🎋🔬🕸️ 218 - Neil Theise on Complexity & Nonduality

At one point, I noticed dust motes in the morning light coming through the window in front of my cushion, and I looked up and saw the stick of incense turning into smoke. And is it stick or smoke? Is it Bob or yourself? And I still get choked up when I talk about this.

It was suddenly like, this is the emptiness of inherent existence. This is what they're talking about. And it isn't decidable. It is both a thing and a process.

It is a thing and not a thing. And everything is not a thing. And it was a visceral moment. It wasn't an intellectual moment.

It was just like, I suddenly mean the incense, the same thing, and I could see it and feel it. And that's when the distance between my science practice and my spiritual practice just disappeared. Greetings Future Fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you back for episode 218 of the podcast, Explore Where There Placed In Time, which means it is April of 2024.

Things are springing. And that's honestly why it's been a while since I've dropped an episode because I've been so immersed in so many amazing creative projects. I don't even really have time to update you on them all. But let me give you a start with listener Van Bettauer's new conversational interface for this entire show, AskFutureFossils.com, which is also now available as a forward slash ask prompts in the Future Fossils Discord server where you can query the entire podcast with your most pressing and profound questions.

And it will give you retrieval, augmented, generative responses with linked citations and timestamped episode audio players. So, you know, whatever you want. I personally give a test drive by asking about the future of the self in an age of intensely interconnected hyperlinked media. And later, I've seen people querying it about the process whereby individual intuition and phenomenological experience becomes firm intersubjectively and then becomes more and more robust and objective knowledge.

This is an amazing resource and it's yours for free. So hop on into the Discord server and if you feel like you want a deeper engagement with this kind of stuff after you have honed your questions on the chatbot, then hit me up with the consulting. But also, Patreon, Bandcamp and Substack supporters are about to score a very fun live recording of the recent Michael Garfield and Friends performance I had at the Mystic here in Santa Fe. This renovated motel is just high desert, strangeness and absolutely structured and scaffolded some of the most awesome and stirring, jazz fusion stuff I've ever been a part of with guest musicians Dave Wayne and Drums, Jim Getch on saxophone, Tommy Bauman and Jay Paiett on percussion and Clear Boys and Stacey O'Watt Abbott on guest vocals.

You know you're doing something right when your band is half composed of Los Alamos scientists. I think back on the chaos cabal that joined the farmer and Jim Crutchfield, others were hammering at in the 80s and I think we've got something similar going on here in New Mexico. It's called a complexity covenant but yeah, huge, huge thanks to all of the new Patreon and Substack supporters, Yuval Kleijon, Taylor Stillman, Silverback, Shumman, William Maastra, Nominal User, Matthew, Laba Taglia, Fuji Slice, if you're not on the boat, get on the boat. It's one of these paradoxes where the more people that are on the boat, the more it floats.

So, hugely appreciate the few hundred of you who helped me keep this going. Oh and lastly, I'm excited to announce I am co-facilitating a course starting on April 18th running to May 16th with Joshua Shri of the Emerald Podcast on Embodied Ethics in the Age of AI. This is of course produced by Andrew Dunn, former head of innovation for the Center for Humane Technology and it will involve a number of wonderful people including turquoise sound and Elena Lake Palazova, former AI engineer at Meta, Evan Sharpe, co-founder of Pinterest, Sarah Jolina Wolkat, ecotheologist and founder of Sequoia Samanvaya and Mara Zepera, co-founder of Zepera's Unite. She has been together over six weekly sessions and ongoing forum activity.

We will explore topics such as the Mythic implications of AI, individual initiation in the age of AI, the topologies of accountability, reprioritizing slow growth and the path towards embodied intelligence. Josh Shri is going to be my next guest for Future Fossils. You can get primer on the ideas that flow into this course in his extraordinary episode of the Emerald Podcast. So, you want to be a sorcerer in the age of Mythic powers.

And then chew on that and then chew on our conversation which I'm going to drop ASAP next week. But first, this is a very delightful long overdue discussion with NYU pathologist complex systems thinker, lifetime Zen Buddhist practitioner and just wonderful person, Neil These. Remember the Lindisfarne Association, who long-term listeners of this show will know, is an enormous inspiration to Future Fossils, the organization run by William Irwin Thompson that attempted to figure the planetary and understand the future of the evolution of consciousness, through a diversity of lenses. Anyway, yeah, gosh, there's so much going on.

The point is sign up on Substack or Patreon, support the show, check the show notes for the registration link and more information on embodied ethics in the age of AI. Go have fun with the beta side load version of yours truly in the Discord server or at AskTheFuturePossils.com. Don't hesitate to reach out to me personally with questions and enjoy a very soulful, stirring, profound, humane. And nourishing conversation with Neil These about his book, Notes on Complexity.

Neil, how are you? I'm okay. Michael, how are you? I'm doing okay.

Your image seems watery. Interesting. I'm not a chopper. Yeah, I think it'll go up and down as the connection, quality, degrades and so on.

Yeah, I've been thinking about that a lot because I work on a team with some guys that all got really nice professional cameras for their video calls and I look at myself and I don't know if you, you seem like a fan of science fiction. There's this- I have been in my day. Yeah, there's a trilogy by John C. Wright called The Golden Ecumen where the protagonist, Faithan and his dad Helion are in this post-human society where his dad runs the Dyson Sphere, that powers society.

And whenever he goes to his dad's house, his bit rate increases. It's like he gets like the benediction of being like ultra HD whenever he's visiting his dad. That's funny. Yeah.

But anyway, so you've got, how's life since you released this book? It's been a very- Oh, and you're recording? Yeah. Yeah, coming and going.

If we need to get anything out, if you want to keep something private, just let me know and I'll cut it out. I don't- I generally don't keep anything private. It's been a really intense year and often very not good. I had a couple of strokes back in a year ago and then that actually felt great because I went on medical leave for six months.

It was fatigue. So all I could do was lie around, I discovered I like just lying around and reconsidering, who am I and what is my life? And then three months into that book launch, I would wake up from nap number five, go to a podcast next door in the front room and then go back and lie down. So that kept me busy and then I tore my rotator cuff and then I had to have surgery on that and that turned out to be the hardest part of everything.

Because of the rotator cuff and what it did to my sleeping, I ground down my left hip so now I need a hip replacement and I walk into the cane. That's May 6th and I'm trying to rebuild because it's my left hip and I need my right shoulder for a cane and crutch when they do my left hip. So we're doing PT to- so that's been here. But on the other hand, my book came out and is doing really well and exciting things are happening.

