Politics and Consciousness

A Conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck

The month-long Future of Consciousness seminar series begins this Saturday (link has a discount code for my readers). Some luminaries of consciousness research will be giving seminars, and I’m honored to be the black sheep of that bunch. In celebration of its commencement, I linked with the series creator,

Daniel Pinchbeck

, to talk about consciousness in the scope of our curious political times.

This talk was so good (and fairly represents some of my thinking lately) that I decided to fully edit the transcript into what I hope is an engaging text (below the vid).

The vid is no slouch, either. Enjoy.

Daniel: So what do you think about consciousness these days?

Alex: What am I thinking about consciousness. Consciousness is, as you know, a very open field. A lot of people have different ideas about what its fundamentals are, their applications, how far those applications extend into the fundamental reality of nature—whether or not it's a fundamental substance or it's an emergent substance, whether or not it supervenes on the physical or the physical supervenes on consciousness, and all of that.

But the way that I've been thinking about it more recently forks into two lanes, and I think that they relate. We'll find out in this jam session whether or not they do, and whether or not I should bring up one or the other for the consciousness seminar. I'm not sure yet. I also don't want to confuse people and bring up too much.

The area of consciousness I'm most interested in is the division between what I call automaticity and problematicity. So the division between packaging information in energetically highly efficient ways which internalize external environments such that you no longer have to engage with the external environment in a quizzical way (automaticity).

Daniel: When something becomes like habit in a way?

Alex: When it becomes habit, when, as we say in predictive mind theory, it becomes schematized, such that every time I pick up a shaker (picks up a musical shaker) I'm not wondering “what is this”? Because that would be a highly inefficient way to interact with my environment—to constantly be curious about what this is.

And then I see another object. Now, it doesn't quite look like this one, you know, it looks a little different. Shall I accommodate it into the existing category I have for shakers? Yeah, okay. I'm just going to accommodate it. And now every time I see this other weird shaker, it's immediately assimilated into that category. And I'm no longer interacting with my environment in a curious way—I am interacting with it in an automatic way. Now, if I encounter something that is strange enough it triggers a prediction error. (So I'm basically predicting this is what I'm going to interact with because I have a map, a schema of the world.) But if I encounter something sufficiently strange, like let's say this object, it might trigger a prediction error, right? Because I didn't predict this. And so then all of a sudden I'm in a state of problematicity—I'm no longer automatically interacting with my environment. I'm interacting with it in terms of a problem or an error, as we say.

And then I figure out, I'm going to include this (new object) in a general percussive instrument category. I don't really even know what to call it, but every time I see it, I'm no longer going to think about it as an error. I'm going to think about it automatically because this is the most energetically efficient way to to interact with my environment.

Now, in terms of locating the truth of an interaction, it has very little to do (truth) with with energetic efficiency. The process and evolution of life can be described as selecting for highest orders of efficiency. According to evolutionary theory, the likelihood that our mutations are selecting for truth is zero.

This is according to people like Donald Hoffman. They were studying conscious structures and they're like, “what's the probability that any of these structures are trying to figure out the truth about anything?” And what they figured out is that the selection pressures on consciousness make it (evolve) as energetically efficient as possible and as fast as possible.

So truth, of course, is going to kind of fall by the wayside. It's not going to be a primary concern (of evolution). You're more concerned with surviving. You're more concerned with packaging this complex information as efficiently as possible. And so truth schmooth—it doesn't really matter as long as it's getting you by in the most survivalistically efficient way possible…

Daniel: That's obviously, for many people, the big reveal when they first take psychedelics like LSD or mushrooms, it's like suddenly there's so much information that they've just tuned out because they didn't realize that there's this infinite, swarming complexity in the pattern of this woodgrain, and how that's incredibly aesthetically appealing. So suddenly you don't know what to pay attention to anymore and so you lose your reference.

Alex: Yes. And you end up with an over-saturation—an overwhelming sense of information. You get an informational overload and you enter a state of awe because you don't have the schematic bandwidth to accommodate all of that nuance. And so you effectively, during your normal course of life, shut all that nuance out.

So we're effectively operating in a state of knowns—in a state of certainty—at the expense of truth.

So certainty and truth seem to be somewhat oppositional, which would indicate then that the state of problematicity is—

Daniel: But also even this idea of truth, right, is an idea of the human mind, right? I think even Nietzsche went into that. There is a truth, you know, that's just an idea of the human mind—that it could be a mistake. Like all of our ideas, you know?

Alex: The truth of any given object is indeterminate, fundamentally indeterminate. And so whenever something evades us or creates a sense of awe or overwhelm which sends us into a state of phenomenological indeterminacy—where we're no longer certain about a given object—it's not that the truth is then evading us, it’s that we're experiencing truth as such.

Daniel: That makes sense. But maybe it would also be sensible to say that truth is actually just relational, right? Like, like, you know, you try to form a concept of an object. The object is also always connected to other objects. And a world picture, you know, the objects do different things and so on?

Alex: Yes. There's the third aspect, which is that, as Stephen Wolfram likes to say, “observers like us” have certain limited scope, constraints—conscious constraints—to consciousness. So that if I, for instance, had a consciousness with far larger parameters—let's say infinite parameters of perception—and I could see all of the Higgs field in between you and I, and all the negative space in between you and I was filled with visions of virtual particles and photons, I might not even see you. I might have a very hard time even apprehending you because I'm seeing so much in between you and I that you are effectively disappeared in the soup of everything.

Meanwhile, it's because we cannot see everything that we are able to see something.

So there is this ironic relationship between ignorance and knowledge, where we need ignorance to have knowledge about something.

