William Irwin Thompson in writing the American replacement of nature told his European audience that what distinguishes Americans from Europeans is that, broadly speaking, Americans do not base narrative on the past that they have inherited, but rather on the future. You look at grand visionary projects like Disney World or Silicon Valley or Hollywood, and it's about telling the story of what could be as a way of recruiting resources. And I've thought a lot about how over the years you can see, although this is not the only right way to see this, but you can see all communication as a kind of psychedelic, in the sense of mind manifesting advertisement, where information is propagating itself through mind to mind translation and through behavior and is thereby recruiting material and energetic resources. And that basically, for as long as we have had symbolic communication, it has been our ideas that are actually at the wheel, including our institutions.
Humans are not driving the unfolding of culture, but culture is driving the unfolding of humans. Thanks for watching. I'm Michael Garfield, and welcome to the final episode for now of the podcast that explores our place in time. In January 2016, I launched this podcast with my friend Evan Skytree Snyder as a way of thinking through one of our favorite philosophical investigations, and it grew into something else.
After 10 episodes, he left me at the helm, and this series became my venue for pursuing really whatever curiosity drove me to investigate. It's been a show about everything, about crisis rebirth and transformation, about psychedelic science and therapy, about rites of passage and initiation, about alternative physics and music and interspecies communication, post-humanism, poetry, world travel. In other words, illegible. I've grown up a lot in that time, and so have you.
So it feels right to finally bring all of this into focus in an applied domain, namely the domain of how exactly do we make sense of the self, of the human, of our morals, the nature of intelligence, the relationships that we have and will have with technology, the nature of innovation. In a lot of ways, the show this is becoming in the next episode, Humans on the Loop. Has already been the implicit motivation for future fossils for most of the last year. Even longer, future fossils became something else in the time that I was working as a science communicator for complex systems research at the Santa Fe Institute.
It was informed profoundly by the time I spent studying innovation and AI at Mozilla, and now it feels right to take a step into something that's easier to describe, easier to pitch. I remain committed to investigations at the edge of the known and the knowable, but it feels time to put all of this into language that people find more immediately and obviously relevant to the lives that we are living now, not in some hypothetical future, but in the domain of high weirdness that we all inhabit here at the end of 2024 and beyond. And even though this episode, a monologue and discussion hosted by Stephen Reed in which I discuss the themes of the magic and the mythic in technological metamorphism, namely how wonder and poetry and mystery continue to suffuse, inform and define our relationship to reason and science and engineering at a time when the pace of change leaves us actually somewhere closer to where we started as a species, in a state of reverence, or humility with respect to the ultimately ineffable and unknowable world into which we nonetheless continue to build conceptual scaffolding and navigate through rigorous, pragmatic inaction through our behaviors and our built environments. This episode is a zero episode for humans on the loop, a way of laying out the emotional tone, the disposition and the bearing with which I will spend at least the next year engaged with you and with dozens of amazing guests and co-hosts and fellow salon participants in the question of what now, to really reckon with myth and magic in technological metamorphism means to accept as I quote very early in the upcoming talk what Frederick Holderlin said that poetry is the beginning and the end of all scientific knowledge.
This is a kind of declaration or manifesto of the fact that science, art, religion and philosophy are all in some sense arbitrary trans sects through a much larger unified domain in which self and other colorize as fundamental perspectives and what John Vervake calls the transjective as strategies for the abstraction of and operation on a world that we can ultimately, rightly engage with the knowledge that our conceptual constructs, our identities, our beliefs, our theoretical frameworks are all post hoc explanations for the patterns that we much like our large language models and other technologies that discover and surface statistical correlations in the chaos of experience must ultimately regard as prior to all of the work our heads are doing and also the destination of the great journey of our lives and of the human project. I want to thank everybody who has supported the show over the years and I want to take this moment to invite you to continue supporting in whatever ways that you can, much as I won't claim to make any absolute final and totalizing statements about the nature of our mysterious cosmos. I want to be careful not to make any such assumptions about the kinds of help that you can provide me and the listening community that has sprung up in amazing ways around these conversations. Having finally taken the leap of faith into doing this as my full time gig, I invite you to consider how you can help support the ongoing work to synthesize, translate and investigate our mysterious ground of being as well as the relationships and projects that will precipitate out of this and I have wonderful things in store.
