanisms built in endogenously, in ways that can resonate with what you're talking about, which is the embodied sense that we have, intuitively or unconsciously that arises, but we don't necessarily have the language or the framework to explicitly talk about it so sort of that that that emergent welling up of emotion or frustration or depression or enemy as you said, gets shunted into language and cultural symbols and representations that don't fully close back on the on to actuation capacities that we need to actuate or that we need to up regulate in this particular moment and I think active inference and other frameworks like it, precisely because they take this perspective epistemic perspective that says actually, you can directly observe the world. All you can do and the best you can do is take this humble process of trying the best you can to connect signals of perception to signals of action in relationship to preferences at a given time and the context in which they exist, and from there, ground up. I think it's a leading candidate in the modes of phenomenologically shifting our perspective through new ways of operating and seeing the world through new paradigms through new toolkits. So that's why I think I've been really interested in the active inference space and see it as something that's quite relevant to this entire conversation and in particular to your final remarks there. All right. Excellent. Awesome. Thanks both for the dialogue. This is really great. So I will try to bring in many of the questions that were asked in the very active and energetic live chat. We'll get pretty quick thoughts that will conclude the primary section of the stream. And then if you want to stay or leave but I'll just add a few more points because indeed the connection with active inference is very salient. Okay, so into the questions we go. First from Charles Blas. Hello. What are the primary patterns, including values of wise collaboration? One was the one that you just noticed, which is moving at the pace of wise collaboration, meaning in this case I noticed that's a very complex question. I'll have to take a lot of time to think about it. Questions raised. Yeah, we raise the questions here and explore it in the coming time, but feel free to give a short response while you can. For sure. For sure. I mean, it's just interesting. I think there's a constant there because one of the things that was coming to mind as I was taking the time to try to reflect on that was patience. Right, especially in light of all of the tendencies that shipped us away from the capacity to take in sufficient information, relation to cycle on that in a to to. So there's a tendency to always want to especially under pressure under stress to always want to take perception and immediately map to action. Right, like for every cycle perception, some sort of symmetric action because it feels very it feels like you're at least doing something feels better than doing nothing. But there might be some minimal necessary amount of reflection. You might need to cycle a number of times at a number of scales with a diversity of opinions before the capacity is built up in that collective intelligence or collective coherent structure. Before any action that it takes externally can do anything other than make things worse. And I think that that's a massive problem that we're confronting right now because most of our tools are designed to map perception to some sort of extrinsic action almost instantaneously. And we haven't created the infrastructure that allows us to more deeply allow for complex emergent perception and mediated mediated in the context of action at the sort of duration and depth required to meet them. Great. So then a follow up comment and then a question. So Charles followed speaking of time, flagging an inquiry in regard to timekeeping and calendars and their specific numerics effects on humanities, psyche and cultures related to this patients and chronos and kairos. Next question from Nathan Curtis. At what point in time from instantiation, does the established government lose its ability to be self referential and able to look in on itself to identify flaws? I've had a general thought about this question. What I would say of course is that the answer is it depends. And so the particulars matter. And I think it's going to be something like three primary characteristics. One is going to actually have to do with the was called the shape or the topology of the underlying architecture. So an architecture like say liberalism has a decent number of designed fail safes. Very specifically consciousness consciously aware of this problem. And so it has a, it's more like a dissipative structure. It has a higher capacity to actually live longer given a particular color gradient we're using the earliest language we were using. The second is funny can actually you can basically identify three very straightforward principle like one is the the amount of energy with the amount of information or potential that was enclosed in the initial design. The second is the the intelligence or elegance of design in terms of its actual ability to produce structure that most effectively navigates that that dissipation into entropy. The third, and this is I think a piece that we're running into a lot is something like a characteristic of bandwidth distinct from time, meaning the proper measure is not chronological time chronos, but it's something like relational interactions, or loops of perception agency, something like that. And so if I think of say an older loop is a kind of a clock. That is the right clock. Awesome. I mean, and now that maps directly on to kind of what I was