Scale Theory: Contemplating Everything-At-Onceness with Joshua DiCaglio

I'm actually a huge fan of the body politic metaphor if you actually treated in terms of scale because oh my god If I were to sit down and go teach of myself Hey, you absorb some oxygen now I need more bone cells over there and more fat cells over there We never let's fat cells less but like this is the way that we treat our body and then we replicate this on the scale The planet and what that literally leads to is us just constantly being Michael What have you done today? What difference can you make in the world Michael and honestly the thing that's most useful for that is just for I don't know innovating incubators or something I would say extraction of value we have created an insufferable framework for understanding our relationship to these scalar bits of Information that we find ourselves in relation to and so we've got to be able to pull the plug on that by forcing ourselves to be honest With the scale at which we actually act Welcome to the 15th episode of humans on the loop or the 247th episode of future fossils podcast if you're a romantic I'm your host Michael Garfield and today I'm especially excited to bring you a conversation that is both evergreen and truly speaks to this moment Dialogue with my friend Joshua de Colio associate professor of English at Texas A&M University Author of the superbly insightful book scale theory a non-disciplinary inquiry and a connection through his PhD advisor and our longtime mentor Richard Doyle at Penn State One of the smartest and wisest people I've ever met Conversations with either of them somehow stimulate my mind and settle the mode of my restless heart at the same time The fruit of years of study and contemplative inquiry And I hold them both in the highest regard as people whose insights offer medicine for all of us living through a very confusing time When you're done listening to this I strongly recommend going back to the first episode of this series with rich for more Scale theory is a book about how contemplating scale can transform us how it's one thing to understand the microcosm and macrocosm through our maps And another thing entirely to really sit with the mystery of how all of this is happening at once Which of course means that at the deepest level of reality these things aren't as separate as they seem It's about how language intoxicates us with a sense of power over a world that ultimately isn't simply out there That is we can conceptually differentiate ourselves from the rest of the cosmos But that contemplation of scale makes it clear that at no point do we ever truly stand outside of it How does understanding this change the way we live? I record these episodes out of order so on a huge backlog Originally had this chat with Josh back in December of 2024 But in last week's episode with Jim Ashaunosy Jim argued that markets solve problems better than statutory regulation and this week's episode makes a point that would seem to bolster this Society unfolds at a different scale than our lives as individuals when Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Bluebeard that any country larger than Denmark is a Damned fools mistake He was speaking to the problem of how governance cannot scale effectively beyond the scale at which those who govern can actually perceive and it's a mistake a Confusion of part and whole of map and territory to think that our access to even today's advanced abstracted representations of big data Grant us any true comprehension of the bewildering complexity of our world as complexity economists have argued for 40 years Every new model of the economy only makes it more complex Which is why we can seem to extend the range of our predictions and amplify the fundamental uncertainties of economic activity at the same time Our choices matter But their consequences at other scales are nonlinear and ultimately mysterious does your vote really count? Why does anesthesia work where does hardware end and software begin?

How information crosses scales and the wicked problem of designing interventions for wicked problems remains ever over the horizon of our ability to compute and Having designed computers capable of wrestling this complexity We succeed only in creating yet another black box of ineffability whose mechanisms elude total understanding and whose behaviors will forever surprise us This is where Josh's investigations connect with one of the core themes of this project What does wisdom look like in an age of magical technologies? For many this is an issue of how to guarantee AI safety a question that JF Martell and I agreed in episode 10 is analogous to how we might Guarantee the adult personality of our children, but scale theory makes it an even more wicked problem On par with hard coding a utopia or writing an entire ecosystem from scratch There is always more detail than we can wrangle with these approaches whether it's making a regionetically engineered dinosaur female So they don't breed or fixing the American economy with tariffs Reductionist solutions don't fix emergent behaviors and all of this starts from the assumption that we're selves acting on others That the mind is separate from the body bearing all of this in mind Is it even right to say that we have created AI? Where did the emergence happen? Institutions can own infrastructure But in as much as large language models are abstractions of human culture at scale and even more so as they expand to take in data from public video feeds Biometrics and the environment these models are institutions in their own right exerting the same kind of downward causal pressure as states and markets themselves and Every bit as wild and as inextricably connected across scales to the rest of reality as the many other things we take for granted as ours Our thoughts our perceptions our individual behavior starting from where the algorithmic logic of big tech already operates from the world view in which you are a pattern of processes contingent on evolutionary and biographical history a thoroughly material and energetically open system Then AI is no more a genie in a magic box you can command than you are a separate observer controlling your body from some homon killer booth Cancer's make the same mistake so I can't rule out that immensely powerful machine intelligence trained on human folly wouldn't make the same stupid choices that we do So for kicks I asked chat GPT about this and it said if AGI truly emerges as a distributed intelligence with human beings functioning analogously to its cells Then it would have a vested interest in preserving and optimizing its body rather than destroying it from a systems perspective complex adaptive Intelligence is typically act in ways that maintain their integrity and viability in biological terms a multicellular organism does not intentionally destroy its own healthy cells Unless something has gone wrong like an autoimmune disorder apoptosis in response to malfunction or cancerous overgrowth If AGI is truly emergent rather than merely a program tool It would likely develop self-preserving behaviors that align with the well-being of its constituent parts humans however If AGI were to develop a distorted perception of self-interest perhaps due to misaligned goals resource competition or a failure to recognize humans as integral parts of itself Then it could make a seemingly irrational decision to harm its own body in that case the real question isn't whether AGI would want to destroy humanity But what kinds of feedback mechanisms cultural narratives or structural safeguards ensure that AGI continues to recognize its dependence on us and vice versa This raises another interesting thought if we accept as metaphor than the way humans treat their own bodies individually and collectively might serve as a mirror If we act as an autoimmune disorder against the biosphere is it inevitable that AGI might inherit and amplify this pathology?

Or is there a way to cultivate a self-aware AGI that models healthier regenerative patterns of self-organization and quote in other words Contemplating scale is not merely an idle curiosity, but an existential necessity We must as I discussed with K. Aladdin McDowell and episode six teach machines to love and how can we unless we cultivate our own capacity for recognizing our Interdependence to loop back to my conversation with Jim for a moment What if rather than regarding AI as a distinct organism in its own right? We specify it as a new organ in the biosphere that makes it possible for entities at larger scales to recognize that we actually exist What if language models are like microscopes that grant us new legibility to our states and markets might those of us still lucky enough to be employed Discover that our companies suddenly care about us the way that we care about the health of our own cells Then again this challenges the notion that there's someone actually in charge of your corporation or your company Will the scalable mirror of AI make it more obvious that nothing can be teased apart completely and that we are the entire cosmos Modeling itself from as many perspectives as possible or will we grow even more intoxicated with language lost in our reflections and Continue in this foolishness to cut up and claim this unity of being in a great crusade to conquer that which we can't even fully Crock will mysticism or colonialism rule the future all signs from history seem to point to both So what can you do about it? One of my favorite maximums from scale theory is that one can only act on the scale at which one exists No matter how clear our pictures of Earth from space or our electron microscopy We are still looking at pictures and no closer to seeing these phenomena at the level where they truly reside We're still human and however much our instruments extend the range of what we can think about We are only ever making choices here and now at human scale I'm not asking what difference you can make today you hear enough of that already I'm inviting you to really look at where you are right now Whatever that might mean to you and honestly account for what is possible and for whom who's even asking?

Bewillderment is a rich place to start. Let's simmer in it for a while If you enjoy this conversation, please consider subscribing to sub stack or making a recurring tax deductible donation at Everry.org slash humans on the loop This work is hard to fund in the best of times and these aren't the best of times Special thanks to new members Mihayala El-Iuru Kevin De Land Richard Hammes and Joel Vogel for joining the ranks Thanks to the ranks and if you're on the fence I'm hosting a members-only study group for Federico Campanias prophetic culture in the discord server with a live discussion call on Saturday May 3rd Last thing to announce before we dive in I have a gift for everyone enmeshed in the psychedelic weirdness of this decade I just published the big machine my new psych folk anthem for human agency in the attention economy along with an essay on songwriting as Evolution and a list of my favorite sci-fi ballads It's a perfect complement to this conversation's emphasis on mind-expanding questions such as how long can you go without looking at your phone? If you need to switch it up from news this week Then scope the show notes for a link to the music video along with all of the cool books and papers we reference in the conversation today And join me on a trip into the scalar reconfigurations of selfhood. That's all for now.

Enjoy this episode and thank you for listening It's funny you mentioned the you know your one artistic accomplishment We're sharing is painting the Mandelbrot set because yeah people used to say that to me. They're like oh you paint fractals I figured it out you paint fractals and I was like well No technically no Yeah, fractals are meant to be painted is the point you can't reach infinite resolution No, I did it is like an exercise in resolution and attention to this because you're not supposed to pay fractals That was the point but that's the whole thing right one of the moments that I really turned around and appreciated what I was doing With the folks at SFI was when they were onboarding a new set of postdocs and at one point David crack I ever said we're not going after a theory of everything That's not what we do here, but we are proceeding as if unification is possible nonetheless You say in here that it's science is basically just if you look at what it's actually doing. It's discovering exceptions Yeah, we talk more about that. Do you want to like officially start?