If you visit the show notes, you can see a list of the dozens of people I have already interviewed for this project and the dozens more I hope to. If you know any of these people and want to help foster their relationships upon which this work depends, please do not hesitate to do so. And of course, I deeply welcome and appreciate your support at Michael Garfield.substack.com or patreon.com. I'm finally in the groove writing on a regular basis about the themes of informed consent, addiction, gaming, accountability and oversight, multi-scale cognition and regulation, spellcasting and technology as parenting.
I'm bringing all of this work together in essay form and book form and ultimately in the training of bespoke language models for sense making and for wise innovation. So, yeah, again, thanks to Stephen Reed for hosting the technological Metamodernism course and to you, all of the people I've been engaged with in the Future Fossils Facebook group and Discord server in the Wise Innovation and Holistic Technology Discord server which is its own wonderful barrel of monkeys. And I want to reassure you that Future Fossils will continue as not only the legal entity and production company through which this work is born into the world but as a series of additional members only conversations I will continue to publish on as regular basis as I can because my curiosity obviously continues to run rampant and unbounded through the vortices of the adjacent possible. Thanks you all and enjoy and stay tuned as I close out this year with the beginning of something new and awesome.
If we haven't spoken in a while I'd love to hear from you again. If we've never spoken I would love for you to introduce yourself. I know that mine is the face on the camera right now but ours is an ensemble improvisatory exercise in which I am immensely grateful to co-participate with you. So enjoy myth and magic in technological Metamodernism and if you're so inspired let me know what you think.
I would love to fold your insights and interventions into this ongoing shebang. You're great thank you so much for your attention and for your inspiration. Like who Garfield, paleontologists, futurist, host and producer of the Future Fossils podcast and now currently working on a new project, Humans in the Loop, Humans in the Loop. It's definitely very particularly in one way.
Humans on the Loop which is the less common phrase that you would have heard and I did read your explanation for why you think that's very important and more useful phrase to be contemplating rather than the humanism. And I just am multidisciplinary artist. I read your fantastic short fictional piece about AI generated audio and video like transforming our conception of reality and truth just earlier today which was superbly written actually, beyond the content of it and I think the art that we're seeing above your head there is probably by use it. Yeah I used to paint for a living.
And you still paint? No again at least. I think I've seen evidence of that but yeah a true multidisciplinary creator thinker with us today. So Michael over to you to jam on technological metallumnes and myth and magic.
Thanks. Okay so myth and magic. I'm coming out of some graduate study and some personal and professional affiliation with the Integral Institute circa 2003 to 2010. The sort of climactic heyday of the scene around Ken Wilbur and that kind of thinking.
Although it was very clear to me very early on that yeah I was like I was frustrated with both the misrepresentation of evolutionary biology and the unwillingness of that scene to use the metaphragm work to treat or investigate paranormal or anomalous or weird stuff psychedelic experiences and the UFO phenomenon and etc. entities. And then also the inability of that group to reckon with what they were claiming which was that this is something that is happening naturally as an evolutionary process the emergence of integral consciousness and that therefore it's not the responsibility of one group of people to prosecute that or to manifest or enable it but that they had an opportunity that they lost to help people from many different walks of life and many different cultural and linguistic frameworks integrate and metabolize what is going on in the world and it ended up getting in grown and trapped in its own confabulated disciplinary jargon and so on. And the reason I bring that up is because it's a framework that's the lens through which I'm thinking about the mythic and the magic is this sort of developmental psych thing.
The notion magical thinking is the substrate of conceptual thought. It's what we are seeing now in some respect in the identification of statistical correlations in the semantic or latent spaces of large language models or large AI models generally and that the early work on AI saying that we don't need theory, we just need to throw an enormous amount of data into some transformer and see what comes out is actually very much like the way that a mind develops not by starting with narrative but starting simply with symbolic associations or like edge detection first, right, like making distinctions and differentiations and then noticing certain things that Ken drawing on the work of many other people saying that to the magical consciousness, the drawing of an elephant is an elephant that the way that we are capable of engaging in magical working is afforded by this identity which then ends up becoming, if you think about the way that this works in the brain, we have heavy and fire to wire learning and then at some point we can start cutting trails through that forest of symbolic associations and articulating them into sequences and that's the emergence of the mythic and we're starting to see that now, right? We're starting to see generative language models that are capable of telling coherent narratives. And so at any rate, when for instance, Friedrich Holterland says poetry is the beginning and end of all scientific knowledge, I take that to mean that we depend on metaphorical entailments.