And I just wish I had a simple mundane middle ground and there hasn't been one. Next summer I'm going to just ride my bicycle and sit by the river and read books. That's interesting. One of the longest overdue guests on this show is Jonathan Malayse, a career called the End of Burnout.

And it's just a poor book and he talks about how he got the job of his dreams as a college professor teaching divinity. And then he realized that he hated it. He hated his life. And so he took a year off and managed to find balance again and then went back thinking that he had recovered and then immediately hated his life again.

And his point has to do with burnout and purpose and how we've created this problem that's not new to the modern world. He talks about how it's manifested through history in different ways. But the people who tend to suffer burnout and you fall into one of the most kind of aggrieved classes of people who work in medicine. Check.

Come on, surprise me. Yeah. What it is, it's not about how much you get paid. It's not about how much prestige you have.

It's about the gap between your sense of duty and the everyday reality of your work. And so I've been experiencing something like that without incriminating anyone. I once had a job that I absolutely that I was so motivated to, it seemed like the right thing. And then I was just a mess for years.

And then like you said, like last year, I spent most of last year recuperating and now I'm back to work. And I'm wondering like how much longer can I get away with this before I'm just like gardening for a living or something like a life like a couple. This was, I really do look at the stroke. The shoulder not so much, but the stroke strokes.

There were two little ones up here as a real gift because it, there was no way I could stop myself from all the things I was committed to and give myself a chance to not be the clinical doctor, not be the publishing researcher, not be anything. And just lie there, contented to do nothing. People were like, aren't you frustrated or bored? No, because I had no energy that it was the brain energy was missing.

So I was perfectly happy to just lie there. And at this juncture in my life, I could take a look at things and go, okay, yeah, medicine, it's particularly academic medicine. It's really hard to get off the various treadmills that you're on simultaneously. The research stuff, I have 220 peer review papers.

It's a fair amount. I have friends with at 500, but lying there was like, okay, I'm 64. I'm probably going to work till 70 or so is when I can afford to retire, I think. And so another 20 papers, does it really matter?

240 versus 220. So I'm sitting on a whole bunch of data with my interstitial research, this whole new anatomic reconsideration of human bodies. I'm getting that out the field. People have responded to the work that's already published and it's moving on its own.

I don't need to do that. So I'm going to stop doing academic stuff. On the other hand, writing this book turned out to be, there were moments that were extremely fraught, but partly because I was doing it with other things, right? I want to focus on the next couple of books.

And so that feels good. And one of the aftermath of the stroke, it wasn't a stress associated thing. It's actually, I'm one of the one in 1,000. I just had a couple of clots for no apparent reason.

And people in this category are very unlikely to ever have them again. So the prognosis is great. I'm not particularly worried. And I don't remember what I was going to say.

Oh, but stroke, I can't multitask anymore. And it happened like a week after the strokes. I was on the street trying to get an Uber to go to a minorologist and a friend from work texted to see how I was doing. And those two things collided and my brain had to go.

Not a literal meltdown. It wasn't really my brain. It was my cortisol. So I can do one thing at a time.

And this was really upsetting for the first few minutes. And then I thought, you've been a Zen student for over three decades. The point is to do one thing at a time. So again, the universe was like, you can only do one thing at a time.

So that's all you're going to do. Going back to work, it's hard being in a hospital and doing one thing at a time. But I'm setting up the systems to allow me to do that. Wow.

What a thought. So it's all actually pretty good. It's just learning to work with physical pain. That's extended.

That's been really interesting. But it's just it's been a very rich year. Let's say there's a lot in there, including tendency I have is to dig into this thing about multitasking and do you really do like it's actually what is it? Like rapid task switching and then something like that.

And that's what I can't do. If you interrupt me while I'm on this thing, I turned into an anxious chihuahua backed into a corner. And if you come here, I'm going to snap at you. I've started experiencing this in conversations with my wife.

You have a child? Yes. In a way, I feel like working in tech now and having kids. There's the benefit of everyone else on the team also having kids.

So at least everyone is suffering the same kind of thing of constant interruption. But I've been talking a lot with Tom Morgan, who's a director at Sapient Capital. Shout out to you, Tom, if you're hearing this. He's got a fantastic blog for his website that he has a large readership of New York VCs who he takes down the path of what he calls minimal viable woo into this.

These considerations about how really high performing investment portfolios tend to put more attention on intuition. And there's like my buddies who hosted Weird Studies podcast had Joshua Raimi on in episode 22. And Joshua Raimi talked about the role of divination in science and in finance and how the modern world has acts as though this doesn't happen, but it still remains a central practice. The decision of which hypothesis to pursue or which investment to make.

And so I'm calling a shot in the long game here because this brings us very close to the resolution that you take people to in your book with Gertel in completeness and intuition. Yeah. But the point I guess in bringing up Tom is that I was talking about this morning where he was saying there's this relationship. If you walk into a room and you forget what you're you walked into the room to do and that he experiences this now every time he looks at his phone.

And I said, yeah, there's this thing about the throughput of information. If you think of the brain as a computer, which I go back and forth on this, it's fairly computational aspect. Yeah. And I want to talk with you about von Neumann and all this stuff too.

But anyway, the to the degree that the way that information theorists use computation and to the degree that you can rigorously say that the brain is a computer that it's interesting to me that something like DMT and like the down regulation of the default network and the collapse of narratives and the collapse of serial episodic autobiographical memory is the most obvious effect of living in this mature regime of computer technology. And that like when you look back over the history of the development of computers, you've got all of these weird things like Doug Engelbart, who was a principal in the origins of personal computing and the internet was an LSD trial subject in the 50s at the Institute for Advanced Study. Yeah. And you know, all of the important Steve Jobs and Wozniak taking assets, Kerry Mullis take on his psychedelic adventures and the polymerase chain reaction.

Anyway, so there is this, there's something about the like as the environment, as the salient features of our environment, metamorphos at an ever greater rate that we lose, we lose this illusion of continuity that carried us through hundreds and hundreds of years of like the way that we define the modern self. And I don't know why I'm ranting about this, except that this thing about no longer being able to kid ourselves about being able to multitask and like the importance of working to regain our ability to focus. And so there's like this whole piece. Do you know Richard Doyle at Penn State?

No. Oh, he wrote. I don't know. Okay.