mentioning with respect to the active inference idea of duration as time right in the sense that that is precisely that cyclic relation in terms of perceiving the consequences of action as perception and then, you know, internally inside of whatever mechanism is perceiving and acting at whatever scale we're talking about. You know, that transformation is sort of this this this this era of time that we perceive as as the linear structure that linear mapping but the real time. In a lot of ways the systemic time is the path length through this causal structure that flows between the action of any given entity and the the capacity perceived feedback. In terms of what those actions cause and how that allows you in light of the contextualize relations that give meaning to the action in light of the values that are ostensibly pursued. And so back to the question in terms of when is this system capable of or when does become no longer capable of that kind of self reflection. Well, I would say to the extent that that cyclic time that capacity that closure for being able to understand the causal effects of one's own actions in a contextualize meaning grounded frame to the extent that that is intercepted or broken. Right. Or to the extent that it becomes no longer concerned with its own or solipsistic is another way of putting it. So those would be conditions right. It's like to the extent that it actually becomes so wrapped in its own existing frame or its own assumptions of causality. So this would be in active inference, you know, you have something along the lines of you have something along the lines of like an over like the precision of its its capacity to represent the world becomes far too precise with respect to the the relationship between a very narrow subset of modalities and factors in the world, percepts and actions in the world, which is exactly what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about in Jordan's language, the decontextualization or like hyper contextualization. And then, you know, that prevents you from being able to identify a very large percentage of the causal structure that might be relevant to whatever is is threatening the coherence of your collective intelligence or your actual physically embodied metabolic systems or whatever that may be so. Yeah. Nathan wrote, if we want those representatives to embody a certain aspect of being in that position, how do we best select those people, what modalities can we use to select the best AI recommendation systems temperament and character inventory test Personally, I'm fascinated by the possibilities of emergent identification of reputation like networks that take advantage of the information that exists in local relationships. We might notice that to the extent that we have elections at larger and larger scales, we lose that right like in your local elections in a democratic election and democratic electorate. If you're voting for your county, like, you know, for sort of like a county chair, or a governor or whatnot, you're much more likely to have relationships, or at least some sort of socially contextualized understanding of who that person is and what the words that are coming out of their mouth are really mean in relationship to your embodied life. But the further you get away from that, the more you're dealing with abstractions. And so the more energy has to be put into making those abstractions feel real to you. And then you enter the world of, you know, television news and political news cycles, very myopically focused, hyper precise, a lot of energy and time put into those particular issues that get the most attention as opposed to those issues that tend to actually have a more embodied effect on an individual. So how do you actually take advantage or surface that emergent pattern of contextualized wisdom, not just within democratic elections, but at a much deeper level than we've ever considered before? Because I think one requirement of meeting the level of complexity of the problems before us is representing a much greater degree of information which without that information, you know, and that information being at many scales of our net emergent organism, being the nation state, let's say, for now, without that information flow through the system, overwhelming the system, I think liquid democracy perspectives as a general category are quite interesting. In terms of looking at them as sort of like graph finding or path finding algorithms of expertise that are mediated by local expertise or local relationships, local trust networks. The trick with those is I think executing those in a way that is capture resistant, that doesn't necessarily make, that doesn't turn the entire game of life into a game of politics such that we are all campaigning all the time to be perceived as the greatest expert in whatever domain without actually producing the actions that would naturally give rise to those perceptions. It's a big problem. It's like aping the behaviors that would lead to someone perceiving you as successful. It's like the Instagram model or Instagram personality problem. It's like if you rent the jet plane and put on the facade and you wear the skin suit and have the persona, it's increasingly difficult for a large percentage of people to divorce that from the real signal itself. So I think within liquid democracy patterns of sort of emergent stewardship or identification of people who might be able to solve problems with greater competence that emerges as a problem. And then there's also the problem of response time. So it's like to some extent, the reason why we have central executives or the reason why we have individual representatives