If you think about Lakeoff and Johnson's book, Metaphors We Live By, which is fantastic and did more than Ken, I think, to help me understand what John Vivekian others call the transjective or the notion that subjective and objective perspectives are low-dimensional slices taken out of the real capital R real in which nothing is purely subjective or objective, but that everything is structured out of some combination of these perspectives. The metaphors that we create are, yes, in some sense a record of stable features in the interaction between organism and environment quote-unquote, but that as we learn and grow, what we actually physically perceive is like the oovelt or the sinsorium of an intelligent system is more and more co-determined by expectation and prediction and the features of the models that it has built out of these interactions. And so there is a sense in which like everything that we regard as objectively true is such not because it is a complete or even perfectly accurate representation of a so-called out there, but because we have managed to verify it with increasing rigor in studying integral philosophy with Sean S. Buren-Hargins at JFKU.
I read On Becoming Aware, which was a fantastic book I recommend about phenomenology by Francisco Verrella et al. And they chart the development of an idea from first-person intuitive apprehension of something to second-person interjective conformation to third-person intercultural conformation and the point of using integral or any kind of reconstructive postmodern framework to look beyond the ways that, for instance, empirical science can continue to stress test observations through the reproducibility of experiments, you get to a point where you need to start stress testing those validity claims by actually testing them against the claims made by other methodologies entirely so that you get into this question about, for instance, neurotheology as the synthesis or synchronization of phenomenology and brain scanning, qualitative and quantitative approaches. And the further you push into that, the more obvious it becomes that poetry is not just the beginning of all knowledge in that it affords us the conceptual frameworks upon which causal mechanistic frameworks are based, but it is also the end of scientific knowledge in that your epistemic horizon is characterized by an inability to reduce complexity into human-legible cognizable models. And so you're back to this sort of having to accept the effective predictive outputs of large statistical models on more or less faith simply because you know that they work.
Like it ends up becoming a pragmatic claim rather than a purely empirical claim in the sense that we consider empirical claims to have some sort of associated causal mechanism attached to them. So evolutionary theory is an extremely effective narrative for the regularities that we observe in the transformation of living forms in the natural world, but Kevin Kelly talks about in his article on the expansion of ignorance, the science is in some sense the exponential production of answers, but the super exponential production of questions because there's a recombinant process going on here where the more answers we have, the more possible interactions occur between them. And what we end up with is embodied in the fact that all paradigm challenging scientists tend to have their attention on that which transcends the abilities of science as we've defined it to explain. So there's like, you think about Einstein or Bohr or Beaum, like all of these people end up casting some sort of ultimate devotion to science as the production of questions rather than the production of answers or science pursued to the hilt is actually fundamentally mystical.
And so we end up back more or less where we started, which is a reverence for the isness and an appreciation for again, fundamental capital and mystery or our inability to make solid claims or the groundlessness, the constructedness of scientific knowledge. I like the way William and Thompson put it, which is that a fact requires a theory like a flame requires an atmosphere. And if you think about it in evolutionary time scales, the atmosphere is itself an object that was constructed by the autopoietic processes of bacteria and of other microbes, photosynthesizing and producing oxygen and then utilizing oxygen in a different metabolism. So even the idea of the atmosphere is not itself a static and objective thing, but is an emergent phenomenon that's processual and built out of relational dynamics.
And so you're back to again, thinking about the very air we breathe as a kind of poetry made out of associations between different metabolisms that operate as hypotheses about the environment as a way of empowering life to dissipate energy and process information. And again, that's the narrative that I live in. What's okay? So what does this mean for us with respect to co-evolution with AI?
