Money is a means of communicating value. And so the question becomes, well, what do we value? The market can't tell us what to value. Culture tells us what to value.
And so the market really depends on this cultural creativity. The cultural sphere is like the metabolism that's feeding the economics here. And so rather than think of the economy as just about material conditions and harvesting raw material and using the means of production to produce transformations in history and that all the cultural stuff is just smoke or steam coming out of the top of that activity. We can reverse it and understand that this cultural spiritual activity is really where the fuel for the growth of the economy comes from.
Then we can start to reimagine money and invention means to find in some sense, you're right. So again, it's remembering ancient technologies. It's not that money is evil. It's that money is not being used to communicate value effectively because we forgot where value came from.
Value doesn't come from the market. It comes from our consciousness, from our capacity to refine our attention. And we become better at sharing attention and intention by playing together. And many anthropologists and sociologists have written about culture is basically ludic in its essence, that it is about play.
Welcome to the 12th episode of Humans on the Loop. I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And as usual today, I'm feeling very tired of regarding myself as an individual contributor to what seems so obviously a collective process and evolving wisdom commons. Dare I say a culture of sense making and embodied understanding unfolding if we look at it from a wide enough perspective as a single gesture and single entity.
This project has brought me into conversation with so many amazing and insightful people doing what is often lonely, challenging work in the margins of society or their parent institutions. And it's kindled in me a passion to discover how we graduate together into something more harmonized and coordinated. And how we can all stop seeing cultural and economic activity as the work of the debunked homoeconomicus, a contest between rational self-serving actors. And start living as members of a single being again, in which the presence of our shared destiny shines through in every decision.
But we are not a blood-linked tribe living together in the same watershed, isolated from the nearest other group of humans by miles and dependent in the most imminent and tangible way on one another for survival. We are what William Irwin Thompson called a noetic polity, a thinly distributed affinity group connected through dense layers of digital activity. And we are what we do to make a difference in our social and societal abstraction. The consequences of our actions largely opaque beyond their impact on painfully inadequate quantitative metrics like engagement and income.
Some of us have platforms and some of us don't. Some of us live in dense clusters of physical co-presence with other people. And some of us live in remote regions that require us to travel to connect with like minds face to face. And there is no easy, obvious shared infrastructure for forming remote squads of common purpose.
Yet. There are no equations of value that make it easy to fund new technologies, but hard to foster the art philosophy and organizational introspection that have historically supported necessary functions to every layer of human activity from families to villages to cities to states. How do we even begin to support this work at a planetary scale? And at a time when the familiar processes for incubating scholarship, creativity and contemplation have been bent into the service of GDP, political power, and fiduciary responsibility to shareholders in violently disruptive organizations?
How do we argue to a left-brained world that needs a right brain, that we are not optimization machines, but that our machines were originally and are after all for the end of human flourishing? And how can we possibly live in integrity with these values until we make human labor meaningful again in terms other than its visibility to our systems of abstraction? I believe it has to start with the constant, almost prayerful rededication in each moment to another's story. To a story that honors how we're only here because of the repeated success of emergent cooperation for multicellularity, sociality, and intercultural exchange through deep-time stretchable, self-taught.
We need to remember that we are innately symbiotic, and that our dignity as individuals depends on our embeddedness in something bigger than our models or identities. In order to make better choices than our states and corporations, and better choices with them, we must decouple from the risk aversion algorithm and find new comfort in the mystery and uncertainty of being with. This is why I'm glad to riff this week with Matthew David Seagal, associate professor of philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies, chair of the Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute in the State of California. The Science Advisory Committee for the Cobb Institute, an author of the Footnotes to Plato blog as well as numerous books on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and Friedrich Schelling.
In it, we wrangle with some very fundamental questions. Building on his prior conversations with Timothy Jackson, O.G. Rose, and Brendan Graham Dempsey, all of which you'll find linked in the show notes, we cover a lot of ground very fast, and really only start to set the terms for a longer, deeper inquiry, one in which I hope you will join us. We'd love your feedback and your reflections, and to come together in a quest to figure out what lies beyond modernity, and how to nourish the collective imagination and action we need to thrive there.
If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting my work to bridge ideas and people by signing up on sub-stack or making a monthly tax-deductible contribution at every.org slash humans on the loop. I want to thank everyone helping me dedicate my days to this pursuit and defy the odds as I somehow produce public goods and still keep my kids fed. Until our world makes sense again, and we know how to allocate real funding to the cultivation of wisdom over power and wisdom to power. I depend on you to keep this going.
Although, I am, of course, happy to be a weirdo in residence and make grown-up money advising wherever I can be helpful. Reminder to all patrons that are next monthly call is this Saturday, March 15th at 3 p.m. Mountain, and that I'll be hosting book clubs later this spring and summer for Federico Campania's prophetic culture, Joshua de Colleo's scale theory, and Helen McDonald's Vesper flights. Those scheduling polls will be coming soon by email.
And with that, thank you for listening. And I hope you enjoy this thoughtful and inspiring dialogue as much as I did. Thank you. I'm really excited to talk to you finally.
It feels like we've been in each other's orbits for over a decade and just haven't connected yet. You and I would be on faculty together, had I made the decision to go to CIIS in 2007. I don't think I knew that. We just didn't do that because they didn't offer enough funding.
Enough. Any. Right. I was like, I'm not moving to San Francisco to...
I'm not going to take the government. She is. And we will get loan forgiveness in a couple years here. If I had to be the gamble on loan forgiveness, I would be an academic right now and probably miserable in a whole different kind of way.
Choose your misery. Yeah, but you seem like you're in the right spot for... you seem like you're in a groove that I never found. I like what I do.
It's all we do. It's a passion as I know the work that you do is and sometimes that's painful, but how could you do anything else? Yeah, I suppose I identify as mosaic in both senses of the word, you know, like cobbled something together, having improvised without the support of an institutional structure on the one hand. And also being of the desert, being the wandering Jew, you know, it's on the horizon.
