I think we have to stay with the gap or the crack and being stay with it. Don't try to cover it over don't try to paper it over religions have tried to paper it over capitalism has tried to paper it over but both of the papering over of the gap or the crack and being is where you find self-actualization you find your future project in fidelity to the gap or crack and being because you're actually serving the real of history you can only find your future project if you're staying with what's missing if you're staying with what's lacking and you develop that every beginning starts with a lack every beginning starts with something missing and you stay with that there's a certain pain in but if you stay with that I think that's where there's a real generative project can emerge and I think staying with this gap staying with this crack this is also the guarantee to be non-deterministic this is also the guarantee to be non-computational why because what is the gap or the crack I think it's just our freedom and I think it's there that we have the space to overcome any of these fantasies of AI as some sort of apocalyptic end of the human being I think AI is going to computationally or deterministically transform the world but it's not going to cover over this gap it's yet another if we have religion if we have capitalism if we have technology trying to cover over the gap or the I think that the gift that we have at this moment is that we can discover on a deeper level what is the nature of subjectivity and I think that's what has motivated the history of modern philosophy I think it's motivated a lot of the history of psychoanalysis and I think it should be motivating us when we're building these future networks to be really interested and intrigued about what does it mean today to be free. Welcome to the 18th episode of Humans on the Loop I'm your host Michael Garfield and this week's guest is Cadelle Lass the creator of Philosophy Portal author of Global Brain Singularity and Real Speculations organizer of myriad conferences anthologies and collaborative volumes exploring biocultural evolution mind matter relations and speculative futures. Cadelle has been the director of psychedelic research at Serenity a researcher at the Bertalanfi Center for the Study of System Science a science writer on primatology and paleo anthropology for Scientific American and the founder writer and researcher for the Advanced Apes at PBS Digital Studios he is someone I can always count on to inspire me to think deeply and act wisely this conversation was very overdue and I'm grateful to finally fold him into this program's ongoing weave of perspectives in this episode we discuss self-actualization and self-transformation in our age of magical technologies the domestication of the human being by AI and institutions how to live in a future of hyper-social neuroplasticity navigating hybrid physical virtual relationships the importance of intergenerational learning and how we can make a better argument for culture to the social systems that only perceive measurable value.
In the climax of our dialogue Cadelle makes a case for staying with the lack and working the cracks in being as ways of cultivating our agency in a highly automated world if you enjoy this conversation consider becoming a supporter the show is just a small part of the mostly unpaid work I'm doing to foster public discourse on wise innovation and help to integrate the psychedelic experience of advanced computing including regular hangouts and study groups and the wonderful online commons we have growing in the wisdom and technology discord server as well as more illegible but highly generative community work than I can mention here the two latest essays to interrupt my regular podcast schedule what is being more than a machine and why should I contain multitudes are now both up on sub stack where I'm having a ton of fun on social media for the first time in a long time and I promise more soon because I'm bursting with ideas to share from the dozens of unpublished episodes in the humans on the loop editing queue subscribe if you want to stay up on where I was with this research six months ago and become a patron if you want to be in on where it's taking me now big thanks everyone's taking in on independent research including our new member Oyston K and the excellent student cohort in my running weirdest fear course on how to live in the future join our next community call on May 31st and scope the superb discussion we just had on Federico Campanio's prophetic culture by signing up at humansontheloop.com there you'll also find links to all of Caddell's research papers books videos and courses and investment well worth making in your own open ended becoming and with that thank you for listening and enjoy yeah Caddell you're on the loop you asked just a moment ago for a little more framing on this project I guess this project is a way of not only helping provide people with what I consider to be a useful conceptual framework for better imagination and better attention allocation in the age of generative AI but can help people think about how to structure their own knowledge and to foster their own relationships and is somewhat self undermining in the way that a good teacher obsolesces themselves it is intended to lead to people finding each other sifting themselves out together into working groups and projects in the umbra of the artifacts made by this and generally I think it comes out of and is still profoundly motivated by a desire to get people out of this position of alienation and disenfranchisement as end users of technologies that other people have made so I think it'll be clear to you how the thoughts that you've had about a decentralizing ularity and about the changing nature of the human as we become more deliberately co-participatory within a global brain etcetera all fit into this big thing that you and I have been dancing around together but somewhat down the beach from one another now for over a decade so anyway hello yeah so it's a weird such a weird co-parallel evolution that we've had I think totally so I mean I guess where I would like to start is just the seemingly mundane ritual of telling people like who you are where you come from why you started getting interested in this stuff how you're exploring it now and then we can use some of your papers as anchor points as we enter into a more structured examination of the stuff sure I just want to say first that I'm totally on board and I think it's absolutely important to have this idea that the teacher is a kind of vanishing mediator as opposed to a permanent point of reference and I think that is a hallmark of good teaching and I think that is both healthy for the student and the teacher actually I don't think it's actually healthy for a teacher to hold themselves as a permanent point of self-reference I think that's a deeper maybe reflection on their own unconscious there and I think that there's huge opportunities here if we can develop a deeper self-relation to our own attention and our own awareness of course huge powers to cultivate a new world but also huge threats at the same time I'm reminded of what one of the technological singularity theorist Peter Diamenda said that one person now can create what an institution used to create and that gives us this opening into a move from institutional life to a more network life but what type of subjectivity is required for this transformation from let's say institutions to networks and how to think through this together so just very quickly who am I I basically tell my story as someone who the time of 18 or 19 for whatever reason started to engage in an intellectual investigation based on