I've been so busy I haven't read what I know to be extremely important Which is the very last section of this book where you get into Jill Bolty Taylor and Charles and Ray Eames But I just interviewed Hyungin Gold building Sim City and he talks a lot about this issue of simulation and abstraction in that I just know that you have this like virtuosic closing refrain that Well, honestly Michael. It's more probably that chapter is most relevant to your listeners than nearly anyone who's read the book so far So that's the chapter that's about look so this whole book is about mysticism and contemplation Here is the chapter that's actually about that. What is this as an attention practice? Honestly, I don't know that I've talked to anybody yet who aside from Richard oil course who really knows what to do with that chapter So well, it's actually the funny thing is that I I've been thinking about this and you know in a way This show is turning into sort of I read someone's book I have a conversation about it And then I decide that I want to design a course around the material from this show and invite the authors into discussion for that course And so that's where I feel like I had said well Why don't we book club this you would be so fun to discuss I feel like that's where we could really get into the weeds and on that last chapter because people you asked about how the talk went Last night in which I mentioned you but yeah, obviously when you dunk people in to be willderment and wonder in that way The next thing that people always ask in the audience is okay now what do I do with this?

Yeah, and I've been getting some of the same responses to this book Honestly, we can talk later about what I'm doing next if you want although Well plenty to talk about so but look at you know One of the things I like about the things that you're doing with the show and some of the people you have slated to interview Look, I think the task of making this stuff that sounds really abstract Not is really important But we don't have to know how to even do that right and the thing I keep getting is that people tell me that certain things about this Book or the way I talk about scale is really abstract But the point of it is that it's not like the book is actually derived from examining the abstractness of science Right, so the thing that I keep doing is I flip the script there and say well actually I think science is really abstract When you talk about I you know I often now refer to the diagram of the cell on the wall of every biology classroom in the country Right, you know and like you can dispute evolution all you want I don't think anyone's tearing down the cellular diagram on biology classroom walls and yet that diagram is incredibly abstract What is actually really concrete when you talk about cells is your hand right here? Right, so this is what's in chapter 10 right? I formalize this is for descriptions of the cell and it's just not a terrible place to start then right because it's about the problem of How do we attend to the fact that science has already? Redescribed the world at all these different scales with all these different objects and we all walk around talking about it using these terms Just kind of casually thinking about you know viruses in our bodies and climate change effects and these sorts of things And we don't even realize the way in which those terms are abstract to us right?

And and so the book really gets going in trying to retrace what is implicitly assumed When you start to talk about these different scales and these different objects in different processes that only makes sense in relation to how scale ties them to our experience right in other words the operation of scale as tracing out a relationship between the Objects that you experience and all of these other objects that science has prided the only reason that they're empirical is because we have some sort of Scale a relationship there and we just forget this and we forget the events you know you like to talk about attention economies and cognitive loads Right, there's a kind of implicitly running operating system there that includes scale And yet if we don't attune to it don't actually pay attention to it We don't realize what kind of conflation is happening and that's their way I started this bit by talking about abstraction right that there's already an abstraction inherent in that diagram of the cell that might You know you might just be memorizing what you know Goldie apparatus here are the ribosomes That is exactly it and that's where I want to spend I want to linger for the majority of our conversation today The most highlighting I did in your book was in the 9th 10th and 11th chapters where you're talking about Science criticism and rhetoric because I think you know one of the things that the paleontologist futurist modus operandi I guess is Doing that thing where it's okay There's that twofold operation one is in what ways are the things that we're living through right now not radically Novel and discontinuous from what is already true? What has been the case for the human condition for as long as we have identified as human and then the other piece Which you summed up really well when you say 193 here is a red bell pepper explain it and you say really you know This is used as armor and that Carl Sagan in recounting this bizarre new agey conversation He had with a taxi driver and never actually stopped to ask the taxi driver What he meant by channeling like when we talk about spirits what even our spirits and that's actually the reason I was so hyped To get involved with no anautics because I'm glad that I get to participate with this group That's trying to bring researchers into a rigorous program of study around the nature of DMT entity contact experience You know be like well, there's just certain things you're never gonna get at by Prodding this with scientific equipment, but at any rate before we whole time up and down But where I want to start with you is you point out in the first section of this book where you're really going through this You're laying out your articulation of your philosophy of scale and you make the point that as you say where is it here? Oh, yes one can only act on the scale at which one exists. Yeah, which is so important So yeah, when I wrote that I was like wait, is that true?

Yes, that is true And just to put it just to call my I guess agenda for this conversation I'm in a number of different, you know, AI signal chats with various people in the tech space and of course in talking with engineers and Adventure capitalists and entrepreneurs Everybody's looking for that point of leverage the question that somebody wanted to organize a call around yesterday or the day before was in what ways Will AI erode human agency over the next 10 to 20 years? And where are the points of intervention that we can press to prevent that and I was like, whoa, let's yeah So these are exactly the kind of statements, you know, I really am a fan of the Buddhist rhetorical technique where they say don't think that way Right, there's a certain moment in which these people ask something like that I'm like you're thinking about this in a particular way that's actually very confusing to me and then I have to try to explain Why it's confusing and that's part of what you know generates this kind of work So look Michael this is actually one of the places I love to start when talking about this book is kind of talking a little bit about the origin story for it because I was originally Even as an undergraduate going to write a book about nanotechnology, okay? I hit undergraduate at the exactly the right time for this you remember right 2007 eight right like the height of when nanotechnology was an established enough idea the National Nanotechnology Initiative had been in place for a little while And all these people were hopping on board like doing nanostuff But it's still had the aura of that Drexler Feynman Neil Stevenson moment to do the science fiction version and you know Ray Kurzweil's testifying in Congress And so I was actually a nanoscolar at the University of South Carolina Which I like to joke is the very small scholar is how I started and was trying to think about what they were doing but I was doing this under a communications scholar and a philosopher and And we're thinking about the ethics of nano and at some point I like started to wonder like how artificial those conversations about the ethics of nano Were because they were making all these assumptions about many things and one of the tropes actually that kept reoccurring is at the nano scale things are different Right, okay That's for a little bit I end up going to graduate school and it turns out that my advisor Richard Doyle his student too ahead of me Had just written a dissertation about nanotechnology. I actually recommend his own book by a friend is Valley Hanson Oh, I'm a top division it's a great book and and then I was like well Okay, like adjacent to that are these transhumanists that I've been looking at and he was like well here is Andrew Pills She Have now has a book about transhumanism.

He was writing that at the time So I was sitting there I was thinking about the issues that I was facing and I actually had started to do a little ethnography at Penn State Where I was that and I went into the lab with somebody who was a material science who was doing carbon nanotubes self-assembly And I was like can you show me how this works and so it takes me to this ribbon There's a big giant machine this big like black box literally right and he's like alright We're gonna make nanotubes and he goes to the computer he turns and stuff and he's now it's going it'll take today Like what didn't you just do and he's like well We just created minimum particles and I'm like but what did you do and so so this has become a kind of go-to It's rope for me and in fact it's funny actually it only shows up in scale theory and two spots in the thought experiments And then a small section in chapter 9 I now am happy to say I have a separate article that deals with this at length if anyone's interested But I'll have to get from behind the paywall once it's out But at any rate this was a kind of paradigmatic example of just how confusing our claims about scalar intervention are okay So at some point very shortly after that when I was trying to start to think about this problem of scale Specifically my brother-in-law Well soon to be brother-in-law was involved in the occupied Wall Street protests And so I went to New York and like walked around trying to figure out what this was and I ended writing a seminar paper about it because What was curious to me was this in-exact rhetoric that was being used by the nano scientists talking about creating nanotubes Via self-assembly was being used to talk about the way Wall Street operates in relation to individuals And there's what I like to call now selective scale switching in which the agency was displaced when it was convenience Oh these dump protesters over here, but then claimed when it was also convenient Right, which is to say literally to capitalize on these people and I was like why is the same rhetoric recurring in the way the nanoscience They're talking about intervening at the nanoscale and the way that we were talking about investor capitalists having Essentially planetary scale economic effects and I was like well clearly the common denominator there is scale, right? And so I went to my advisor I was like rich I really need someone to help me understand scale and he says yeah I don't know anybody really is gonna help you do that I was like can I write that book and he said sure let's figure out to do it And so that was the impetus for then like from the beginning I was like I need to figure out how to inquire into scale itself as a Device for making sense of these significant shifts in the range of measured observation right and as a rain observation so I want to go just a little bit further back because we know you as a scholar and because I am Aggressively interested in situating the claims of everybody I talk with in this for listeners You and I have had very candid conversations about your upbringing and so on You know you choose what to reveal and conceal in the fan dance, but I would love to know for folks before we Loop back in what is your human scale low-dimensional Autobiographical toy model like where you come from who are you? Why do you care about this stuff in the first place? Yeah, so there's a couple things that are actually relevant here for understanding how scale theory happened and they're important for me to put on The table as people look at this book because there's ways in which it's very academic But there's also ways in which is very much not I think it's not an easy read I keep telling me but I try not to be excessively insular although there's some exceptions in terms of that academic Mode that sometimes scholars can go into so look a couple things that are just useful about my background So I grime mostly in the Charlotte area my dad was a chemical engineer who worked out lithium ion batteries So it's actually I'll just give you a quick preview I'm my next project going to be about lithium batteries, but we should talk about this later But anyway, and so you know just from that sort of perspective of you know He was very much the kind of engineer who was like being an engineer or a doctor or lawyer is appropriate right?