and place authority in the hands of single individuals is because there are particular kinds of events that require response that is at the scale of smaller time windows than is typically capable with processes that include large numbers of people. So that's another tension in terms of needing to solve that without falling back into sort of the central executive idea. But there was just sort of the cluster of thoughts that come into my mind when that question arises. The first thing that came up for me is that I would profoundly caution that principle of asymmetry, that I'm reasonably confident that the right way to do this is to almost perfectly invert our current way of doing things in our habits and intuitions, meaning a radical regeneration of actual real relationality and orientation of sovereignty, i.e. choice making authority and power to the lower level, more intimate locations is profoundly the right way of doing things. And so that most people for the most most of the time, most of their choices are actually being governed by high context dynamics. And then on top of that substrate, you then can actually relatively easily build a construct that allows kind of a distributed syncinitis, where when it is in fact very important to identify individuals of extremely unique capacity to deal with very specific problems that aren't available within even a vaguely large local environment, you can press them into it. But the point is that they're so deeply connected 80% of the time into a actual lived context with all the different, how do you say this, like strong bond, high feedback loop, high context, high subtlety, that the capture into the Instagram model thing, it doesn't really have, it's obvious that that's a really bad idea. If you have people who are living almost entirely in virtual lives, where there's really nothing real in their lives, like they don't actually have real friends, they don't have real territory, they don't have real relationships with even like their parents or their siblings, then it's very difficult for them to notice that the Instagram influencer thing is terrible, because they don't really have something other than that that is qualitatively distinct. But if they're actually living a truly healthy life with all kinds of good positive things happening, then you can pop into this other role, notice that you really don't want to live there, do your job and get the hell back into a nurturing environment. I should mention, by the way, it's not clear to me that we can actually get from here to there outside of catastrophe, right? The navigation is that particular path, at the very least is a serious, serious, serious job, clearly well beyond the capacity of anything that we have right now. So it would be kind of a trope of cascade of a series of upgraded capacities that get us to the point where we have that capacity. And, you know, that's a good luck. I think we've talked a little bit about this or exchanged a little bit about this, like on Twitter in terms of one of those constraints and what you're talking, I just kind of wanted to get your take on this. One of those issues with respect to potentially walking that adaptive valley, right, or like trying to balance upon that like adaptive ridge line between our current local Maxiva and perhaps some sort of, you know, foothold on a larger fitness landscape. Or a higher point on that fitness landscape is this idea of national capacity in relation to the geopolitical structure of the rest of the world, right, because like we're operating not in isolation, we're operating, you know, if we if we delegate, if we delegate responsibility and like this transformation that brings agency outside of that central locus of coherence that is now this this behemoth the Leviathan of the state with its primary focus, let's say, or at least it's a sensible reason for being as the maintenance of the integrity and the boundaries of the entity called the United States or whatever the nation might be at that scale. If that, you know, as soon as that sort of starts to falter, it's also perceived by other agents on the landscape as opportunity. And then, interestingly enough, is it possible to maintain that transformative traversal in light of whatever pressures are added atop of our already great list of pressures by other geopolitical actors. And I suspect that that's at least one possible reason why you think that, you know, a transformation like this will have to be forced out of sort of a terrific cascade collapse or a cascading collapses. I'd be interested to hear your take on that. Yeah, that's great. What just popped in my head was this notion of pyramids. So by hypothesis, let's say that the American Empire is one giant peacock tail. And so we're going to lose it. But the good news is we can't we can afford it. In fact, we better off without it. And so yes, I think you're right. And in front is almost like an expanding to fill a niche where we found ourselves in this odd circumstance of being first a one of two superpowers and then being an actual global hegemon for the very first time in human history. And we expanded to fill that niche, meaning we we sort of depleted all of our excess capacity until we sort of, I'd say unconsciously and arbitrarily sort of deployed the global hegemon game all the way out to the edge. And then we're sort of pushing at the absolute limits of our control capacity. And by the way, in the context of all these other things we've been talking about like local entropy and parasitism, etc. And all the niches that open up in the interior. And I would simply propose that we're already past that point. So one might argue that any