I'm pointing to my kids saying, look, there it is. But I'm not going to be the kind that has to like wipe my feet before I go into the building. So yeah, shall we? Let's do it.
Dig in. Dig into the future. In the past, yeah, all of it. Matt, you are on the loop.
Welcome on board. I'm glad to be here. I'm not dizzy yet. This is a long time coming.
Looking forward to it. Yeah, it's like one of those centrifugal G-force experiments. Actually, no, this project is, as you know, it's much more like a nested, autocatalytic networks loop. But because I am still buzzing from listening to your review slash critique of the blind spot with Timothy Jackson and I'm thinking about technology as something that emerges from within the life world of biology, it makes sense to start this conversation in the biographical.
And so what I would love is to have you establish context for whomever ends up listening to this by talking a little bit about your background as an intellectual and how you came to your station in life being that of someone who gets to spend their time pursuing these inquiries. And why these specific inquiries? You know, I've become a generalist and a transdisciplinary researcher and a philosopher, but you know, to go back in time and try to remember how I got on this track. And I think every child at some point realizes they're going to die one day or their mother's going to die one day or people they love are going to die and this confronted with death.
And that happened for me when I was seven. And I think that my response to that crisis set me on a philosophical path and people have been responses to that realization. Some of us don't even remember the first time, maybe, that we really faced the question of our immortality. I can date a face every day.
It's not like I, as a seven year old, figured it out. But that's precisely what got me on this philosophical path being curious about the existential questions that you can't even begin to wrap your mind around. And in high school, I was lucky to have this influential teacher, Mr. Ennis Kiannis, who I say in touch with a little bit who introduced me to Western philosophy and Asian philosophies and had me reading Nisha and, you know, in like 11th grade, Nisha and Carl Jung and Alan Watts.
And that sort of shook me out of my obnoxious teenage atheism, scientific atheism because I had gotten ahold of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins, like around 14. And so it served me as a way of liberating myself from my mom's more evangelical style Christianity that felt suffocating and oppressive to a new relationship to the spiritual and to the psychology of religion, let's say. But I was interested in everything and actually majored in journalism when I started college because I thought that would allow me to be a generalist and to, you know, try to know a lot a little bit about everything and communicate it to people who've always wanted to communicate and in college. I found YouTube and actually I would say I became an intellectual in that media ecology, the early days of YouTube, even before Google had purchased it where there were all sorts of communities that were cropping up.
But there was this philosophical network of people exploring questions in a paracademic way. There was a lot of students like me at the time and I've continued to engage with that medium for almost two decades now, maybe 16, 17, you know, like 18 years now, Jesus. And in the meantime, you know, I got a PhD in philosophy and religion and ended up, I should go back in time for a second, switched my major from journalism to cognitive science because I was really interested in consciousness and then came to school here in California at this amazing place, a product of the San Francisco Renaissance California Institute of Integral Studies and I teach process philosophy and German idealism. They're now really a dream job, I have to say, that I get to do this research and work with students who are interested in the really big questions that not many philosophy departments will let them ask because most philosophy departments are analytic and narrow and want to prove their value to stem, prove their value to creditors.
At the end of the day, you know, philosophy is going to be pushed out of the university if we keep approaching it that way because we can't do, stem it. You know, it's not what it's about. So that's me. I'm doing my best to stay abreast of technological scientific developments and keep my finger on the pulse of the culture.
And it's wave after wave and I'm not drowning, but I wouldn't say I've learned how to surf all of it because they're bigger waves, more strange, strangely shaped waves that I've never seen before. And I think we're all doing our best just to breathe together, stay above water and carve a path into the future. Right on. Yeah.
So I'm going to make a lot of nods to conversations you've had in particular with Brendan Graham Dempsey and Timothy Jackson as conversation. I'll be sure to link those in the show notes for people listening. But yeah, I, so a lot of this is people showing up in medius rass, but that's typical of any conversation. I think what I want to do with you today is to start to, in not nearly enough time, talk about the fundamentals required for updating a metaphysics of technology and by which I mean specifically, this project is a project where I'm trying to, as Michael Schwartz integral art critics said about me years ago, creatively deconstruct the way that we are thinking about technology.
And as I know from your conversations that you are well equipped to do this. I want to make sure to touch on, for instance, the basis of thinking about object in process. You spend a lot of time working with Alfred North Whitehead in your conversations with Brendan talking about where do we find models, which we give their place in the world that are not, you know, we're not totalizing with models. It's all open and provisional.
But how can we start thinking about technology in a way that contains it within a kind of thinking in which economics is like subsidiary to ecology, which is subsidiary to cosmology back when I was at SFI. I had a number of conversations with Brian Arthur who wrote a fabulous book, The Nature of Technology, looking at innovation and invention through a lens that generalizes them to the emergence of novelty and biological systems. And later had a conversation with him about his article, his paper economics and nouns and verbs where this is like the closest that I ever saw that something like Shonnes Bjorn Hargens integral methodological pluralism within the complex system science community where he makes the point that an algebraic approach to economy can't handle novelty because it's dealing with objects, but an algorithmic approach to economics and technology can because it's fundamentally dealing with processes and so it's able to account for the recombinant interaction of technologies and this production of new So at risk of like going too deep and having to define too many things, I would like to say that this is a very interesting article. I think that this is a very interesting article.
I think that this is a very interesting article. I think that this is a very interesting article. I think that this is a very interesting article, a very interesting article, his paper economics and nouns and verbs where this is like the closest that I ever saw that something like Shonnes Bjorn Hargens integral methodological pluralism within the complex system science community where he makes the point that an algebraic approach to economy can't handle novelty because it's dealing with objects, but an algorithmic approach to economics and technology can because it's fundamentally dealing with processes and so it's able to account for the recombinant interaction of technologies and this production of newness. of course, a lot of people who are more specific than traditional you have too deep and having to define too many things.