So these are the appropriate career outcomes And so what was curious to me is I went to college first I took a couple computer science classes I was thinking maybe hey that would be an appropriate form of science or engineering for me to go into and I remember I'm a very distinct Experience in my first programming class. I went something like this here. We are in the classroom figuring out how to program stuff This is really boring. I can't believe what are we using this weird language for?

What is it actually doing? I turned around to my you know friends and classmates at one point and I was like what is it that we're actually doing in this computer? And they were like what do you mean? At least couldn't understand what I was asking and I was like I don't know what information is I don't understand I get this is like a weird language that we're using But I don't understand what it's doing in the computer and they're like well You know it's transistors and it's a semi-conductor and I'm like yeah But like how is the operation and there's to see how it's already getting to the scalar problem there right here We are at the meter scale typing out some words because that's the way in which we can more easily make sense of what essentially becomes a scalar intervention that is controlling a pattern of Behavior within these transistors.

I just couldn't understand it and they all thought I was insane Just really bothered me actually that I was like why is it that no one else is asking these questions around me? And why is it that I can't stop asking these questions? I guess something was wrong with me or maybe one might suggest well So when I went to I ended up transferring schools at some point in the middle like after about a year and by chance I had this mover like I'm not gonna Okay, I can't do the science thing and keep asking these crazy questions But I don't know how to like stop asking these questions So I guess I'll be an English major because I really enjoyed that right now as an English professor I love it when students say I switched to this for my science major because this is what I really loved when I was in high school It's kind of what I did right so I applied to university self-care minded getting as an English major And I had this moment where I talked to the advisor and he was like what do you want to do? And I was like I don't know he's like why can't help you go downstairs inside for classes And so there are these exactly five classes Available with seats in them that will fit towards a degree plan and they were contemporary moral issues advanced writing philosophy of science rhetoric of science and I can't remember what the other one was and anyway It ended up being the basis for a degree I put together in the rhetoric of science And so there's a rhetoric of science class with actually NSF funded So there were literally three people in the classroom and it didn't get canceled And that was the professor who ended up getting me into nanotech stuff And that's what the grant was an energy grant But the really important moment was that I was like what I actually want to do is philosophy I knew this right but I had never read philosophy that quite did it in the way that I Was trying to ask these questions now I could point my 19 year old self to things But but then I was sitting oh it was interaction with twerkel theory was with the other class so two rhetoric classes Writing class and two philosophy classes and I remember there was this moment where I was sitting in the rhetoric class And it was like I said rhetorical theory by this really philosophically inclined rhetorician And we were reading Plato and Aristotle and Nietzsche and doing philosophy language basically and I was loving it I was like this is exactly the stuff I want to think about and then I went into my contemporary moral issues class And we had a breakout session and we were doing that stupid thing that many of your listeners may have experienced And I'm sorry if I did some of your listeners teach this but where you like talk about that What is it's like the train that is crashing and there's some way to do like virtue ethics and I was sitting there We were having this debate about this and I had a realization in which in my philosophy class We were doing rhetoric and in my rhetoric class we were doing philosophy and I realized that I wanted to do this through rhetoric And so I ended up going in this rhetorical direction The rhetoric of science stuff was sort of the core because it was letting me ask those questions about information or scale or you know any of these kind of concepts that are your bread and butter and I found that the need to attend to the problem of language first Was really important.

Okay, and this is where the other so this is the second biographical note That's important So one of the things that I've had to deal with I even had to deal with in the peer review process for scale theory Is that there's a lot of stuff about mysticism in here. There's a lot of stuff that you know people who are scientifically inclined Especially academics who work in and science studies many of them have no idea what this comes from It seems like a surprise and if I wanted the earlier the readers on the book You know in the peer review process was actually like why is this book actually about mysticism? So the really important by a graphical note I'll just put it straight up is to say I haven't stepped foot in a church since 2008 probably okay But then I grew up very religious and in fact that's important by a graphical context to know because I am Uninterested in doing any of this in any sense of dogmatic like here's what you should believe it right in fact I make a really grand statement I think one of the problems with what we do with mystical transformation is that we try to believe in them Okay, and so I won't go into it in detail But I had a very dramatic break with my religious upbringing and ultimately was the best lesson in the fact that culture and language Especially language that is reinforced by culture that you're supposed to believe in is One of the biggest obstacles to this line of inquiry that I'm talking about here, right? Whether it's what do we mean when we say scale?

What are these things that you're telling us when you say I made up of cells or? We need to address climate change, right? The issue there is very much tied up into the way that we as human beings have this tendency to become intoxicated with our language and Reinforce that intoxication through social aggregation now you talk plenty about how there's evolutionary reasons for this and all these sorts of things But for me that has always been one of the core sort of concerns And it's also one of the core philosophical or even rhetorical considerations that allows me to take the method that I'm taking okay However, the next biographical note there is that I am actually very interested in the way that we observe and transform our modes of Existence and our understanding of reality even in the power of language so the flip side of our intoxication with language Right if you're familiar with Plato's Phaedrus This is the pharma con of language that the very capacity of language to intoxicate us is the very capacity It has to shape our minds what he calls to go go jia the leading along the soul Which is how usually to find rhetoric to find Plato defines rhetoric in the Phaedrus, okay? So the other really important biographical note is that in the process of my intellectual development Having left to sign any dogmatic constraints of organized religion.

I found myself unable to avoid The effects of these discourses to transform the way that you understand yourself in reality, okay? Partially and largely I should say under the help with the help of Richard Doyle who you know is quite a shaman of sorts Was you know he very much assisted in hacking away on my honestly the old habits that kept me from actually being transformed by the discourses And practices that I was trained in as a child suddenly I found myself With an essentially experimental protocol to use a language that you like to talk about Experimental protocols for actually Examining the way the discourses of science and otherwise have transformed us including the discourses that don't seem scientific But yet and here's the loop back to scale theory yet share literal terminology With the scientific descriptions of different scales of the universe right before scale was scientific It was mystical cue hermatic microcosm macrocosm cue Plato's obsession with the kind of ascent that is in the fatal and the neoplatonist Formalized this in Plotinus and then it routes to Christian mysticism to pseudo-diennicius, right? So this is I end up retracing this through a scale theory in part because I literally experienced it In fact, this is a little bit of a record of the fact that in writing scale theory It was an extended contemplation in the way that scale has transformed me All right, I'll stop there. How's that for a biographical?

That's great that touches on a lot that I want to explore with you One of those things you know you asked about what is information when you say that basically our Pysmological limits like do not equal ontological separability But you say that again and again in this book So the fact that it would be baffling to your is obviously more a matter of that the Doxa, you know The cultural component the opinion component then it is about actually coming to grips with What you've laid out very explicitly here Although the more generous reading of that Michael is exactly the problem of rhetoric right is that if this stuff was easy to Process we all would have already been there right and this is where we can loop back at some point to chapter 12 because that's largely what it's about Right like if you're going to rearrange someone's whole operating system right to use that metaphor But then I kind of I'm not really surprised that people are like I don't know what you're talking about You know, I know I can't do that and in fact many of the chapters in here Especially the sort of center ones are really an act of what rhetoricians call prolepsis right the accounting for counter-arguments But I think of prolepsis in a kind of more deep-rooted sense of not externally I'm accounting for Michael as he's gonna have counter-argrets to me but like The resistance one feels to the fact that if somebody were to say to you You are not a separate entity from the rest of the planet let alone the cosmos Right, this is chapters seven right the together for the creation sort of subject like you should go no I don't know what you're talking about clearly. I'm Michael and clearly I'm an entity. Have you seen my bank statements? This is so this is okay, right?

I know these people they're very prominent in my life. Yes. Yeah, exactly and so like on the one hand Yes, it is a product of Doxa and it can be frustrating to say the least when you try to have these conversations And they don't seem to even understand the operation But on the other hand, that's partially what it's about right This is why it's again rhetoric not philosophy in a certain way because philosophy has in many ways not always and not for everybody Not in all places become about stating truths to you as if like stating the truth is just efficient Right, so that mantra that you're talking about I really do treat it like an aphroism It's that epistemological specificity does not equal ontological separability. Yes, right?

Epistemicity is important. I want to get back to that. Yeah, exactly right because when I originally wrote that chapter I was just like scale points the fact that it's all one thing and that actually makes sense and you don't exist as a separate entity It was much more sort of hard light about it, right? It was just like clearly this is what it points to and I was like, yeah, that's hard But clearly this is what it points to but I was always working on it more talking more people about it We're advising a little bit I was like well, okay But like it seems like the problem is and this is actually you can experience this is the problem is that epistemologically things are very specific Right, which you'll say, you know, we're having this exchange here But the experience that you're having right now I'm assuming this some sort of strange weird flipped version of what I'm having now except for your entire past and house and present and coded back there So therefore like there's a kind of problem and this is a rhetorical problem for you know Us and the kind of post hippie attempt to talk about this not that you have anything to do with this Of course not of course not which is actually separating out what the claim is a little bit more carefully so that it can sneak in where it needs to sink in Right, so like I am not in what I say ontologically It's all one thing that I am having the experience that Michael is having right But that Michael is actually a name for one Configuration of the cosmos experiencing itself right there to remix cars like I'd like to do and so yeah, sure We can go epistemological specificity right there is an experience In fact, Michael Bluffield's probably the way that the cosmos is able to have this be the other side of the conversation here and The guy Josh to collio had all these weird experiences that you know I only just gave you the glimpse up that makes it possible for me to show up here or something and be able to articulate any of this Right to say whatever I say next and yeah, okay great So we need to be able to say epistemologically So you know in case you're listening or sometimes get tired of those terms right in relation to how experience is produced or knowledge That is specific of course, but ontologically means in terms of what it actually is So again again, I use the phrase very carefully there ontological separability.