I'll connect the two of you. I think you really like each other. Doyle wrote three really good books about the rhetorical transformations in the life sciences. The last was about psychedelics and chronicle his turn into Advaita Vedanta, non dual philosophy.

And he talks a lot about how the psychedelics in the internet are training wheels for a transhuman condition that is a mcluinesque cultural retrieval of pre-modern, pre-rational self-authoring ego construction. And that like the new being, the new human being on the other end of this is a being that is so embedded in information flows that we cannot kid ourselves about being separate anymore. That is just not part of the phenomenology of 21st century life. So this is where I want to just dump like that's the frame.

And I would love to have, I'm just going to sit back and let you tell us to the degree that we can do one thing at a time here. Tell us the story of your own intellectual biography. I'm being a big fan of Bill Thompson and knowing that there's that connection in Lindisfarne between the neurotheological stuff, connecting neuroscientists, the Buddhists. And this is something that you do really boldly in this book that I was relieved that you did, that you take the unlike most complex systems scientists I have ever met, you take the sort of conceptual framework of complexity into its metaphysical implications.

And you credit Stu Kaufman as being one of the early readers of this book and Stu is one of the only people I know that does this. But that seems like a kind of that is something Brian Arthur does too and both of them are involved in Lindisfarne. And so I'm interested in through your own personal story, tracing the roots of this book back into something that I consider a kind of lost history of the relationship between complexity science and consciousness studies that shows up in the work of Francesco Varella and Evan Thompson and all of these people, but is largely ignored in the public discussion about complexity science. And I think it's really one of my favorite things about this book.

So that's my rant. And yeah, thank you. I just let you have even one favorite thing about this book. That's the thrill.

So, you know, my method, I had a little bit of a moment with my editor when I started writing the book. There's what we now call the authors note in the front, which is like a little mini intro behind the bigger intro of chapter one. And my first draft I said, I'm drawing together all sorts of different things from different fields because in my life, I've been the dillaton and he was like, you can't call yourself a dillaton. You're writing a book, it means you're an expert.

You can't call yourself a dillaton. The thing is that I don't believe in astrology, but it seems to believe in me. I'm a Gemini with Virgo rising. So Gemini is your dillaton.

But Virgo is your obsessive compulsive. So when I dillatonally enter a new field, I go a little insane digging deep into it. But now I acknowledge I'm an expert because I've written a book. It's like the scarecrow getting a diploma.

So really, part of my methods scientifically, but it took me some decades to realize it's a method is that I'm not a typical 20th or 21st century scientist who applies for grants by making a hypothesis and figuring out the experiments that I'm going to do to prove or disprove it on the basis of that, creating a new hypothesis, etc. Of course, I'm making hypotheses all the time, but I'm much more like a 19th century natural historian. I wander into the woods and I see an interesting leaf over there and I see an interesting acorn over here and things start to pull in. It turned into actual scientific practice in the mid 90s.

So I went to medical school for kind of stupid reasons. I was intending to become a clinician. I didn't do well in medical school. I failed second year and had to repeat the whole year.

I was depressed. It was a terrible place. But I had the summer off and I needed a job and I got a job at the pathology department and discovered that I love looking at slides through microscopes. This is my microscope and my office because I'm a pathologist.

So I went to give meaning to my life that I would take care of patients and that even I was gay in the closet, couldn't cope with it. I thought I'm never going to get married. I'll never have kids. I'm going to be socially isolated and alone.

I'll die alone. If I go to medical school, I'll have connections that are meaningful with people. So that got me to medical school. That was a terrible mistake.

But I discovered pathology, which was the parachute out of those agonies. And with pathology, I just, there's a little bit of tissue. Can you see these little, that's a liver biopsy. And I wander around in the slide trying to figure out what's going on in this patient's liver.

And the practice of liver pathology in particular, because the liver has a very limited range of things that can, responses that can make, many diseases look very similar. And so we don't get the clinical history when we start to look at the slide. So just look at it blind and let our intuition play. That's the practice.

And it's very much like my Zen practice. You're just sitting and being present with the present moment. And then things start to arise. One of the things that arose through that was on understanding that livers do have stem cells.

And 25 years ago, generally people said the skin, the lining of the GI tract, the blood in bone marrow, they have stem cells and no other organ has stem cells or needs stem cells. The liver included. That obviously started to shift. And I was part of that shift initially focused on the liver.

And it was work I did looking at human tissues. And I wasn't even, this wasn't an NIH grant where I was doing experiments. I just was taking clinical specimens and staining them to look for some proteins to identify different cell types. And I could prove through 3D reconstruction, why would you do that?

I was curious and discovered these cells linked up into networks. And that meant that they were stem cells. And that led to the idea that not all stem cells in the liver come from the liver. They come from the bone marrow potential.

And so I became part of the crowd at the turn of the millennium that was saying adult stem cells could do way more than we thought they could. That cells were traveling around the body to behave as stem and progenitor cells. That every organ had stem cells. And there were many types of stem cells.

And this ran into the political head wings of embryonic stem cell research. It was my group's paper actually showing that this adult stuff could happen at the single cell level. One cell from a bone marrow could turn into tissues of the cells of every organ that led to George Bush's address to the nation, limiting embryonic stem cell research, oops, unintended consequences. And through that work, a friend of mine in England named Peter Ride, who was an academic and at the time he was interested in interdisciplinary studies and how people across disciplines would speak to each other.

And he had a very good friend named Jane Prophet, who was an artist. And he always wanted us to meet. But whenever I was in London, she was out of town. Whenever she was in New York, I was out of town.

So we got a grant to make a sit together in London and in New York and just talk to each other, explaining what we do, learning each other's languages for what we do. And there was no expectation of a research project, a paper, a report, an artwork. They just wanted to record our conversation so other people could study how we communicate. And I was telling her about how stem cells move around the body.

And she said that sounded to her like people who do this thing called complexity theory and talk about how ants move around the body, how ants form colonies, and how slime holds function and stuff like this. And I was like, what's complexity here? So that was my intro was thanks to Jane. And if you're not familiar with her work, what got her interested in complexity is she had an early interest in how people relate emotionally to virtual creatures online.

And this is before virtual creatures were anything sophisticated the way games are done today. And working with Gordon Selly, who was a computer programmer, they created an online world called Technosphere. And people could create little creatures, decide whether they are herbivores or carnivores, design what kind of feet, bodies, mouths they had and stuff. And then they were released into the virtual world of Technosphere to interact with each other and they would send you postcard messages about how they were doing.