the just basically mystery and wonder about the human condition I basically had the presupposition that human beings are different from everything else in the universe and followed that intuition and and that first led me to an investigation of the difference between humans and great apes but secondarily that led me into the consequences of that difference basically the consequences of our language our technology our self-consciousness and being interested in what all of those dimensions of our uniqueness meant for the human future and that long story short led me to do a doctorate on the global brain singularity which was basically trying to develop an anthropological theory of evolution in relationship to ideas about the technological singularity and I think why that's a novel contribution to science and a novel contribution to philosophy is that our starting point our ground presupposition in evolutionary theory is actually usually starting in biology and starting in of course Darwinian evolutionary thinking but I think that what this kind this starting point misses is again the uniqueness of the human being and the possibility that what the human being is is actually a collision point between two different forms of evolutionary process and understanding actually the dynamics of these evolutionary processes of course on the one hand you've got the biochemical but on the other hand I think you've got the technocultural and I think that the meeting point of these two evolutions is producing something bizarre and disorient and so that's been my motivating drive so one of the the papers I pulled off your google scholar it touches on this shift from like when I think about this I think in terms of the individual as process of mutual information exchanged with the environment either through descent and through inheritance in time this gradient between systems like an eddy in a creek that has no DNA and is entirely scaffolded by the structural relationships between water and the creek bed and then the sort of more classically defined self-contained individual that's primarily defined by the inheritance of information I find it really useful to think about that when I part out the three layers of automation that people are talking about in like weapons systems human out of the loop where there's no decision making is on the world pool end of that spectrum and human in the loop where the person is actually authoring a decision is on that sense of being the sort of agent of one zone destiny you know this whole project is specked on both of those extremes being rare if at all even existent when you're looking at the way that all of us are kind of shaped by both nature and culture to the extent that we can even talk about those as distinct so you've got this paper human evolution life history theory in the end of biological reproduction where I want to start because looking at our relationship to other primates and how we have lifelong neuroplasticity and encephalization and hyper-socialization and delayed age of reproduction there's a sense in which we can talk about becoming more and more co-determined by culture which includes the built environment and Kevin Kelly's Technium and all this stuff that this is like our institutions are part of the way that we are domesticated by the emerging global superorganism and that there's like you cast forward into a vision of the future in which basically culture has overtaken biology in this Darwinian sense. This is really important for at least two pillars of this project one being thinking about technology as a form of parenting where it's like what it means to take responsibility for one's biological offspring but also we don't get to pre-determine the destiny or the personality of these things like a smartphone or a wheel even and then the other is this sort of gaming and addiction in the way that you can think about the relationship between the hedonic imperative and human reproduction and how it's like a weird tragic joke that a lot of people are experiencing this being in bed with your partner both glued to your phones instead of actually just making love. Yeah there's just like a huge yarn ball of stuff there that I would love for you to talk a little bit more about your thinking on this paper and then how it relates to the continued process of our domestication and then what it means to be responsible in this space when we are like colonial organisms and our agency has to be recast in light of all of this. You can go like half an hour.
Yeah it's a lot but I can play with this. There's a lot to play with and I first let's just bring it to our own self-relation to basically our own path and maybe each other as well that I see at least I'll speak for myself what I'm doing as primarily caught up into a drive of cultural reproduction in the sense that I place an inordinate amount of time and attention into cultural reproduction whether that's the creation of my different philosophical works or books or podcasts or whatever it is that I find culturally and creatively drawn to a lot of my time attention and identity is put into this drive. Consequently there's a type of feedback loop that opens up there that actually generates a lot of meaning and new forms of relationality from this drive and I'm not sure if you've experienced the same thing I know you're also a father but as being a father I think you've also expressed in various sort of social media posts this intense tension and antagonism between the amount of time and energy it takes to both be a full-time creative cultural reproducer on the one hand and a biological reproducer on the other hand and to do both of those things well and I think that's really the major challenge for what you were talking about in regards to let's say post-industrial adult in the developed world today is that how do we do both of these well and I think that what we can take as a starting point here for reflection or at least what I take as a starting point here for reflection is that no human beings in the past have been able to solve this riddle because human beings in the past were primarily caught up in the biological reproduction loop the reproduction rates the number of children that people were having as well as the times at which people were having children was much earlier and of course many more offspring and at the same time I think there were less avenues for cultural creativity and cultural expression and so in some ways this tension and antagonism which I'm taking in my work to be central is really the challenge of I think our generation and I think the more conversations we have about this and maybe even the more robust and reflective networks that we have to take this challenge on board and actively work through this challenge as a community or as a nor as a distributed network I think the better and I think that this is going to become the central issue for young people coming up now young people coming up now they do complain about a meaning crisis there are data on sexlessness and young people just being disinterested in sex which is of course very strange probably for both you and I to think back on being 18 or 19 certainly for me being attracted and being attractive was incredibly important so it does beg the question what's going on and I think that this theory that I developed actually one of the first papers I published is related to cultural reproduction in some sort of antagonistic relationship with biological reproduction but that this has gone overlooked that we're not that reflective about this tension and how potentially crazy the consequences of this tension are because what it means ultimately is that our being is being decoupled in some