Daniel: Yeah. It's like if we could remember everything, we would be blasted out, we wouldn't be able to be in reality.

Alex: Yeah. But back to the high energetic cost of apprehending the truth, and the idea that if a certainty has some relationship to untruth—if, in other words, certainty has a relationship to packaging information in the most energetically efficient way which itself produces a probability of zero that we will apprehend any truth—then maybe truth lies in the opposite direction, in the direction of inefficiency, in the direction of confusion.

Daniel: Once again, I was just coming back to this thing about what extent is even an idea of truth just another idea of the human mind. Like maybe all that we can know are these kind of like relational networks of how things fit together in a world picture.

Alex: That's where I'm ending up, too. Because, again, if when we're apprehending the truth, we're effectively experiencing the nothingness of everything—the qualitative nothingness of the quantitative everything (because quantitative everything's have the quality of nothing, immanence produces absence)—then the way to take truth into consideration is simply the truth of the relational dialectic between certainty and confusion, between states of determinism and indeterminacy. And that the “truth”, quote unquote, is actually the relationship between those two things.

The truth resides in relation as opposed to the quantitative interior of any aspect. It is comprised of the relation between, in this case, the dialectic between determinism and indeterminacy.

For instance, consider that the entire cosmos and its cosmogony—the beginning of the universe—is a dance of determinate fixed concentrations bursting into and dispersing into indeterminate gases and indeterminate forms that then, through the functions of gravity, clump back together into determinate objects again, which then again explode into more indeterminate states of being.

And then you look at societal history and we see these asymmetric clumps of people exploding into more indeterminate categories and then coalescing again into determinate clumps. And we can view politics in this sort of way, conservatism of preserving an asymmetry—of preserving a determinate item—and then the progressivism or the liberalism of wanting to break that open and create more equanimity. And then the resultant impulse to then re-conglomerate some of that indeterminacy and return again to a tribalistic state.

So you see you see all of that happening—and you see all of that also happening within the mind on a on a moment to moment basis.

You also see it within the workweek. And this is, if I was to say one good thing about religion (because I'm just not much of a fan of religion with a capital R) is the delineation between ordinary time and ritual time. Religion sort of had an implicit sense that we needed structure and certainty, but that we also needed to oscillate between that and then ritualistic sort of Bacchanalian revelry and loss of self, and then return. And so you need this oscillation between structured and unstructured time in order to sort of remain sane.

We see everywhere this same relationship between determinism and indeterminacy—even within the oscillations of consciousness, between automaticity and problematicity.

And so if there is a truth to anything it would be the relational architecture of this relationship between contraction and expansion, aggregation and dissipation—between certainty and confusion.

Daniel: I know you also mentioned that you're interested in the political dimensions of consciousness or social dimensions. How do you extrapolate from from this into, thinking about that?

Alex: So there is a framework, I think, through which we can best view politics. And it may sound roundabout at first, but I think I can link it back into everything I was just describing, and that is through the lens of thermodynamics. (Just just roll with me for a moment.) Everything I was just describing with regard to aggregation and, dissipation, between contraction and explosion, is a description of the thermodynamic concepts of entropy and negative entropy. Where entropy dissipates energy and then negative entropy works to try and hold states of difference.

So your refrigerator is basically like a negative entropy contraption that tries to maintain coolness inside of a room temperature room, and tries to not allow that (its coolness) to dissipate.

Daniel: While it's causing entropy outside of it.

Alex: While it's causing entropy by offsetting that (refrigerant) energy elsewhere (into the room itself, as all refrigerators make the room they are in hotter). And so that negative entropy comes at a cost.

Now let’s think of this in terms of the conservative and liberal impulse. The conservative impulse is to conserve what is there. What we've inherited, the basic paradigmatic inheritance of our lives. Whether it's a small town that I want to keep a small town. I am American and I want to stay American. I'm white, I grew up with white people, and now I want to keep it white people—I am afraid of the reconfiguration of my phenotypic landscape with a bunch of brown people—or whatever the conservative impulse has been historically: “White men can vote.” “It would be weird if women voted.” Any aversion to changes that may disrupt ones sense of difference, asymmetry, disequilibrium. That’s the negative entropy impulse. The impulse of the refrigerator.

But then progressivism comes along and says “let's unlock and release these asymmetries and create more symmetry”. “We want more equanimity.” Well, that's the impulse toward entropy.

Now, of course, I like using “entropy” here because entropy has a negative connotation. And as a progressive, I like challenging myself. I like thinking about things that I would otherwise think of as inherently positive—like everyone being equal—as potentially problematic, right? And on a phenomenological level, like we just talked about earlier, when everything is the same, you actually lose the capacity to experience life, right? For instance, if we were the same, I couldn't talk to you. You need disequilibrium in order to have an experience—for me to talk to you.

So conservative / liberal impulses can be reflected at a cosmological scale and at the conscious scale.

But here's the interesting thing. When we view politics through the lens of thermodynamics, suddenly we realize that a lot of the platforms of the left are conservative and a lot of the platforms on the right are liberal.

Daniel: In what sense (are platforms on the right liberal)? Or I would say more “radical”.

Alex: Well—deregulation. The unbound capitalist impulse (of deregulation) may be, initially, a liberation from the constraints of government. Or liberating pockets of energy inside of oil shale as the liberation of an asymmetry.

And then, of course, the left. Environmentalism is, of course, a classic example of conservatism. We want to preserve what exists. We do not want it all to become MacDonald's and so on.

But the most interesting case, I think, is woke. It's not a reaction against conservatism. What you see with woke is the re-tribalization and essentialization of phenotype (colors of skin, eyes, hair) and sex.

