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The "What is Money?" Show
WiM060 - The Vervaeke Series | Episode 7 | Religion and Other Sacred Canopies
01:15:19
John Vervaeke joins me for a deep conversation exploring his work as a cognitive scientist and his YouTube lecture series "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis."
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- [00:00]
Robert Reedlove
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- [01:27]
Jordan Hall
What I'm coming to is a conclusion that while distributed cognition is more powerful and therefore has more powerful capacities for self correction, it also has tremendous abilities because of creating very powerful and widely permeating self deception. Precisely because I think even self, even distributed cognition faces combinatorial explosion faces the frame problem. Just because it's larger and more powerful and more self correcting doesn't mean it's free from any of those fundamental issues that I talk about in my work. So what are your thoughts on that? How do you respond to that? Is that a fair question to bring up first of all?
- [02:15]
Robert Reedlove
Absolutely, completely. And I think many great thinkers are talking about this point. There's a great I'm just reminded of this episode with Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel, the first episode of the Portal. They start going into the pervasive institutional rot since the early 1970s, which I think might be related to this. But again I draw the point that we went off the gold standard in the 70s. So I think there is a connection there. I don't have as deep knowledge, definitely not as you of academia. I've never been on, I've only gone through as a student. I've never been on the other side of the table. But my intuition about this at least is that this distortion of incentives perhaps to pursue, like you said, new scientific ideas versus disconfirmation. Right. And Versus, I guess, interconnecting older ideas.
- [03:23]
Jordan Hall
Yes, yes.
- [03:23]
Robert Reedlove
I would just intuit, again, I don't know anything about this, that this is perhaps somehow related to the funding mechanisms that these individuals are pursuing when they publish these papers. Are they doing it with the aim of getting grants or funding of some kind?
- [03:39]
Jordan Hall
There is, and I did say that I didn't want to identify with that. But you're right to correct me and say that I was trying to talk about something other than financial corruption. However, I probably went too far that the funding process is definitely a factor. The problem with the funding process is it also faces the frame problem, which is if we're genuinely doing science, and this is why it's not a deductive process, we have to be. We don't know where it's going to go. Right, right. Because we know where it's going to go. We're not doing science. That's one of the really clear rules in my mind. Right, right, right. And so trying to fund this stuff, like, again, I hesitate to put myself in a position of judgment of people are doing this. So certain policies have arisen for funding that try to balance between stability and plasticity. And I think they originally were functioning, but again, somehow they get disc. Decoupled. And this is my concern. My concern is any system is going to get decoupled from its environment over time. Right?
- [05:00]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. Okay. So the other thought I had about, so decoupling from its environment, I guess you could say this is the agency decoupling from the arena to some extent.
- [05:13]
Jordan Hall
Yeah.
- [05:13]
Robert Reedlove
And then there's a correction.
- [05:15]
Jordan Hall
Yeah, there can be. And the corrections. Right. So let the Bronze Age collapse. There's several theories about it. One is, you know, general systems collapse, a complex system. I'm not so sure of that. But a very interesting theory, one that I think actually has more archaeological evidence going forth than Klein is Drew's theory. And Drew's theory was you have, you have these Bronze Age empires and they have, they've been existence literally for millennia. Right. And there's been stressors all along. There's been drought and flood and all kinds of stressors. And there seems to have been a set of stressors around 1200 BCE, but the evidence seems to be that something there was a technological change and you dropped it into this complex international network and the whole thing just became unglued. And when you say it, it sounds like it can't be that. But here's his proposal. What happens is you get the institutionalization in the way we've talked about it of warfare. Chariot warfare, right. And chariot warfare is dominant during the Bronze Age. It becomes progressively dominant. And you see the Egyptian Empire, the greatest empire of the age, because what it's done is they have just. They have worked the chariot into, like, probably its optimal form, right? And chariots aren't tanks. You don't ride the chariot into the infantry. Chariots are archery platforms. So they're designed to give you. You can move your archers around very fast, get them close, pull them away from danger, and that is what gives them their power. So they're tremendous that way. Now, what Drewes argues is what you see is after the Bronze Age collapse, chariot warfare is gone. People keep chariots around, but they don't quite know what to do with them. The Romans used them for sort of in the circus Homer's writing about, right. The Bronze Age world, it's filled with chariots. He doesn't know after the Bronze Age collapse, what you do with the chariot. He has, like, Ajax and other people ride up to battle in the chariot. You can see this in the movie Troy. And then they get out of the chariot and they go and fight on foot, right? And he said there's this huge change. And he says, you can see all this evidence that it wasn't the invention of iron, per se. The Hittites are using iron tools. But what happened with iron is a kind of. You could make armor more available and a new kind of armor and a new kind of sword come in. And what that does is it allows infantry to take out the chariots like that.
- [07:56]
Robert Reedlove
Interesting.
- [07:57]
Jordan Hall
And overnight, chariots, which had become the institutional. The institutionalization of how military power is, is wielded in the Bronze Age, it is instantly, instantly made obsolete. And then the whole thing just collapses. The whole system just unravels because there's as much evidence, the idea that there's the sea people and they invade, that's pretty much disconfirmed by everybody who's doing work on it, right? There's lots of evidence that the cities were being destroyed by uprisings within, rather than invasions without. Because the aristocracy couldn't hold onto power anymore because it lost, to use one of your phrases, it lost the monopoly on violence, right? Because the main advantage, which is you had to be an aristocrat to own a chariot, right? General Joe Guy can't do that. But if General Joe could buy some cheap, relatively cheap, Iron Age armor and get a bunch of his buddies together, and instead of running away from you, they actually run towards your chariot and kill your horse, and it's gone.
- [09:07]
Robert Reedlove
Go ahead.
- [09:08]
Jordan Hall
Well, that hopefully that was at least independently historically interesting. But the point I'm trying to make.
- [09:13]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah, right.
- [09:14]
Jordan Hall
You have this very complex. You have literally not just civilization, you have civilizations and they are meta network together vast trade empires. Right. And it's this massively self correcting system and it's, you know, it's been able to adapt for thousands of years and then you get, it's like, it's like the asteroid. You get this potentially, if Drew's is right, you get this one unforeseeable change and then the whole thing falls apart.