way from the meaning systems that were related to biological reproduction because where did the meaning really come from in the past of course it was secondarily the religions and the metaphysical structures but it was also the actual being embedded and embodied in in the reproduction process which just gives you the meaning because just being a father or just being a mother is already a full-time job and it's incredibly meaningful job and it's self-evident that it's meaningful so all of that is I think what is really at the core of this meaning crisis I think it could also be connected to the fact of another idea that I develop in global brain singularity which is the meta-system transition which is that our institutions from the industrial era are absolutely being undermined and transformed and something new I think could appear or something new is appearing and perhaps you and I are both participating in this new appearing and also the collapse of the old system it's still very early and I think it's still very in its seed forms and I think our projects are probably the seeds themselves of what might be the new networks how we relate to each other and how we build lifelong projects that are able to stabilize meaning on both hopefully the biological and the cultural level but this is something that for me I approach as a scientific and a philosophical mystery is what is the future of these evolutionary processes I think it's a really an open-ended question and I try to approach this with the mind of a curiosity in terms of the strangeness of our moment yeah so I haven't published this yet but for the last several years I've been collecting notes on this trend in our lineage anyway of Patamorphosis that the first vertebrates were basically the sexually mature larva of these organisms that started out swimming through the water column and eventually settled under rocks and became filter fears and we still see these the c-squirts and so on and again it looks like when we trend towards socialization and we trend toward interdependence with other organisms of our type schooling fish conferred advantages for example predator evasion that like a tunicate does not have by being an assessile filter feeding organism they're able to actively seek out food as well as to escape from predators and we can see a similar kind of thing again and again and again as our environments become more complex and we become more entangled with one another in the matrix of our sociality which has like you said there's a in a sense we're getting simpler because the locus of agency is moving toward the group the emergence of a meta-individual in another sense there is a pressure on the individual as originally prescribed to become more and more intelligent as it has to navigate spaces of greater dimensionality so like the c-squirt doesn't lose its head it develops a more and more complex brain as the environment of the school requires more nimble and agile relationship to the other fish and so there's a sense in which Lawrence Steinberg has said continue to exposure to novelty keeps the brain plastic for longer there's a shift in education to open-ended problem solving and play and metacognition like you said in this paper but simply having a job in this world is increasingly dependent on the acquisition of advanced degrees the length of schooling and you can see this sort of when humans and wolves domesticated each other wolves don't have obedient school so i don't know this is just another bouquet of stuff that i'd love to hear you riff on this in relationship specifically to the way that it's not just that cultural information production and transmission is taking over it is also the fact that our understanding of biology is becoming more and more digitized and we're making more and more sophisticated models of the person in computer simulation and if you listen to effective accelerationists and singularitarians they talk about a sort of complete handover where we still have people but they become digital objects at that point there's a sort of a paradox where the convergence of digitally augmented life extension research and high fidelity reproduction of human beings through digital mechanisms leads us to not immortality of the biological organism but a phase transition where we become constantly hyper adaptive to the environment in a phase that is obedient to the demands of an extremely rapid innovation landscape and like pressures on us to stay young and playful and cute as a means of being like interoperable with one another and with the pressures of hyper-socialization and so on that yeah that's bonkers but i swear to god that i'm trying to get us to a point where we can make some really simple and concrete and pragmatic statements about what it means to practice agency in these kinds of advanced technological landscapes if the huge challenge and i think we are all in over our heads and i think that's one of the defining features of this move of what type of subjectivity is going to be required to move from this institutional identity on the one hand to a network identity on the other hand i think that it's the type of human being that can get comfortable with being overwhelmed and be the type of human that can be comfortable with having the situation be as it were metaphorically over our head as opposed to neatly contained in our head and this takes a much deeper engagement with i think our emotional spiritual process take for example what you're saying about being transformed into digital objects i was just discovering last week on this website called perplexity which i'm sure you're aware of that it does a pretty good job of reproducing my digital identity if i just put in what is global ring singularity or what are the courses at philosophy portal perplexity like basically gives you really good answers so in some sense i'm already being like mapped by ai as a digital object and in regards to this point you made about biology becoming digitized that's kind of part of what i'm trying to say with the biochemical evolution and what i would call techno-cultural evolution because biology becoming digitized is biology being taken up into the techno-cultural and i think that here this idea of becoming a digital object i'll just be frank many of my collaborators many of my friends many of my creative networks we're basically digital objects to each other in a way we have to go out of our way to not just be digital objects to each other and i think i'll get to that in a moment because i think that's actually an important key is how can we at the one time accept the reality of being turned into digital objects for each other and on the other hand trying to make space for this tension between the actual biological evolutionary process and the cultural evolutionary process and i think those are where the stakes are in terms of our actual life process you and i but in regards to this type of accelerationism that you were pointing towards i think this is really where i situate the meta-system transition on the highest level to techno-cultural evolution how to interpret this you have philosophers like nick land who are saying for example that we are imminently going to become techno-sapiens and that any sort of clinging to the biological any clinging to he says nature or socially-literate culture or modes of theological sentimentalities is a infantile resistance to the emergence of future techno-sapiens and i think that here this is like a really important philosophical challenge okay on the one hand this seems imminent but on the other hand is it really so simple is it really is it really just this linear process towards the techno-sapiens or is there a different