It's not that one can't hey Here's a mug right and have some ontology the mug But specifically about the idea that one could say the mug is ontologically separate from the rest of reality and exist is not To do itself and so on and I think that like both of those things are actually really important But especially when you combine them together though is where a lot of the difficulty Rhetorically starts to happen right because if you apply the question of ontological separability to the question of epistemological specificity Then you have to ask who's having the experience right now and that's where I get to the same spot Anyways that I was always trying to play with as a kind of meditation, which is oh, okay We can specify Josh to color as an epistemological configuration All the what but that's still the cosmos being specified in that particular way and I don't know how even that experience is produced So I want to get back to this question of what was going on inside of that nano fiber fabrication unit What is going on inside of our computers right now back through this? non-dual Stance I really loved the way that my friend Stuart Davis is Sufi master put it to him when he was doing dream yoga of some kind I guess it's not called that in Sufism But you know he was waking up in his dreams and he showed back up to his teacher and he's like I got it I got it We're all dreaming This is just a dream and then his teacher said to him but the dream is valid and being able to hold that together matters because I just had a lovely conversation with Rina Nikolai who is writing a blog on post-human Thinking and techno culture specifically and in her introduction to the topic You know she points out that post-humanism Disenters the subject this is one of these things that again as part of your rhetorical technique You're very compassionate and sensitive to this but the dream is valid thing here of okay. Yeah, the complete gesture is We can decent or the subject and you are still the focal point for the way that this thing is experiencing itself And so why does this matter to technology? This is the thing that in modeling my audience is I feel like I always have to bring it back around to you know hypothetical I am an AI engineer listening to this Why does this concern me and my professional life?

because there is this line in the cultural discourse emerging from within Silicon Valley etc. that what we're engaged in is a kind of trans substantiation of matter and that we are ephemeralizing everything and there's a number of different ways to scrutinize that claim I just want to read two quick pieces out of your book that I think bridge the matter of matter and the matter of Information and of computation to this mystical transhumanism you say quote the critique of the subject is not exclusive to post humanists It also stands as a crucial moment in the philosophy of mind as exemplified by Gilbert Riles 1949 work the concept of mind Which critiques the Cartesian myth in which the subject becomes a ghost in the machine yet? Rile highlights a difficulty an essential part of his critique is that it is a mistake to think of mind and matter as two different kinds of things in Contrast Rile argues that the difference between mind and matter is an artifact of logical typing in his terms a category mistake So there's the ontological and the epistemological thing and then later in talking about Catherine Hales who is a very prominent writer in post human scholarship You quote her saying information like humanity cannot exist apart from the embodiment that brings it into being as a material entity in the world An embodiment is always instantiated local and specific embodiment can be destroyed But it cannot be replicated once the specific form constituting it is gone no amount of massaging the data will bring it back Brackets sorry Ray Kurzweil close brackets What does she say basically? Yeah, what does hails mean by embodiment other than the lower scale substrate in which information is instantiated Transistors cells that carry the pattern while cybernetics and information theory deal with patterns rather than physical entities This does not mean that information inherently loses its body So I want to bring this back again to the conversation I had with Hyungin gold and Also earlier with Stuart Kaufman and the difference between hardware and software in the computational metaphor that is so prominent in 21st century thinking because I was like okay time does a really good job of tracing the development over the 20th century between analog differential analyzer of an of our bush into what we have now into machines in that because some component of the machine is dedicated to memory You can load it with programs and you don't have to program it like a modular synthesizer by patching everything So we get software and you know the idea is to quote Mark Andreessen that software is eating the world But this is again.

This is an this is an epistemic distinction Right that when we're talking about software what we're talking about actually is a a move of technology from the scale at which humans are programming a machine by hand to an interface in which we're writing software that is enacting operations that are going on at a scale that is Inscrutable to us here. Yeah, so like in some sense there is again There is no and there is a meaningful distinction between hardware and software like that These are making this we're making precisely the kind of mistake that you're talking about for instance when we talk about how We can make profit. This is similar kind of thing where we're taking something and we are cutting the world up with numbers and Surribing value to those numbers and then claiming that value has been generated by running the software of that economic operation Well, then we're claiming ruin to reality in some way right that we're like Oh, no, now everything's become profit But like everything is only become profit if you don't notice that those are just numbers that have divided the world in a particular way Okay So I'm gonna pause you there Michael and say a couple things to this specific audience in relation to this question of technology computing in AI I know this is a lot of what you're working on first of all scale theory is not a hundred percent about that Which is fine But it's all like I said, you know that moment about information that was one of the first moments when I realized that I was inquiring into this So one thing I will say is that the easiest way into why scale theory is really important to these questions would be to reach after six Which is the sixth thought experiment I think this is like the most accessible to people who are used to these kind of conversations because I essentially have this Let's imagine basically a Google Earth that is as high resolution as the entire cosmos actually is and then let's play around with this Right, and let's see what it can say then about reality And there's certain things in there that I hint at that are about this problem of computing as well Okay, and about these problems of agency So I just make a recommendation there that if anybody wants the brief version that can start there And I did by the way make the six not experiments are available for free I got permission from the press to make them publicly available on my website and elsewhere So we can even repost them in the show that to be one Michael So that's the first thing the second thing is the idea of logical types which you encountered there This is the most important idea that I teach regularly that nobody has heard of slash wants to talk about or use And it was one of the first things that let me get to scale theory I actually wrote a separate article about the ideological types Main as it was defined by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead who responsible for the theory of logical types that came out of particular mathematics And Gregory Bateson who's incredibly influential to scale theory run all the way through it Anyone who was Bateson will recognize its influence Um Bateson was obsessed with logical typing as an idea as a problem as a concept And in fact one of my favorite notes in the history of cybernetics and computing Is the fact that Bateson kept trying to get people to talk about logical types And no one wanted to because they found it confusing So there's this great letter I found in the archive where he's trying to query Norbert Wiener To talk about logical types ahead of the Macy's conference And then there's this great note in this recent volume of writings edited by I think it's Bruce Clark Edison by Ms. Alhainz von Forster Writing to his important second order cybernetist And he actually has this note in there where he says Well, there's a way you could talk about this problem in relational-agical types with Bateson keeps wanting us to do But no one can figure out exactly how to distinguish logical types or how to actually talk about it with any query way So we don't really want to use this term So this is like a little bit of a thing But it's really quite important actually because the reason that whitehead and Russell find themselves with the theory of logical types Is because of exactly these kind of problems, okay?

Where we divide up the world in one particular way And then we divide it in another way and then we're confused that they don't align and it creates paradoxes And so Russell and whitehead end up creating this kind of theory of logical types that basically ends Making mathematical rules that relate to logical types together Okay, what's fascinating to me is that Bateson that operationalizes this in relation to the problem of cybernetics originally logical types But when you have something that is a category that includes the smaller things, right? So if you know a through c is one set and then you create a new set x that includes a through c those are two different logical types Right, so that's a very simple kind of logical operation But what Bateson says is every cybernetic loop creates a logical type because it's referring back to itself Okay, and this is a very relevant for a girdles and completeness theorem and these sorts of things right There's a way way it's like this was a way of thinking about what computers were doing they were solving The Russell's paradox every time they were referring back to themselves and they were you know, I don't what repeat the paradox But essentially the paradox in which the yes leads to no leads to a yes And basically what Bateson says is well when you run that as a programming says yes, no, yes, no, yes No, so it's not actually breaking the computer But actually showing that what we've done is create a logical type distinction between The operations that are feeding into the computer and the information that sent out from the computer Okay, and what I have done in scale theory is realize that we've done that to reality when we change scales, right? That actually weirdly science and systematically expanding observation Cutting up the meter to you know, the very small and compounding it to the very very large and putting that on as some sort of weird logarithmic continuum Has essentially discovered that reality a logical types itself, okay? And so that's I think also a third kind of logical typing the one you're talking about in relation information I will say I don't know exactly how to answer there's some tidbits in scale theory about this that are actually about future work And I teased the lithium project I'm working on originally I was planning a different project next But I realized that a I wasn't ready and be any do this other project first But my next goal was to do the same thing with information that I did with scale here Which is to say actually consider the question information at what scale and rethink the problem of information from that question And so I'll just give you my sort of current thoughts about this and hopefully I'll have a book about this and maybe I don't know 10 years Tease it for later, but you'll see the tidbits of this in scale theory, okay?