Now there was an initial a progressive entropic explosion where woke said: “here is one sex and here is the other—these are asymmetric, these are these consolidated determinate identities and I'm going to explode them”. So there was an initial dissipation, and this happened within the scope of three or four years. But that initial transmutation of sex very quickly then consolidated, and what started with an entropic disbursement of undifferentiated sex collapsed into a highly consolidated and essentialized version of itself.

You now (again, ironically) have to have been born of a given tribalized category. And the creation of new tribal categories is, of course, the re-conglomeration of otherwise indeterminate sexual denominations into now very determinant and essential sexual categorizations, which is a very conservative move.

And so yeah, I just think it's an interesting way to look at politics because it becomes impossible to really defame any one group because you realize that they really do need each other. They don't simply need each other because every struggle needs an oppressor. They also need each other on a fundamental, cosmological level, where disequilibrium needs equilibrium needs disequilibrium.

Daniel: Have you read some of Jonathan Haidt’s work. Did you ever look at his work?

Alex: Some, yeah. In fact, the stuff I was referencing about awe was from some of his work with Keltner on the overwhelm of information producing unschematized categories and so on.

Daniel: I was thinking when he talks about the conservative and liberal having sort of almost like, almost like different brains. Like in terms of what they prioritize as important, you know.

Alex: Well, actually that was going to be the topic that I was initially going to come with, which is that, IQ tests aside (which I think are interesting), whenever they've studied liberal and conservative brains using like fMRI, they see different brains.

The conservatives have more gray matter in their amygdala and liberals (self-professed liberals) have more gray matter in their anterior cingulate cortex.

I think that this is very interesting. Of course, the amygdala sort of predates the frontal cortex. So we can easily say (if we want to as liberals) “well, conservatives are obviously less evolutionarily evolved”.

Daniel: And that's a physicalization of the Ken Wilber kind of idea, those dynamics moving inexorably towards equalization, I guess so, yes.

Alex: Yes. And remember that the anterior cingulate cortex’s function, among many things, is pattern matching. So think about an anterior cingulate cortex—the liberal mind—in overdrive, where everything is the same:

“This is similar to this and this is similar to this and this is similar to this and everything is similar.” “I'm just like the Muslim down the street.” “I'm just like that thief over there.” “I'm just like everyone.” “Everyone is me and I am everyone.”

And all of a sudden all the boundaries are dissolving—and the conservatives are freaking out going, “No!”

Daniel: I just want to say, you know, the ultimate version of what you just described is also what you find in Tibetan Buddhism, Dzogchen. Everything is the same, you know, and ultimately there's only primordial awareness and everything that arises within the scope of that awareness is just illusion, dream, and all made of the same transitory matter that then dissolves back into the sort of the sameness, you know. So to make any distinction becomes completely pointless and almost laughable.

And I think there's a level where that is the truth. I mean, I'm completely sold on Dzogchen. I recommended this guy, Longchempa. He was a Tibetan monk, but whenever I feel emotionally disregulated I go to his book, The Basic Space of Phenomena. It's an incredible exegesis of this idea of this sort of bliss of this sort of non duality kind of equanimity to the nth degree, you know.

00:28:08:07 - 00:28:48:08

Alex: A lot of people like to think of that bliss—that basic state of phenomena—as the level one. The blissed out state, the drunk or monk, the state of the baby in the womb and so on. And that we're always trying to return that—that drive (static drive, death drive) essentially is born of the desire to return to that state, that we're always trying to internalize ourselves in various states of status (static state), whether that's “I am a doctor now” or whatever it is, or getting very drunk and just entering that bliss state, and that there's something wrong with trying to return to that bliss state, that it's somehow childish and and so on.

But I think that's wrong. I think that if there was a truth to be experienced, it is that truth—that basic state of phenomena. And and I think that there's a lot of evidence that not only is the universe heading toward that basic state phenomena (the idea that the entire universe is heading toward a universal heat death), which would be the total equalization of all energy, so that all energy is the same self, same meaning, undifferentiated meaning.

00:29:38:23 - 00:30:01:00

Daniel: Exactly.

Alex: The very state that you just described. And then, you know, if we take that second law of thermodynamics to be true, which is that the universe is headed toward equanimity, self sameness, and then we see—so is the world. If you've traveled, if you went to New York in the nineties and then you go now you're like, “Whoa, what happened to all the different little pockets?” What happened to all the difference? When I was in Edward Sharpe and we were just traveling everywhere, touring, I would go from one city to the other, and I couldn't tell the difference between one city and the other. And it happens more and more rapidly. It's almost exponential. Everything becomes P.F. Chang's.

Daniel: But maybe there's new distinctions forming. I mean, the culture is kind of overturning, you know.

Alex: Of course, there's there's always new distinctions. But despite new distinctions, it is two steps forward, only one step back.

So, yes, we create new distinctions, but we are headed toward a globalization. I mean, it's obvious, especially if you open the scope of history wide enough. We went from tribe to town to village to city to city, state to state to global entity.

Religion goes from a few set of beliefs to the abstraction of thought to conglomerate a diaspora of people who otherwise would not know each other and are suddenly unified in this abstraction of religion.

This is the basic story of the history of humanity, and it's also the basic story of the history of the cosmos.

Now, you know, the second law of thermodynamics may be proven to be wrong. Who knows? But what I just described is a is indisputable. So when we think about that, we see, okay, history is headed toward this sort of dissolution of difference. And yes, it's two steps forward, one step back. And yes, you can say there are new differences and new subdivisions. But nevertheless, we are headed increasingly in this direction.

And then we say, okay, if that's the case, how do we feel about it?