interpretation here and where i start is actually where you started with the notion of bounds or boundary which is that at least in my exploration of the technological singularity theory literature i think the concepts that are overlooked here are things like constraint things like limit and things like boundary so when we take into consideration constraint limit and boundary i think that we overcome this tendency in technological singularity thinking towards going towards some infinite thing overcoming every limit overcoming every boundary overcoming every possible limitation on my being into the infinite thing and i think that we can actually start thinking about a new social life is basically creating new limits creating new constraints creating new boundaries and i think here the central challenge and the paradox of our sociology if i can call it that is that technology is creating for us both a strange social closeness and a strange social distance now i think the closeness is actually a disembodied sociality like you and i are closer than we could ever be in the past but it's in a disembodied form now there's more distance between us physically though like in terms of my day-to-day physical life i actually don't need to interact with hardly any human beings i can even go to the grocery store and everything's automated already you can go to the automated checkouts or whatever you don't need to even go to the movie theater anymore because everything's better on Netflix anyway so there is i'm just saying here that there is technologies creating the conditions of possibility for this immense social distance and this adam the what people call atomization or this hyper-individuation but on the other hand the paradox is that it creates a hyper closeness if i really pay attention to all of my links and networks on the on let's say the level of the internet we are so close to each other and our networks are so interestingly overlapping with each other it's mind-boggling and it's infinitely fascinating to me and this does demand a new type of reflective engagement with sociality it's a super strange challenge but then i'll really finish here by saying that the ultimate challenge in terms of the what i'm trying to do in my work is what i call the virtual physical loop and and now this could be some interesting connection with your project humans on the loop because the virtual physical loop is basically saying okay we are collaborating and coordinating with each other as virtual digital objects basically and there's a huge creative power there i don't think we should just dismiss it i think it's something that is is tremendously powerful but at the same time i think that we learn something extremely important by taking the time to really think through those limits to really think through those boundaries and to really think through those constraints in terms of physically organizing events and retreats and different types of workshops with each other to really think what is the meaning and what is the purpose of coming together physically why is that necessary why can't we lose that because i don't think we can i think that we're massively strengthened and i think my network is massively strengthened by taking that extra step yeah so just to embellish this a little bit i want to plug this into another working paper that you wrote self-actualization in the commons this is at least in which a lot of what you're talking about comes into focus this paradoxical relationship between distance and closeness or between our mediation through technology and our shared interdependence on those technologies or the decontextualization of information and relationships affected by that superstructure the way that for instance you know english as a universal language for science or decimal based mathematics systems extract things out of what nor basin calls the warm data of lived experience and into models that are then acted on that are then constrain our behavior that as the way that jesica flak talks about course draining as downward causation that like the models that we create not just about each other but about ourselves then lead to this weird thing where each of us in some respect has more of a social contract with the shared modeling space than we do with directly with one another and so through our shared abstractions and through our embeddedness in and definition by the hyper objects of the internet obviously but the internet being just the latest layer of something that existed already in the form of markets and nation states and so on in this piece you're exploring what it means to self-actualized and how you cannot be self-actualized without being inside of a network and this show is predicated on the notion that a lot of people are focusing on the product that their organization produces without recognizing that the product emerges within a prior atmosphere of conversation and shared understanding and that you can't just write scientific papers or new software or whatever and then push it out into the world and expect it to live on its own. I would love to hear you talk more about the way that we're going to be able to claw the commons back out of its enclosure by the economies of scale and the condensation of wealth and power that kind of dynamic has afforded and you make a distinction here between automated commons and collaborative commons that I guess maybe we can loosely analogize as illegible ecosystem upon which innovation depends and then also maybe the narratives the religious value systems etc that harmonize our behavior toward common objectives.
If I'm understanding you right and in light of all of this a part of this is a networked permeable self-actualizing in networked and permeable institutions is currently bumping up violently against this sort of exist in order to exist tendency for bureaucracy including the sort of myth of a continuous egoic identity at the level of the human at the level of the nation state at the level of whatever religious narrative what you talk about also in a number of other pieces that there are prescriptive and predictive statements that you make about how governance at multiple scales and religion in a very broadly defined sense are going to have to look in order to actually function as the vehicles for self-actualization in a highly automated planet scale operation. Yeah there's okay so there's again a lot there I think in the actual paper I developed from the original ideas about the self-actualization in the commons was a paper called Global Commons and the Global Brain and basically what I'm trying to work out there is what is our political response to the coming wave of technological automation and going through the different options in terms of the main ones I could think in terms of what I think are current political say predisposition is a type of neoliberalism a type of international open-market dynamic I think that there are other people like Thomas Piketty who are proposing a type of global state Keynesianism where we take the Keynesian policies from the early 20th century and we apply them on the scale of the global meta-system transition and there I think we get into questions about the actual qualitative transition do solutions from the 20th century that were applied to the nation state model actually work on the level of the global state model or is that language even itself wrong and ultimately coming to the idea which I think is shared by many other thinkers like the first person that's coming to my mind is the work of Michelle Bowen's which is the idea that the commons is actually needed as a third category that if we continue to think within the state and the market and if we don't