- [09:42]
Robert Reedlove
Yes, See that's, that's what I would like to share a comparable historical account actually. So this, this is covered deeply. I've mentioned this book to you before. I think the sovereign individual. They talk about the economics of violence being one of the main driving forces, what they call a mega political variable that shapes human civilization effectively. So our ability to project force across distance is what allows us to project our willpower on one another and on the world at large. And so they share the tale of the simple invention of the stirrup, actually.
- [10:24]
Jordan Hall
Yes, yes.
- [10:25]
Robert Reedlove
That allowed the, the heavily armed knight to mount a horse. Once a heavily armed knight could mount a horse, all of a sudden he's an army of one on the countryside. You know, 50 peasants can't do anything about an armed knight. So this lead, this like contributes to the rise of feudalism actually these armed knights. And back to the cost element, the equivalent I think they say in the book is like this is like a $100,000 outfit to get the armor and the battle horse. So you know, 0.01% of the population can afford it or whatever. So that portion of the population comes to dominate the rest of the world. That's feudalism. What happens, the invention of gunpowder. All of a sudden these peasants can take out a knight at 200 yards, no problem. Feudalism collapses, the chivalric code collapses and then the church sort of brings peace and then it later suffers its own disruption with the printing press. So this economics of violence I think is very key to how we organize ourselves in addition to the systemization of money and social institutions. So yeah, I just wanted to share that.
- [11:38]
Jordan Hall
No, that's an excellent example. And then you, I mean, and that comes to fruition with Napoleon. Napoleon is the person who first figures out you can mass citizens together with guns and they can overwhelm any aristocratic army and then he just destroys the order of Europe. So I think that's. Yeah, I think that's. Well Said so the over point, the point I want to make is I want to come, I guess I'm arguing to come to some judicial, judicious, not judicial judicious appreciation of both the power of these complex systems. But how that seems to correlate with a kind of fragility that is masked by their power. Yes, your example is just as good as my example for showing that. Here's this comp. And you know that the. The feudalism spread. It's multinational network. It gets, you know, all the. And then. Right, right. Yes, right, right.
- [12:49]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah. The fragility seems to me to be related to the. It's very pragmatic and technological. Right. It's like how effective is this technology at influencing or corralling or controlling human behavior? And a lot of that does come down to the logic of violence. Like can I impose my willpower over you? And this is based on again, what I argue is the viability of property, which again, if we understand property properly, it's controlling the time of others. Right. The time and the things they spend their time in creating effectively. So in that same lens, and this ties back into the broader thesis of Bitcoin is that it's the ultimate defender's advantage. It's an informational property. Right. Independent of the monopoly on violence. Very high cost to try to steal it. And you can't even really steal it if you custody it properly. You can't even torture me and get my bitcoin because it's distributed in a multi signature schema. I can't unlock it. It's just infinite number of ways to custody the asset that make it resistant to theft. So all of a sudden violence is just not profitable in a bitcoinized world. Is a theory. I'm wondering how to parse that out a little bit. There is this economics of violence that shapes the world. But then there's also the money system largely has to do with shaping the world.
- [14:22]
Jordan Hall
But I'm trying to put on a third variable. There's a sense in which the world can. There's a difference between problem solving and problem finding. In fact, creativity is usually understood as you use insight machinery not to solve problems, but to find problems. The world has the capacity to throw up a problem that nobody has. Like, you know, you've got iron, allows for new armor, which. Right. Gunpowder. Right.
- [14:58]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah.
- [14:59]
Jordan Hall
You see what I'm saying that these. Right. There's a sense in which the world is. It's. I'm trying not to anthropomorphize the world too Much. And language is really bedeviling me here. But we can't, like the world is constantly going to throw up problems that are not foreseeable by the cultural cognitive grammar of a particular distributed cognitive system.
- [15:31]
Robert Reedlove
From outside the frame.
- [15:33]
Jordan Hall
Right. And that's what I was trying to get at loosely, with the analogy of the asteroid hitting. You know, the dinosaurs have been in existence for hundreds of millions of years. You have these complex ecosystem and it's managing all kinds of problems. And then here's a problem it can't write in and boom. Right, that kind of thing.
- [15:50]
Robert Reedlove
No, it's an excellent point. And the other thing that keeps coming to mind here, I hate to be so singularly focused on the money and economic side, but it's just what I think about a lot. I can't help but see, you know, language is a frame. Right? It's one frame we're using to frame up and understand the world. But, you know, as the old saying goes, talk is cheap in a way. I think money is at least as, as important of a frame as language.
- [16:28]
Jordan Hall
Well, I agree, I agree with you. And so I don't know if we've talked about this before. You know, we faced an extinction event somewhere between 100,000, 70,000 BCE in Africa, might have been due to a super volcanic. It's not clear. Right. Matt Rossanto has done some of the excellent work on this and it looks like, and I think this is to strengthen your point and make it very deep. The thing that saved us from extinction, which we hadn't done before, was we created broad trading networks.
- [16:56]
Robert Reedlove
Yes, right.
- [16:57]
Jordan Hall
And that gave us a distributed cognition, a resiliency, because you're not only trading goods, right, you're trading ideas. And that was the adaptive response and that allowed us to basically get through. So I totally think you're saying something like important that insofar as money is the hybrid lubricant, we're now just throwing our ontologies together or trading it is plugged into one of our deepest kinds of adaptivity. I'm not denying that. I'm not denying. In fact, I'm trying to strengthen your argument for you.
- [17:34]
Robert Reedlove
Right, thank you.
- [17:36]
Jordan Hall
But what I'm trying to get at is I'm trying to get at an understanding of here's, here's. I want to understand and maybe you don't, and that's fine. But this is where my. I really want to understand the capacities for very complex, highly adaptive, intelligent systems like our brain to fall into self deception. And I want to understand the same thing at the level of distributed cognition, how highly complex, highly self correcting, highly adaptive systems can nevertheless fall prey to self deception because of the fact that they still also face combinatorial explosion frame problem.
- [18:30]
Robert Reedlove
Right.
- [18:31]
Jordan Hall
They K2 events that can't possibly be predicted within the proceduralized machinery of the institutions, et cetera.