And she was interested in the idea that people form attachments to these virtual creatures. What's going on there? When there were like five or 10,000 creatures released into Technosphere, they started doing things that Gordon had not programmed. So the herbivores were starting to create hurt.

And they noticed at one point, and none of this was visual. It was just numbers coming at data coming out of the system because there was no way to visualize this back. I think this was in like the late 90s. And then they noticed that there was a sudden stabilization of population.

Carnivores weren't eating herbivores apparently. And then suddenly there was a population collapse and it was entirely herbivores. So Gordon went into the code to see what was happening. And it turns out that not only had the herbivores formed herds, but they would eat themselves into an enclosed valley.

And the carnivores were lining up at the mouth of the valley to wait. And when the herbivores had consumed all the grass in that valley and tried to leave, the carnivores pounced and there was a mass extinction of it. So word got out of this was going on and they were invited to a conference on artificial life in Berlin and asked to present. And she said, so this is artificial life.

And they were like, no, this is artificial life. It's a complex system. It's self-organizing. It's adaptive.

It's doing things that are not predictable by your intentions, et cetera. And so that's how she entered thinking about complexity theory. And we realized the cells I'm looking at are doing the same thing. I think the key thing for me is that I spend most of my workdays, which up until my strokes was just about every day, I'm sitting here talking to people at the everyday scale and encountering people's bodies as these separate objects.

And then I get a piece of a person and I put it under the microscope and I'm looking at bodies at the microscopic level. So I'm constantly moving back and forth across scales. And so very soon, it probably took a year or two before this really sunk in because it's always harder moving forward than looking back. That ants self-organize into colonies, humans self-organize into neighborhoods, cities, cultures, economies.

But I was doing this regarding stem cells and cells have cells make up the body. So suddenly you've got this hierarchy, but I don't like that term, but it's good shorthand. The cells are organizing into bodies, bodies are organizing into communities. Each of those looks like a thing if you're looking at it at that level of scale.

If you look at an ant colony from a distance, it looks like a dark shape on the ground. If you hear a sound in the sky look up and you see a murmuration of starlings, particularly if you've never seen it before, your first thought is, what is that thing in the sky? And then you realize it's not a thing. It's a phenomenon arising from interacting birds.

The colony is arising from interacting ants. If you go to the cellular level though, the thingness of the ant disappears, the thingness of the bird disappears into a phenomenon arising from smaller things, namely cells, according to Western medicine defined by cell doctrine, that all living things are made of cells which come from other cells. And so suddenly the idea that something is a reified thing became a scale dependent and a perspective dependent. And suddenly there was an alignment between some Buddhist stuff and this.

I wasn't particularly interested in that. I've never been interested in where science meets my spiritual practice. It seems boring question to me. There's this way of your own reality and this way of your own reality.

I let other people worry about how those might link up. During this time, I started to get obsessed about this idea that the cells that I'm studying on the slide or in the laboratory animals when I was back when I was doing animal research are my cells. They're the same as the cells in my body. So really I'm not studying something outside of me.

I'm studying something in the. And these cells are moving around. Is this body a thing? Is it a body or is it a community of cells?

And I was caught between the fact that I couldn't find a way to wait it in one direction or another. And very much like a Zen Cohen, which is a story or statement or question that can't be answered through analytical mind as a thing as an object of contemplation. So I'm walking around New York and just can't shake this question of my body or my cells. And I was walking down.

I came to the corner of Park Avenue one evening and there was a don't walk sign. So I stood there and I'm mulling this question over obsessively. I can't turn it off and the light changes and people next to me step off the curb and I can't step off because my leg has become a flock of cells. And I couldn't direct it.

And then I could and I kept walking. So that happened. And then a few weeks later, I was in my Zen, I'm a student at the village Zen in New York City, downtown. I'm still there.

And it was my job to open the place for meditators on Thursday mornings. And back in those days, there weren't a lot of people on Thursday morning. So I was there by myself this particular morning. And instead of doing the Zen practice, which I think at the time was following my breath, sit it on the cushion.

I lit the incense on the altar, went back and sat on my cushion. And I just can't shake the question about yourself. And at one point, I noticed dust molds in the light, the morning light coming through the window in front of my cushion. And I looked up and saw the stick of incense turning into smoke.

And is it stick or smoke? Is it Bob or yourself? And I still get choked up when I talk about this. It was suddenly like, this is the emptiness of inherent existence.

This is what they're talking about. And it isn't decidable. It is both a thing and a process. It is a thing and not a thing.

And everything is not a thing. And it was a visceral moment. It wasn't an intellectual moment. It was just like, I suddenly, me and the incense were the same thing and I could see it and feel it.

And that's when the distance between my science practice and my spiritual practice just disappeared. In that moment, they became precisely the same thing. They're just different ways of exploring precisely the same thing. Because there's only one true nature of reality.

I would think there's two just because we have two methods. So that's chasing that question down. They're cells of things. No, they're just molecules.

They're molecules of things. No, they're just atoms. And those are just subatomic particles. And what are subatomic particles anyway?

They're just excited fields of energy. And then it's not turtles all the way down. It's not an infinite regress. You reach a limit, a blank length and a clock time.

Time isn't smooth the way relativity describes it in quantum terms. And thus, it's also not empty. It's not a vacuum. It's an energy-rich field.

And down there you have what's called the quantum foam because thanks to relativity, you have this energy-rich quantum field, e equals mc squared. Periodically, some of that energy is going to erupt in little mass containing entities. Usually matter-antimatter pairing, which then immediately self-enilate and disappear back into the energy field. But those that escape can interact with each other.

And here's that complexity theory thing. So when I was interacting according to some basic principles, self-organizing the larger scale structures which are creative and adaptive. And then quantum foam turns into subatomic particles, becomes atoms, becomes molecules, and the whole universe brings into existence. So that's happened to the complexity, I think, because I came to complexity theory from left field.

The part of it that caught my eye was where the implications. I wasn't involved in. How do I use complexity theory to solve this problem? I started off by thinking, what is complexity theory and what are the implications if you really push them?

And so that's where the book comes from. It was then that I entered Linda's form. Actually. I was going to talk on this at the Upaya Zen Center where Joan Halifax is the Roshi, the Abbot.

You're in town. Is Abbot? Yeah, it's Abbot. Yeah.

And oh, it was no. I had gone down for a retreat because my Zen teacher, Enchil O'Hara Roshi at the village endo, she and Joan are sort of Dharma sisters. And so I went as my teacher's attendant for a week long retreat there. And I had started talking about this stuff in talks, including my own Zen-Dow.