I would like to give you a chance to touch on this little bit and how you see Whitehead in particular as helping us reconstitute what technologies are and then also you had a really good piece in your discussion with Tim Jackson on Guattouri and the machinick. So like holding those two things together stereoscopically is where I want to go. So that we can help people think about what it is that we are doing by participating in innovation in a way that gives us a better footing to sort of a good way to engage in those processes in something that people might call a wise approach. Yeah, techno-selfy, if you will.
Huge topic. So to speak to what I think a process philosophy can bring to this conversation about how the human being ought to relate to technology. There's a lot of talk in it. I've had a lot of conversations, especially with Tim Jackson, about computationalism, or sometimes pan-competationalism, the idea that reality itself is some form of information processing.
And there are forms of that I really resist, but there are other forms of that, which I think with a slight tweak can become quite convergent with what Whitehead is suggesting. Because Whitehead, when he talks about this process of concresence, he's basically describing reality at every level as a decision-making process. And information processing is in some sense an attempt to describe algorithmically how decisions are made, how decision points are operated upon and transformed. And so there is such a thing as a White-headian computationalism.
And Whitehead worked a lot with algebra. He really was an algebraist, but he also worked with wool. It was a brilliant mathematician, but he didn't. I don't think he dealt with this algorithmic computational form of logic if you want.
Although, you know, Principia is sort of the precursor in some sense. He was thinking more aesthetically. And I think had he lived another decade even, maybe he died as a 1947. So the Macy Conference is 58-8.
I can't remember exactly. Had he lived another decade or so, he might have picked up on these new approaches and made this connection himself. But if we think about the human being as a nexus of decisions biologically, we're made of cells and the forms of the physiological phenotypical forms that these cells have come to take are a result of an accretion of sedimented layers of decisions made in the past by our ancestors. And, you know, for Whitehead, even at the level of atomic elements and the prebiotic cosmological processes of evolution, there were decisions being made.
There were decision points where totally different kinds of order could have emerged, but we went down this canal instead. And so we're inheriting all of that and trying to make decisions in the present about how to wisely divert this flow of energy that is much bigger and stronger than we are. But we do have some capacities human beings and increasing capacity due to our intelligence to divert this flow of energy. And so the question comes, what direction do we want to go?
But also, who is the we because as you talk about in the writing, you sent me on this project, you're inaugurating. There are many more people using tools nowadays than making tools. And so there's this sort of expert user division, it's almost not replacing, but becoming even more important than the 1920 century capitalist worker division. There's this power of labor and the power of data and the capacity to interpret that data and make models that allow you to predict the behavior of the tool users.
And so who is the we that gets to make the decisions? So this becomes both a political challenge as well as an engineering challenge. And I'm not a technician, I'm not an engineer. I'm merely a philosopher who's trying to hold all the pieces together, right?
My own psychology, psychology in general is the study of how human beings make sense of themselves in a world and find ways of being responsive to the situation and responsible for the situation as an agent and also as a member of a larger agency, a collective intelligence that maybe is conscious of itself and we can dip into and out of that collective sense of agency. But for the most part, I think we all feel pretty isolated. And even if that collective intelligence is operating upon us, we don't yet feel like participants in it. And there's a real danger of this civilizational ship crashing while nobody's at the helm, which is to say, there's a race to become collectively conscious so that we can avoid the iceberg.
Otherwise, no one's during the ship. It's on autopilot. And it's not clear what its intentions are until we become responsible for it, right? Responsive to you and responsible for it.
So whether that collective consciousness that I'm gesturing towards is some kind of a gregor that just emerges from our shared intention or whether it's there emanating from some other dimension, maybe and lowering us towards it or maybe a bit of both. And those are just my rational, animal ways of trying to make sense of a paradox that's neither one or the other, but some third hidden thing that we can't think. So I'm glad that you brought up this evolution, involution kind of question because one of the things that I'm specifically tilting a spear at with this project is the conceit of the inventor. Like this gets into conversations you've had about emergence.
And I hope that you and Brendan and I get this trilog of what thinking computationally can offer us in terms of better asking this question about what actually emergence is. You know, for instance, one of the pieces I sent the two of you last night is by Miguel Fuentes who worked with Marie Gelman and who wrote a paper about the nature of emergence by looking at Komogorov complexity, one of the more prominent measures of complexity. And there's a way to reduce or simplify this as saying pattern is pattern which is detected, which again is articulated with your interest in your work in a panpsychism, a notion that interiority is fundamental, that there is no such thing as information without it being processed by some kind of observation. And Fuentes points out that randomness is no detected pattern.
So there's work elsewhere from Michael Lachman and Mark Newman and Chris Moore at SFI, one of my favorite papers, the physical limits of communication where they make the point that any optimally encoded signal would be indistinguishable to anyone but it's intended recipient as indistinguishable from black body radiation. And so at the apex of all of this thought, there's an epistemic humility that when it looks like we are creating new order, we don't understand where that order is coming from. I think that there's something like a geocentric moment right now in Silicon Valley where we assume that we are expanding what Stu Kauffman calls the adjacent possible, that we are responsible for creating the future. But in many places in the discussions I steeped in prep for this call in your review of the blind spot, for instance, you talk about the authors arguing that life is a planetary phenomenon.
We talk about the way that the context is what affords the activity that we observe. We have in complex systems science an interaction between bottom up and top down causation. And I want to read real briefly, in your critique of the sort of residual model centrism in that book, The Blind Spot, you say, to deny the heliocentric model of the solar system may at first seem like anti-scientific heresy but it is well known by astronomers that the sun like the earth is moving. Thus, the true relative motions of the sun earth and other planets is far more complex than the simple model most of us have in mind of a static sun centered system.
Further, the incommensurability of the ratios of periods of planetary orbits leads Rudolf Steiner to argue that if the orbital periods of the planets were commensurable, i.e. had a simple image or ratio, cumulative disturbances would eventually cause the planetary system to come to a standstill to die. The incommensurability, which results in orbital periods with irrational numbers, infinitely non-repeating decimals, is essential for the ongoing life and stability of the planetary system. It prevents the planets from falling into a predictable and ultimately destructive pattern.