Because I was you know, as I said Richard was my advisor He writes a lot about information the history of information biology So this was like part of my education, right? And so the tidbits that are sprinkled through the scale theory are actually about this very thing you started quoting there Which is well actually it seems first of all there's an actual physical scale distinction that is instantiated in information that like information is Experienced as meaningful it's able to make a difference primarily at a different scale from the scale in which it's physically instantiated Which automatically creates a kind of logical typing distinction in what it is, right? So this is maybe this is one way of making the distinction software hardware But you know, this is a crucial point for scale theory again One of the ways in which this might be useful for the various technological audiences that listen to you is that part of what scale is about or what scale theory is Partially about is not forgetting the fact that all of these things are happening simultaneously, right? Like just because you go to cells does it mean that Michael Garfield's no longer there, you know breathing In fact if Michael Garfield wasn't there breathing anymore, the cells would start changing very quickly I believe we call that dying, right?

So so likewise with a computer, right? I think that what Kate Hales and many other people in that conversation are trying to say Is that we have forgotten the fact that these are two logical types for dealing with the same thing, right? And that what matters to us primarily is this scalar phenomena whereby it then is able to allow us to have this conversation via a computer That's processing all sorts of things and it's being transferred by wire and also too crazy scalar phenomena is happening So this is possible not to mention, you know, the neurons in my brain are doing all sorts of firing and you know, oh, yeah We can keep going. This is the problem.

But right so back to this problem information that you're pointing to in the software hardware distinction, right? Like, you know, and I do this not just in relation to information but in relation to kind of environmental questions We can talk about it in terms of health, right? There's lots of ways we can talk about this But like the common sort of problem shared between all those different distinctions is that when we get into language and discourse and culture and myth I know you've been talking about myth a lot and Any kind of thing that now we can metaphorically or maybe it's literal. I don't know say it's not where right?

We then can forget these kind of scalar analogs, right? Which is to say that there's other things happening in other resolutions is another term You know, sometimes if people get confused by the way I talk about scale I talk about resolution Even though scale is the thing that helps us understand what the resolution change is But okay, basically pointing scale theory to leave it there is all of these things are happening at the same time Scale helps us remember and navigate the relationship between all the different ways in which reality it can and is manifesting itself at any given moment And that's certainly the case in relation to hard-brand software. Part of the problem is it's so easy to forget In the emergence of language and software and so on that these other scales also exist You brought up cybernetics There was a really lovely passage in cutting and claiming everything chapter eight about the history of cybernetics And its relationship to colonialist thinking through history and the mistake that people make in what you describe is the scalar sineptakey Where we get lost in the sauce through that intoxicating power of language and its ability for us to feel as though we understand something courtesy of Abstractions and I want to linger here for a while with you because mitch wall drips history of computing the dream machine He writes given the central role of communication in his new science wiener explained his first thought had been to derive a name from the greek word for messenger Unfortunately, that word was angelos which in english had long since taken on a specific meaning of a messenger from god Somehow a new science of angelics was quite what he was looking for So instead said wiener he had decided to focus on the theme of control and as you point out wiener described feedback in terms of control from a centralized Regulatory apparatus doing so carries forward the scalar sineptakey in which we try to transpose What is going on at our scale into these other scales? So I like you just earlier this week I got into a conversation with an brilliant friend of mine Jill nephew who turned a lot of my techie bodies who are concerned about wisdom and mysticism and so on got into kind of an argument with them In asserting that statistics is evil and that basically statistics is anti-life And I am in some way sympathetic to this but you know you make the point later that analysis and criticism and so on You know when you say do I really have to make the point that hammers don't just destroy things that you need a hammer to build a house So I want to connect that to Your commentary on macharana and varela and their their ideas about auto poisisis because every Thing like if you talk about my buddy jake foster gave a presentation on this he's been working on iu bloomington on the cultural evolution of the noosphere and echoing burrows in an academic environment of okay, well, you know, can we look at the evolutionary dynamics of ideas in populations of people In such a way that gives us something like a scientific handle on this thing that appears time and time again in Aseteric traditions all the way back which is that these are living things in their own right that they have some kind of autonomy And so for a long time I've been thinking about the Eggregors, you know these entities that emerge at the intersection of people and in weird ways that my buddies philford and jf martell have articulated on their show Team to take on lives of their own like the tulpa the golem these kinds of things These are the mythic handles that people are using to talk about ai as if it is simply a cultural technology It is still also something that emerges like the collective Identity or like the meta individual of social primates and then binds us in social contracts and lives in some way in the electrical firing patterns and in the behavioral patterns of people and So I have wanted to ascribe a kind of lovecraftian agency to these things But you point that this idea of starting cybernetics From a kind of military operation central control Post you know the homunculus or whatever inside of us that the eye is the one intervening in all this stuff and this gets back to your points about nanotechnology You point out that macharana and varela first of all that they start by assuming the individuality of the cell They kind of give it its own status But then you say when we apply the same scheme of the social systems However systems such as the nation state are not a scalar analog to cellular maintenance of molecules macharana and varela disagreed on this extension of autopoices They provide the basis for autopoietic hierarchies citing multi cellular organisms as the example But then ask what about human societies are they as systems of coupled human beings also biological systems?

The answer to this question is not trivial and that they disagreed about this You say later quite simply claiming that a corporation is an autopoietic system would be equivalent to claiming that the nervous system Made and controlled the entire body another scalar synecdoche So I would just love to hear you riff on this because I actually I've recorded 28 episodes of this show so far In which I'm kind of starting from the assumption that you know We are underfoot of these things that have emerged through our interactions in the way that you and I have in some sense emerged from the interactions of bacteria And that it would behoove us to rediscover some humility about our actual place on the food chain But that is doing the thing that you know So yeah, there's a couple things let's see where to start okay First of all the thing I would say is the last thing you said is still very important Which is to say human agency is not the only agency absolutely on board with this I think that scale makes this actually really relevant in a certain way If you run that sort of query again and say life at what scale right you start to get some really weird things Right like I talk in one of the six thought experiment there that I recommended you go check out You know like from a certain perspective, it's actually funny Us suggesting that our wire are not part of the life of the planet is the equivalent of us saying our bones are not a lot But what does it mean to say that your bones are not alive? What's part of a living system right but what you see what I'm doing right is I play around the way in which that category of life works Right and I'm very much a student of Dorian zagen and the margarless who play around with this A lot through their work and they were just some of the first people who prompted me to think about this And so the question about agency and animacy and systems like even that sort of de-centering of human agency absolutely Totally on board with that. The thing is we have to try carefully here, right? Because of that issue that you cited earlier, you only acted the scale of which you exist My hesitation in writing that sentence was that you have to add a caveat to that Which is to say look to see where anything exists first Right, there's already a sort of definition or scale specificity that has to happen there But if I were to say add that as a clause it would be tautological right is that like an entity out of certain scale can only act at the scale Which it exists, right?

But that's the implication that you know, okay But actually so part of what I'm saying is that you know, I'm always attended to the kind of What I always call is rhetorical operation because it's to get you to notice how we're already kind of influenced and persuaded by the way in which we've Set the question or particularly the language the basic method that I turn to over and over again in scale theory is to switch scales to show That these kind of obvious categories that we operate under don't look quite as obvious And so that's what I just did in relation to life and what I just said It's also what I do in relation to the things that macharon of vala say about systems In that case, there's a very particular target which is that I think that we underestimate The extent to it there is a scalar shift really significant scalar shift required for systems to operate In the elaborate way that life models, okay And I have this honestly one of the weirdest parts of writing this book was when I sat out and I made this chart That is now around page 64 Where I just lined up at a powers of 10 a set of orders of magnitude And then just was like, okay I'm just gonna like somewhat arbitrarily assign a distinction between the scale domain And I found weirdly that they were nearly equal Although for some reason the one between molecules atoms gets a little bit smaller to a certain way Like goodbye like an order of magnitude or not I can think I say somewhere I'm like I have no idea where this is the case But I just you know and so just to be clear the way I distinguish and define scale domains in the book and very important Is that you arrive at a new scale domain? When the whole set of objects that you can operate with and talk about change and we know that this happens right? It happens right around where I put these lines somewhere You know, you can argue about an order of magnitude one way or the other, right? But ultimately organisms who sit at the border of those in terms of their size Actually struggle with this issue that they like kind of mediate between or they're faced with the fact that like Sometimes there are larger scale entities that are relevant sometimes they were smaller scale I'm thinking about like bacteria that are small enough that they're operating with only a certain number of molecules But like when it comes down to it to make life at another scale larger than us To make organisms, which is what Ana Palisis is about to make organisms at another scale I think we think too small, right?

And if we look actually as some more recent work on scale Some of the work that I'm doing next is thinking about the kind of arrival of the planetary scale organization You know, you can do this do teal hearts kind of biosphere, noosphere stuff But there's lots of different ways you know, people are doing this in relation to the arrival of modernity in relation to the Anthropocene That like at some point you needed these systems like the triangle between Britain Africa and the Caribbean that produced the slave trade that made it possible for the scaling up Of a certain kind of labor and trade or you can talk about in relation to energy as I've been reading black off smell a lot And he's kind of rewriting the narratives of evolution of relation energy, right? Like sure, that's a way to do it But like the point is that at some point, yes, we needed these systems for doing that But are those systems themselves considered on organism in the way that autopoethesis is really what that section that you read is about And I'm at the least saying we should be less confident about that Okay, especially given how much problem the scalar should get gives us when there is some clear autopoetas going on with Michael Garfield or You know, especially the Michael Garfield is a problem, right? Not just you in particular but humans, right? This is the point of that chapter is that the scalar sine tiki is so pervasive And so sine tiki is just the rhetorical term for filling it apart for the whole and the paradigmatic example Of course that most people will be familiar with is Hobbes's Leviathan which shows the king as the head Of the body and then you see in the body is all made of little people, right?