kind of change of behavior comes with the cost of having to give up the benefit of being a global hegemon. And maybe you don't want to do that. That's kind of the tainter pivot point if you're familiar with that point in the in the art. I think that has been cast that we're right now in the process of a forced cast skate down from that position into some new multi polarity. And that can be and I suspect we've probably gotten the order of like, three to five, maybe seven more years for that to kind of land all the way down and all the way down the land very clearly that that's where we are. But I would say we're past the top of that point. So it's a downhill roll from there. And much like this notion of bullshit jobs or the demoralization cynicism of being stuck, we might find ourselves demoralized by being unrooted from being global hegemon. But we might also recognize that was actually never a thing that ever that we really, really aspire to be and could have been or should have been more importantly could have been it was doomed in from the very beginning. And that we're right now being forcibly liberated from a highly dysfunctional dysfunctional location, which then if you sort of shrink the scope back down to a much smaller scope may actually produce a large enough large jets of time and control capacity to afford us called a generation and generation and a half to reestablish a more generative governance infrastructure. So that's an interesting possibility. At least it's a nice story. Okay, to ask a few more questions, just feel free to make sure I have to be very careful with timing because my wife's becoming back with my four year old and I have an immediate responsibility. So we can we can go but be mindful I may literally hit the red button and be gone. Sounds good. Please depart as family demands. So just I'll read a few more questions. And then again, I'll just stay after to give a few reflections. So what is a good example of a major expanded decontextualization that we live in that exists in the culture now? Ex expanded. I didn't understand that. A major expanded decontextualization, maybe a broad scale. Okay. Maybe that might be like a synthesis of the two ways that we were talking about this and maybe in terms of expanded decontextualization in the sense of the hyper, the tendency to see the world maladaptively through a lens that has grown so large that we can see nothing else. The COVID policy is a great example of exactly that. We built a medical and health care, what is it called, public health infrastructure, holding forward, decontextualizing a very large number of aspects of the body to embedded humans. And effectively what that did is that put a series of knobs in the cybernetic control structure that when a real problem came up that has extreme systemic complexity, the way we ended up dealing with it is we started pulling these knobs as opposed to addressing the underlying systemic complexity. We were like, okay, lockdown. Why lockdown? Well, lockdown may be an optimal strategy if you think that you can shut down the spreading of a virus and are completely ignoring all the other systemic consequences of lockdown. For example, it was kind of like you go to war with the army, you have philosophy except that the control board we had was extremely low resolution and even contraindicated by our own past advice in many ways, but it was at hand. And so we pulled the levers. Even though there were plenty of us who were saying, you know, perhaps treating this as a giant light switch is not wise. Make up and think of it isn't always the best play. I would also just extend that point into the fact that beginning to reflect on that as a society is also showing us that there are a number of other decontextualization or sort of like frame lock issues that we have that are quite, that have built quite a lot of inertia around them, especially around the domain of what we call science or what is now parodied as science or scientism, which is like the slightly the more serious conversation that's been going on since the advent of essentially early postmodern philosophy in the vein of sort of phenomenology like Husserl and Husserl's questioning of sort of the paradigmatic nature of science as a way of seeing the world that can displace all other ways of seeing the world if we're not careful. And the tendency of that to because it has provided such a, again, this is sort of this question of exploration, finding capacity. And then that capacity becoming so powerful that it puts people into habitual mode, and that habitual mode becomes a fallback if other levels of social or psychological or even mythopoetic coherence break down. So, you know, to the extent that people lose other frames for perceiving reality, perhaps for interpreting their phenomenological meaning, which is what the mythopoetic frame has provided for so long to the extent that breaks down. Sometimes for good reason. I mean, again, there's a lot of corruption in the church and in religion. And there's a lot of, I would say decay in the sort of interpretive frames presented to to upcoming generations. I mean, I was one of those people, raised Catholic, initially left the church became essentially anti theist for quite some period of time before beginning to realize only through evolutionary education and looking at through the game theoretic lens in terms of deep history, that there was something there, there was a there there, and that it wasn't necessarily something we could jettison. But many people have I think maybe we're in that same position, and being in that position, have jettison that frame falling back upon the purely scientific frame, but