What does it mean for us in terms of living within what Timothy Morin calls the hyper-objects of the modern world or the metamodern or meta-industrial, Caleb Sharf's data home, these different ways of talking about the built wilderness that the success of the modern project undermines this totalizing aspiration to control and understand because actually the tools that we use to better understand and control the environment end up producing a ton of endogenous novelty. That means that the burden on us to model and understand all of it continues to grow and eventually right a point now where the effort to model and operate on planet scale processes requires something like a transplanetary computer. We are using more resources than the planet can actually support in an effort to garden it with computers. So again, Bill Thompson and many others have recognized that the aspirations of global technocratic managerial top-down cybernetic regulation of the global economy and the quote unquote ecosystem services upon which it depends is scheduled for self-demolition and that we start to accept that we have to engage in a cultural retrieval of certain things that more commonly characterized the pre-modern world, whether you want to talk about it in terms of animism, whether you want to talk about it in terms of recruiting in the Gilchrist right-brained pattern detection, potential mode, whether you want to talk about it in terms of engaging with chatbots as oracles in the way that Athens engaged with the Delphic oracle as a way of complementing clearly defined analytical structures with injected noise, whether you want to think about it in terms of Eric Wargo's argument that dreams are all pre-cognitive and that noise in the brain is actually future information and the brain is binding time as a four-dimensional object and therefore we live in a material world but it's a material world in which we have to accept the fundamental inexplicably of our transtemporal weave like the human world actually emerges out of these sort of tautological curves and that's a quantum physics and general relativity way of saying that the end of science of knowledge is poetry because if in fact we can reconcile thermodynamics with relativity by modeling the act of inference of living systems as that which binds an organism in time loops then we don't get to indulge a linear narrative in which innovation is happening and the future is being made out of effort but rather the future in the past co-create one another and so the structure of time is itself tautological and poetic in the way that magical thinking was at the beginning of this rant so yeah I think the story that you mentioned Stephen, a neural history at the end of reality is my attempt to point to the increasing demand for exceedingly subtle and nuanced evaluation of the basis for and nature of the claims that we make about reality in a society where we can no longer rest in complacency on what York University philosopher Regina Rini called the epistemic backstop of consensus trust in photographic and videographic records which in a way is a very similar kind of thing to what Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and others were saying had to happen in the loss of universal consensus around the invisible environment of a Christian cosmology in the West.
This thing that we all took for granted doesn't work anymore and so real-time deep fakes force us to reckon with the processes whereby knowledge is constructed and force us to stare into the abyss of the absolute groundlessness of knowledge which hopefully makes this all actually more effective scientists also at the same time transforms science into something that demands the registration of much more carefully accounted statements of who is doing the research and how so in that way like in a way it realizes the project of the rational enlightenment even as it undermines the end goal of actually getting there getting to a complete single unified framework of understanding and it also lastly places an enormous emphasis on not just the magical but the mythic because we realize that story is the medium if you have a causal framework that's a hypothesis that you're testing and it's where you go to allocate talent and resources to the next iteration of creation and discovery in research. So the last piece I'll say on this is that William Rowan Thompson in writing the American replacement of nature told his European audience that what distinguishes Americans from Europeans is that broadly speaking Americans do not base narrative on the past that they have inherited but rather on the future. You look at grand visionary projects like Disney World or Silicon Valley or Hollywood and it's about telling the story of what could be as a way of recruiting resources and I've thought a lot about how over the years you can see although this is not the only right way to see this but you can see all communication as a kind of psychedelic in the sense of mind manifesting advertisement where information is propagating itself through mind to mind translation and through behavior and is thereby recruiting material and energetic resources and that basically for as long as we have had symbolic communication it has been our ideas that are actually at the wheel including our institutions. Humans are not driving the unfolding of culture but culture is driving the unfolding of humans.
Again I'm not going to do a neither or thing here but there is a provocative sense in which we can regard the economy now and crypto people talk about this all the time that you look at 90% of the IPOs in 2017 being complete vaporware but they told a very good story and religion is more about the mythic layer and its hindment or its compulsion of behavior than it is about the empirical claim and so I just think that what is going to shape our interactions with technology and with one another in a metamodern framework is our ability to find plausible and verifiable or evolutionary sustainable narratives out of robust metaphorical entailments that we identify as stable features in the bewildering complexity of the seas of data that we're swimming in and so we can tell stories to one another that afford the coordination of behavior at scale but do so in a way that recruits this sort of refigured scientific verification into the workings of our service to the futures that quote unquote everyone can agree actually serve their interests and those interests include the truthiness or the believability of the story. So that's a ton of stuff. I'll stop there if anything didn't make sense let me know and I'll try and make better sense of it. That was fantastic Michael.