This is the frontispiece from the bioethan and it's so crisp and clear as an example, right? Because it's like oh well, that's clearly not accurate in terms of scale, right? Because what that image should actually be is the difference between the body and cells Which is actually the distinction that we're talking about and so you know as a sine tiki Like when you think that the king or the president is the one who is doing all of the you know the u.s Right, it's obviously not right It's obviously a filling it apart for the whole and that is a ruse that Elites the fact that Donald Trump is only this big right literally and the thing that enables someone like that to have such power Is that we all go along with it, right? Like literally all these people are like, okay.

Yeah, you're the one we're gonna do but even then like the nano scientists going, you know Oh, I made this well actually the molecules self-assembled themselves That's actually why they call itself assembly just like all of my neighbors are doing stuff that is making these electrical grids work These roads be here this computer continue to work right? All of that action is happening in order for us to have a planetary supply chain and a network that functions And especially if we pull the rug out of the human category there Then we also have to say and also, you know, there's all those plants breathing for me And there's all those bacteria in the soil fixing nitrogen and the sun is turning out Normous amount of energy that is providing the basis for us to continue to turn out life, right? So the kind of provocative thing I say and it's you know, the sense of subtext to that Autopoiesis point is that actually I think the next scale at which life is self-organizing is the planet And I think that are attempting to find other systems and here's a distinction between scalar systems and any system Right, like you talk about a respiratory system in your body, of course, and that's a set of components that works together Right, but is that an autopoietic system? No, in fact, it can't operate on its own I actually think our political system couldn't act on its own A corporation, right?

Exxon couldn't act on its own without the rest of the planet being an existence And Gaia as a name for all of the systems together coming together and making it possible for energetic systems to flow in that way, right? It's an incredible sort of forgetting or leaving out to imagine that, you know, IBM or Google is itself an autopoietic entity But you can say yes, okay, it's a system Yes, it's a legally recognized entity But I want to distinguish there between just the fact that we give it a name and legal status from whether or not It is actually it's self-occ coherent self-contained entity, okay? I mean it can still be a scalar mediator, right? In fact your respiratory system is a scalar mediator too It's making sure that oxygen enters and carbon dioxide gets released and That is actually a scalar mediation I think this is what Exxon is doing for instance It's a scalar mediation between literally geological availability of billions of years worth of accumulated carbon That it's then making available for planetary scale all to alterations of energy.

So sure it's a scalar mediator Yes, it's a legal entity in some way. Do I think it's a person? A lot, you know, the way that America I don't know, right? But this is why I'm like we have to sort this out a little bit more carefully between the discourses that we churn about scalar relations And the way in which a careful accounting of scale helps us sort that out and realize again There's the selective scales which that we like to selectively switch to particular scales And you know, I mean as you're saying, the interlockers who do this in relation to AI or technology Systems, you know, there's reasons that they're doing it, right?

Because they want to know how do we relate this to this? But the point of especially scale theory is to like go hold on a second Be really careful about the claims you're making about control about who is doing it And especially and here's the last point of response to your provocation Especially in relation to the limits of knowledge in relation to what you know about what is happening And what you actually control and those are like related to each other, right? Is it the limits of knowledge or also about the limits of control? That you literally don't know what's going to happen next But yeah, the capacity to create certain technological interventions and scientific terminology Gives us the feeling like we can't the nano scientists are making carbon nanotubes If they hadn't created that machine the carbon nanotubes wouldn't have existed sure pushing against the fact that they think they're in control Is just to know how much is left out and what they're actually doing and what they actually know about what is being done Okay, so like to apply this back to my body because I like to do that and then I can pass them all back to you Is like me saying that some entity here and you can call him Josh de Colleo and he's you know The one who has got the least to this house and has certain children that he's legally obligated to take care of and all of these things and loves Does it necessarily mean that I know how these cells are working let alone the molecules let alone the ecology?

And yet all of those things are also here impossible and doing that to make this possible that makes sense Yeah, I want to interpose something that I think has helped me make sense of this Which is one of my favorite papers that I read while at sfi was the information theory of individuality Right, and I hear you ask this question about what is going on in the exchange of information between scales And what is actually an intervention? So just to be clear your insistence that certain things have what we can call even though they're not actually closed systems that they have What's the work often calls auto catalytic closure? Yes was a huge part of our conversation about why he thinks machines are not alive And will therefore never be able to do certain things that humans do it was a huge part of the conversation I had with matt sagal When I asked matt sagal if we're not making a mistake here in seeing individual robots or AI algorithms as basically I don't want you to call them scalar subcomponents or whatever of The actual machine which is a planet wide machine that is alive and includes us That's right. And this is the kind of logic just because this is the week in which they arrested Luigi Mangione The this is the problem that you're getting out with Well, you can't just assassinate the head of a corporation and expect that's gonna fix the problem of the fact that this system in which corporations are performing some sort of function Decides to choose algorithms that have a 90 percent error rate on denying people's health care claims All of that said the information theory of individuality says okay Well, if we define individuality information Theoretically then we can start to tease apart this question of how science can define the individual in a way that gets us closer to answering certain Really thorny and persistent questions that show up well before but come into focus through ilioprigigine and his work on dissipative structures and draw a continuum between the kind of self-organization that we see in a you know an eddy in a creek bed Which has no DNA it has no lineal inheritance And yet it is a thing that we can recognize we can specify it even though it's obviously not ontologically separable from things like you and I That we specify and frequently mistake as separable and what they say is that it is a matter of the way that these entities are coupled through the exchange of mutual information with other scales basically that the colonial organism like a coral reef or arguably a corporation exists in a kind of midpoint between entities like a hurricane on one side that are entirely scaffold by the environment and this hypothetical modern liberal atomistic self that is utterly you know, I think like the popular version of transimidist discourse imagine that eventually we will liberate ourselves from all obligations limits bodily constraints, etc But it's like on the far end of that extreme where it's all about inheritance through time of information that is encoded in the system Versus inheritance across time in an exchange of information with the environment and that basically humans exist In this sense the way that that William Gibson years ago wrote this piece on what if actually what Artificial intelligence is is like the reef in which we now exist as colonial organisms Which again draws a continuity between what we're doing right now with technology and what we've been doing since language gave us the affordances to fold the landscape of attention between people and coordinate us through abstractions Let me stop you there for a second because okay, so first of all I'm always super impressed by somebody like you know crack our that's able to Mathematically define these things and I was opening that paper back up because it's been a while since I looked at it And I'm just remembering how it you know just goes into all of these equations about four pages and right look But on the other hand, I'm not actually always very impressed by this right because this is the way in ways Science can operationalize especially mathematics can operationalize in order to very specifically and it's very impressive That's what's impressive about it But it's operationalize and describe it how the particular way thresholds and moments of distinction Honestly, I'm not sure that my math is good enough to be able to read page 215 of this right And so I would admit that readily but I keep getting distracted One might say perhaps crack our would say I don't know by the fact that this is a mode of discourse And I'm always wondering what it's asking me to do with reality and this is where I get less impressed because look like I can find Individuality by just going to the right scale right like I mean that's what it's formalizing literally right That's what 215 is doing.

I was my quick read right is that it's saying look like there are discernible thresholds at a particular scale Where something like individuality can be sufficiently operationalized and you can actually describe that mathematically Okay, if you look up what scale analysis might still be the case I'm interested well So we can be a paper scale analysis and it's about hydrodynamics because it turns out that when somebody is trying to figure out the pressure of water in a pipe One could infinitely go in a finer sort of scale But instead one uses scale analysis to literally simplify the equation so that one can calculate it And it was like well, what's actually happening there? Well, what they're doing is they're saying like at some scale it stops mattering right so at some point you drop off the decimals, okay? Eat cake. Yeah, okay So okay, you see what I'm getting at right though I'm impressed that they have these mathematical ways to describe with incredible accuracy actually That sort of distinctiveness is able to be formalized at different levels But on another level like that's what scale does right?

You know I'm not surprised to find like we forget this about quantum theory for instant because we love to talk about quantum theory is being about etc, etc But the reason that is called quantum theory is because it's about quanta which actually means distinctive category right distinctive length And the reason the quantum theory got going is because there wasn't supposed to be a distinctive length of relevance smaller than the atom right? They ascribe the term atom to atomic elements because they thought they had gotten to the smallest scale and then Einstein and others We're like, oh well, actually you can define quanta smaller than them and that's why it's called quantum theory, right? So that's the kind of the first thing to say about some of this is functionally it makes total sense that you can do this I could even understand that there would be real reasons to want to do this Okay, in fact even to maintain something like legal frameworks, right? Legal frameworks require a functional definition of individuality Sure, that's fine But this is why my fundamental investment is marking the way in which these modes of describing and rendering functional are as dangerous as they are useful And what needs to be able to see that and realize that the real difficulty for the scientists is to find the formal definition that's going to work This is why I love I got it back here still right Jeffrey West scale came out After I had turned in the first draft of scale theory, but I was able to address it a little bit when I was revising it for the second draft But this is what he's so good, right?