not themselves doing science, being associated with the process, therefore falling into a dogma, and being willing to trust the high priests, therefore creating an incentive for high priests who are mouthing the words and playing the game of politics as opposed to really committed to the continued process of discovery and transformation and representation that we know the science and, you know, getting ourselves into that whole situation. And I think we're still very live conversation, we're still trying to figure this out and you know what is the relationship between science, can you have a scientific exploration of mythopoetic constructs. I think that's a really fascinating possible field that also active difference would have a lot to say in terms of the emergent structure of collective behavior that the same kind of questions like really digging into and beginning to examine the kind of questions you were talking about earlier with respect to what it means for different people to have different traits, tendencies of perception personality traits, what that ontology looks like you're going to say seven to 40 psychotypes or something like that. What the dynamics of that as an emergent system actually look like in terms of their feedback and parameterization on the underlying structure and evolution of our society and how mythopoetic structures and scientific perspectives change those perceptions and interaction with one another and dynamic feedback mechanisms upon another or dynamic feedback relations with one another. I mean these are all questions for the next 50 years right I mean, very important ones I would say. Yeah, so I'd like for those who are listening I'd like the fact that you were actually in describing a decontextualized camera the structure is describing the structure, you also are articulating where a lot of the failure conditions emerge and how we find ourselves. Like this systemic shift if you don't notice that you're actually moving from science into politics or moving from science into theology into politics and because you don't even notice this that thing that could happen is not a risk that you're even contemplating in your behavior. And so you're finding yourself on that on that trajectory. Maybe the mother of all like who actually met a being where we are like nearing the end of something that the short answer is is to the question is kind of everything. So, everywhere you look is a hypertrophied example of extended decontextualization. So the problem is actually being aware of what the opposite might look like. But maybe the mother of all is education, the education system. I would say that the current education system decontextualize humans and development developing humans so radically as to deprive them of probably something between 70 and 90% of developmental needs, which produces probably a net yield of probably a 99% reduction in total human capacity. And many of the things that Matthew was just bringing up like the embodied facility, not just the cognitive scientific awareness of the particular psychotypes and the relationships, but actually building actual facility in navigating that properly, how you individually navigate the world and how you can be in right relationship with distinct other kinds of humans in collaborative spaces. Like, that's actually really hard. And it's not the kind of thing that's easy to learn when you're 50. Right. It's the proper thing to be learning between the ages like four and 12, and then deployed effectively in particular kinds of contexts between say 12 and 20. So, sorry, that's a, I'm doing the same thing. I'm pointing out the things we don't even notice that we have lost by virtue of becoming hyper hyper focused on a very particular set of optimization characteristics, and also education as I think a very, very big example of the basic problem. And I think that that that form of education to the extent that we can do that we can also begin to see, you know, in light of what you're saying with respect to it's almost everything at this point, a key element of that almost everything is the economic domain in which this plays out. You can consider that sort of like a hypertrophic exploitation of super normal stimuli, right, like what is a super normal stimuli stimuli that we have that are essentially we've discovered as part of this reflection process of discovery in the domain of science we've discovered particular ways of tapping into involved, involved perception action groups that are unbounded in their sensitivity, right, like there's no, it's very hard to identify upper bound for, you know, how the extent to which you can advertise self undermining food products, or ways of spending your time, if in the moment those produce some sort of extremely positive or extremely some high salience positive affect experience like eating sugar, or, you know, getting that dopamine release from the anticipation of acknowledgement of one's perspective online or these types of economic threads that we have created are specifically, you know, the profit maximization thread I think this is often put on the shoulders of the word capitalism as a pointer to some sort of like, there's something going on here and it's capitalism. But I think at a deeper level what we're pointing to here is the fact that because of this very long lineage of frames that we have chosen and in many ways like adapted to live within as a function of past adaptive challenges. We now live inside this maximal representation of those ideas in a way that is no longer sustainable so I profit maximization as a myopic focus, leading to identifying those narrow set of dimensions that are most in line with