There was a calling saying from Daniel saying this is the best academic lecture slash slant poetry slash sermon slash magical indications slash achievement and the limitations we engage have experienced in a long while. So I'm going to exercise my privileges post to drop in a couple of questions we open it up to the floor and I'm going to use that to get your take on a couple of concepts that we speak about in today's notes. So most broadly what is the proper relationship as metamodern technologists we should have with myths like Wettico, like Moloch, that we saw how Mark Zuckerberg is inspired by Caesar Augustus. So you could even be figures actually existed in the past but reminded of the idea of the pre-trans fallacy much popularized by Wilbur suggesting that it's like a really important trap that is very tempting to the integral mind and the metal bond mind to go into the realms of myth and magic and claim that they're approaching this from some kind of higher perspective but actually when she under inspection there's actually some kind of devolution or some loss of the kind of real essence of the integral thinking.
And so how do we avoid that here? What is the proper place or story and myth in constructing a metamodern technology? How can we work with it in a useful and productive way without being somehow sort of the suggest or confused by it? So I think the metamodern piece of this is don't believe everything you think or an understanding that the narratives that effectively compress the against stress tested relationships from a particular point of view exist in a non computably large possibility space.
And so one of the things that's worth keeping from the scientific revolution in a trans-rational world is an appreciation for skepticism or for the provisional nature of knowledge or as David Crack I wrote SFI used to say the science is about killing your parents. And I think if you look at Wettico or Molik they're the output of very effective compressions of enormous complexity that work very well to describe certain patterns in the observable world but we have to be careful not to allow the conversation to end there. If you look at the emergence of new religious structures throughout history one they tend to be a motion much like a major evolutionary transitions in individuality like the emergence of multicellularity or whatever. They tend to follow this process of transclusion where the gods of the prior age are killed or subsumed by or metabolized within some larger more complex ecological framework.
You get Catholicism taking up into itself all of the local indigenous deities as saints in a kind of endosimbiotic process. And so I think that the risk that a lot of people run including many prominent voices in this conversation is attending to devoutly to the problem as characterized by Molik. I'll just say a lesson from LSD is that the mind expansion like Russell Akoff's framework you can relate to a problem through absolution which is dismissal of the problem through resolution which is like allowing it to unfold in time. Solution which is like engineering way out of it or dissolution which is to dissolve it in a higher logical order.
I'm quite fond of dissolution. I remember being plagued by an Egragor that appeared to me and my now wife in an LSD trip in 2007 that seemed like it existed to hold us together in a relationship even when we were really struggling. And then she and I set out in 2017 to banish this thing with another LSD trip something we were horrified to even contemplate. But then on the other side of that base transition I realized that I didn't need to fight this thing but rather I could simply invite another one intentionally into the Pantheon.
And so this sense of this being that was defining us and holding us together that we had somehow created but was also creating us. And that was in some sense there for limiting my agency and an insult to my sovereignty and dignity or whatever. I was like you know what I can just reproduce the recipe by which this thing was created only do it on purpose this time. And when I did that I realized it's harder to pay attention to two things at the same time than it is to pay attention to just one right.
And so by expanding ourselves then we not only learned to resolve an apparent paradox in the higher logical order by adding additional dimensions or perspectives. Oh it's a snake on the wall of my childhood bedroom. Oh no it's just the shadow of this other thing. But there's the added perk of getting to intentionally invite new ed rigors into a conversation that they think about conservation ecologists like reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone.
The design and invocation of a second ed rigor in our relationship really took the piss out of the first one. It really cut it down to a manageable level. And so the lesson for me from that is that if Moloch is running rampant in the human economy or the human meme space then we just need to fold it into a larger symbiotic structure that includes its natural predator or includes its parasite or its symbionts. And I think the concrete example that I would give for this is Primavera de Felipe's collaboration monster which she has presented in a number of conferences that you can find the videos for this year.