And my Roshi said suggested that Joan she would enjoy it. So I gave the talk to a small cluster of people in her living room. And she said, oh, this is the stuff Francesco Barello was talking about. And it's why if you, it's not in the book, I refer to it obliquely.

But while the book winds up on a strongly idealist proposition that consciousness is what underlies existence, it doesn't arise from existence, where I started was a panpsychist sort of thing influenced by Barella and Evan Thompson saying that no, cells are, Barella's point of view, at least at some point, was that cells are the smallest unit of life and cells have the smallest unit of mind. That's why when he helped found the mind and life organization, it was called Mind and Life. If you're alive, you have mind, if you have mind, you're alive. But that's a panpsychist point of view.

And eventually I started to think do molecules really not exhibit the same sorts of sentience that Barella's talking about in Autopoietic theory? So then I started going down that rabbit hole. This is the last step to the intellectual journey. Notice at every stage I bump into someone who I never would have ordinarily met and they give me another piece of the puzzle to go forward.

So there's Jane in that case, then Joan and then the Linda Sfarnfolk. Then a friend of mine who at the time was working for Tibet House, Bill Bachell, who's a medical anthropologist, honest with completely other bunch of stuff I do. He had to give a talk at the science of consciousness meetings in Stockholm. And he was nervous about doing that and wanted me to go with.

So I could hold his hand while he gave his talk. But in order to go with, I had to submit an abstract on something. And what do I know about consciousness? But I had these ideas about sentience and Barella and complexity.

So I put that into a little abstract that I hope would be rejected, but got accepted for a little tiny afternoon session. That morning, the plenary speaker was Menes Kufatos, who is a cosmologist, quantum physicist, Kazemari Shavis, and has been talking about the conscious universe for 40 years. He was one of the first people. His book titled that I think was one of the first uses in that way.

And he was giving a talk in which he talked about quantum theory. And the reason that we can't go further with this is we need a similarly revolutionary idea of biology. We need a new biology to understand this. And he talks about what the new biology would have to accomplish.

And I'm sitting there getting angry because it's what I'm talking about with complexity theory. Haven't you seen my papers? Of course, I went no one to see my papers. And I actually laughed in a huff before I finished the talk.

I was just so frustrated. That afternoon, I have to give my little thing in the side session. There were four abstracts being presented in a room of 20 people, the four people, and each of them had two or three friends. I was the last one, and the moderator for the session was Menes.

And I gave my little thing. And he, as soon as the session was over, you and I have to talk. And then we started exploring complexity, quantum physics, consciousness, Advaita Vedanta, Kashmirism, Buddhism. And so meeting him is what took me down the last road.

And then I had to fill in some gaps. And Godel was the most important part of that, which is in the last third of the book. Yeah, so that's how I got here. Is that what you were asking?

Yeah, yeah. I could have, that question of like, turns, McKenna says, the story doesn't really have a beginning. But as storytellers, we always start it somewhere. Never an end.

We always end it somewhere. There's a very different version in the book itself, actually, because I didn't want it to be 400 pages. I met this person. Then I met this person.

And they told me this. And honestly, not to blow smoke up your ass. But this, I was really impressed by the clarity. And I know that in the acknowledgments, you in debt yourself to Anne Horowitz, your copy editor, who's a precise throw in kind.

But it really is one of the most, as someone who was tasked for almost five years with reporting on complexity science to a general audience, I was pleased and impressed at how well you did to communicate this stuff and considerably more. Quantum theory, Copenhagen interpretation, Gertel and completeness, et cetera, in under 180 pages. With the picture. And the funny thing is that in the time that I spent on that, the powers that be were always deeply concerned that translating the work out of formal mathematical models and into language was a threat in some way to the rigor of the work.

And it's interesting that you, as most other really practiced meditators, do make a point later in the book that you're basically just pointing at the moon. When it comes to describing Vedanta or Kashmirishism or any of these things, that the phenomenology of non-duality is bastardized in some way. It can't be avoided. And at this, again, when Cormac McCarthy published his last two books right before his passing last year, and I think it was a review in The New Yorker said that he had physicist envy that hanging out at the Santa Fe Institute for many years had made him feel as though the fuzziness of language was somehow inadequate to the presentation of truth in a way that math is not.

And yet, this is where I'd like to carry it because you brought up Gertel. But then you have something I never knew about the history of his death blow to logical positivism and this notion that science is going to be the one ring to rule them all in the way that we think of empirical quantitative science. Like you and my graduate advisor, Sean S. Bjorn-Hargens and others have made the point that science is perhaps more better understood in a more general way as a process-based thing that carries intuitive apprehensive experiences into peer review and it's hardly data mode.

Partly why I told that full story is there was no inductive logical process here. Where I went from fact to fact, I was feeling my way, literally feeling my way, following my intuition. And then when the ground was killed, I'd suddenly get an insight that like, why didn't I think of that before? It's really obvious.

Much of my scientific output has been that kind of thing, which makes it impossible for me to get funded, but it doesn't matter because I have a profession that pays a living. And so some people ask me about this book, aren't I worried about what am I doing? My reputation. And I was like, my reputation as a liver pathologist?

No. Not particularly worried about that. My reputation as a philosopher of science, I don't think of myself as a philosopher as a philosopher, I'm not worried about that either. So I'm in a privileged position where I can go out on limbs, but which is a digression.

All of it, when I get to a question that's a hard nugget within there, then I have to go back and look for the data. But again, it's like the natural historian going and seeing, what can I gather here from the field that's out here that can help me distinguish where I'm supposed to go next? And it's endlessly astonishing to me. The best scientists that I know if you push them on their discoveries, you get stories like this.

In my early research days, it's no longer true. Around the stem cell, after the stem cell stuff happened, there was a moment in like 99, 2000, where I just couldn't stop doing it. It was really upsetting. And I feel like I've never emerged from that state.

Something I don't know whether my Zen practice, 10,000 hours I'd kick in or something. But prior to that, all my best research ideas came while I was sitting on a cushion. I had spent my professional time gathering data from specimens I was looking at or experiments that I did. But where the moments of insight happened was when I was not looking for it, it was when I was sitting on the cushion and then something would emerge.

You can explain that away as neurological processing. There's computational stuff going on all the time below conscious level. And when it's ready, it bubbles up fine. Again, that's not a question that particularly interests me.