How do we feel about entering a state which is simultaneously the dissolution of phenomenological experience, a.k.a theoretically death, and the state of most bliss?

The state which Dzogchen describes, or you know, Trungpa-what's-his-name.

Daniel: Longchempa I love that guy. Here's just my favorite little story about him. Apparently once he was like speaking to his Western students in Boulder in this big auditorium. And he stopped his talk and he was like:

“You know, you probably all could be enlightened right now, but I really don't think you'd like it very much. You'd find it too cold and too spacious.”

Alex: Right, he's describing death as the death of difference and probably the dissolution of self.

Daniel: Yeah.

Alex: And so the question as to how we feel about this, I think is very important.

I just spoke to a

Tim Adalin

from Voicecraft about this yesterday and I'm actually going to post it today is that this fear of the nothingness of everything. We have this repulsion, this simultaneous attraction to it and repulsion from it, and negotiating that is, I think, the future of consciousness in a way, because what it effectively is negotiating your relationship between life and death, between the determinate states of “I know what this is, I have an environment, I have my self, I have my place in the world, I have my place in time”, and then the experience of having no self, no place in time, and no sense of what's going on except that everything's going on, which produces a sense of nothingness.

And so some of us react really viscerally against the dissolution of self. And those are the conservatives. And some of have a tendency toward it. And those are the liberals.

I'm using those terms (liberal/conservative) totally redefined in the context of this conversation. But to put it in another way, the ones that react really vehemently against it have more activity in the amygdala—fight flight and freeze, the fear center of the brain, and those of us who are coming toward it have a higher capacity for experiencing symmetries.

00:35:18:23 - 00:35:54:01

Daniel: And you think those are genetic lines or is it more something that develops in terms of how we are taught to focus as a young person?

Alex: No, no. They're genetic. And and I say that with a degree of certainty, but I believe they are genetic. There was a recent study that just came out which actually studied twins and siblings and found the very same thing that found differentiation among the twins and siblings, having experienced more or less the exact same environment, same education.

They the ones with more gray matter in the in the amygdala were more conservative and the ones with more gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex were more liberal* and they experienced the same basic environmental conditions and educational conditions. (*Correction, the test measured IQ and polygenic scores, not gray matter, finding that those siblings genetically predisposed to being smarter tended to also be more liberal).

Daniel: I mean that opens up so many questions of like how to deal with, you know, the social catastrophe that we're facing. But I think a lot about what you were just talking about before, the sort of inexorable tendency towards, I guess globalization. I mean, it sort of looks like we're inexorable heading for something like global dictatorship in some way, like total surveillance.

But there's like the Teilhard de Chardin idea of the noosphere, you know, maybe there's a dialectic between liberation and domination that somehow gets resolved in a new creative synthesis or something.

Alex: Yeah. And it may be a global self-dictatorship. You can imagine Woke, extrapolate it to the globe and and see that we can create self-police states, and that the arbiter of those laws and habits will probably be something that is automated like A.I., where the world operates itself kind of like an air conditioning unit. If you do something above a certain threshold, the AC kicks on and you go to jail or whatever. That we establish an automated sense of social equilibrium.

Daniel: Like China or something like that.

Alex: Yeah, exactly.

Daniel: But on the other hand, it hasn't happened yet, which is also interesting in the West, so that is intriguing. Like something is still holding out against it as the ultimate fate. You ever get into that Korean German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han?

Alex: A little bit. I've flipped through Psychopolitics.

Daniel: I think he overlaps with some of your thinking. So he talks a lot about how there's something very oppressive about the culture of perpetual self optimization. Entrepreneurship ideology where you're always supposed to be improving yourself. How do you become like maximum efficiency? I know you have a sort of different perspective, right? That you were sort of sharing before, that actually it's the inefficiencies that are where the problematizing lies.

Alex: Yeah. The optimized state is the most efficient state and again the most efficient state is the most automated state.

And so if we're talking about consciousness, the most optimized consciousness is the one that's basically no longer thinking.

Daniel: Yeah. And so I guess you could also sometimes think about how the brain basically must on some level be an outgrowth of the immune system, right? Like the immune system was developed to handle viral threats, bacterial threats. Then things got bigger and you needed something to handle sabertooth, tigers and snakes. And so on. You know, you only think when there's a problem, right? If there's no problem at all, you would have have no thoughts.

So consciousness is somehow, I guess inherently connected to having problems.

00:40:00:05 - 00:40:28:01

Alex: Well, that's what I would like to say. There's, Michael Levin and others who are really trying to create a concretized terminology where they're like, no, no, no. consciousness applies all the way down to protozoa and maybe a rock has a bit of consciousness, because anything that relationally is able to react is conscious.

But I think that is skipping over a very important semantic understanding of consciousness, which is that it is highly associated with awareness and and highly disassociated with automatic things like automaticity and thoughtlessness. How can you be conscious and thoughtless?

And so we either have to create a new term for the problematic, error-producing state, which would be something like exo-consciousness, or we decide that consciousness is when you're critically thinking about something, and otherwise you're in a state of subconsciousness most of the time.

Daniel: That was like Gurdjieff saying that most people are machines. Essentially they're just operating automatically, and he was trying to get them to… self remembering was his idea, to be continuously remembering as a way to develop I guess what he would say is a soul, right? The soul develops through suffering. I love a lot of good Geoff's ideas, actually, you know.

Alex: Yeah, I want to read that new book that

Layman Pascal

just put out on Gurdjief.