think the nature of the commons that we are politically going to be shooting ourselves theoretically in the foot because the market and the state are broken by whatever's coming with these waves of technological automation and I do think that distinction between automated commons and collaborative commons really can help us think through new network dynamics and ultimately I think that our intellectual artistic creative projects are on the line in really thinking with these processes as opposed to against these processes and I think you made that point really well by saying that you cannot just write papers or write software as standalone creative entities and expect them to live on their own I learned that kind of the hard way in terms of releasing my book global brain singularity at the same time as leaving the institutional network within which I publish global brain singularity and only met the void really the book just doesn't do anything on its own and then learning from that process basically starting to create my work much more organically and dynamically in network context and recognizing that books and courses and anything that I create is really only as valuable as the network I'm participating in and I think what we haven't thought through enough but which I'm glad you brought to the center of the conversation is this idea that let's say as digital objects we have a lot of stakes and I think right now it's unconscious but we have a lot of stakes in the shared modeling process and again the networks that are overlapping with each other they're a lot closer and a lot more interconnected than we think this shared modeling process is already well underway you know and I do think that there is community let's say I would say community plural identities that are emerging and I think that we at least for me I don't think we should think about it as one community it could be one network but it's going to be a one network with many communities and many different visions and the question really becomes do we have the shamanic subjectivity that can help navigate between the different communities and the different tribes and their different modeling processes because that we can feel a sense of belonging and we can feel a sense of home within our sort of shared modeling community but we can feel a sense of antagonism we can feel a sense of tension with other communities and it does take the shaman which is a kind of in-between character and I've talked about this a lot with layman pascal at the integral stage and I really think layman pascal is also someone who's a kind of shamanic intelligence and is really moving between different tribes and trying to find that right balance between grounding a belonging in one tribe and finding the space to navigate between different tribes and I think that's an art and a skill all of its own but that's the human skill we need if we're not going to just treat each other as digital objects and if we're going to come into the loop so to speak yeah I guess this is where we can really bite down on the central question that I have for you which is it seems like people recognize that the commons or the work of cultural creation are art and philosophy as a way of producing the ways of seeing that allow us to adapt to novel conditions this is all incredibly important and yet having to render everything into the language that makes it legible to an operable on by markets is like you've lost the fight before you've even started and so everybody I talked to I was just talking to David Jay recently David was part of the Center for Humane Technology and just wrote a book on relationality and is working with people inside organizations and in the US Senate and elsewhere to help make the kind of the networking that people do inside of organizations more visible to and appreciated by the leadership of those organizations but like you run the risk in doing that of creating proxy metrics that then end up distorting the behavior and forcing it into subservience to quantitative measurement which gets you back to the beginning of the problem right so there's a sense of like complex life on earth would not exist if we did not have an increase in atmospheric oxygen which enabled the diffusion of oxygen into organisms that were made of more layers of cells right but like oxygen starts off as a waste product that nothing knows how to metabolize or Philip Kadik famously wrote that the symbols of the divine emerge in the trash stratum so my question for you in thinking about how to actually foster a commons where we've got space for that third poll in the triangle is something like how do we come to love waste or noise or inefficiency how do we actually make time in our lives not just to accelerate but to steer how do we make relationality and activities of intrinsic value more of a concrete and explicit value in virtue in society without bending them to the instrumentalization of the other's dominant systems yeah so for me i want to get to your question i want to start though by saying that we aren't going to solve this problem through a liberal notion of institutional recognition you already pointed at that yourself but i think that's a trap and i don't think that's really going to at the end of the day do the work we need to actually get us to a different system basically i'm still working with a model that i would call marxist in a way i'm certainly not a orthodox marxist but i just find the dialectical structure useful for thinking specifically between the dimensions of slavery feudalism capitalism socialism and communism and specifically thinking through that as a dialectical matrix because i think that where we are right now i don't know if you read the work of jonas verifakis but the idea of techno feudalism is i think a very powerful one and i know there are people detractors and there are people who argue against that notion but at the same time i think it's a very powerful notion and i see it catching on that it at least convincing to me that what we're living in right now is not so much techno capitalism and that suggests that because when we were growing up there was a coherent political direction towards democratic socialism and there was the idea among millennials that democratic socialism could be a viable pathway forward and i think that sort of reached its climax with both the disappointment of the obama regime and also the failure of the sander's campaign but ultimately with the collapse of those projects i think following here the work of marxist theres chris katrone i think we are living through what he calls the death of the millennial left and with that death of the millennial left comes a big question about how do we really move forward and for me at philosophy portal i'm going back to the philosophical drawing board of those early writings of the habels and the marxist and the derman idealist where these ideas about left and right and the ideas about socialism and the liberal state really came into their early formation i think that philosophical work is at the moment underrated because it's absolutely at the core of many of the challenges that we face politically and economically but just here to go deeper i think the when you see for example the twitter feed of someone like andrew tate andrew tate is basically not only embracing techno feudalism but he's saying that if you do not follow him into a futile type structure that you will become a slave to what he calls the matrix and so this idea that feudalism and slavery are the territory we're wandering into if we don't think of a coherent way forward to some type of democratic socialism if that's the right word or some sort of new form of socialism that