Primavera who authored Extitutional Theory has some really interesting ideas about how you could design AI-based collaborative infrastructure that rewards coordination and collective action in the facilitation of commons that shifts the incentive landscape. And so in that sense you would be taking the narrative energy out of Moloch because you are revealing it as not the only way the world works. And the last thing I'll say about this is that you can see this in the telling of evolutionary narratives over the last 160 years or 70 years in that most people completely missed the emphasis on collaboration and on the aesthetic and on those circumstances that favor sociality and so on in the work of Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace because at the time this sort of laissez-faire robber baron capitalism was completely in charge and it made it hard to even read a more socialist angle in so much later when you have the work of people like Lynn Margulis pointing out that major evolutionary transitions unfold not through all against all competition but through the creation of new selves through intense engagement of interdependencies such that bacteria effectively domesticated one another and became reproductively coupled and dependent and now your mitochondria can't reproduce outside of your nucleated cells and so on. So the question becomes how do we tell the story not just in the language of ideas but in the language of code and law that allows it to become obvious to people that Moloch exists but Moloch is partial and incomplete and actually the competition and shortsightedness and so on actually serves as a evolutionary function within a larger and more species pantheon of institutional strategies.
Yeah love it love it I mean it's a big story that one could trace there is in pre-modern world these myths often had a reality that was actually even stronger than what was appropriate or useful in the modern world we killed them off completely in the kind of post-modern world but we cautiously invited myth back in so far as we could explain it in a kind of primarily culturally constructed way and so we've ended up with at this point there are a number of people being familiar with things like Margul way to go and so the metamol and move was I heard it is to say yeah we need to invite a whole pantheon let's get let's really bring the big band back together and let all of these different deities and stories have their place both recall we mentioned like Ganesha and Athena and Gaia in today's session as well and also invented like the collaboration monster this actually has the flavour of Rob the Bay is soul-making dharma so Robert Bay I wrote so made it back on emptiness in a bit of tradition called seeing the freeze and struggled to finish that book because he was already by that point so into this this kind of puff called soul-making dharma which essentially is this construction of a kind of personal mythos or personal pantheons guide different aspects of our lives and then allow those personal deities to interact with those constructed by others so I like where this is going but yeah we've so flinty said I'll shut up at least and see if there's any comments or questions from the floor be not afraid this is wild and interesting I'd love to know for you how does your interplay with this look can you describe that piece that was really vocative with you and your wife and trying to invite those other goors in but in your own work on this stuff how do you interplay with these forces productively well if I feel like I am spiraling down the drain of some kind of depressive fixation on or anxious overwhelmed from something anything in my life then I just try to noise jostle myself out of that channel in a way it's like a generalization of the insight that if you are hung up on your ex you should just go dating get out of the house get out and mix up because I think this stuff has a very strong and universal neurological base like you think about like machine learning and the problem of overfitting on training data and how do you make sure that your model is not just making catastrophically bad predictions and it's like well for starters when I interviewed Tim Morton for future fossils and we talked about the Christian notion of grace and its relationship to like forgetting as forgiveness and what is the evolutionary utility of forgetting well it turns out that research on learning networks shows that if a particular node in a network has an extremely long memory then it makes the entire network less adaptable and this could be good right you got to find your level this is not an argument for high turnover organizations kicking out the storykeepers if anything we probably err on the end of amnesia as a bias in service of chasing after innovation but I think that those are the bounds I try to be sober about like when am I stuck on something or over committed to a particular strategy or a particular story and when might I benefit from the very well characterized approach of taking a bath going on a hike getting a nap decoupling myself from the optimization function that isn't working and jostling myself off a particular hill climb down into some valley when it turns out that it's not really up and down a fitness landscape because the landscape has more dimensions than I realized and what looks like down for instance quitting my job at the ai startup this spring to pursue humans on the loop is actually up because in order to do that work with integrity then I needed to not be preoccupied with this job that had paid me a better hourly wage than any other job I'd ever had and be like you know what I can't this is like slave logic I don't exactly condone master slave metaphorical frameworks but because in chaos magic as Duncan barford and others have pointed out there's a sort of a thermal climb where what you thought was mastery becomes like bach dioga or devotion once you've realized where it takes you because to the point I was saying about the expansion of ignorance earlier but yeah I don't know is that concrete enough I think it's just having sticky note on the wall that says is there another way or like my wife is getting frustrated with her computer and