But science isn't machine-like. When I think back on ambitions I had when I was young to be a scientist and I gave up to go to medical school. It's not about doing science-like school. It was that question of being alone and having meaningful relationships.

But when I looked around at the people who were successful, going down a scientific route when they got to university and then got to PhD programs, and I thought, oh, I just don't have it. Like they do. But I look back at the relative impact of the contributions made. And oh, I'm really glad I didn't go down that path.

I would have been very narrowly focused and very restricted. And probably not as good at that aspect as they were. But you need both. Ultimately, you need both.

A lot of the data I pull into support when I'm saying, like in the book, comes from people who are doing that kind of nitty-gritty sound. But then I get to come in and position it for him. Yeah, there's what is it, Niri Oxman at MIT has that diagram that almost looks like a Buddhist wheel. So it's a little creativity where she shows things moving in and out of qualitative and quantitative domains.

And then William Irwin Thompson used to talk about novelty erupting into culture from the crazies, then the artists, then the savants, and then the pedants. And by the time that people were working on this in an economically legible way, it's no longer cutting edge. And so you said this was a tangent or a digression, but it's not for me because this is one of the big questions, and maybe I'm banging my head against the wall here trying to find ways to fund work about which I am passionate. Like this time extraordinarily privileged, and that was pure heaven's sense.

Right. Yeah, so it's barring literature pathology to ask people to fund, and it's funny because the Murray-Gill Man talked about this. This was actually, this was in its own way a problem for SFI and for, it continues to be for every other organization or individual devoted to fundamental research or to art, which is why art is art's funding always cut first. And it's because it's the hardest to put into a legible language for investors, right?

Like why are children and these are talking about money? And the people who have money by and large got it not because they're poets. Right, I mean, yeah, there's like the efficiency algorithm. But so that's the root back into your book for me and for this curiosity, which is that really the rise, like the rise to power of scientism, like materialist, rackle, not rackle empiricism, like William James Way, like this sort of extremist fundamentalist approach to science that you identify as the diaspora of the inner circle after World War II.

This came after girdle proved that you can't do that. This is not utilizing a term. It came after quantum physics. And this was a real puzzle to me, a logical puzzle of the Vienna circle.

They were, they went the ones who created these notions. But I, when you had the collapse of European society after World War I, people were trying to pick up the pieces. And one of the things that collapsed was religious orthodoxy. And where do you turn?

And there was a sense because of the success of the Industrial Revolution here are objects that we build through scientific principles, science seems to be a thing. So there was this general idea that ended was working in medicine. You had antibiotics coming up down the pike soon. You understood a little bit more about infections.

But the Vienna circle were the, those were the thinkers who codified it with the greatest precision. And they saw that as their task to understand how all this metaphysical stuff, thinking of Orthodox church hierarchies, the presumably delusional experiences from meditative states and things you could not examine in front of you through empirical science or things you could not prove through mathematical formal logic. All of that needed to be dismissed because it can't be proven. It can't be demonstrated.

But those things that can't be demonstrated don't even talk about it. And there are obviously relationships between this and, oh God, what's his name? Language, Austria. Oh God.

It'll come. It'll come. But yeah, so the point is that these are the ways to assess the true nature of reality. Empirical science, development of hypotheses, production of experiments, gathering of data, test five offices, revise five offices, start over again, period.

But there were also mathematical truths and empirical science doesn't work for that, but mathematics does. So what those both assume, what science, empirical science assumes is that there's a separation between the subject and the object. I'm the scientist studying my stem cells under the microscope. And there's a separation there.

When I started to realize the evisibility of separation, that's when foundations got a little wobbly for me. And that seems to be true. Vickenstein. Yeah, Vickenstein.

Yes. Relax about that. So he was part of the end of the circle, not part of the end of the circle. But some of these ideas sound like they overlap with his.

That's complicated. So I left it out because I wanted it to be small. So here they are talking about how science is objective and there's a separation between the subject and the object that's reifiable. And yet relativity is happening and quantum physics has happened.

Now, we know Einstein had a real problem with quantum physics, even though he was one of the initiators, he could not cope with this notion of separation, that there is no separation of subject and object. And I think his enormous celebrity, and when after relativity was proven, he had this trip to Vienna where he sold out thousands and thousands of seats standing remotely in the largest public hall they could possibly have. He was a rock star. And I think, and he agreed with them.

And so I think they knew more. They talked to board. They talked to Heisenberg. They certainly knew the information, but they met each other at conferences.

They never talk about this issue of the Copenhagen interpretation. I think because they just figured Einstein's got that and he'll figure out why they're wrong. But the mathematical stuff, they seem to be on track until good. And he pulled the rug out from that and basically the implications of his thinking and his proof are that there are things we can know to be true mathematically that cannot be proven to be true.

Then how do you know them? You know them through intuition. Wait, that's metaphysics. That's a problem.

But he proved it using their own methods. Utterly rigorous mathematics. So then they were screwed. And you look at the conversations amongst themselves confronting that and they just fall apart into screaming fights because none of them, there is no way through that.

And so there's a lot of heated emotion and a lot of failure. That's our dominant worldview. So this is where I hope a little bit of clarity can emerge from this conversation for me because there are two people that get an enormous amount of due credit for modern computing, Alan Turing and John von Neumann. And like the von Neumann computer, which didn't have to be this way.

Like history could have taken another path. We could have built the 21st century on a completely different idea of computation. But as you point out in the book, something I did not know, which was that von Neumann was quite fond of Gertel and had independently come to his own formulation of incompleteness and that this stuff becomes instantiated in the universal Turing machine as a failure of decidability. So like all of modern computer science is built on what your time is.

The foundation is totally. Yeah. The philosophical foundation that we cannot eradicate metaphysics, that we can't have perfect knowledge, that there is a profound fundamental tension between prediction and understanding. And then one of my favorite things I learned immersing myself in complexity for so long was work by people like David Wilpert on the statistical physics of computation that processing information is metabolic.

It incurs material and energetic cost. And there's this weird thing going on right now in society where the cost of ignoring the philosophical foundations of the entire field of computer science and its most rigorous quantitative results in the 21st century is that we are swallowing the spider to chase the fly, that we are in this sort of like West world-esque bid forever more complete predictive capacity that we are exporting disorder at an unprecedented pace and therefore making the world harder and harder to predict at some level. And so the weird thing to me about this is that this is like the asking for a friend part because some friends and I are actually trying to put together, not unlike Lindisfarne, on helping people innovate wisely and wield technologies beyond our understanding and control in a wiser way. There's this again, lots of people have talked about the way that the after modernism looks a lot like before modernism, like going all the way at least to McLuhan, that we live, there's that last chapter in William Rowan Thompson's book coming into being where he talks about the Rig Veda and how maturation of digital technology in the screen is like a portal through which the spirit world reenters the human domain.