Daniel: Yeah. I haven't met with him personally yet. Gurdjieff thought that most people are not inherently born with a soul, some constituent element of ourselves that somehow is able to exist beyond death. And now maybe through like quantum physics, you know, Amit Goswami wrote a book called Physics of the Soul. We could be moving along in the world creating sort of quantum aggregates, right? And somehow these quantum aggregates remain kind of like stuck together even as they travel around the whole universe.

So even when we die, those aggregates still are connected and they sort of have impulses and momentums. Then they come back into a body to move the energy further. And the work that they have to do, according to Gurdjieff, is conscious labor and intentional suffering. So this could actually fit very well. A lot of these people speak about similar things, but it's somewhat different rhetorics and registers. It also becomes really hard to kind of recognize the kind of like junction points. But I think what you're talking about is actually quite similar to that.

I mean, I don't know where you stand on the, the soul or anything like that, but it's, also just a word, you know?

Alex: There's some quote, I can't remember what it is, but “you have two deaths. One is when you die and the other is when the last person that remembers you stops thinking about you”. And I think that there might be some truth to that, that the soul is developed in relation to one's awareness in the consciousness of others, and that there's a possibly a sort of abstract relation or existence of soul which transcends the body, but may be still supervene on and be tethered to a real, embodied people with real embodied consciousnesses having intermittent thoughts or awareness of you in their general apparatus.

I think that souls are these aggregate consciousness forms that are not fully substrate independent, but nevertheless—so long as there are people to think—exist independently of bodies.

Daniel: I mean, where do you then stands metaphysically? Like we've got, you know, materialism, we've got the analytic idealism, we've got the panpsychism. Because as an idealist and also big fan of Rudolf Steiner's ideas. I think it could be that reincarnation exists or even that maybe other subtler dimensions of reality. That there are types of afterlife experiences.

Alex: I mean I'm not against any of that, because even though we could say:

“Well there are these various vectors of, of emergence. Life is one of them. And you cannot reduce life to biology, you cannot reduce consciousness to biology. And therefore when you die, your consciousness cannot you cannot transcend the limits of life, the limit of death. And so you do not as you continue through that. There is an indeterminacy on the other side of which you would come out no longer you.”

But I don't think that that's necessarily the case.

I think that observers like us view death as death possibly because we're observers like us.

Possibly the delineation between life and death is another consequence of the constraints of human consciousness. And if we were a different type of being, we wouldn't see the delineation between life and death any more than we would see the delineation between steam and water.

We would see the continuation of it.

So I think a lot of it comes down to the constraints of observers like us. And so we have to almost talk in two baskets. One is the basket in which we're relegated to observers like us, which is more of a scientific basket, and the other is the metaphysical basket where we're like, “but what if we weren't observers like us and we problematize the science”, you know?

So. So and I think both are totally feasible. I mean, there's so much we don't know. And and yet one of the great things I mean, you know, one of the things I think is not looked at in the science of consciousness studies is when someone like Donald Hofmann will be like, “But show me the science that shows where the quality is happening, where the color pink is actually occurring. Show me science. You can't. And therefore there is no, you know, like you're wrong” and so on.

And yet the very absence of the data is the data, in my view.

Like I said earlier, if we're tracking along a computation and then very suddenly the computation goes indeterminate, that's because there's too much data.

It's not because the data has actually disappeared, it's because the data has increased so that it breaks the computer and the experience is one of statistical absence.

I think what's happening here is that we're confusing the absence for an actual negativity when the absence is actually an excess.

And I think that the state of pure consciousness is just that—it is in excess of your ability to schematize and it therefore it feels like nothingness. And I think we have to re-approach the math, science, all of it, to understand that whenever we have singularities or things that we would otherwise throw out as unquantifiable, those things are not to be discarded as bad math. They're to be investigated and included, just like we need to include subjectivity itself in science.

Have you looked at Jeffrey Kripal’s work at all?

Alex: No.

Daniel: He’s teaching in our seminar. Super cool. He wrote a book called The Flip and another called Authors of the Impossible. Both of them really, really interesting. But he's an academic who verified the paranormal or the supernatural, tried to create better categories for them, sort of understand how they evolved as categories of understanding that were suppressed by the mainstream and so on. But I think you'd be interested in his work.

Actually, I wanted to go back to… I'm still kind of mulling on what for me is a sort of new idea about the different gray matter of the conservatives. I’m just really curious about that. I mean, it's creepy. But also, I wonder if I think it's true because it's like societies as a whole will veer being much more liberal to much more conservative. You know, like the US in the sixties was the Great Society and, I don't know, maybe it was always like 5050. But, look at European societies, Scandinavian cultures. I mean, is that just the question of inheritance that they somehow have this more evolutionary oriented gray matter? Or is it more just something that habit creates and reinforces, you know?

Alex: Yeah, well, I want to I want to problematize what I said. So as a liberal, I'd be like, “ha ha ha. The conservative is less evolutionary adapted and the liberal is more evolved” and so on.

But it's quite possible that progressivism is maladaptive given classic environmental constraints, classic environmental pressures.

So when we think about, you know, being stark naked in the middle of the tundra and then we think about progressivism, we we immediately can probably grok that being super progressive in a classically Neanderthal state is probably a bad idea.

You probably want a strong leader. You probably want to have high delineations of hierarchy. You probably want things to move and operate much like the military. When shit is hitting the fan, you probably don't want to be going on and on about, you know, your rights as a trans person. There's no time, you know what I mean?

Things are too fucked up and survival is happening.

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, as society becomes more complex and we're comfortable and more people have more access to a life that they're separate from survival requirements or privations, then yeah, then these other qualities and compassionate tendencies have have the capacity to emerge.