- [18:38]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. Okay, just throwing something out. So is it the self deception is a matter of this complex system selecting a frame and then performing reciprocal narrowing into that frame?
- [18:54]
Jordan Hall
Yes, yes.
- [18:55]
Robert Reedlove
And then at some point, perhaps it discovers its misfitness of the frame to reality or the arena.
- [19:03]
Jordan Hall
Yes.
- [19:04]
Robert Reedlove
And then there's a cataclysm of some kind. Right. Like I'm thinking of the nine dot problem again. Like you're staring at this thing, you're framing it, you're. And then you're like, oh shit, I need to zoom out and see that the line needs to be longer.
- [19:18]
Jordan Hall
Cause I. Here's my concern, and this goes to discussions I have with Jordan Hall. The information. The cyber information environment that has been part of our framing of how we're trying to solve our problem. Right. Is itself becoming so it's complexifying and it's not and it's accelerating the rate of this. So, right. What happens in what's called general system collapse is you've got a system and here's an unexpected problem. So it complexifies. Here's an. And then what happens is the system gets so complex that managing the internal environment of the system is as much of a problem as responding to the external environment with the system. That's the idea of what's happening in the Western Roman Empire. Right. And so I think Jordan hall and other people are right, is we're facing a new problem that our civilization has not wrestled with before. And I think this sometimes gets mythologized by people and the fears of AI. I think that's part. It's a symbol of this rather than being the actual issue, which is it's clear that, for example, social media, which arises for all kinds of prosaic reasons of self interest and communication, it seems completely reasonable to do this. It's having a dramatically deleterious effect on people. Massive depression, increasing anxiety, and we're running this terrific unexplored or unreflected social experiment on human biology. And so what I'm trying to show is this is becoming as much of a problem as any problem that it is capable of solving.
- [21:24]
Robert Reedlove
Do you think this may be an aside, but do you think there is an equivalent benefit to social media? Like for instance, you and I connected via social media. Most of my work and ideas and connections occur through social media. How do you look at the, I guess, cost benefit equation of that?
- [21:44]
Jordan Hall
I don't. I mean, I do. First of all, I think it would be ridiculously false to claim there aren't benefits because it would be a performative contradiction.
- [21:52]
Robert Reedlove
Right, right.
- [21:53]
Jordan Hall
Right. Now that's how I do my series.
- [21:55]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah.
- [21:56]
Jordan Hall
And I was actually surprised because. Because when I was originally doing this series, a lot of people said nobody's going to stay in for an hour and then 50 hours and. And that turned out to be wrong. People were. But I don't know. And the point I'm saying is nobody does. We're not. And I think this is a problem that we should be reflecting on because if Jordan hall and Daniel Schmachtenberger and other people in that community are right, this acceleration of technology, psychotechnology and cyber technology that's happening right now is a new kind of problem that our existing institutions are not set up to address. And that concerns me because I think that problem, the meta crisis of environment and other stuff and the meaning crisis are all bound up together in a really toxic and complicated way. I've taken this completely in a direction we would.
- [23:12]
Robert Reedlove
No, no, no, I really appreciate it. And it's, you know, kind of forcing me to broaden my own thinking about the topic, it seems to me, and I don't, again, don't have the level of expertise you have. But if the, what I call, what the Austrians call the free market, right, which is essentially everyone exchanging voluntarily, so a form of free exchange without coercion that that will necessarily produce over time, it may make errors, it may adopt the wrong frame and whatnot, but over time it will optimally self correct better than any other system that we can come up with. Because you're getting by definition the input from everyone, right? Everyone is exchanging voluntarily. When we exchange voluntarily. This is an important point too, in Austrian economics. That is how we create value. So every time you and I trade, that means you value what I have more than what you have. You value, hey, I've got apples, you've got oranges. I value oranges above apples and you do the reverse. And that's how we trade. So when we complete the trade, at least in our minds, we are both better off, we both believe we're better off, otherwise we wouldn't trade. And this is important, if we thought they were equal, we wouldn't trade. What's the point? Why incur the transaction cost? So value in that sense is created through voluntary exchange. And so the more you maximize voluntary exchange and minimize coercion, the better outcomes you have overall. So. So at a systemic level, and I think that is, I mean, in my mind, that's the best way to clear these errors. Like you're still going to make them. You know, humanity is going to invent something that doesn't work, or a nuclear power plant is going to blow up. We're going to learn from it. But when you start to impose coercion or these institutions, even that bottleneck, that information flow, like the central bank, I would say, is a huge bottleneck on information flow. Academia is a bottleneck on information flow. And I'm not saying it's with bad intent, like they served a purpose originally, but maybe we've just kind of outgrown that original purpose and so now it becomes more of a hindrance. I'm reminded here of Nietzsche where he says, like, you have to be a slave before you know how to be free. Right. Like, we had to be subservient to some institutional form before we could overcome it or transcend it.
- [25:48]
Jordan Hall
So I guess my. I think that if I understand you, I mean, when you say voluntary, you also mean. Right. The Habermas idea of voluntary. Right. Like that.
- [26:03]
Robert Reedlove
What is that?
- [26:05]
Jordan Hall
Well, Habermas, you know, he tried to work out kind of a universal ethics given the necessary requirements for communication. Like, Right. So if people are degrading the signal because they're lying or defrauding or they're misrepresenting. Right. Like there's all kinds of things which actually undermine the capacity for people to make informed choice or decision. And so he's trying to get at. He was doing it from the pragmatics of communication. So. Right. Although you can individually lie to me, if you were to just always lie, people are just going to stop communicating with you. Right. In fact, if you mostly lie, people are going to stop communicating with you, et cetera. And then you try and figure out, well, what, what, what. What cultural norms should we pursue such that we can optimize or at least enhance, maybe optimize is too strong, enhance the capacity for the best possible communication, not the best content, but the best possible process of communication. So I'm just. What I'm saying is, when I hear you saying voluntary, you don't just mean that people are choosing without political coercion. It's also that they're not being forced to choose within a system. Right. Where there's lots of bad actors corrupting it. Right. Manipulating machinery.
- [27:29]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. I would say that this probably gets back to the economics of violence where people aren't facing a threat or veiled threat of force.