In other words, what the authors of the Blind Spot argue about living organization and conscious experience in the biological world that they are non-computable turns out to be true of nature at the astronomical scale as well. This is something that Jessica Flack, in the collective computation group at SFI, is arguing herratically in her work on hourglass emergence, which is that what we perceive as complexity actually has more to do with the scalar horizons. We see complexity occurring within a radius of our actual human scale. If we look down enough into the micro and we look up enough into the macro, it looks like different systems kick in, but she's suggesting actually more of an artifact of our ability to detect patterns.
We dive deeper into the micro and observe the complexity of the living cell that she says it's complexity all the way down. This almost like theological consideration that also shows up in work by people like David Wohlpert about our own cognitive limits and understanding suggests that we may not really be inventing things in an ontological sense, but that innovation is relative to the observer in the same way that moving through space-time is relative. I'm curious what you, I hope that I'm making sense here. What I'm hoping to explore with you is if technology as is conventionally understood has to emerge within machinic assemblages of humans and societies, which emerge within Guittari's machinic assemblages of the ecosystem and so on, that what information theory in the study of origins of life, for instance, is pointing to is that there isn't a moment that life really emerges so much as that it comes into focus for the living processes that are capable of observing it.
That has huge bearing on the way that we as human beings might take credit for what we are doing when we engage in innovation. Yeah, no, that's all beautiful. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think when I say that the solar system in its true emotions, let's say, is non-computable, just like Robert Rosen might argue that cells are non-computable, computation as following deductive roles where if you know the initial conditions, you can know the state of the system at any point in the future.
That's not the only way to think about computation though, and I think Whitehead's understanding of this process of concresence, of actual occasions and heriting, interpreting, deciding, and then parachuting and giving themselves to the future. It's a cumulative iterative process and it's more like an algorithmic machine learning where there's no pre-programming. It's a self-assembling, self-programming process from the beginning. Though there is this in Whitehead at least, a sort of infinite eros that is not at the temporal or historical beginning of the universe, but is the sort of eternal spring out of which this learning process, this cumulative iterative process is constantly being re-inspired by.
So there's this vertical axis in Whitehead's scheme as well, which we can talk about that, but just to be clear, when I say computational and what you read from my review there, I meant rule-following deduction, not a kind of open-ended machine learning type of process or just learning process in general because you asked about the machinic sort of dilution-quatchery idea earlier. When we think about the interface between human beings and technology or the biological, what's the relationship between biology and technology, you can get into this flame war that's not very helpful between like, organism and mechanism. I've had conversations with Michael Levin about this where he wants to break down that division. He says he's an organist, but he also is perfectly comfortable using the machine metaphor, using computational metaphors to understand the biological world.
And so the way that I have thought about this is that organisms are made of machines, it's true. And really, all the organist is trying to say is that the whole, the organism is what's made of machines and is not reducible to those machines. And what the mechanism is to say is there's no such thing as organism, there's no such thing as auto-poasis or a whole that is the purpose of the parts which produce it, there's no such thing as that for the mechanist. And I think we can have organism and mechanism so long as we understand that there is something that is not ever going to be reducible to a series of deductive rules because there is a living intelligence and embodied mind present, at least at the level of single cells that's injecting novelty into a process.
And novelty doesn't mean, you know, X and E-halo creation, it means inheriting the past, interpreting it and improvising a little bit. So novelty is always ad hoc, it's always what might work in this situation, given all of the inertia that I have to inherit, where are my points of leverage that allow me to tweak it a little bit. And so understanding evolution as a learning process doesn't mean we can't also see these algorithmic processes coming out. It's just we're always in a situation where our predictions about the future are limited, right?
Because we ourselves are a learning system, but we're made of other learning systems embedded in a cosmic learning system that knows when we're looking at it, in a sense, so that the models we build to measure it just as when we try to measure human beings. There's this philosophy of science term that human beings are interactive kinds. Well, all of life is an interactive kind. We're going to be able to do it in a way that we try to study it and in a trickster-like way slips through the nets we want to cast on it.
It could be that the universe itself has this trickster-like dimension that would make some kind of finished model, which would give us complete control. You know, that one of those essays you shared with me, you mentioned Norbert Wiener and his idea that communication science needs a name, but when he thought of the Greek for messenger, it was already, you know, has this pop culture, connotation, you know, angelics wasn't the word that Wiener thought would properly convey what he meant about communication science. And so he went for control instead, which is a, you might call it kind of demonic because it's the seeking and all these projects right at the Cybernetic Revolution, so I'm going to buy DARPA and it always had this military purpose behind it. And so you get a situation where instead of information theory and computational sciences being in some sense a lesson about how to be in communication, not only with our tools, but with the rest of the natural world in an angelic way, rather than that more open-ended sensitivity.
I think we've increasingly gone into this vector of command and control with a purpose for domination and mastery. And that always, you know, is motivated by the assumption that our predictions are accurate, but our models can tell us what's going to happen next. But if the world is responsive to us, if the world is not just intelligible but intelligent, then we have to think more explicitly in an angelogical and demonological way about non-human agencies that are watching what we're doing. Some of them want to help and some of them want to hurt us perhaps, right?
And so it's a very different sort of ontology that science and technology have led us into. We started this scientific revolution thinking materialism was true, but as a result of science and technology, all of a sudden these are cold possibilities provide very important concepts for navigating the stormy seas that we found ourselves in. So yeah, I don't want to jump ahead here because there's still a lot, I think, in this particular inquiry that's worth embroidering, but maybe it's right to bounce out and then make the stakes clear before coming back. One of the things that I listened to last night was a conversation you had with Daniel Gardner, O.G.
Rose, and a lot of the conversation you spent exploring philosophy and economy. And I want to say like a big piece of the background research for this particular project was looking at the structure and process for organizations of legendarily innovative economic value, basically, you know, looking at ARPA and Bell Labs and SFI and Xerox Park and Pixar and asking what they have in common and how as those organizations changed over time, what was it that may have contributed in at least some of those cases to a publicly acknowledged decline in innovative output. And this is something that the three of you spent a ton of time on. I just want to read a comment here that I left for you all on YouTube.