is a real threat so let me bring that more closer to myself because i became very disenchanted and became very disengaged from mainstream politics back in 2016 and i think that was actually the right move but i've internalized these structures into myself and tried to work through them on a lower scale local level which is basically i came to the decision in 2017 that i cannot foreclose the reality of capitalism meaning that i have to work through capitalism and without and that's just the reality i'm in or that's the pre-seposition and what i mean by that i'm not identifying with capitalism as an end goal certainly not but i'm not foreclosing it as part of my process and i'm not foreclosing it as a necessary part of the process to hopefully get towards a more socialist reality but basically what i do there is i introduce capitalism in terms of its limits and constraints on my behavior and my activity and try to use those and harness those as difficult as it is and as unpleasurable as it is quite frankly to open up spaces that i would call socialist spaces and i could get more concrete with what i mean by that and i could give you concrete examples of what i call socialist spaces but the point there is that the end goal of my capitalist activity is socialist and so i'm trying to build in the dialectic into my life so basically i'm using the profits that i can accumulate through my capitalist activity towards building more social spaces and then my my thinking is that if i can collaborate with enough other people who are in a similar age range and in a similar business construction phase as myself that we can collaborate and build even greater socialist spaces and so basically building from the bottom up because here following the work of political scientist Benjamin Studabaker i agree with his analysis of american politics that the quote unquote way is shut meaning democracy that the way through the state at the moment is shut and so collaborating or building a movement on the level of an occupy wall street or a Bernie sander's campaign is not necessarily the way forward at the moment it's much more i see the emancipatory potential in these networks that we're both participating in but in these networks stewarded by people who are basically working the dialectic of capitalism and socialism and i think that there here we get to the key question to me which is how do we decelerate and i think you ask that we got accelerationism on the one hand then you got a question how do we decelerate and i think that's back to what i was saying earlier we have to introduce limits constraints and boundaries in order to decelerate and now here's the deeper question what are those limits constraints and boundaries and i think those limits constraints and boundaries have to be thought on the level of both capitalism and socialism in a dialectic with each other which is that there's a few things here let me point first to the socialist dimension then i think our relation should be in a physical virtual loop that we're thinking in terms of years we're thinking in terms of building physical ritual space with each other and this is not one community this is a multi-tribal multi-communal vision here the physical virtual loop intergenerational relationships are absolutely key if we do not get intergenerational relationships right we are f here i'm talking about and this and here as a father you're yourself it starts to me with father and son mother and daughter elder and child it starts with that and a teacher and student and again thinking about these terms as vanishing mediator the father is a vanishing mediator the teacher is a vanishing mediator what is it a vanishing mediator for it's for independence and freedom of that person to build and participate in the networks on their own choice and on their own decision making and then finally long-term relationality and also sexual difference long-term relationality on the level of sexual difference to me is the absolute center of our limits and our constraints if and i don't want to judge here i'm not moral about it and i don't moralize about it but at the same time when i look at the people who i'm closest to in terms of my collaborations the people who i'm closest to in terms of my long-term collaborations are all recognizing the importance of the limits and the constraints on sexual difference and that is absolutely key to deceleration i could go on further but that's a lot yeah okay let's talk a little bit about this specifically in the context of the new structures of religion there is a fundamental argument that you can make if you want to reduce the hierarchy of needs to something like survival success and significance that people tend to regard these as separate and this is basically what you're saying in your work on the commons like i was watching gordon brander this morning comparing the invention of the wheel to the invention of language models and saying that if twitter existed during the adventur of the wheel this is like hilarious commentary on how people would have said oh but we already walk around what's the point and in that discussion i didn't see anybody really pointing to the fact that the increase in speed or the qualitative difference in human life afforded by the wheel also depends on roads and that roads depend on well at least historically a civilization is more or less synonymous with taxation and so similarly i feel like to the extent that i have tried to use the machinery of capitalism to get myself into something that looks like a more socialist lifestyle i found myself trying to make an argument to organizations and individuals of means that you can't actually survive or succeed without folding the process of sense making or of philosophical activity or of the creation of inner subjective space for the coordination of behavior in acts of the production or the realization of significance and that so that like this notion of like productivity as the means rather than an end the end being a more complete instantiation or exfoliation of what it means to be a human the idea that like festivals exist not simply to relieve pressure from an oppressive control structure but like bachanelya is an end unto itself that ex-tasis is fun that liberation from self-definition is actually the goal of the production of abundance through technological means that festivals are not a vehicle for profit but are a celebration of access and likewise to the extent that our increasing dependence on opaque systems of statistical correlation brings us back to a realization that like we actually only ever understand things in retrospect that science wouldn't actually function if we demanded that we would have a mechanism in place before we investigated anomalous evidence that there's hope in the notion that a lot of the world that we're looking at now came out of an increased tolerance or slack or accommodation of weirdness and mystery in wartime research and like people like allenturing were accepted for as long as they were useful and we don't have to understand we just have to know that it works I feel like again I'm just betraying the fact that I'm still not fully decolonized here in my thinking but as somebody who is trying to find better and better ways to describe the significance and the value of this work to people who only have 23 seconds to listen to your pitch how do you think about the thin end of the wedge when it comes to recognizing the resurgence of ritual and play and religious activity in a society that is like pathologically fixated on practicality and on legible value okay so what I sent as the underlying tension and current in your reflection there and it's something I'm sympathetic with