Alex: They have the capacity to emerge. But what's interesting from an evolutionary standpoint is that is the question as to whether the whether compassion for others—the erasure of xenophobia-type compassion, abstract compassion—whether abstract compassion is actually adaptive, because from an environmental view, can argue one way or the other.

You can say, well, in the context of globalism, abstract compassion is very adaptive because it mitigates existential risk, it mitigates the possibility of the hydrogen bombs going off and everybody killing each other by having a compassion for people.

So there is an argument that that it is adaptive. But for a lot of people like

Robin Hanson

, who writes a lot about these topics with regard to adaptivity, there is an argument that none of this stuff is adaptive and it's all maladaptive. That the only reason we can't tell it's maladaptive is because we've alleviated environmental pressures, and by becoming so comfortable we are able to build up structures of society that are actually really maladaptive given classic environmental pressures. But because we have removed those classic environmental pressures, we're able to sort of exist in a suspension of evolutionary constraints and pressures.

Daniel: Which sounds like a good thing in my book.

Alex: It probably it probably is a good thing. But because I'm always interested in problematizing my own ideology, I think it's an interesting argument against myself.

But I'd like to go back to one of the things that immediately hit me when I was thinking about the gray matter in the anterior cingulate cortex for the progressive, the more gray matter in the amygdala for the conservative, and the conservative being full of more fear and the liberal being full of more capacity for pattern matching, I'm thinking about two things:

One is—they also did a study at Yale where they tried to see if they could make conservatives temporarily liberal by giving them meditations that would make them feel safe, that would alleviate some of the activity of the amygdala temporarily, and see if when they alleviate the activity of the amygdala, would the participants who claim to be conservative temporarily express themselves in a more liberal way.

Daniel: That's interesting. That's also the theoretical promise of psychedelia, right? MDMA. It's been very interesting watching that psychedelic movement now where it's so focused on individual healing. Giving ketamine or MDMA to the to the Iraq warrior, so they can send them back out into the battlefield, you know. But given those studies… how to deal with them, how to get them to agree or I wonder if the opposite works. If you give people other meditations, if you make them more afraid.

Alex: You know, post-9-11. Everyone is conservative right. Suddenly we're like, “yay imperialism, go attack”. A lot of people that were erstwhile liberals were suddenly temporarily conservatives.

Daniel: But anyway, you're thinking about?

Alex: Okay, I have this conservative I'm dealing with—I have a whole swath of them—and I really want them to agree to more liberal policies. I want them to stop cock blocking my progressive values. What do I do? Well, maybe I need to make them feel more safe because when they feel more safe, they're more inclined to act more liberally. So what would be the most progressive tact I could take? To build a wall? Maybe I need to build a wall. Maybe I need to make them feel more more safe, so that they they'll be more inclined to act progressively.

Now, what are the problems with building a wall? Well, the liberal would say “the wall would do nothing. It would be purely symbolic”. Well, jeez, that sounds perfect. It would literally do nothing, only be symbolic, perfect. Would that not be then the perfect progressive gambit?

I guess what I'm saying is, when you're dealing with a kid who's afraid of the dark and they’ve got more activity in their amygdala and they're not evolved yet in their in their own consciousness to understand that it's just the lights going off—the lights will come back on, that the lights going off doesn't mean there's now a boogeyman in the corner—well, what do you do? You put up a nightlight. You do some measure which gives them a sense of safety, and you gradually bring them into the light, or in this case, the darkness.

Now, why not do the same thing with the conservatives?

Why not treat the conservative as our little sibling and bring them slowly into the into the safety, from which they would act more progressive?

I like this idea because I think that it would severely challenge progressive orthodoxy in a way that I think is potentially very important.

It would severely offend the conservatives because I'm basically saying conservatives are less evolved and like children. But, you know, just speaking in terms of the activity of their brains, that's what's going on. And they think they're the big guys in the in the big the big pants. But really, they're just more afraid.

Now, on the flip side, again, I talked about like what happens when you have a fetishization of progressivism, when that progressive impulse to pattern match is unchecked by the amygdala. Well then you have another problem, which is you're availing yourself to all sorts of genuine dangers that you shouldn't be.

Because you know what? You're not exactly the same as a muslim terrorist.

You shouldn't necessarily have all the empathy in the world and think that they can be completely changed by your overtures. That is probably naive and you probably need some some aspect of amygdala kicking in to let you know that your options are flight freeze and flight.

So there is an interplay. But all that to say that if you're a progressive with a balanced brain, you might want to treat the conservative in the way that that study did and try and actually make them feel safer.

If you truly care about things changing. If you only care about changing things, then yeah, go on and keep your adversary nice and propped up. But if you care about things changing, you would you would seek to make the conservative more liberal.

Daniel: One idea I'm really intrigued with is cognitive capitalism and how it's actually changing consciousness and changing the brain in many, many different ways. One example that he gave me, which really stuck with me and kind of hurts me actually—he was telling me that apparently the brains of children, the hippocampus which handles like spatial memory or navigation, tends to develop and reach its full flourishing age of like ten and sixteen.

So we have all these kids of smartphones starting the age of nine, ten, get lost. You should go out to the forest, you should be with your friends, you get lost, then find your way back. That’s that rock, that’s that stream, and then develop this capacity for spatial navigation. And that's also very connected to memory.

So we've essentially taken a generation and we've had them outsource their hippocampus to the Internet, to the GPS in a way that's actually impacting how their brain permanently functions.

So we take these things that we all used to do for ourselves and we turn them into markets. That's how because capitalism is driven, by underlying insecurity and debt. So it has to keep creating new markets to keep monetizing stuff. But now we're out of external markets because we've globalized the whole world.