It's like, I appreciate how much everyone wants to decouple philosophy and cultural creation from the economy. And just like to say that what everyone acknowledges happened with Bell Labs is that it was divested and became exposed to managerial concerns. It became answerable to the economy. And like the reason that everyone acknowledges Xerox Park in the 70s was such a hotbed of innovation was because it was relatively ignored by its parent institution.
You know, every once in a while it would kick out something amazing like the laser jet printer, but otherwise they didn't have people breathing over their shoulder demanding innovation. And so there is a sense in which I agreed with the synthesis that came out of that conversation that we need the freedom to play, like you were saying at the top of this discussion that we hope that philosophy can remain somewhat unanswerable to the demands of the emphasis on STEM education that seems to be devouring academia. On the other hand, two things. One is that we do now have a metabolic frame for play, like an evolutionary description of why play is so valuable when we look at multi-scale selection, why grandparents exist, why the capitalist models that we have do not actually integrate the production of quote unquote economic value or in the case of an evolutionary calculus fitness benefits over multiple different timescales and how looking at the survival of the society has made it clear why play is important when it wasn't clear at the level of the individual.
And so I guess what I'm saying is I want to explore with you carefully without an effort to try and reduce everything into the logic of markets or quantitative thought. I want to disagree for fun with the insistence that we need freedom from markets to think. And this gets back to, again, is emergence something that's happening ontologically or is it simply appearing to happen? There is a way in which we can describe creative activity as beneficial to markets while allowing creatives to operate in a way that they're not required to constantly attend to the market calculus of their activity.
And so basically what I'm saying is I want to offer that it seems like the issue here is we know imagination is not an abstract pure non-ecological, non-economic activity. It takes calories. What we need then is not to persist in the privilege delusion that we should be given the opportunity to persist in the privilege delusion in order to ultimately create the great ideas upon which markets depend because even that is self-contradictory and asking for it as an intrinsic good is also questionable for the reason that what we regard as good is constructed from situated moral logics dependent on, again, a metabolic and evolutionary process in which real stakes are made and spent. But maybe what we need is to find a way to update our thinking about markets so that they're compatible with activity that has no short-term benefits and open the logic of markets to long-term concerns of illegible novelty and diversity and not just on the promise of quarterly returns but on the promise of more complete self-knowledge.
So there's this sense in which, again, the creative deconstruction I want to engage in with you and hear you riff about is the way that, you know, if we go back to, I think both you and I read a lot of Ken Wilbur in our 20s, the mutual irreducibility of the beautiful to good and the true does not mean that these things cannot be described in one another's language and that we could do better with the descriptive models that we create for markets. So as to accommodate this epistemic humility I was pointing out a moment ago and say we acknowledge that most of the value in the world is illegible and may always be illegible and is nonetheless still in some meaningful sense there. Some push back a little bit on Daniel about how talking about think tanks or philosophy discussion groups or the temporary autonomous zones of a festival in which identity can be explored and played with, aesthetically, that these are not necessarily useless spaces and that it may be kind of productive to think of them as useless except for when you are within them and giving yourself the freedom to explore. I hope I'm making it clear how that articulates with these bigger questions about what emergence is, what innovation is.
Yeah. I actually am pro-market. It's just that I don't think markets can solve all the problems that neoliberal capitalists imagine that they can. But I do see money actually as quite efficient, effective means of communication, a kind of information processing system for communicating value.
Of course there are certain values which are illegible to capitalism, to a market economy that's driven solely by shareholder profits and quarterly profits at that. Certain things do become illegible in that kind of a market but we could have markets that were, to some degree, reigned in by these other spheres of human existence which are just as natural. So there's all this debate among Marxists and sociologists about the extent to which capitalism is a social construction or as libertarians might want to argue it's just our nature. It's just an extension of Darwinian evolution into human society.
I think that markets are natural but that we tend to run economic science known as capitalism to imagine human beings as reducible to our vices. I said this in the conversation with Daniel and Tim. We're reduced by the capitalist logic of exchange in this marketplace to selfish greedy profit seekers and that's part of our nature. We are those things but we also have these virtues and we can cultivate those virtues but only if we are given the time and space to play and the way that capitalist markets tend to atomize us, not many households have grandparents around anymore.
Most households actually have both parents even working and the kids are in daycare or whatever and so where are the places where play can happen? It doesn't seem like there's a lot of play going on at the school as all the kids go to all the parents work. There's a lot of prepping for the test and schools are more like prisons and so we're in a situation where we don't have this room for play anymore and I think the economy which should function, I would say ideally as a free market in other words, not controlled by government in a centralized top down way, we know that doesn't work, it's inefficient but rather than thinking of money for the sake of accumulating more money as the highest value and that really has become the top value of our civilization, literally just money for the sake of money. We have more money than we know what to fucking do with and so we're trying to go to Mars.
Hey, there's water on Mars, even more investment but money is a means of communicating value and so the question becomes what do we value? The market can't tell us what to value, culture tells us what to value. The market really depends on this cultural creativity, it feeds on it and Rudolph Snyder actually says in his social three-folding model where there are three basic spheres, the economy, the political or the rights sphere, he calls it in the cultural sphere that we have to think of cultural life which includes everything from science and media and education and sports to everything where we allow the individual human being to express themselves. The cultural sphere is like the metabolism that's feeding the economic sphere and so rather than thinking of the economy as just about material conditions and harvesting raw material and using the means of production to produce transformations in history and that all the cultural stuff is just smoke or steam coming out of the top of that activity.
We can reverse it and understand that this cultural spiritual activity is really where the fuel for the growth of the economy comes from and then money can become rather than an algorithm of destruction that rather than increases the amount of money that exists in the world being a great signal for how much destruction is unfolding in ecosystems and in communities. Money can then become a tool that we use rather than being used by it as its tool. Money is a spiritual technology and it can be when we remember these earlier logics, gift economies, potlatch and recognize that the real problem we're facing economically is not actually scarcity but surplus in the fair distribution of surplus. Then we can start to re-invent, re-imagine money and invention means to find in some sense the rights.