stuff isn't working and trying to use the thing is getting in the way of her being able to express herself in an email I'm like that is an indication that you need to walk away from this thing for a little while and then come back to it a different person thank you Anna in thank you so much I just dropped in on the last but thank you for a lot that you shared actually makes me think of Josh Shri's guardians and protectors episode which is excellent so I'm a researcher in RL we were learning and I'm thinking about the technological formalization of a collaboration monster right and I'm interested in the question of how to legitimize it and it's to have to out-compete the competition the competitive mindset and obviously I guess these things have to be in balance so there has to be this collaborative symbiosis between them that is the thing but I'm curious if you have more thoughts and knowledge on this and thank you again yeah thank you for treating me like an expert I don't get a lot of this okay so I'll take it back to the first talk I ever gave in public at Burning Man in 2009 in this series on evolutionary thinking where I was like this idea of like the species concept as a pragmatic construct and that no species concept is adequate to function across every possible context that is also true of self-witter individuality at any scale in that talk I brought up the caterpillar right we see things coarsely enough to regard the caterpillar and the butterfly as a single individual but it's become very well known since 2009 that during metamorphosis people talk about this all the time the imaginal cells in the caterpillar basically dissolve the caterpillar and completely reconstitute it into a different animal that probably has no memory of being a caterpillar in the first place and so is that one animal or is it two is the xenomorph the same animal as the face hugger no it's but also yes and this is where the real challenge issued by evolutionary biology and I think I put a link to this in the prereads but if you didn't read it I wrote a piece on this about improvising out of algorithmic isolation or talking about creativity happening at the fuzzy edges of selfhood and what that means for co-evolving with language models because they can't see us perfectly we can't see them perfectly to the degree that they do see us they change our behavior in ways that result in things like the evolution of eye spots on a butterfly or of evasive patterns in a school of fish we keep trying to escape the model of our behavior so your question about is there a right way to the extent that there's a right way it's a recognition that you always have to ask for what reason am I assuming a particular boundary or frame around self in order to make some particular operation easier my project right now is standing really firmly in the expression that our world is so complex now that what is actually required of us is to adopt a fluid and multi-perspective approach we gain something by being able to say in what ways is art science in what way is science art in what way are either of those things religion rather than assigning them some sort of static ontology and the scary thing about evolution for a lot of people is that it means that there isn't a thing that is the human being anymore it disenters us radically it dissenters all categories radically but again can be this point you can't be like all models are false except the model that all models are false we can return with humility to the question of okay I can't make an absolute claim about the relationship between this and the other thing I can't make an absolute claim that it's a thing or that it's a process or that it's some secret third thing but I can engage it provisionally and I can decide to change my mind if this approach isn't working and there's like an additional requirement which is that we be really careful about the sunk cost fallacy and that we budget additional time energy attention or whatever to the strategy we've selected at the outset not proving itself out in practice we have to get better at thinking across scales and being like I'm going to optimize for this knowing that I might have to undo that and start from somewhere else I don't know does that help yeah it helps it's not exactly I think about it's very well nicely put can you try it again because I would rather actually answer the actual question okay the question was not so much whether or not there's a right way although I think what you said is relevant but it's like in the landscape where we evaluate things based on whether one thing is better than another thing in academia and tech how to legitimize this different approach I don't take this question like that seriously as well it's just like I thought maybe you have something if I'm to understand this right you're basically saying how do I get a bunch of hardcore profit oriented engineers to adopt more curiosity and playfulness and humility or how do I get the market to recognize the value of practices that do not have a sort of pre-specified legibility without showing that this thing is actually better than your saying right right I'm staking my entire career on that question being easier to answer now than it was even 10 years ago because the more disruption characterizes the environment in which we are trying to achieve some sort of optimal goal the more improvisation becomes the strategy right at a really good conversation back when I was at SFI with the president David Krakauer about basically there are stable times in earth history and then there are catastrophic times in earth history and sometimes the catastrophes are a meteor or volcanoes or something external to the ecosystem sometimes it's flowers like sometimes it's an innovation that happened in the system that transforms everything overnight and there are basically two different kinds of approaches if you want to think about an organism as the investment of a certain way of thinking in bodies then there's a relationship between high beta portfolio investment diverse investment and generalist strategies versus specialist strategies like in a mature stable ecosystem specialists thrive and generalists the example like I'm constantly thinking