So the new market is the internal market and how you take aspects of our cognitive functioning and outsource them permanently to the Internet and make people more and more impaired. So for instance, like with AI, instead of writing a paper about William Blake and Shakespeare, you'll be like, Chatbot, write me a first draft of a paper.

I'm finding this, like, very, very terrifying, actually. What do you think of this whole, you know, thought construct, which for me is one of the inspirations for doing this course, just get this idea more anchored. What do you think about the sort of evolution of consciousness over the last decades in relationship to technology and social media and now artificial intelligence?

01:04:33:16 - 01:05:14:20

Alex: Well, my first thought is to problematize what you said in the context of our discussion about the phenomenological base state. So, if just as a thought experiment, I offload all of my cognitive functioning to the cloud, I am left with nothingness.

Is that good?

I mean, I'm told that that's the basic phenomenological state I'm supposed to attempt to aspire to if I'm going to engage with meditation.

Daniel: I have that thought also. I've gone down that rabbit hole.

Alex: I have a problem that I always call drunk or monk. And it's “how do you tell the difference?” And then how do you explain why they're different? The drunk is in a state of indeterminacy. The monk is in a state of indeterminacy. How are they qualitatively different? And I think you're right, that there are stages of zero, effectively. If we're to say both of them are in a state of internal non-dynamic zero-ness.

There are different kinds of zero and and not only do they have different qualities, they have different external effects. So, you know, the person in the zone, like, say, Michael Jordan, when he's at his peak in the zone, the ball is just an extension of him. He's no longer thinking—he's in the Monk state—and you compare him to a drunk.

They may be identical because they're both in a state of indeterminacy. Neither can tell the difference between themselves and the ball—but externally one is hyperdynamic and the other is just, you know, nondynamical.

And so the monk, who continues to enter new levels of indeterminacy, will acquire external capacities that continue to differentiate him from the drunk.

So usually the answer to the drunk or monk question is very simple because you can simply tell the difference. You can simply tell the difference by experiencing them, even if they're doing the exact same thing.

But yeah, I think that the offloading of our capacity, offloading of our memory, offloading of our sense of time and space, our direction, I've certainly suffered from that myself. I used to have supreme direction and I've basically offloaded it to GPS and it's sad for me. I can only talk about how it feels. It feels sad. And yet if we look at the idea of the global brain or we look at the idea of a singularity, you're always going to look at it from two sides.

A singularity always entails the loss of the determinate in favor of a unified, indeterminate.

So you and I are different. And we're experiencing our different capacities and all of a sudden they all glom into a singularity. And at that point, the singularity is defined by an internal unity, which means an internal indeterminacy.

So I've lost all my different capacities in favor of a singular capacity. And that's why transformation is always a loss of some kind.

And so I hesitate to say that it's necessarily a bad thing. I can say that it makes me feel sad.

Daniel: In my book 2012, I tried critique this concept of the singularity because first of all, it's a very masculine kind of idea. In a weird way. It's like everything is moving towards this point, you know, kind of like male masturbation moves towards the ejaculate of moment. And that actually we should think about ourselves moving towards a multiplicity, as something more beautiful.

But I also wanted to say that one of the speakers we have in the course is this guy, Tom Roberts, who wrote a book that I really love called The Psychedelic Future of the Minds. And his idea in that book was once again, instead of a technological singularity, what if we were actually thinking about the infinite range of body mind states and how they actually have different state-specific knowledge, state-specific capacities, even like superhuman capacities as we see like masters of Qigong, and we actually made that the focus of kind of evolutionary progress going forward.

Just seems much more interesting than the technologic singularity or this idea of like unifying in the sort of blandness in a way. I mean, a neurological singularity, a consciousness singularity, using everything we've been learning about the brain, but using it to amplify our capacities in positive ways, and also explore the edge states of consciousness. Like Joseph Chilton, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg. He documented a period in his life where after a grief over a relationship, he had superhuman abilities for a while. Then he found all these cases where a mother who's child is caught under a car literally pulls the car off the child like, you know, 2000 pounds of metal.

So that means that we have that capacity. We just don't know how to access it. And what if stuff like that actually became the focus of our investigation rather than offloading our brains to computers.

Alex: Sure. But I don't think that the problem of self loss is going to be you know—that is always going to be something we forfeit.

We're always going to forfeit determinate aspects of ourselves in order to transcend the determinate aspects of ourselves.

So that if we have a neuro-singularity, we're going to lose neuro-particularity. There's always going to be sort of the loss of the plurality of self in favor of a singularity of self, whether that is a global brain singularity is like

Cadell Last

says, or if it's a singularity within yourself where all of all aspects of the brain are firing at once and you lose the particularities of the experience of being this and that, of being a multiplicity.

But that's not to say that then a new dialectics between a singularity—which is an aggregate glom of a previous multiplicity—does not now engage as a singularity with other singularities, which, as a system, is describable as another multiplicity.

And so that's sort of the game that we're playing, is the the loss of multiplicity in favor of singularity, which then engages in a relationship with other singularities which themselves are aggregates of a previous multiplicity.

So, you know, I mean that's how Alex is interacting with Daniel, you know the unified Alex with the unified Daniel. Meanwhile I have 35 billion alien microbes in my body and I'm comprised of this multiplicity that I'm not, on a moment to moment basis, aware of.

They've sort of aggregated into this (me) while I'm talking to you.

When I enter a zone, if I'm really in the zone, I don't even know who I am when I'm talking to you, when I'm really doing well and I'm speaking and it's just coming. I'm not thinking about the words, this is rolling. I don't even know where I am when I'm speaking. I mean, that's when I'm doing good.