And so now we deal with on a daily basis with these agencies that we don't understand and sometimes we don't even perceive. You don't really know, there's this weird undermining or this erosion of our certainty in a world where most of the agents interacting on YouTube are bots or your girlfriend is a chatbot, like this kind of stuff. So in a late runner 2049 Westworld kind of thing, we are, and this comes up on Future Fossils all the time, it's suddenly the framework that makes a ton of sense for navigating these uncertainties is like a digitally reinterpreted kind of animism or something. Like to the extent that it makes sense to even talk about this in a dualistic framework, but like the last thing that we get before we just settle into self and other as the, like the amount of time you spend on this book on complementarity and interesting, the interstitium being an entry a gateway between self thinking and like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine fluid thinking about the body that we have this sort of wave of.

It isn't in this book. I hope to never write that book. Yeah, the interstitium book. But the interstitium stuff, but yeah, they're related there obviously because everything's interconnected.

So when you stumble on something that's connecting things, it's reflecting the same stuff. Yeah, that was the moment that was the big thing with talking with Minas. I knew about quantum complementarity, wave particle, duality of like blah, blah, blah. But I wasn't aware of how Bohr had seen that, intuited that as a universal principle across all scales.

And so one of my might have been the first paper, Minas, and I did was specifically talking about how complexity theory gives you another kind of complementarity above the quantum level is something a thing or a phenomenon arising from smaller things. It is not decidable. It is dependent on your view. It is exactly equal.

Neither can be privileged. And when you make a choice to view it one way, you will be excluding things you cannot see at the same time. That turned out to be an incredibly powerful tool. And to some extent, that's actually become part of how this stuff has changed, how I move in the book and how I think about things in the book.

Because whenever you select a view, the implicit and complexity theory is you have to check out the other views. You can't be contented sitting on one cushion. You have to go see what it looks like from the other cushion. And getting into that habit has kept me socially calmer, politically calmer, scientifically calmer.

I'm always looking for that. How do you flip it? What am I getting at here? If anybody can tell me how to fold all of this back into this runaway economic and cultural scenario in which I find ourselves now, you see him like a prime candidate.

And so really this is again, Tom and others, Andrew Dunn and Turquoise Sound and others with whom I'm in a regular correspondence about this stuff. And it's some point we've crossed over into like through the looking glass, into terrain where it feels like the most responsible thing that we can do is make what is ironically an economic argument that the world has become so metamorphic that we need to bring the seers and shamans and wizards back into the conversation. And yet we have this sort of fundamental problem. Not allowed to.

Yeah, which is that the success of the $7 trillion bid Sam Altman is making to bring AI chip manufacturer back in the United States is only made possible by the fact that we ignore all of this stuff and put all of our money on economies of scale and efficiency gains. So one of the things that's been fascinating and really exciting and amazing to me is that a lot of people read the book and come at me with questions like this. There's a whole business world dealing with sustainability from within the business perspective and I'm keynoting a talk at a major conference in the fall on that and they found me, I didn't find that. There are two things I think of in this regard and it's the same conversation I had with them.

First of all, what allowed me to talk about complexity theory was earlier written for lay people books on complexity like Roger Lewis complexity and Stephen Johnson's emergence. They were hinting at aspects of complex systems that allowed them to do what they do and no one counted it in a formal way when I was reading these things but then I met some complexity people and I was like are there any things I'm missing here? It's these four rules in my chapter three and what I find another thing that complexity is brought to me is you look at these four governing modes of interaction that make a complex system and you can look at a system that's going awry either suffering a mass extinction event or blowing up with positive feedback loops and you can figure out which of these rules needs to be applied here and things need to be very quickly. So the more the larger system, the greater the possibility for complexity, the more diversity of reactions, the greater the degree of complex.

An amp colony that's 25 ounces less complex than one's 250, 2500 is more complex. In human terms of villages, not a globalist. The mathematics, one of the extraordinary things is it's the same mathematics across all of those. I don't have to worry about what happens to the math if I go to a larger system.

It's the same stuff and that's the nature of complexity theory and I don't have to worry about it because I'm not a mathematician. The second one is the predominance of negative feedback loops and I'm guessing that your audience probably knows what feedback loops are. I assume so, but okay, because it takes five minutes. Thermostats, exactly, air conditioners.

But with a positive feedback loop, instead of keeping things in a homeostatic oscillating realm and all living things are oscillating, all living processes are oscillating, you have things like a room that gets warm, the heater turns on so it gets warmer. Like when you have a fever, your body suddenly starts revving up your temperature rather than constraining it and that serves its purpose. But then you need negative feedback loops to come in after you've eliminated the infection that the fever helps fight. So the moment you have positive feedback loops predominating, you can get self-organization, but you wind up not being creative and adaptive, you wind up being energy-expending and you collapse.

So economic bubbles, cancer, when you think about it in terms of cells. So there has to be, and I look at what's going on with things like social media, Facebook, etc. I think part of the hinge here is their algorithms are creating positive feedback loops. And you can design the right homeostatic feedback loops by creating the appropriate algorithms.

If they were designed with complexity in mind and with an eye towards not making more money, but towards sustainable creativity that's adaptive and living. Facebook and TikTok, they'd all be radically different things. If the algorithms were designed that way rather than as positive feedback loops that are run away, what's going to happen? It collapses.

The third thing is things are happening because of bottom up interactions. There may be an illusion of top down control. There may be an aspect of top down control, but even that's actually local. We're talking about a whole hierarchy, not a hierarchy.

And the fourth thing is this limited degree of randomness in the system. If you have too much randomness, you don't get any self-organization, you just have disorder. If you have too little randomness in the system, then if the environment changes, the system is being machine-like because there's no opportunity to shimmy and change the response. And so somewhere between too little and too much is this sweet spot.

And the result, the implications of that, this is what Stuart Kaufman calls the adjacent possibles. In every moment, there's not an infinite array of possibilities around the adjacent moment for what the next might be. It's constrained, but it's not predictable which one will follow. So we aren't machines.