that narrow metric over the sort of corporate function. And then tapping in that actually successfully tapping into aspects of all aspects of human psychology perception that are unbounded. It was a search function. And eventually it was going to come to rest on like, probing the human experience in mind until it found those parts that literally would not. Are you gotta go? I gotta go guys, sorry. Indeed, Jordan. Great talk. Thank you. Wow. In any case, yeah, that's another, that's another, that economic thread is another thread to pull on. But that was a great conversation. In this, in the act of overtime, I just want to run through a few hits that I wrote down from this great convo and just plant some seeds for how maybe we can continue 35.2 or in the future. All right, so in the very beginning, there was a discussion of something like a meta theory among the three of Kuhn with respect to science, Hayek with respect to business and tainter with respect to politics. And we can even see that meta theory as the prototypical perception cognition action or eco evo divo loop. So you spoke to the transformational mapping between perception and action which is basically what cognition is. We just say it's everything between that map between perception and action and hence active inference as a prototypical framework for not solving but framing some of these contexts. A structured way of mapping those percepts on to available actions and then identifying, I mean, interestingly enough, like one of the most essential aspects of the framework is that capacity to switch between the development or like reduction of variational free energy in the moment understanding like whether my representation of parsing reality and action and what I'm doing is actually in line with the causal structure of my local environment versus this explore exploit future oriented frame of reference in light of when is it time to actually search out some disruption or some entropy so that that entropy injection into my locally ossified frame can open me up again to navigating that adaptive landscape and introducing new maps between perception and action that can facilitate my continued adaptation. Awesome. So I wanted to actually go to the free energy with we had the earliest epoch of human collaboration, which Jordan characterized as sort of an unconscious. And that is a lot like type one thinking in the type one type two system and it's a lot like variational free energy. It's just this real time unfolding ball goes downhill modality type two thinking second stage civilization as per Jordan and expected free energy is where we actually have the double edged sword of the rollout and anticipation. And we've seen simulations in active where a tiny proportion of hypothesized negative outcomes, even if they're totally avoidable, drive rumination and anxiety and high variance estimates. And then the question is, is there a third epoch? Is there a third mode that uses attention to modulate the balance or the reliance between the variational and the expected free energy and to what extent is that attentional modulation implicit tacit onboard, not automatable. And to what extent could that kind of wisdom be reflected in our externalized niche. And that connects to the question of automation and transparency around our information architecture, communications and our infrastructure. And I thought of first, a sort of infrastructural incompleteness or instability theorem, like even if you get all of layer one automated, then of course, layer two has not been automated. So there's always the hyper prior. And also that men to opponent processing thinking with tensegrity architecture compression and tension. Could we have systems where instead of just trying to, oh, we want this object hanging here, we'll just put a pillar underneath it. And then we'll put a pillow underneath that like, are we going to compress all the way down? Or could we have a harmonic mode that involved compression and tension. And that's how it stayed flying. Then just go ahead and then I have two last points. I know either way, but yeah, there's a lot of resonance here with some of the things I'm working on, literally right now in terms of attempting to work with active inference as a, like I was saying earlier as a that cognitive mapping that that mapping you can look at it also as a category theoretic mapping within a category and a set of morphisms, right between this sort of space of perception and the space of action. And you can then also, in that sense, integrate that into a larger hypothesis around the topology of emergence, and then develop that as a toolkit, which is interesting because in active inference through the lens of active inference in theory, everything can be active inference. And then it leads to this sort of recursive hierarchical structure, but following thinkers such as like Robert Rosen in terms of his and like Vachevsky in relational biology, and bringing in theories of a temporal causal structure that basically can contextualize the temporal unfolding of entailments. You can actually use those understandings to you to take active inference as a as a tool and weave it into larger fabrics, like you're talking about. And, and those fabric connections, they are related to active inference, but they're not necessarily active inference itself, although you could then take a metastep outside of that and say, we can apply the principles to the entire system. But there's this role of understanding novel closures of observing of reflexivity. And that reflexivity I think is a really like the approach I describe as approach I'm taking to introduce a different kind of reflexivity