- [27:38]
Jordan Hall
Right. But it also goes back to your argument of trying to remove the motivation for deception through something like Bitcoin.
- [27:45]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [27:46]
Jordan Hall
So right now I'm just trying to draw it all together.
- [27:49]
Robert Reedlove
Correct.
- [27:49]
Jordan Hall
Here, here. Here's the thing is like we used to have an institution. That's not even the right word, but let's call it that. No, we used to have a. An ecology of practices and psychotechnologies. That was the. The mother, the home, the birthplace of new institutions. And that's religion. There's a cult. Cultists cultivate. Those are all share an etymological root for a good reason.
- [28:25]
Robert Reedlove
Okay. Yeah.
- [28:26]
Jordan Hall
Right. And so again, like, my concern is that the place where we turn for the generation of new ecologies of practices, new institutions no longer exists for us in a pervasive way. I mean, this is part of the argument for the meaning crisis. And so I wonder if. I just wonder if we can get. The religion, for me, is the place that simultaneously exposes us to. It simultaneously homes us and exposes us to horror. Right. And it's on the horizon of intelligibility. I just wonder if without. Because this is my whole project of the religion that's not a religion. I wonder without that functionality and our distributed cognition, if we have the cultural cognitive machinery for cultivating new social institutions and sets of practices that go with. And that's why I'm expressing doubt, but I'm doing it with respect. I hope I'm expressing doubt about the sufficiency of the market to be able to do this kind of thing, to perform this kind of function.
- [29:50]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah. This is a very deep question, and it's funny you brought it up because that was one of my questions about the connection between psychotechnology and social institutions. If literacy is the, you know, the og, psychotechnology is religion, than the OG institution. Sorry, OG original, basically using a little bit of slang there. But I like the way you've described this as an ecology. It's not just. I was originally thinking psychotechnology. You put a bunch of them together and then humans form this sort of emergent application called social institution. But what you're saying is it's more of an ecology of psychotechnologies, procedures. It's kind of a template for ontology, maybe even. Right. Where a way of being.
- [30:42]
Jordan Hall
The worldview generator. Right?
- [30:44]
Robert Reedlove
What?
- [30:44]
Jordan Hall
I'm sorry, the worldview generator. And a world. Worldview is not a picture it is a fundamental cognitive cultural grammar for running distributed cognition and doing this kind of right. Evolving of our capacity to generate institutions and new psycho technologies. One of the ways of thinking about religion is it is. It was sort of the ultimate, ultimate curator and cultivator of ecologies of practices.
- [31:15]
Robert Reedlove
And so what I was picking up on here is your inquiry is to whether or not, please correct me where I'm wrong. Can we exapt old wisdom traditions to a non religion religion? Something that could, I don't know, a secular religion of some kind is that.
- [31:35]
Jordan Hall
Well, so I mean, and I'm really open to a lot of criticism and I'm not saying that emptily you can see criticisms that my friends Jonathan Pageau.
- [31:44]
Robert Reedlove
And Paul Vanderkle, I've listened to some of those. Yeah.
- [31:47]
Jordan Hall
And I take them to heart and I respond to them in good faith because I do not have a foreclosure argument. I do not have an argument that says, no, here's the a priori proof that I'm right. This is how things are going to go. Right. What I point to is a pretty constant empirical fact of the rise of the nones N o N E s people who have no official religious allegiance, the massive decline of the influence and participation in the church in Europe, it's also in Canada, the United States is also now starting to pick up steam on this, etc. Now those people are not Sam Harris atheists or Richard Dawkins atheists. Sam. Some of them are by and large, they don't reject religion because they see it as being false. They reject it because they find it is irrelevant. It is not providing them with an ecology of practices that is adapting them to two things. The world seen through a scientific lens. And simply rejecting science with magical thinking is to be as bound to that worldview as the people who worship it. Right?
- [32:58]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [32:59]
Jordan Hall
So that, and then the pervasiveness of technology, I find it like, I find it like on the edge of absurdity. And I'm not trying to be insulting to my interlocutor, but it's almost Kafkas. You're talking to people and they say, I don't believe they're talking to you in this medium and they're using it to say I don't believe in science.
- [33:18]
Robert Reedlove
And it's like, agreed, yes.
- [33:20]
Jordan Hall
What does that mean? Right. So again, the scientific worldview and technology were not part of the environment in which all of our religions evolved.
- [33:33]
Robert Reedlove
Right? Yes.
- [33:35]
Jordan Hall
And we see that they have been struggling with them, not very successfully to become viable I think they're bound to a lot of structures from the actual revolution. It's actually preventing them from adapting. And I want to be really clear about here. If you belong to a religious tradition and you are able within that community to cultivate wisdom. Right. And find meaning in life, keep doing it. I'm not telling anybody to leave. Yes, I. That is hubristic. And. And because I have empirical evidence from one of my ras that if you're in an established religious tradition, you're going to do much better at cultivating wisdom and meaning in life than if you're not.
- [34:16]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [34:17]
Jordan Hall
So I believe people when they tell me that. But what I'm saying is the demographics show that is simply not the case for a growing group of people that are soon going to be the majority of people. They're already the majority of people in this generation.
- [34:31]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [34:32]
Jordan Hall
So how are. And this is part of why the meaning crisis is happening. One of the many reasons. How are we going to help these people cultivate the wisdom, the meaning in life? And given what we've been talking about, the new psycho technologies and the new institutions that are needed for this world that we're in that has these new phenomena, scientific worldview, technology, and importantly, the interaction between them that is ever accelerating in incomprehensible manner for most people. That's my point.
- [35:14]
Robert Reedlove
It is taken with the utmost seriousness. I'll frankly say I have no idea. I mean, you've now where I try to always get deep with my thinking. I think religion is just one step below that. And I don't have an answer. I want to just share some thoughts, though, that the purpose of religion and I just want to share some. That I think so. I think it is the most ancient social institution. I think that's pretty.
- [35:43]
Jordan Hall
Well, I've heard that we were wrong in calling prostitution the oldest occupation in the world, shamanism. The argument has now been made that shamanism was the actual. The oldest profession.