So this idea of self loss and the idea of offloading, it's funny because phenomenologically they may be sort of identical. It's hard to know, you know. But I think I think that they probably are qualitatively different.

Just being selfish for a moment, it's like, well, what experience do we want to have while we're embodied? Especially if you take the idea of sort of like a panpsychism or protopanpsychism or spiritualism—if I am a spiritual being having a physical experience, well, why not have the physical experience?

Why am I constantly trying to make the physical experience the spiritual experience?

And that's something that I've wondered quite a lot in terms of, you know, pain mitigation and these sorts of things, like why am I mitigating pain? How does Buddhism make any sense—if I am here to have a physical experience, shouldn't I experience the things that are physical?

Daniel: Yeah, I mean, I think the word spiritual trips us up a lot. It's kind of a useless, really annoying word, actually. But I think if you visit the Tibetan Buddhists, they're like super earthy people, slapping each other and laughing and like rolling on the ground or whatever. Tibetan Buddhism totally makes sense for them. But for us, it kind of like pushes us in the wrong direction. Often, you see people who get all into like Tibetan Buddhism and they become very haughty and kind of like distant in a way.

That's why I actually my thing right now is this Temple art school, which is sort of Osho neo-tantra, and it's two different workshops with them. Going more into feeling. That's my life journey in my near future. I want to go more into feeling. I mean, I did the first one and all the people were like, sobbing and crying all the time. Fuck, I could not fucking cry to save my life. The second one, which I just did, I finally fucking opened the channel through a very intimate transmission during a kind of sacred sexual spot massage or whatever you want to call it. I just finally broke through and was, like, weeping. And now I feel like I have the fullness of my emotional body back after.

Alex: I love somatic. Somatic, everything is just that's where it's at.

Daniel: So that's another aspect of this is like consciousness smudges and it's like, what about the body? Where's the, where's consciousness in the body?

But this idea of getting away from the singularity idea, let's, let's think about multiplicity, think about local cultures, you know, like morphogenetic fields, like when you visit a culture like the Kogi and they actually have like, magic like you experience.

And I experience that, and it happens because as humans, if the universe is consciousness, which I think it is, we are conduits of that consciousness. And when we create cultures, when we are in reciprocal relationship with local environments, we create, we have more photogenic fields that actually allow for different things to happen.

Alex: Absolutely. But I think that those are still, whether or not we want to use the word singularity, singularities of sorts. They they are saturations that occur within constraints, and they occur through decades, millennia of relational interactions. So just like the mantra doesn't work upon the first incantation and you have to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and it's determinate, it's determinate, it's the words, the words…. And then, upon a certain quantitative threshold, suddenly it becomes indeterminate. Suddenly the mantra works. It's the same with these tribes.

If you've been in a band and you're jamming, jamming. It's okay, it's okay, it's okay. Then all of a sudden you enter a morphic resonance and suddenly the saturation has occurred. That is basically the singularity—that is the the effect where you have these determinate moments, but in aggregate, upon suddenly some yet to be determined quantitative threshold, a new qualitative shift occurs, and that suddenly unifies you.

And that is basically a singularity, my view. But it can occur locally much easier and more readily that it can then it can occur globally, but there's nothing to say it can't also occur globally.

Daniel: I guess part of our problem right now is that we don't have a good mythological construct for where humanity goes that's super awesome. The technology is not really taking us anywhere super awesome. Like this idea of, like, you know, losing our ability to spatially navigates, kind of becoming the sort of amoebic, kind of like in some ways it's a little bit like this undifferentiated Zen state, but it's kind of very immature. That's a very unpleasant future for humanity.

I was trying to look for this Jakob Boehm quote about how god’s life is play, you know? So basically the existence of humanity is creativity in play. And if we were to allow ourselves to recognize the preciousness of like local singularities, I would call them are local cultures, these local weaves of more energetic fields, how fascinating a future for us, where we recognize that we have this ability and we can form these local aggregates and build these singularities, whether it's like sexual utopias or psychic capacities or, you know, weaving new things into being. Then suddenly we're like opening up a whole different landscape for where humanity could go in the future.

Alex: So I have to pick up my kid here in a second, but I totally agree. I totally agree with that. But I have experience with those singularities, those moments of of aggregation of an accretion on Zoom! So the extent to which they need to be physically local may be overstated.
Maybe, you know, like a an artifact of sort of romance.

Daniel: Yeah, it's both.

Alex: You know, if we can get there without going full blown fundamentalist, that would be great. Because the problem is, once you create these little groups, then suddenly you want to hold on to them and you want to make sure that they sustain. And in order to sustain themselves, you've got to be xenophobic. You've got a gatekeeper and so on and so forth. And then suddenly you are essentially living your life in fear of dissolution. And that can be problematic too.

Daniel: I love that because normally I'm the pessimist in the room. And right now, I’m the utopian optimist, you're the pessimist.

Alex: Everything you write right about is so full of optimism.

Daniel: Thank you. Yeah, I feel like a pessimist, and I do feel like a pessimist. But I'm also just like, being cautious.

Alex: I always like seeing both sides of the coin because it's otherwise I'm going have to run into the other side of the coin after, you know, down the street. And I'd rather just do it right away.

Daniel: Well, listen, we've been ranting on for almost a couple of hours now. It has been beautiful. Nice to just like I feel like, yeah, we wove in a little more of a feel.

Alex: Yeah, it's been really good. Great conversation, and I'm really looking forward to this.

Daniel: The seminar series?

Alex: Yeah.

Daniel: Yeah. Maybe I'll have to visit in New Orleans and say hello to you there.

Alex: Yeah, you should.