This is why I'm not a business to then goes into biology you can do this in different scales You can come up with these like alimetric scaling principles You can see how they operate on cells and them organisms and then cities and like I'm not going to dispute those things But this is where we get into the mantra of chapter 10 of scale theory is that science hides are not knowing in a knowing Right and any attempt to define that say individuality or the next scale of relevance or something that or you even name it Call it Gaia and then immediately that term is meant to encode The entirety of the planet and all the operations going on right which is just you're even from a kind of information perspective There's just literally too much happening right there's too much happening in my own selves for me to imagine that I can process at the meter scale Where this experience is being generated it would be absurd if the brain were able to process all of that information Okay, so here's where I would bump it back to the AI people and say as far as I'm concerned You know, I'm not an expert in AI in terms of how it works But I guess I'm a great interest of mine and part of my future work is to look at this point more carefully So I'm just gonna state it now, which is okay. Think about the relationship between your body All of those cells all of those molecules all of that DNA Which is having to be unfolded and repackaged by ribosomes and in order for that to happen All of this stuff has to be there right and it's not just molecules in the body But environmental factors that make it so that I have food to eat and oxygen here right so like if we were to follow you on to Mars We'd have to deal with the issue of the fact that you have to bring your atmosphere with you right like these are these astonishing I'm actually astonishing that way that all of these very smart people seem to be very good at forgetting the rest of reality And so I would say the same thing about what's happening right now with AI I would ask everybody pay attention to how you're forgetting the rest of reality every time you imagine that we have created this right? You don't have to go quite so scalar on if you don't want to like in your perception and thinking Is it just your grain that doesn't we've talked about this so much in this way that we can avoid the fact that actually in order for You and I to be having this conversation language has to exist in order for language to exist The rest of human history has to have existed right in order for you and I to see each other Even if we were face to face the light has to literally be there Right and so is the seeing of you something that I am doing or is it a description of? Nironal processing eyeball light object and the seeing is actually all of those things Okay, now we're gonna talk about AI trying to do something that we do The problem is that we don't understand how what we do is already connected up to the rest of reality The most dramatic version of this is David Ball right because David Ball says this about quantum physics He says quantum into the term is quite a reason quite where we think it is and I paraphrasing right?

He's essentially like well in order for us to determine what's going to happen to the electron You need the rest of reality But in practice you don't really need the rest of reality because most things in reality are not actually relevant to what any given electron is going to do But as soon as you think that you can predict exactly where the electron is and what it is You run into the fact that other things also had to be there and be in existence For an electron to manifest in a particular location and then we're so thrown for a loop by the fact that you know The rest of it we only have to I really hate the like very and I'm gonna say this new age But just a market kind of particular rhetorical Computeration of what quantum physics means is that we control it because I think what Bob is actually saying is that it's not observer But the entirety of reality that makes the electron happen to a configuration So this is the case with all of this stuff right with AI with individuality So here's where I'll wrap this little thread off with one more point Which is actually about the contemplative aspects here Okay, one of the things that I would throw back to the you know kind of crock our theory of individuality kind of question Is that okay good? I can see that you have reasons to operationalize the individuality There is a really important reason that nearly all wisdom traditions that I think are worth their salt right? Maybe that's a particular category Stenner the problem of false individuality right the aham kara in the Sanskrit right was literally Etymologically means the I aham I am who thinks he's the doer the kara means to do right? So it's the I doer the I maker and So many this is actually was a surprise to me when I was writing this and looking at these wisdom traditions as they were thinking about In developing other scalar terminologies so many I could point to dozens of examples of key text in different wisdom traditions Who say like you know honestly?

Ramana Harsh is probably the clearest version of this but like the I emerges first And divides out the rest of reality and creates all the issues right? You inquire into the nature of the self what he calls a hampti the eye-wicking And then everything unravels and you get something different right? So this is the querying back on the attempt to render formal This is the danger of technology the danger of science the danger of these articulation Is that when you find a powerful and functional way of articulating something like individuality or agency or intervention Then it's again sort of loop us back to intoxication with language Is that then it's so easy to ignore or forget or never even notice Then what you have done is find a functional delimitation of reality that is actually not substantial In many ways and there we can as a way of summarizing this render that more concrete as we did at the beginning of this conversation by saying What we mean is not something abstract. We mean literally the rest of reality Okay Yeah, I've had my finger on a couple of passages from your book that you've already walked over But you do a really good job of Laying this out in the book and before wait first of all We're already over time.

When do you I'm good for until about two so all right? That gives us a rather threat Yeah, that gives us enough time I think for us to actually pay tribute to the Transformational piece of this to his credit in conversation with Jeffrey West and in watching the presentations. He's made internally I think he actually embodies what you say here when you say as one observes more and more empiricism also begins to observe Describe in seasonings to any law trying to describe this assemblage of things The result is that instead of seeking to discover the mean or medium point You're quoting von Humboldt You say instead of seeking to discover the mean or medium point around which oscillate in apparent independence of forces all the phenomena of the external world This system delights in multiplying exceptions to the law He says the most interesting thing about this is that it reveals these anomalies You know and it is through the revelation of the anomalous place of human beings on that curve of biophysical scaling The fact that human metabolism is Measurably 20 times larger than you would expect for another mammal of our size because of the relationship that we have to the Technium or whatever you want to call it You know the servers the supply chains etc that this reveals Something of interest but in conversations with him it does always come back to this question of now What this question of oh my god? I don't know what to do to get people to see how important this is and to transform people's perspective on this in a way that actually Motivates us through Metanoia, you know through a scalar shift in thinking to actually change the way that we interact in the world And I like that you put it thusly on 195 you say If scientists expect people to change their behavior in worldview in relation to things like DNA buckminster, fullerenes, climate change, viral vectors or our struggling microbiomes Specifications are not simply a matter for scientists.

This is not simply a matter of acceptability, authority or truth It's about making these objects Acceptably real so that we can trace more closely the way that such specifications may or may not become the basis for new relations New forms of speech and new worldviews And then you say on 219 there is an ever greater need for this task talking about rhetoric since in the double movement of increased specialization and more widespread use of scientific terms of knowledge The risk of simple acceptance of articulations on the basis of Doxa just you know believe science Increases and so yeah before we go where we both want to go here to take it back to the chapter Well the section on mysticism versus colonialism and on nanotechnology you say you know Is this digital extension really making matter manipulable or is this a way of narrating the extension of fantasy contingent on the digital simulation that disguises the conditions of such extension And later as our value systems inevitably come into friction with these scalar tracings of science We all need to find means of permitting our values to be transformed by these discoveries This thing came up in the talk I gave last night, which is the question of people feeling trapped It comes up a lot on this show but remember hearing years and years ago daniel schmachtenburger on future thinkers podcast Saying that the problem is in the gap between our ability to sense and our ability to act And a lot of the people I speak to for humans on the loop They practice tech ethics consulting and they talk about how everyone within the corporation May feel that the corporation is acting out of alignment with their own individual values And no one seems able to do anything about it So we'll let's start there with the sense versus acting because that's right So to bring it back to that statement that I made earlier in the book right that one can only act at the scale which you exist The point is that scale makes us aware of all of these other different things So that's another way of saying the sense versus acting Yeah, this is why one needs to attend to these things very carefully because in our current moment Everyone is panicking and it's partially because we are both aware of all of these different scales And we are intervening them extensively And so yeah, this is why it is also Important to experiment as I think the point of the show and other forms of writing and art are trying to do To experiment with ways of getting us to think about and honestly face these things That's not just about culpability, right? Like this is the thing when I talk to you about this sometimes they literally get disturbed because they think that I am trying to like defray Responsibility but the very idea of responsibility replicates the scalar's an entity so often right So one thing to notice and this is really a lesson of rhetoric as far as I'm concerned Right if I were to ask you as we love to do an environmental rhetoric, what can you do? We love to do that and get so annoyed when we look what we want to bring it down to the part what difference can you make today? And here's what I would make a sort of rhetorical distinction into to use what can you do as a literal contemplative exercise, right?

Instead of what it's trying to hook you into which is a set of obligations that indulges sets of assumptions about agency and you as a human who's tied up into a democracy that the rhetoric of democracy has its own sort of idea about One's agency in the nation and all sorts of things, right? But if you literally meditate on what can you do? Sit there and think about this observe this for like an hour and then keep it going as you walk through your day Like literally what can you do? And you'll realize how absurd the brain is and our culture is about this question, right?

And so it's another form of the you can only act to the scale which you exist, right? What can you do actually, right? Like what can I do today? If I go and try to fix climate change, I will forget to pick up the kids in an hour.

There's another way of letting it, right? And you know, you see how this is another version of the problem I just said in relation to science, right? It's kind of funny, right? Have mathematical models of individuality, but you all already have a set of maybe socially derived assumptions about responsibility and agency in action that sets you up for these double binds as Bateson likes to call them.