- [35:56]
Robert Reedlove
Right. The mediator between the patterns of action of the group and the world. Right. He was bringing new ideas and.
- [36:05]
Jordan Hall
And so new states of consciousness, new, new potent, new possibilities for identity, new thinking, metaphorical thought, et cetera. Yes.
- [36:15]
Robert Reedlove
He was the judge or the philosopher for the group.
- [36:17]
Jordan Hall
Perhaps if you could take a great philosopher, a great rock star, a great psychotherapist and a great doctor and put them all together, you'd have sort of. You'd sort of have what the shaman was. Yes.
- [36:31]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. Okay. So the purpose or purposes of this social institution called religion, I think. I'm not sure Here was to entrain humans to unify or harmonize their actions. So we needed common patterns of behavior and common symbology or moral code. And this is really just kind of like money. Again, it's a lubricant for exchange. So if I can trust you, or I know what you're going to do, or we follow the same moral code, this lowers the cost of us building rapport with one another, developing interpersonal trust.
- [37:16]
Jordan Hall
Religion definitely has that function. And there's increasing empirical evidence and theoretical argumentation to show that that is one of. That's sort of the Durkheimian function of religion. And I think it's important. In fact, religion is basically your membership card to distributed cognition insofar as you're tapping into the cultural creativity of distributed cognition. Right. So everything you just said, but religion also, I mean, this is, you know, you see great theologians like Tillich talking about the constant pull between participation and individuation. Right. That's one of the ways in which I think Tillich is superior to Jung. The idea being that religion should. Religion allows you to enter into it. Like you said, it lubricates and affords it structurally, functionally organizes distributed cognition. But it also does something, because these two are inseparable, because not only do you indwell your culture, you internalize it. So not only does your cognition reach out through your culture that's indwelling, the culture reaches deeply into you. We've been talking about that a lot today.
- [38:34]
Robert Reedlove
Recycle, feedback.
- [38:35]
Jordan Hall
And so religion also is designed to help people. And I want to go further. I want to say that that lubrication is. There's. There's both external and internal lubrication, if you'll allow me those metaphors. And. And you want to properly calibrate so that they are affording each other and resonating with each other. But I would say there's a purpose to that lubrication which is exactly. To enhance individual cognition and distributed cognition, to enhance our capacities for zeroing in on relevant information by making it more meaningful, even making it sacred in order to solve problems, increase and enhance our individual and collective dynamically interwoven adaptive relationship to an environment that is constantly dynamically in flux.
- [39:33]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. So this ontological canopy, if you will, Sacred canopy.
- [39:41]
Jordan Hall
Called it the sacred canopy. Yes.
- [39:43]
Robert Reedlove
We're calling religion under which. So the purpose of which is really to decrease the cost of trust in many ways, which is to also say we're increasing what we call this lubrication, or improving the fluency of information between agents and the arena. Right. So there's accelerated feedback so we can function more as one organism in a way. Right, we can. And so therefore it's bioeconomically more efficient this, under this canopy. So this, this is where, and there's something, a deep connection here because now we're talking about decreasing the cost of trust, is increasing the fluency of information under this canopy. That's religion. Right. Another definition of money, by the way, is that it's a trust minimized asset. So it's, it too is decreasing the cost of trust. Right. If you hand me gold, I, I don't care who you are, I don't care about your background, I don't care where you got it. I don't need to know you, I'm going to give you whatever it's worth. Right? We just trade and we're done. So the more effectively a monetary technology can minimize the cost of trust, the more likely it is to succeed. And this sounds similar to religion. And the connections get weirder because money has a very religious quality to it. Just pull out a dollar bill in God we Trust. There's this symbology that has to be infused with the money to get it to work. It's a social construct.
- [41:14]
Jordan Hall
That's not coincidental. That has to be the case.
- [41:17]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. And when you get into Bitcoin world, Bitcoin's generating its own new religion. I mean, these bitcoiners are zealous, the Bitcoin maximalists, they are full blown religious zealots about Bitcoin. As you touch an alternative coin, you're corrupting your soul kind of thing. It's no joke. So there's something here. I don't know what it is and I don't want to, I don't want to throw religion into this bucket of being like, oh, it's just a collection of psycho technologies and kind of discard the sacred elements to it. But it definitely has some of these qualities that we can also identify in the hybrid psychotechnology of money. And the one last point I want to say is that when we remove religion from our socioeconomic systems, that's what leads us to statism and totalitarianism and all of this. You can't get rid of the religion. Once you pull out the ancient religion, all of a sudden you get the religion of statism in its place and that has all these deleterious outcomes.
- [42:20]
Jordan Hall
I agree totally with that. And that's why I this paradoxical thing, the religion that's not a religion, because you can't leave that Vacuum. I think the argument for that is very clear. And so the idea is how can. But we also have to hold religion accountable for it's sometimes genocidal behavior. The fact that it has also been a vehicle for massive self deception at the level of distributed cognition. I mean, and again, people who know me know I have a tremendous respect for religion as a phenomena and I take it very seriously. But I'll quote Nietzsche back at you. When the madman goes into the marketplace. Right, right. To claim that God is dead. He's not talking to the believers, he's talking to the atheists. And he says to them, you do not understand what you have done by killing God. You do not get it. You do not understand. You do not see where this is going. Right. So, I mean, whatever criticism I might have of Nietzsche, I mean, he's a profound thinker, deeply influential on me. Right, right. His recognition of the functionality of this.
- [43:35]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [43:35]
Jordan Hall
Is important. Now, I like what you just did a minute ago. Right. I thought it was like, that was so cool. That was a juicy moment. He said they're not the same. Right. But they're. They're not. But they're not. But they're not. They're not separate from each other. And that seems that, that there's some kind of dynamical relation. So what I think like you, you, you talked about how it makes, you know, it makes its religions like this lubricant for social coordination. But, you know, that's the homing part of religion. Religion is also exposing us to the numinous because it's, it's not only assimilating, to use Piagetian developmental terms, it's not only about assimilating the environment to us. That's Culture does that partially. But it's also about making us accommodate to an environment that is currently beyond our framing. So religion, I think is. It's constantly. The sacred is both that which ultimately homes us, but ultimately takes us out into the numinous, which is terrifying and horrific.