and a kind that I believe is consonant with multi scale arbitrarily complex emergence into the to the world of active inference. But, you know, experimenting with how to stitch active inference together into itself I think is a very, you know, the entire field is new and exploratory but even amongst that it's a is that that sort of periphery in the edge of exploration. So, Indeed. And just these last two points. Breaka Lodge was mentioned and active inference helps us with the composability legibility and simulation emulation analytics on different systems, physical cyber physical cognitive unknown, etc. So if we're doing Breaka Lodge on the edges, now we have the glue or the sticky tape or whatever it is. And then last point was on the peacocks and pyramids. It's not so simple as just an adaptive buffer, even throwing a pleotropy. So the consequences on different phenotypes aside, because it becomes integrated as the kind of thing I am. And so, yes, it's like the eraser is the capacity of the pencil, but we don't rub our erasers all the way down. We're not always on our last life in the video game. And a symbol that on one hand, the energy could have been diverted to some other purpose, that symbol can actually become an introduction at even the mythopoetic level. And therefore, actually lose its capacity to be an adaptive buffer at one level and become a pivotal player at another level. So the buffer, I think that is that's also like related to that Instagram problem where it's like, and it's particularly with respect to the abstraction of that buffer as well. Right. So like if you abstract the buffer as well, the buffer is in theory a signal of underlying quality of behavior to accumulate and create resources over and above the requisite level of short term consumption or metabolic need. Right. That's the evolutionary instinct we have for sort of appreciating someone who has quote unquote gathered wealth at least by means that we're constructive or generative. But then you can, you know, to the extent that that becomes associated with identity, right. And then you look at the signals as that wealth manifests in a particular culture as the proxy measurement for the underlying phenomenon. Then you can start to get into the manipulation of those signals. If someone understands and observes others behaving as if the signals were the process of production of that capacity for wealth, the capacity for production of generating wealth or useful byproducts. Then you can see again this emergent parasitism element dropping in there because people will try to middleman that process and say if I can get you to treat me as if I am that person. Maybe I can get access to whatever associated privileges come alongside that. So, so yeah, 100% that's a that identity association and all of the games that it opens up or is essentially a central what your main tool we're talking about, what we were talking about. Awesome. And a closing thought. The discussion made me think of a July 4 fireworks for information. What does it look like when the weaponry is turned into living re and when there can be a symbolic ritual around the utilization of that dual functional technology within the boundaries across those levels. Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean we're in a beautiful time for that right now I think so much of the emerging technology the generative technologies out there, especially under the hospices of AI or ML. The capacity to use that generative toolkit and its its ability to allow people to a much broader swath of people to produce potentially resonant artistic and cultural artifacts that are pointers to something they find unique or interesting or insightful that might then spread if it aligns with a given moment or need. And that's particularly fascinating to me as a as a catalyst for increasing our capacity to think collectively, you know, transcending just the verbal domain and bringing in other sensory modalities aligned with the word. I mean that's the funny thing about these LMS right like their large language models and you know language can act as that fabric as that as that, you know, language as the neural network itself as the as the computational network between these other sensory apparatus and the ability to to produce artifacts that bring people into forms of alignment or phenomenological residents that just would not have otherwise existed. Now, you know, people are there are potential downsides this as well just like anything, but you know I'm very excited about that because I look at the all of the art that I've seen this new generative artwork. It is like you know I'm very much informational fireworks right people are able to take five ideas they heard today you can go you know based on this podcast you could basically say like take any subsection of that produce a series of generative artworks and then associate that lineage of or like series of gen you know generative art with this as a network of visual network that could be a dynamic placeholder, you know that could attract attention automatically from the potential network that resonates with that artwork right and tap into the latent space of this conversation that none of us hold explicitly our heads, but we're all pointing to it based on our words and our conversations and the kind of things we're trying to talk about here like there is a latent space representation. It's possible. So, yeah, I mean I think we're interesting times for that and using that as a tool constructively and wisely. I'm looking forward to seeing seeing that part of this unfold. Thank you, Matthew. Thank you to Jordan. Till next time. Thanks. Always a pleasure.