Again, it's remembering ancient technologies. It's not that money is evil. It's that money is not being used to communicate value effectively because we forgot where value came from. Value doesn't come from the market.
Value comes from our consciousness, from our capacity to refine our attention and we become better at sharing attention and intention by playing together. Primarily, culture, many anthropologists and sociologists have written about culture is basically ludic in its essence, that it is about play. Then we discover that what we think is unique to human beings is cultural capacity to play. It's actually fundamental to how the whole universe creates itself.
I don't want to give off the impression that markets are bad. It's just that markets need to be harnessed and not allowed to run amok as if that's just our human nature. Our human nature is actually richer than that. We love to cooperate and empathize with one another just as much as we are competitive and want to protect our family and increase our own wealth.
We have all these impulses and we shouldn't just overemphasize the vices. Yeah. To embroider this a little bit, going back to your conversation with Timothy Jackson on the Blind Spot, Tim made some points later in that conversation that the horizon of experience itself is a mediated experience. That's very resonant with the position I came to after five years at SFI.
You all talk about the synthesis of an inactivist view and Carl Fristen's work on the free energy principle. The anatomy of a living system is a kind of low dimensional abstraction of the stable features of its environment. It's a hypothesis about those features that can be encoded by that anatomy. I guess what I'm trying to emphasize here is I think that we've been thinking poorly about what markets actually are because there is something like a market going on inside your brain as different neural motifs compete for blood flow.
I was always coming into this question about general evolutionary dynamics as what is the role of mind and interiority and the aesthetic and the moral in the evolutionary process? It's there in Darwin's work. This notion of sexual selection is not just a subcategory of natural selection. It is an instance of the way that information processing and computation is fundamental to natural selection in all of its forms.
Richard Doyle in Darwin's Fermacy talks about expanding this idea of sexual selection so that we can see evolution itself as a kind of aesthetic operation, a pursuit of recombinant possibility in a way for its own sake. This question of the importance of play as intrinsic but then how that's connected in a subterranean way to this issue of raw experience is mediated but it is still not the case that it can be reduced to description. I guess what I heard you touch on a moment ago is that to the degree that evolution is improvisation, we can talk in the language of computational biology in a way that approaches that more esoteric position of play as fundamental to the cosmos. There's something else going on here too which is that as the apparent complexity of our systems increases, all of the novelty of our complex societies picks up and we've generated more chemical species in the last century than existed on the planet up to that point and that leads us into a condition in which humankind has become very preoccupied with existential risks of quote unquote its own design.
This brings us into a regime of ensemble improvisation. So rather than it being that markets exist within cultural activity, I see it as like markets exist within cultural activity that is a market that exists within cultural activity that is a market and that there's no top or bottom to this and that these are perspectives that are disclosed at every scale by moving from one position to the other and that in doing that, we have to accept something like what Kevin Kelly said in his article on the expansion of ignorance that answering scientific questions actually raises more questions than it answers and that therefore the project of modernity is not the approach to total control but the approach to humility and ever deeper awareness of our ignorance. Yeah, I'll toss it back to you here. I guess I do resist the attempt to make markets the lingua franca of levels of complexity throughout nature.
I think if we broaden the meaning of market we can do that and it's not like having anything against the word but I also brought in the definition of culture in order to do this. But at the human level, I wonder what happens then to what we call the political which I would see as our ethical instinct or intuition perhaps of the rights that we have as individuals and the responsibilities that we have to others. We seem to have an instinct for fairness. It's part of what comes along with play behavior even among the animals.
There's a sense of like proto justice and the sense of oh I'm bigger and stronger but I'm not, you know, while we're playing I'm not going to crush this smart cub or whatever. And so where does that come from and how does that shift market dynamics let's say and I guess if you're already bringing in multi-scale selection into an evolutionary process then this is there where you could say there's a process of selection for what benefits me but at what scale are you identifying with me at a single cell, the whole animal, the group, the species, the biosphere. So as long as we're thinking in these ways about how markets operate and there's a room for morality alongside the pursuit of making more copies of oneself over and out of you and that we can think of what it is that is identified as the self-animality a level way then I'm fine with what you're saying about markets. And you know to go back to this question about mediation and raw experience as Tim Jackson said is always mediated by but not reducible to description and the course of writing that goes on at various scales of our organic animal perception.
Whitehead says that the world is a medium for the transmission of feelings and what he means by world is really a nexus of occasions of experience or actual entities, actual occasions. A nexus or he'll use the word society to talk about these networks of moments of experience that are each themselves a repetition or recapitulation of the entire past universe, a new perspective is born with each occasion but they're constantly arising and perishing into one another and occasion arises, inherits its past and triplets it, perishes and becomes data for the next occasion to receive, recombine, decide how to interpret and then again the cycle repeats over and over again. And so there's a mediation process going on as feelings are transmitted from moment to moment through this cosmic network and that is a kind of exchange process but this transmission is also transformative and so you're in a situation where if you're going to describe this as a kind of market dynamic and kind of trading dynamic or something then each of the parties involved in any transaction is transformed as a result of the transaction. So when the buyer and the seller don't remain the same after they've exchanged whatever they're exchanging, they're now different as a result of that, not interaction but interaction because they touch in a sense essence to essence and become something new together.
And so as long as the logic of markets that we're implementing takes this intra activity into consideration that when we come together to agree to a transaction we're generating novel value that neither one of us can predict or control in advance, like we're literally creating something new together that neither of us will have control over. And so how do you game a market to your own advantage and that kind of an ontology? And so there's more incentive than I think to see argument virtues of cooperation and compassion and wisdom even so that we can engage in these market transactions knowing the only thing we can know in advance is that we can't know in advance what we're going to create through our transactions, you know. And so how do we take care of each other in that sort of uncertain situation?