- [44:39]
Robert Reedlove
Right.
- [44:40]
Jordan Hall
And what it's doing is trying to continually complexify distributed cognition in a way not off here. It's complexifying distributed cognition to more and more track and conform to the complexity of the environment. Right.
- [44:57]
Robert Reedlove
Sorry, go ahead. I was just.
- [44:59]
Jordan Hall
That makes sense what I just said.
- [45:01]
Robert Reedlove
Yes. And it reminds me of this, the toggling you described. Right. Between generalizability and discriminability, that it's this interface mechanism that it almost maps on to, I guess, our salience landscape that we can very much.
- [45:16]
Jordan Hall
Religion.
- [45:17]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah.
- [45:18]
Jordan Hall
You think of religion as Our distributed cognition salience landscaping.
- [45:22]
Robert Reedlove
Right.
- [45:23]
Jordan Hall
Calling something sacred is a way of saying right is a way of pointing to its prominence and it's permanent. And notice what I'm doing here. It's permanence within our collective salience landscaping. And that is deeply functional and indispensable. The problem is we confuse the sacred as deeply functional, indispensable, profound, with it being perfect and permanent and complete.
- [45:57]
Robert Reedlove
And that's when we go and kill each other over it. Right. We say mine is perfect, incomplete, yours is flawed, we're going to war kind of thing.
- [46:07]
Jordan Hall
Yes, we do that. And we also start to become. Instead of adaptive, we become defensive. The system becomes defensive rather than adaptive. And that's also a tricky thing to say because part of being adaptive is to being defensive to some degree.
- [46:24]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [46:25]
Jordan Hall
Right, Right. So we're not, we're not talking about simplistic things here. We're talking about very complex, nuanced things. Yeah, but. And that's. And, and I want to like, once we say that about religion and the sacred and the fact that like so the nuns need. That they need something like that. The religion of me, the religion of just me, myself, autodidactic, which we're all trying to do, that doesn't work for all kind. I mean, it's gonna work here and there, but overall, generally it's not gonna work. Right.
- [47:01]
Robert Reedlove
So it's gotta be a canopy.
- [47:03]
Jordan Hall
Yes, exactly.
- [47:04]
Robert Reedlove
Right.
- [47:05]
Jordan Hall
It's like it like it's. It's like, well, I won't do that right now. I was gonna do it because I want to get back to the point. This is the point now. Take that. Take everything we've been saying about money and then you noticing their interpenetration and their non identity. I'm not leading to a conclusion here. This is opening up a tremendous question in my mind about what? Think about them as complex systems and complex wave patterns. What's the wave interference of the way money is coordinating our distributed cognition salience landscape. That's how you've been describing it a lot to me. And how it. Even on a sacred value and then religion over here doing it. Right. And how. Like I don't know. This is an open question. Right? This is.
- [47:55]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [47:55]
Jordan Hall
What are the complex patterns of interference, affordance, mutual constraint going on there? That strikes me as like, wow, that, that's. That somebody should be doing work on that. That sounds to me.
- [48:08]
Robert Reedlove
I think we might be.
- [48:09]
Jordan Hall
Yeah.
- [48:11]
Robert Reedlove
I mean where I'm. I feel resonant with the. The idea of unifying and coordinating human Action. There seems to be a large parallel between religion and market money there. And this idea of yours, this paradoxical religion that is a non religion. So we're almost like a meta religion, like Moses observing the people interacting for 40 years and then he abstracts the Ten Commandments. You're almost positing like we observe all of these religious interactions over time and abstract what's useful and construct something new. I'm wondering here, paradox is something that's very fascinating to me. I'm always, you know, the answers to all the profound questions are paradox. Have you heard or studied or read about the Lapis philosophorum, the philosopher's stone?
- [49:03]
Jordan Hall
Much I have like within the context of Jungian reflections and post Jungian reflections on alchemy as another by the way hybrid, because it's both the, the Jungian argument is that alchemy is both a physical transformative process and a psychological transformative process. So it is properly both the psychotechnology and a kind of material technology. Yes.
- [49:32]
Robert Reedlove
And in many ways your the idea of religion that is a non religion. The philosopher's stone was said to be the unity of opposites, that we could discover this thing. And there were a lot of things about it. One was the principles of Christ and matter. Right. This perfectly truthful substance actually they talked about, I think Peterson described this as the incorruptible substance. The philosopher's stone would be the incorruptible substance that served as the antidote to tyranny in the world. I don't want to get too far out on a limb here, but I have written a little bit about again bitcoin. It is a social institution. It is a psycho technology hybrid psychotechnology. It is a money and it does exhibit the first feature that has proven to be incorruptible, which is its fixed supply of 21 million. Right. If we just consider corruption as being non fidelity to what it's meant to represent. Again, money's meant to represent time or energy. Time and energy are perfectly scarce in the universe, specifically energy. Second law of thermodynamics. Money is intended to map to that. So it's as if we have this first incorruptible substance, if you will, in bitcoin. And I don't want to say that bitcoin is the philosopher's stone, but it is interesting to me and it does have this potential to disrupt the tyranny of central banks. It has this unity of opposites quality. It's not a religion, but it's inspiring religion. Religious fervor at least So I don't know. I think about that.
- [51:22]
Jordan Hall
That's great. If it permeates. Again, I do not know enough about Bitcoin. Right. So I'm not making you so hear the if and then if it permeates and given what we said about the capacity for psychotechnologies to radically reframe trans frame.
- [51:42]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [51:43]
Jordan Hall
Transform individual cognition and cultural cognition, then it could be that perhaps we could turn it around then and say it needs to become the philosopher's stone in order to perform the functions you want it to perform. Maybe that's what we could.
- [51:59]
Robert Reedlove
And you bring up the last point that's very compelling about this is that again I think you called this salience discounting. Right. Where we're more concerned about things nearer to us in time than further Austrians call this time preference. And just by the. There's a lot of factors that influence time preference but by money that just holds its value over time. Just a savings technology that you know, no one can violate. This opens you up to longer term planning. So there are a number of people in Bitcoin that document the personal transformations this is creating in people. It's like just to be able to have a money that, you know, no one can confiscate. People are thinking longer term, you become more focused on fitness, family, community, morality, Christianity. I mean I'm living this by the way. I've been in the fiat world. I had some success and I was a much darker version of myself versus where I'm at now. And I credit a lot of that to the study of Bitcoin and all the other rabbit holes has taken me down.