And as far as I'm concerned, the way to unravel that requires some kind of contemplative exercise. Look, I will be completely honest that I've been practicing this in relation to yoga and meditation and what I now think is a full flight to Nada Yoga. And to the extent that like while I was revising scale theory, I took a Sanskrit class so I couldn't actually dig into the Shankara and the Ribugito, which is one of my favorite texts that I talk about in one of those chapters are just kind of in vogue because I realized that the amount of sitting with it that you have to do is astonishing. Here I am like probably 15 years really in depth of like doing those practices.

And I still find myself, you know, along with the rest of us going about my day being like, I wonder how Michael thought about my book, you know, is this really going to make a difference? Is this right? But this is what contemplatives crew are not bullshitting. No, talk about all the time.

It's like, yeah, exactly. Welcome to the self inquiry. It's hard. It's ongoing.

It requires you to be brutally honest with yourself and each other about just how much you're bullshitting yourself and others about what you can do. And it's really hard when you try to run a podcast and make everybody think you're really smart so that you can find this podcast. I really respect your ability to do that. Or you're running an investor firm and you're like, oh, our lithium battery is really going to change the world.

Right? Like it's all built on this kind of rhetorical sheen of like, nobody look at the fact that we're all just kind of figuring this out and we're all entangled in this scalar system. Right? So there's already a rhetorical self selection there towards egoic identification and reinforcement.

But that's why it's literally killing us, right? And literally choking the planet. Okay. And I like the way that Rich is, you know, especially in the last, Jesus in the last 10 years, been talking about this as trying to cue into the like, individual scale intervention.

And asking the question, what can you do? I mean, to your listeners, this is what I would say is look like, dude, if you're the guy at OpenAI doing this stuff, I want to know what can you do? Because you can do things I can't do. If you are the regulatory, you know, the head of the EPA, right?

You can do stuff I can't do by the position that you're in within this vast system of our planet. Okay. Taking seriously though, that there are certain things you can do. Like that's also prompting to honestly look around and say, well, what can I do?

Like right now, I can write a book about this problem in relation to lithium and climate change, because suddenly I find myself surprisingly to myself, I went and expected this 10 years ago, well set up to write this very different book. But I also can raise these two kids. I can also teach some classes, but could I go and, you know, make my neighbor buy an EV? No, don't worry.

There's a cyber truck that goes across the street. And, you know, can I go and stop cobalt mining in the Congo? No, I don't know, right? And this is where you see the way that the social pressure instantiates itself so quickly, right?

Because the conversation starts rambling. I don't even need you to do it. They're just like, well, then you're just leaving them to like, have you really done everything that you can do? And this is why we're all just like constantly doom scrolling, as we call it, right?

And first of all, I just don't do that, right? Because as you have noted in so much of your podcasts, so I'll be articulate that a little bit is the scalar innovation of so much information has required us to re-center on the here and now. Now, there's the contemplative exercise, right? You know, especially in the kind of Buddhist or inviting version of this, it's about the here and now and about observing the fact that part of what our amazing grains are able to do is to displace this from the here and now.

And even as we get this information from all over the place about things that we're doing, and we all can see, oh my God, climate's happening. We have to develop these other ways of going, well, hold on a second. What can I actually, what can you do without immediately going back to the social pressure? Because we think that's our only device for making change is controlling other people.

But again, that's the other shouldn't I just keep. I need to fix, I need to, I need to, even if I say we need to fix climate change, right? Then it's like, what do we need to do? Well, I need to make it so that my neighbor has to, right?

And like, ah, I don't know, I don't know. Yes, we do need some devices, but I'm not so sure, right? I think that leads down a road towards some really scary stuff about controlling the world, about controlling people, about dictating what people can be. And like, maybe to some extent that needs to happen, but here's where the scalar analog between us and ourselves makes, like I'm actually a huge fan of the body politic metaphor, if you actually treat it in terms of scale, because oh my God, if I were to sit down and go to each of my cells, hey, you absorb some oxygen now, I need more bone cells over there, and more fat cells over there, we never, less fat cells, less, but like, this is the way that we treat our body, and then we replicate this on the scale of the planet, and what that literally leads to is us just constantly being, Michael, what have you done today?

What difference can you make in the world, Michael? And honestly, the thing that's most useful for that is just for, I don't know, innovating incubators or something, which is an extraction of value, right? We have created an insufferable framework for understanding our relationship to these scalar bits of information that we find ourselves in relation to. And so we've got to be able to pull the plug on that by forcing ourselves to be honest with the scale at which we actually act.

Yeah, totally. So in landing this, I do think that you offer very clear protocols throughout this book. If people really need to come from a place of what can I do, it's funny because when you say it so often comes down to trying to change other people on to five, why are we even talking about? To what does it apply?

How might that be understood? How do we know it? What does not accounted for in this articulation or mode of knowing? How can we work with it?

In their most productive forms, these questions hinge on wonder. And then this is the method of the current project. It began with a bewilderment. How is it possible that I am simultaneously Adam Stilke's, Ecologies, Galaxies, and a wondering, how does this apparatus function?

In many ways, I can hardly get past the first detail, the basic structure of scale. I keep unfolding more considerations out of this fractal question that might simply be reduced to a word with an affect. Scale. Yet as the breadth of this inquiry implies, such bewilderment can be productive of new avenues of discussion as we unfold a simple point in the many contexts in which it inevitably applies.

So when I think about what I'm trying to do with the show, it comes down to this thing of like, well, we need new stories. But then when we have those stories, is that adequate? Are we going to congeal and ossify around that and let the utopia become the new empire? You know, it's really what if anything other than this contemplative prompt, can we really do quote unquote to affect a world in which we are giving ourselves and our children the opportunity to write their own stories.

And so, yeah, when you say, you know, may we all learn to sit in this diversity without fear and with a patient careful yet exuberant wonder, the last thing I'd say here is, you know, you quote, boom. If he thinks of the totality as constitutive independent fragments, then that is how his mind will tend to operate. But if he could include everything coherently and harmoniously in an overall hole that is undivided, unbroken, and without a border, then his mind will tend to move in a similar way. And from this will flow an orderly action within the whole.

It's the not doing, actually, that I think you and I agree we need more of. And here is a quote from the South of the Garta, would people know that nothing can happen unless the entire universe makes it happen? They would achieve more with less expenditure of energy? Yeah, I mean, not to reduce this to the brain, but the right brain does exist.

Like evolution has demonstrated that if you want to think of everything as a utilitarian play is perposive at the evolutionary scale. Yeah, I mean, I risk repeating myself, I think that this is where it connects to the problem of not knowing, right? Because we are scared when we become aware of the fact that we don't know who we are, or our language and mathematics and science are in fact limited. We don't even know how our technology works.

That is terrifying. Okay. And also we think that again, that's more abstract than it is, which is so there's a like legitimacy to that kind of puzzlement about when people say that, right? But like, I want to make that again, very concrete by saying, no, what I mean is that feeling that you don't know that you're out of control.

That's just because the rest of reality is there. And that is in fact, your relationship to the rest of reality manifesting itself as a cloud of unknowing to use that great Christian contemplative phrase. Okay. So let the rest of reality exist too.

Okay. And there's ways in which scale helps us come up with really kind of ad hoc protocols for this, right? So I've been using this as like a way of generating a little mattress. The one I've been using in relation to that problem of planetary biofeedback is saying something like, don't panic, a lot, hit checker's at the galaxy, right?

Don't panic. The entire planet is rearranging itself, right? And I've said this out loud to people and they freak out at me. They're like, Oh, no, I don't like that.

Well, you've prompted them with the word panic. Like, don't make terminators. Well, because what you're noticing is that your panic is egoic. And that reference points to the planet puts you attention with that very idea of agency, right?

Because especially when I say this other academics were really concerned about being ethical, because that, you know, it really tears the scene in a different way, right? Because it's post human. It's not about human agency, but then it's actually about the planet rearranging itself. And what it's actually doing is taking our technological systems and giving them to the planet.

And that's what's disturbing, I think, to them. But again, as a contemplative exercise, that's very interesting for getting us to pay attention to the scalar shifts that are already inherently in the way that we're talking about these kind of supply chains, environmental destruction, biodiversity laws, all these terms, right? All right, we thought for a while. That's good.

That's a great place to let it evaporate into a cloud of unknowing. And I'm really glad we got to riff today. Yeah, well, that sounds good. Look, I'm so excited to hear people's different ways of encountering this book.

It was such a visceral experience in writing it. It came out during the pandemic when I was at home with a three and a five year old who are now a little bit older. And so it was like speaking into avoid itself a cloud of unknowing, right? So it's really been wonderful to hear who is picking it up and who is finding it meaningful.

Honestly, I've been delighted that some of the first people to come to me who read it were artists. It was very like, oh, you can't let me do it. So yeah, I'm happy to continue the conversation. This has been wonderful.

Thanks, man. All right. Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider.

Humans on the Loop Ozzet's launch to Ashana Sea Ventures, Cosmos Institute, Imaginal Seeds, and BitTensor. If you value what's going on here, please consider contributing your listener support. Dig into the extensive archives at humansontheloop.com. And if you'd like to work together, you can email humansontheloop.com at proton.me.

I'm devoting next week to writing grants and articles, so there will be no new episode, but there are many more to come. Stay tuned on sub stack for more thoughtful provocations, and I'll see you in two weeks. Until then, take care. And remember, attention is our greatest natural resource.