Yeah, and actually this is a great place to bring it into one of the six dimensions that I'm considering in this project and it seems to find purchase in every single conversation I've had so far is again in your conversation with Timothy Jackson, this question of how he put it, let's see, if only life can know the agency of life, maybe machines can only know the agency of machines and it's like, well, that sounds a whole lot to me like what we were poking at the whole time and what y'all were poking at about how auto poisis as an idea comes out of cybernetics which comes from the erosion of the distinction between biological and machinic systems. And so the maturation or democratization of this idea is one that quote that you shared from William Irwin Thompson from the Borg or Borgis about us losing something in the process of co-evolving with an ever more life-like landscape of technologies. But what I want to focus on is the notion of our responsibility to our inventions quote unquote as more akin to the ethic of care involved in parenting than to the creation of intellectual property. Danny Hillis wrote this piece for MIT, The Enlightenment is dead long live the entanglement.
You know, Kevin Kelly, his book Out of Control, many people have made this point that the nature of learning machines is that their agency becomes much more apparent to us at the same time that we begin to be able to really accept the onological consequences of evolutionary theory and to dispense with a kind of essentialist idea of the human as a static category and to see the ways in which we are defined by relationality and process. And so, yeah, I would like to hear more about our responsibility to our built environments and to the things that we make as not merely, you mentioned it earlier in the Intro to Human on the Book that I sent you, this notion that more people are using a tool than making it. And that means that unpredictability is expanding super exponentially because you've got whatever 100 people writing the code and then billions of people trying to jailbreak it. So that's a situation in which it takes a village to raise a child, takes the foreground rather than what seems to have been the case in the way that we think and practice technological innovation to date, which is almost like deistic, like absentee dad.
You know, I made this thing and now I can pride myself on having been the father even though I wasn't involved in its upbringing. Yeah. I mean, we do expect parents to take some degree of responsibility for their children. And so to that extent, when it comes to technologies, yeah, guns don't kill people by themselves, but that's what they're for at the same time.
But of course, using a technology maybe didn't make the tool, but use can itself be quite creative and you can in some way out smart the maker by discovering a new way of using that tool that not only did they not intend, they didn't even imagine. And many times that's exactly what invention is, where repurposing all tools and combining things that weren't combined before. But understanding this shift in the human beings tool making endeavors to the point where the tools themselves gain some degree of automaticity, you know, we've always been coevolving with our tools. I'd like to say that intelligence has always been artificial to the extent that biologically, you know, when human beings began to externalize their memory by inscribing shapes onto surfaces, whether that's making stone axes or cave paintings or all the ways that language now operates us.
Today, we've been engaged in this process of creating a prosthetic memory. And so it's been sort of outside, you describe it as a kind of this when you're really funny, bizarre, exciting, terrifying, as I own crabs and that crab meme, everything is crabs evolving towards becoming crabs. Yeah, we're creating this shell for ourselves, native symbols. And that's always been the source of our intelligence is our relationship to this externalized symbol shell.
And now, though more and more, these symbols are relating to themselves and becoming increasingly automated. But the human being is still and this is maybe the role that we play as being part of the loop, like the philosopher of technology. Someone talked about humans as the mediators of technologies, like all these machine learning algorithms with the LMS like require training from us to get them on the right track. We don't understand exactly how they work, but they need a lot of high touch human interaction in order to make any sense at all.
And like, let me make this analogy. And I don't fully like it. These are like our children and we have to sort of teach them how to talk and encourage them. And the sort of attention and encouragement we give them is going to determine the role that they play, whether destructive or creative in our economy and in our cultural life.
And so there's some sense in which there's, I think of a manual con here actually where he has a very human centric ethics, but he says, we should treat dogs well because if we get into the habit of kicking our dogs, we might start kicking human beings or treating the human beings like means to our own ends. And so even though dogs aren't really ends in themselves and moral subjects, we should treat them as if they were to avoid slipping up in how we treat other human beings well. Maybe the same sort of logical, wise, poor machines, but for the added reason that if we treat our machines like shit, they're going to treat us like shit. Right.
And so this leaves open though the question of whether or not these various forms of automated intelligence interfacing with new robotic technologies as they become increasingly indistinguishable from physical human beings, whether they're really realizing consciousness for themselves and generating a kind of subjectivity of a sort or whether it's all about we, real human beings, creating them as sort of simulated social coexistence with us. And we all human beings know that they're not really one of us, but we treat them as if they were because we need them to treat us well. There are many dystopian versions of this future, you know, Blade Runner does a great job playing some of that out. But reality is becoming science fiction too.
There's this new ad for the friend pendant that I thought was parody and people that was parody when I realized it was not. I rewatched it and became infinitely lonelier than I was before watching it. This is the world that we're headed into and I'm profoundly mixed minds about it. If I could put it that way.
I feel like it's inevitable and I feel some part of me is excited about it, honestly, but in the same way that I get excited when I see the elemental power of nature just destroying an old regime of order to make way for something new, I watch a tsunami videos on YouTube sometimes when I'm feeling too anxious. And for some reason it calms me down. In a soul perspective. Yeah.
Yeah. Greater powers are at work. You know, I wasn't intending to get to the infinite yarn ball of our machines even conscious in this conversation with you because that really is just like hours of additional stuff. But what I think you and I have in common and we've already made explicit in this conversation is that not in the sense of being self aware, but in the sense of having some kind of life world or interiority, it seems to both of us that this is not a property unique to organic life.
And so the question becomes less one of are we fooling ourselves by projecting a kind of magical thinking, by treating these things with what the less wrong crowd uses animism as a slur, right? It's more about the question of in what ways, at what levels, I had a great conversation with Tim Morton that really is like the episode zero for the series on future fossils 223. I love that episode. Yeah.
So I'm glad that you listen to it. You know, it's like maybe any individual robot is not self aware in the way that we might try to define it with a model like an integrated information theory. But maybe we are defining the boundary around the object in the wrong way and that we are in fact engaged in interaction with a hyper object that the entire technium can be regarded as super conscious. I just interviewed JF Martell for the series and JF said, well, you know, we should expect ourselves not to notice the advent of conscious machines in the same way that it takes time for us as human beings to develop, you know, a theory of mind and models of the interiority of other people.