- [53:07]
Jordan Hall
So I really want to. First of all I want to acknowledge and respect what you just said and I take it seriously. The fact that other people reporting that I would love to study that. I don't mean like make you a specimen or anything, but I mean I want to like what you just said because the other thing, here's another parallel. The other thing that does that, that gets people to work intergenerationally is because what the thing is you also need to get people to work beyond their own lifespan. And that's religion. That's what religions have done, the building of individuals. Interestingly, let me tell. And then I want to show you how this things can be religious without people even recognizing it. So this is an actual experiment that's run. So you go into. So it's called temporal discounting, hyperbolic discounting. And it's a present phenomena and there's an adaptive Reason for this, I think we talked about it before, Right? Now you go in and you teach a bunch of academics who are supposed to be the cream of the crop rationale. You give them all this argument, empirical evidence that they should start saving now for their retirement. And you ask them any questions, challenges, criticisms. No, no, no. Did this make sense? Yes. Do you think? Yes, this is very probably true. You come back in six months. Are any of them saving any money? No. Okay. So then what you do is you try and find out what's going on and think about how this goes into stuff. We were talking about, about identification and symbolism. People don't want to look at their future self. They don't want to identify with it because their future self is close to death, sick, weak and ugly. And who wants to be close to death weak, sick and ugly? So what the experimenters did is they said aha. And they reframed it and notice what's coming here. We want you to think of your future self not as you, but as a relative whose well being depends on your current actions and for whom you should have compassion. So they invoke a moral argument, a compassion argument, and they try to invoke agape. They come back in six months and guess what the people are doing? They're saving for the future.
- [55:32]
Robert Reedlove
Wow.
- [55:32]
Jordan Hall
So all the argument and all that, like, here's the decision matrix, here's the probabilities, here's the utilities, here's the clarity of the information. You get all that? Yes. Does behavior change? No.
- [55:43]
Robert Reedlove
Right.
- [55:44]
Jordan Hall
Go in and you do. The symbolic machinery of identification.
- [55:49]
Robert Reedlove
Wow.
- [55:49]
Jordan Hall
And you can get people to change their behavior.
- [55:52]
Robert Reedlove
Wow. That's amazing. This reminds me. I saw a therapist for a while and I had this really bad habit or skill habit. It was definitely a bad habit of talking to myself very harshly. You know, little mistake. What the f is wrong with you? Why did you do. And he just had me very simply talk to myself as if I were talking to my daughter.
- [56:19]
Jordan Hall
Right.
- [56:19]
Robert Reedlove
Just imagine you're talking to the little boy. The little boy makes mistakes. And what? You know, talk to him like you talk to a little boy, like you talk to your daughter. And it made a world of difference.
- [56:28]
Jordan Hall
Yes, yes, yes.
- [56:29]
Robert Reedlove
It's incredible. Reminded me of that.
- [56:33]
Jordan Hall
Go ahead, go ahead.
- [56:34]
Robert Reedlove
The other thing was the. So the saving. I don't. And I'm talking to a friend of mine, Jimmy Song, about this. But the idea that a sound store of value, something that you can save the fruits of your labor in, that cannot be violated.
- [56:52]
Jordan Hall
I know where you're going on this. There's a confound in the experiment and you're exactly right. There's a confound in that people are incentivized to spend. That's your consumptive argument.
- [57:01]
Robert Reedlove
Well that one, yes. But I wanted to also just draw the connection that when you have something that you can save economic value in enables you to become again lower time preference or lower salience discounting. So you're becoming more, you're becoming more moral.
- [57:18]
Jordan Hall
Right.
- [57:19]
Robert Reedlove
It's almost like the term saving. And then I'm reminded of like being saved in the Judeo Christian sense. You know, there's some connection there.
- [57:29]
Jordan Hall
No, no, I like that. So that the causation can go both ways. Yes, right, right, yes. And that's probably the case. It's typically, it's typically when we try to solve the chicken and egg problem, we find that what's actually going on is a dynamical system between the variable transactivity. Yeah, that's really good. I like that. That's very good. I think that makes plausible sense to me. So now we're, I think we're becoming friends. So I want to. So I'm going to put this out because I want to hear your response and it's not mean spirited. I hope you trust me.
- [58:03]
Robert Reedlove
I do. So please.
- [58:05]
Jordan Hall
So Christianity has this main claim and this goes towards the title of your show, that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.
- [58:13]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [58:14]
Jordan Hall
I mean what. So you're trying to bring these two into deep conversation and yet you get this fundamental claim and like what do you think about that? What would be your response to that?
- [58:26]
Robert Reedlove
Yes, I would again take it back to property. Right, right. So we know property is very important basis of civilization. To take it maybe one level deeper. I think property is the territorial imperative expressed as it's the way humans express territoriality.
- [58:46]
Jordan Hall
Yes, right.
- [58:47]
Robert Reedlove
So most animals are territorial. Right. Birds sing to guard their branch and all this. We express, we express territoriality through property rights.
- [58:57]
Jordan Hall
Yes.
- [58:57]
Robert Reedlove
So it's a very, very earthly, animalistic thing. Right. And I would also argue that's why people are crazy about their money at times. Like if you, you can do a lot of things to a person, but if you mess with their money or steal the money, they're going to possibly flip out on you. So to love that, to love money would be a root of evil because your, your, you know, love, big, big word to unpack. But if you take love, which should be directed upward right. Towards higher principles and things like that and direct it downward.
- [59:31]
Jordan Hall
But you're binding your identity. It's what? You're binding your identity.
- [59:34]
Robert Reedlove
Correct.
- [59:35]
Jordan Hall
Experiment. Right.
- [59:37]
Robert Reedlove
Perfect.
- [59:37]
Jordan Hall
They had perfect love, the future self. Right? Yes.