of is like the weirdo in the science fiction horror movie who's always on youtube watching conspiracy theories until the UFOs actually land and then suddenly everything is sideways and no one knows how to respond except for the guy that's been watching conspiracy videos the whole time and what looked like wastefulness in a stable ecosystem suddenly becomes necessary adaptability and all of the specialists there's no bridge across the adaptation landscape for them to pivot and so I just think that the question of how do you get people to see this is and I say this is like devious grin it's like well you don't have to try because I go on LinkedIn now and everyone is talking about metacognition and meta learning and I'm like okay how do I make the fact that I've been talking about this for 20 years legible to those people now how do I get the high paid speaking good keynote at the innovation lab now because suddenly you have companies with a department of internal disruption suddenly companies realize that they have to improvise or the hundreds of times when the going gets weird the weird turn pro the most concrete thing I can say about that is that it is still actually really difficult to explain this to a lot of people that are dinosaurs that are stuck in what is to many of us a profoundly maladaptive way of navigating this complexity but I just find work with the people in the organizations that have suffered some kind of trauma that have been punched in the mouth that are going through a sense making crisis and realize that they need some kind of different way of seeing things and I think that the crazier the world gets the more we will make room for like Josh Shri's episode after the AI episode was on the seer right and how the modern world doesn't make a lot of room for the seer but the metamodern world will because the metamodern world realizes that rationality is always bounded and that it's hard for you to see the biases in your own model and so I really firmly believe that chat GPT prompts the existence of an entire contrarian AI ecosystem around it because we will realize that one ring to rule them all is a fool's crusade and that we need diversity in order to maintain the reservoirs of adaptive we are already over time thank you Jake if you can state your question concisely we can take it I guess the question was like since we were talking about myth today and Michael you have a personal myth to tell about leaving the stealth AI startup that arguably was doing metamodern technology or was aspiring to it at least and why you left it in what lessons we can draw for doing the real metamodern attack or doing it correctly or rightly or doing it right then okay two minutes the short answer to that is and I talked about this in a recent episode the latest episode of Future Fossils which was also on voicecraft with Tim Adolin in case you want more I'm not trying to talk smack on the wonderful company that I left but simply that I felt like the kind of work that I wanted to do wasn't possible given the priorities of that organization they wanted to design this thing and then push it out in the world and impress everybody and thereby recruit people into an open source dev ecosystem and I said you actually know what you want is for people to trust that you know where you are in the history of computing so that whatever you build people want to be a part of it gets back to that this thing about story I realize that the work that I have to do is at a layer that is below product and infrastructure and so on that like the real programming is not happening in the device it's happening in the people and in the relationships between people and so that's where I felt most useful and I'm happy to talk with all of you at length outside of this so thank you Stephen for if you get so Daniel had us just posted a zoom link I think that's so that people on this call can like call over and then keep the conversation going so thank you so much for you just participating in the course I just really appreciated your enthusiasm and support since the very beginning of the idea for this so yeah really means a lot and really best of luck with he was on the lip I'm sure that you want to do amazing stuff there and I'm glad to see that it's starting to get some funding info I think from Cosmos Institute which seems to be doing kinds of rad stuff we'll talk more about that next. Northening please yes give this man money okay see you next time take a night and that's that thank you so much for listening to this and the prior 231 episodes of Future Fossils and for some of you 106 episodes I produced the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast and the roughly 100 episodes in which I have appeared as a guest on other people's podcasts to which I will link in the show notes humans on the loop starts next week and I'm really really excited to share the amazing conversations I have recorded and planned with you all if you want to support this project this is it I am not selling anything for the holidays this year I am committing myself to the provision of public goods and services I will remain available as a strategic and creative consultant and I would love to be a part of helping you think through whatever problems you may encounter in meeting the weirdness of our world but yeah humans on the loop is a fistally sponsored non-profit operation and uh oh you know what I am gonna be selling some ginger oh my god I can't believe I forgot very very soon I will have a pre-order page up at Revolor Press for the long awaited over a decade in the works by first book oh my god how to live in the future a collection of essays short fiction and other psychoactive writing but I don't have a link for you yet so if you want to support what I'm doing if you want to help me feed my family in an age of 300 grocery bills make a tax deductible charitable donation at evory.org slash humans on the loop become a patron of this show at microcarifield.substack.com or drop me a line if you are right and high on the crypto bull market and want to make a discrete donation in bitcoin or whatever you can message me and I'll send you info on that see you on the other side folks many thanks to you happy holidays