This is on complex systems. They're not predictable. Do you have too much randomness in the system? Too little.

That's another place you can look. When I try to look at how we might fix this broken runaway system, I use those things as do we need more interactivity or less? Do we need more negative feedback loops or less positive ones or or, etc. So those are easy to apply and you can come up with strategies that are testable.

But on the other hand, mass extinction events happen and that's also implicit in the mathematics of complex systems. All math and math, all complex systems will undergo mass extinction events inevitably either partial or whole. And then new things happen. Dinosaurs die.

Mammals descend. bubonic plague hits and we get the renaissance. Nothing was necessarily worth killing all those people who didn't get the resonance and it would be cold comfort to them. But we can't know.

And this is the hardest but most important thing is that we will make our decisions about how to modify things. And because it's a living system, we don't know what those interventions are going to accomplish. We can make reasonable guesses. Oh, diminished positive feedback loops, increased negative feedback loops.

We pretty much know how that's going to go. But like my stem cell research with adult stuff, there's always going to be unintended consequences. Will they be fatal or not? Don't know.

My story, I told the sustainability people and I think this is harsh but I think it's actually very real when we're thinking about how are we going to get out of this mess. My father was a child, was born in Germany and was sent to England during the Holocaust by the Kinder transport. His parents were sent to Riga. That's where the German Jews were primarily sent and they were killed there.

When my grandmother died, she had lost my father already, he had been put on a train and disappeared and then the war started and never saw him again. Her elder son, she could have sent to Amsterdam but didn't. And so he wound up with them in Riga. He survived.

And what he said later on is that had she sent him to Amsterdam, he wouldn't have survived because then he would have been sent to Auschwitz. In Riga, he was merely in a work camp and he had the opportunity to serve them. When my grandmother was killed, I think she really thought she had made all the wrong choices. And now from the perspective I have now having dug up the history, she was the only one of her siblings and cousins who didn't lose a child.

Most of them, all the kids were killed. Some of them, some of the kids were killed because she saved both her children by the decision she did. But she couldn't know it at the time. And I think we're dealing with this sort of situation.

We have to act. We have to make choices that seem appropriate and reasonable to us. But we also have to be prepared for the fact that we can't predict whether they are the right choices. And if we're heading into a mass extinction event, then probably there's not a lot we could do anyway.

And part of me, lean tilting towards the shamanic side says maybe technology might have been the problem. And society collapses to the point we don't have electrical grids, then all of these questions about computational stuff disappear and we're back to biological systems. So that's grim. But all of it's possible.

You end the book on a substantially more economist note. Yeah, complementarity. I guess like a bonus round actually because something maybe for the sake of brevity. You didn't get a lot into- I know you're a US can manage that.

No, you didn't get into why you personally cleave to Copenhagen over, say, the Everett interpretation and like a multiverse. And I'm not a quantum physicist. I'm a liberal biologist. But it doesn't strike me that there is an inherent conflict with the big sea consciousness that awareness is fundamental, ontologically prior awareness.

It's fundamental. Yeah. And that the way that we resolve this is like the way that somebody like Sean Carroll seems keen on resolving this by saying that the wave function is universal in scale and that what we're actually looking at is the probability that as we move down the ladder of emanation into form and into the appearance of selves and others, that it's the probability that we find ourselves in one or another of those worlds. And so you get like around to this question of why me, right?

And there's something I'll send a link in the show notes. There's a really fabulous video essay about everything everywhere, all at once and Rick and Morty and how this like the Marvel Cinematic Universe that this idea of the multiverse has taken over society at a time when the internet has made it easy for us to feel as though we are teleporting from one world into another world and to see the computing has made it easy for us to imagine alternatives. And I guess I didn't think I thought there was a disjunction here, but maybe not. Maybe like I'm curious, one is to say, ooh, we happen to be in the fork in which mass extinction occurs and that's okay because somewhere else, it's a very doctor who kind of.

To some extent, I'm reflecting the way that I was talking about this stuff because he's my reference quantum physicist. And first off, all quantum physicists don't agree on this stuff. The reasons they don't agree vary from, oh, Copenhagen interpretation is one way to interpret these equations, but there could be others. There are people who look for others because, like Einstein, they refuse to believe the Copenhagen interpretation could possibly be correct.

And there must be other ways to eliminate the problems of the Copenhagen interpretation. I think that the first group produces interpretations of quantum physics that are probably in a complementarity with Copenhagen interpretation. And it depends on method perspective, et cetera. The people who are trying to get out of the problem, I don't think get very far.

And particularly the multiverse idea, quantum physics remains a pretty good explanatory model. It's computational accuracy is extraordinary, it's a cliche, but it's the most accurate scientific theory ever produced. The multiverse doesn't explain anything. It just says everything.

And okay, in this universe, it's terrible in that universe, at this moment, it's wonderful because we hit a fork. That's not satisfying to me because what about people on the other side of the fork? I'm supposed to forget about them and just be happy that I'm so lucky. I just don't think it really adds anything.

But I think it really, as you said, I think the way people think about reality is often conditioned in terms of the metaphors that they adopt from the technologies they're using. So machines are invented and the body as a machine, cells are building blocks. We do bioengineering. No, we do bio cultivation.

It's not engineering, but we're locked in that model and the models are limited. The moment you said it, I was like, oh, yeah, we live a multiverse reality because every time I click my screen, I'm taking time to another fork. So I'm prepared to hear that. And it also takes responsibility away from this.

It's going to happen anyways. So in this universe, I'm choosing not to do anything. No, I think this is the universe. And I think its evolution is contingent on every particular member, that the tiniest thing possible.

And this is part of the optimistic thing. You may not know what the impact of something you've done is, but it's the fabled butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, creating a tornado in Texas. That's true. You don't know the fact that you said hello to that person on the street and distracted them from the brooding that they were having over something, they're heading into at work and gave them a moment of a nice social interaction that lightened their spirit.

What does that propagate out? We will never know. But you can't dismiss it. And the last couple of paragraphs of the book are there actually because there was this young friend of ours and my husband and I, and he were out and we'd been drinking a little bit.

And he went on a really angry to about how people in my generation have fucked his world. And what can I say? Yeah, we didn't mean to. Some of us did.

And I thought if my book doesn't say something to him, then what's the fucking point of writing the book? And thinking about that, I realized that it comes down to the complementarity that on the one hand we are isolated little separate units that are incredibly alone. And we have to deal with this world outside of ourselves that is complex and complicated and scary. And that's true.