and it's something I struggle with as well is basically finding funding from the old system and how do we cultivate the attractive basins of investment and why has investment dried up look the simple fact is I think that the techno capitalists and the older generation are not funding and not investing in the next generation and it's creating a fundamental tension between the generations and it's hard not to enter into the mode of scapegoating at the same time I think we have to at least I'll speak for myself we have to take that frustration we have to take that anger we have to take that aggression that we may want to direct externally to the social conditions which are economically abhorrent and we have to learn to build with less and we have to learn how to value relations internal to the networks more than constantly looking for the guy who has 23 seconds to listen to our pitch and I think that's at least path I'm taking now it's not someone calls me and has an investment opportunity that I won't take advantage of that or I won't try to learn better how to navigate and communicate with such individuals but I don't know if that is the most open way forward again I would cite Benjamin Stuubaker's work on the way is shut if it on the higher levels of social organization it does look like the way is shut at the moment and I don't know if that's going to change but if I could source a important principle that is important to take forward with us in these conditions it's that death is fundamentally linked to what I think the next ethic should be and what I mean by that is that the older generation and here I'm talking about the boomer generation and even generation X or whatever they do not have an ethics that's connected to death at all and they basically act as if they're going to live forever and they act as if the next generation doesn't matter and that they don't have to invest in the next generation and I think that's basically the conditions we're existing in at the moment so I just think that the importance of I always have the saying of die again die better which is that actually connecting to death is ethically important and actually can help us make forward advances towards this network identity which can do more with less I guess to use the I think it's a Buckminster Fuller's term and then also to reemphasize your emphasis on moving away from production as an end in itself I think that here Taney's work on basically Marxist political philosophy points in the direction that what is the end in itself is exchanged so production is an important means of course but that means is towards exchange and I think that you put that on the level of human self-expression and I think of course human self-expression is here in exchange with others and so again that points towards a more capitalist identity we have to be quote unquote productive but the reason why we're being quote unquote productive is to move towards I think socialist spaces of exchange and then the question becomes and here's the mega philosophical question for me is what is the relationship between lack and excess and here I would point it in the direction of what you were talking about festivals as an expression of excess in itself and a celebration of excess my main question is for these festivals which come and go like pop up and pop down are these expressions of excess are these celebrations of excess a symptom of the lack that we feel in capitalism and can we bring together lack and excess and understand what I think would be the nature of subjectivity the nature of subjectivity itself I think is a weird oscillation between lack and excess and how does lack and excess get expressed in capitalism and specifically how does lack and excess get expressed in late capitalism and then what are the challenges that we would face effectively in socialism on the level of lack and excess and how would they be expressed and how can we create celebrations of excess that also have a longer term mediation and a deeper connection to the lacks that we all feel so those would be some of my sort of points I'm not sure if there are points of connection there but that's where I am yeah obviously living here in Santa Fe I feel rather poignant or acute sense of intergenerational conflict right by it's obvious it's visible that the heat islands are in the parts of town where people are on average younger and have less money and so on and that the part of Santa Fe that gets advertised to the rest of the world with lots of foliage and running water is somewhere where people don't actually come down out of their castles and a lot of my thinking is informed by what it means to be apparent in a city that is as polarized as this one but I don't want to engage in cyclical revolutionary thinking that seems really short-sighted to me I don't like occupy in as much as it defined a 99 percent against a 1 percent I see a planetary problem as requiring a planetary identity I see Cape Wayworths donut economics as being a system that recognizes that there is ultimately no such thing as waste that there is ultimately no absolute other and so I am still really preoccupied with this question of rather than just like waiting for the tree to fall and release its sort carbon back into the soil this question of again like you said exchange like how can we do a better job of regenerating the soil slash regenerating intergenerational relationships without just expecting that we're next in line to amass and consolidate and like how can we get nutrient cycling between the institutions that exist like how can we do a better job even if we have to do this work out of the model if even if we have to act as like fugitives and work in the shadows and in the lacunae and engage in this sort of paradoxical in the system but not of the system kind of way is there a way that we can still actually recruit the people and organizations that we may never be able to convince that any of this matters into this kind of work like we don't have time to make the argument but we have ways of skimming that access I mean I think you understand I think that I have two things that I want to say here first I want to offer the metaphor of vultures roosters and owls and the vulture and this is all inspired from metaphor philosophy but the vulture is basically the figure of circling the dead carcass right so this is the form of subjectivity that's waiting for the old system to die right the vulture the rooster is inspired by french revolutionary politics which is trying to change the system in a revolutionary sense right and I think you said on both angles that you don't want to be waiting around for the old system to die and you don't want to do this revolutionary change like 99 versus the 1% occupy wall street style of consciousness and here I take the position of the owl which is basically paying attention not thinking about the future too much as in itself even though you're future oriented in the present moment but working with the cracks of the present moment and being diligent patient and trying to form these cracks in such a way as that you can make local change which can have powerful ripple effects within the network and you don't know because the thing is that the network could even be better than we think it could be right like it could like I've had that experience so many times that when you focus on the cracks of the present moment what ends up happening is that something can emerge that's even better than you thought so I think if we stay with that patience we cultivate that subjectivity that is almost beyond death in some deep ethical sense and we're willing to work with the cracks that people use money to escape that's crucial