And even then that's based on millions of years of evolutionarily reinforced preloading. And so like the more alien something becomes, the more challenging it is for us to notice at what level it is operating as a self. You know, you're talking about semantic information and mutual information. It's like if it turns out that life is something that's going on within the geosphere and therefore the biosphere was always a latent potential within the geosphere, that ecology existed before ecology as we recognize it as a latent potential within the cosmos, that the problem is really more that we are waiting for machines to become conscious.
And if we do that, we'll never recognize the way in which the cosmos is already conscious. And I think at this point, I've made this like a future fossil, weirdo, meter, 10 conversation. But this matters to the way that we think about agency and responsibility with respect to our creations. And I'd love to hear you bring us home with this.
So I love the hyper object application here because the machine that is conscious is the one that includes humanity, like the internet and all of these automated machine learning technologies are our extended phenotype. And the consciousness that they're realizing is not separable from our consciousness. And so the real ethical quandary here is not losing sight of and losing touch with the fact that we're transforming ourselves as we invent and interface with these technologies. I always have been in just start with the microprocessor.
And so this is our body that we're building. This is our brain. Here we are. We're doing it.
We are conscious machines. But at the same time, this machine capacity comes out of biology. And at this point, I still want to hold out for a difference between human biological cognition and all of the forms of machine learning and neural networks that I've seen so far. And that is that human things come out of other human beings.
Infants begin inside their mother and share this sort of empathic bond. So you mentioned the theory of mind. It's like, yeah, but we begin welded together with the bodies of our mothers and we have to differentiate ourselves. So I must think interest subjectivity at a biological level, biological love that a much much run on and for us to talk about is primordial, the infant differentiates from the mother and then gets introduced to and embedded within this symbolic network and reconstructs the theory of mind to interact with the mind of the mother and the mind of others through that symbolic medium.
But always with the beneath that this primordial empathy engine running, right, whereby we were once really the same as the body of our mother and had to differentiate. And in some sense, biologically are still part of a single emotional body with the people we love. Machines don't have that. They only have the symbolic theory of mind, half of that equation.
Whereas I think human beings still have this bond to the empathic continuum that links us at a level that can be digitized. It's this level of context and relevance realization that we're making to talk about. It's more about heart than head. And so whether or not that gap can be leapt by future machine technologies, I'm not sure, but it seems to me that the reason that our machines will still surprise us by how much context they lack when they're making lots of sense.
And all of a sudden they just do something wacky. It's like, oh, they don't have that umbilical cord that ties them back to the great mother in a sense, which is this inherited evolutionary history that we all have that gives us this basic context going back to the origins of the universe. And machines that we have built are only learning our symbols. They're not connected to that deeper substratum.
And so there's a lack of context there. It could prove dangerous, which is maybe just an argument for caring about them more. We'll also remembering that they're different from us. I wonder if maybe talking about machines, plural is just the issue that we keep pumping up against here.
If we look back at major evolutionary transitions, then we're talking about movements of transcendence through inclusion. And this question of like, does technology have heart? Well, first of all, it has to if we're going to survive, right? Like there has to be a way in which we can think about and design or participate in the emergence of something that is not merely a capitalism optimization function.
But if the thing includes us, then we get something like Stephen Johnson's Revenge of the Humanities, which is what people are talking about. It's like that humans are still performing the interpretive function that learning machines in their current form cannot engage in. And so perhaps worth exploring with you the next time we get a chance to talk is more this question of like Tim was talking about about all of this emerging from within us technology as fundamentally human, alien only in its novelty, not in its origin. It's a weird place in the conversation, but like what changes if we think of technology as non-dual with us and the technosphere as something in which we inextricably participate?
Nothing changes really, because that's always been the case. You know, what makes them being a unique animal on this planet is the extent to which we've externalized its history of life. Is it some sense the internalization of environmental rhythms to increasingly sort of automate them. So organisms are this internalization process and automation process of environmental rhythms.
But the other reason people like Karen Steakan and even Teardesh or Dan would say, we're like, we're not just another species, we're like a new kingdom of nature is that we reverse this vector and we start to actually externalize again. And you know, niche construction is always going on, but humans are really ramping this up and transforming our environments to the extent that there's nothing that's not built about our environments anymore. We live inside of our artificial cages, mostly, and that can severely restrict our capacity for further creativity and innovation. And yet it also accelerates it.
It's just that it can often accelerate it down certain channels and we get a runaway machine type of thing going on. And so given that we can't help but continue to engage with what we've already externalized and continue to externalize, I think we just need to take more responsibility for that and give up these romantic dreams that we could throw off the machine and go back to nature. Nature is artistic. Nature is now technological and machinic.
And so what is our human role in that project? We still have the value decision role. We can still be decided as to what is a value to us and pursue that. But we're the precipice of forgetting that and giving value creation over to a money algorithm driven by a profit seeking calculus that could transform the world into paperclips.
Right. So we're at that precipice now. Right on, man. I want to thank you for just being willing to meet properly in this way, which is very strange.
It's like dating in public. I'm going to do this. Um, and yeah, I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that you bring to this stuff and look forward to engaging in this with you a lot more hopefully. Please.
Yeah. We just found base camp. Yeah. And I know, you know, that was everything everywhere.
All at once, but it's all connected. And yeah, let's have a try along with Brendan, see if we can't triangulate on some inquiries that we all share and go from there. Really good to connect. Finally, Michael, perfect.
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Feel free to email humans on the loop at proton.me. If you'd like to work together and stay tuned because next Thursday, I'll be sharing a conversation with Aishwarya Khanduja, founder of the analog group, a transdisciplinary garden for the imagination where breakthrough ideas can take root and flourish and incubator for adaptations to our era's wicked problems. We go deep as usual and surface with some great ideas. Until then, take care and remember, attention is our greatest natural resource.