that people use money to escape looking at the cracks of the present moment because they can use money to get rid of it but if we're the type of subjectivity that's the true socialist subjectivity that's willing and I think that who knows this better than anyone parents know this better than anyone because parents can't get away from the cracks you've got to work with the cracks you're a parent you can't even I guess there are some if you're super rich you can hire nannies to take care of your kids and stuff like that but like actual parents who are working with kids you know what the crack is you know what patience is to be a parent that takes enormous patience you have to be an owl you can't be a so I think that's one thing the second thing I want to say and this is I'm taking this from a subtitle of a presentation that Quinn Wielahan at the upcoming philosophy portal conference will be presenting on which is moving from crisis to contradiction I know we've got a lot of talk about the meta crisis but the meta crisis is also subjectively existentially overwhelming to focus on the cracks is to focus on the contradictions of your local moment focus on the cracks the contradictions of your local moment and if you handle them step by step small step by small step I think towards this network that could be a more robust socialist hub where we don't even need these investors where we don't even need people to come along and give us whatever a couple hundred thousand dollars to do a project because our robust socialist hubs already have the infrastructure in place which will make the creative projects that we want to do without having to compromise with people who want to pull us like we're dummies with a marionette string I think this is at least again the way I'm orienting myself last thing I want to ask you is again about working the cracks I like this a lot I think I've thought about what it means to lean into something we've been talking which is that the exercise of agency depends on and often occludes all the ways in which we as freewheeled choosing beings make our choices within constraints that are given to us that the body is predominantly automatic that in order to decide what you want to do with your life you are not allocating attention to sitting there willing your heart to beat your lungs to breathe in every moment also the relationship between if we think about prompting AI plenty of people have written about the similarity between prompting and the invocation of mythical entities like genies or demons or whatever and how the surprise is always in the lack of specification the gaps in the models the line of code that you neglected you weren't able to see as crucial into laughter the fact so yeah I would just this is more of a generic thing but I would love for you to riff on this in particular as it might ground in any kind of practical advice for people who are in the process of actualizing themselves within and in fact because of systems that radically curtail the scope and possibility of individual choice how to use tangle with the contradiction of living in a world that is in some sense a trace fossil of other people's decisions or other entities decisions and yet enact your own decision making in that world knowing that you can never really make a knowing that informed consent is something that is not something that can never really be like practiced in its absolute all right so what I'm going to say here just going to center around free will I'm going to try and make it simple which is I think we have to stay with the gap or the crack in being stay with it don't try to cover it over don't try to paper it over religions have tried to paper it over capitalism has tried to paper it over but both of the papering over of the gap or the crack in being is where you find self actualization you actualize yourself in the gap or the crack in being and I think that's true epistemologically and ontologically and I think that you find your what I mean epistemologically is you find your future project in fidelity to the gapper crack in being because you're actually serving the real of history you can only find your future project if you're staying with what's missing if you're staying with what's lacking and you develop that every beginning starts with a lack every beginning starts with something missing and you stay with that there's a certain pain in that but if you stay with that I think that's where there's a real generative project can emerge and I think it's ontologically true if there was no gapper crack in being humans wouldn't be born we come out of a gap we're ontologically coming out of this so it's actually ontologically our origin as well so I think this is deeply true on both levels and I think you could ask staying with this gap staying with this crack this is also the guarantee to be non-deterministic this is also the guarantee to be non-computational why because what is the gap or the crack I think it's just our freedom and I think it's there that we have the space to overcome any of these fantasies of AI as some sort of apocalyptic end of the human being I think AI is going to computationally or deterministically transform the world but it's not going to cover over this gap it's yet another if we have religion covering over the gap or the crack if we have capitalism covering over the gap if we have technology trying to cover over the gap or the crack I think that the gift that we have at this moment is that we can discover on a deeper level what is the nature of subjectivity and I think that's what has motivated the history of modern philosophy I think it's motivated a lot of the history of psychoanalysis and I think it should be motivating us when we're building these future networks to be really interested and intrigued about what does it mean today to be free I'll just stop there cool who else do you think we ought to fold into this series somebody who is either really standing in their role as an elder we ought to get on record while we still can or underappreciated and deserves a bit more of a platform I'm going to say someone who's a little bit I think off the radar of people in maybe your side of the network which is someone I've been collaborating with for two or three years now and who I see as an elder for myself and building in a direction that I think is absolutely vital for the future I don't know if you know Peter Rollins but Peter Rollins is developing what he calls the church of the contradiction and he's also developing a theology that he calls pyro theology and he's also going to be teaching in the next philosophy proto course on Christian atheism I think that he is developing what the future of Christianity in the west needs and so I think that would be a perfect person to bring on to maybe inject some some theological reflection on these topics awesome thanks so much for riffing today on the loop thanks again for listening this work is made possible by donations from Oshana's adventures cosmos institute imaginal seeds bit tensor and listeners like you explore my extensive archives at humans on the loop.com and feel free to email humans on the loop at proton.me with your questions or invitations over the next weeks we'll continue to knit a noetic polity with people like culture critic Rina Nikolai of incognita techno shaman George pore a future how author and game designer heim gingold on his book building sim city former deep mind researcher Larry mulstein of technological love and ai alignment researcher Evan mia zono of atlas computing and many more so be sure to whitelist your inbox and turn on your youtube notifications until then take care and remember attention is our greatest natural resource