- [59:40]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah. So instead of binding your identity towards your higher self, this would actually be lower. But there's a bit of a paradoxical thing here, because the sounder money is, or the sounder our property rights are, the more we free ourselves from the demands of property and money. So the more money I can save, and the more reliably I can save it, the less of a concern it is to me, the more I can focus on my higher self. So I think it is. That is, if you point that love, that identification downward towards money and property, it is evil. Right. You'll do. You'll. You become an animal. Right. You'll kill and deceive or do whatever you need to do. Whereas if you focus it upward, you have a.
- [60:25]
Jordan Hall
That's a beautiful answer, Robert. That's a beautiful answer. Right. And sort of maslow, actually. Aristotle, kind of. Right. You write, you take. You. You. When you satisfy the more basic having needs, you're free to develop and call them.
- [60:41]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [60:43]
Jordan Hall
So that's interesting. You're. You're. So let me know if this is fair. You actually are proposing this because you, in a sense, want to liberate people from a particular constraint, the constraint of money. Did I understand you correctly?
- [61:07]
Robert Reedlove
Absolutely. And I would also maybe take it a step further and say that it is a platform from which we can elevate civilization to the next level.
- [61:17]
Jordan Hall
Sure. Given all the arguments about functionality that we just made, I get that. Yes. Good.
- [61:20]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah. Well, and the, you know, the principle of inviolable property has been around for a long time. Right. That's been. But now we have a functional implementation of inviolable property. So it's not just written on a constitution and we hope that everyone adheres to it. It's permanently emblazoned in code. You know, no one can do anything about it. So it's like a new scaffolding for civilization.
- [61:46]
Jordan Hall
That's really interesting. That's really interesting. I. I continue to be impressed by the moral intent of what you're. What you're talking about. Like what. And this is important. I don't want to trivialize. I'm not just. First of all, it wasn't flattery, and I'm not just praising you, it's that.
- [62:04]
Robert Reedlove
No, I can tell it's genuine and I really, genuinely appreciate it.
- [62:08]
Jordan Hall
Yeah. Good. Because the theorizing without moral intent is, I think, one of the. And I mean morality very broadly construed, like the aspiration to self transcendence. Right. The Greek word of arete, which meant for virtue and excellence. Broadly construed. Not just what we mean by sort of a Kantian idea of morality. Right. Theorizing without the cultivation of character or with. So I'm a virtue epistemologist. I think the best account of epistemology is virtue epistemology. And so I want to acknowledge and I want to honor and I want to praise, you know, this deep the theory of the way you are integrating the theorizing. Because people could just theorize as an intellectual or self serving project, but you're doing it because like you are trying to bind it. And you've told me. And thank you for sharing that autobiography. It's bound to your ongoing project of. Of transforming and cultivating your character right now. And you hope to be able to offer that to other people. Have I. If I.
- [63:18]
Robert Reedlove
Absolutely. And it's. It's happened organically. I didn't launch out with this mission. I just experienced it in my own life and I've been writing and talking about it and one thing's led to another and here we are.
- [63:31]
Jordan Hall
That's really honorable. It's really honorable.
- [63:33]
Robert Reedlove
Thank you. No, thank you very much. It's kind of surreal at times. I don't know what's going on here because a lot of the bitcoiners and I could point you to some people, like my friend John Vallis, he's really focused on these personal transformations of bitcoiners. There's a lot of far flung stories of people that have been in all types of darkness, have discovered bitcoin, gotten their act together, raising a family, got fit, whatever it is.
- [64:03]
Jordan Hall
For me, given my interests, that's the part of this that I would most like to learn about.
- [64:09]
Robert Reedlove
I'll be happy to introduce you. John's an amazing guy. Um, and it just. So it's like one thing to see it in your own life a little bit. It's another thing to start to see it in others. And everyone else is reporting the same thing. And then, you know, it was. Which bitcoin led me to Peterson. Peterson led me to this discussion of alchemy and values and all these other things. And now you see it when you get into the alchemy rabbit hole. Things got really weird for me because when I read Peterson's Maps of Meanings describe Maps of Meaning book, which is largely derived from young study of alchemy, talking about the incorruptible substance, the end of state, tyranny, personal transformation. I'm like pinching myself a little bit, you know, so that's really.
- [64:55]
Jordan Hall
And I mean, I don't mean this in any kind of. You're a specimen. That's really fascinating. That's really fascinating how all of those things were, you know, it's like there's a, you know, a strange attractor forming.
- [65:09]
Robert Reedlove
Yes, yes, yes.
- [65:11]
Jordan Hall
Yeah.
- [65:11]
Robert Reedlove
It's funny you use that term because I was such a rational atheist growing up too. But this process also. I was. I grew up Christian, became rational atheist in my own explorations, and now I'm like, how can you not. There's something that. There's something quite ineffable, let's just say. So I have a great deal of reverence for that which I call God. Call it whatever you want, but I get that.
- [65:40]
Jordan Hall
I get that.
- [65:41]
Robert Reedlove
So this whole experience has been very powerful. But your work, again, there's a lot of. You talk to bitcoiners about this. Everyone can intuit the same thing. But the precise identification of the causal mechanisms that are relating culture to money and religion, also all of these big concepts and ideas, they don't exist. So it's like we've got the machete hacking at the jungle right now. And your work has been just a really sharp machete.
- [66:11]
Jordan Hall
And that, what you just talked about there, that, that is. I really value that in our discussion, that attempt to try and build connections and new vocabulary, conceptual vocabulary, theoretical grammar, getting those things to talk to each other. Yeah, very much, very much. I think that's very important.
- [66:28]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah. And a lot of the, you know, we talked about earlier, the pseudoscience of Keynesian economics and Austrian economics, kind of being exiled from academia, maybe a lot of that is what's happening right now is Austrian economics is being reincorporated into our understanding of reality. I mean, there's this. It's an a priori knowledge system. Right. It's as serious as mathematics, but it is the youngest science too. So. So we might be. Maybe we're in like the 18th century biology terms with economics, you know, so that's happening as well. It's another factor.
- [67:07]
Jordan Hall
I think that's a very. I mean, I think that's a very humble way to frame a positive valuation of Austrian economics. That was well said. That was well said. That was very well said.
- [67:22]
Robert Reedlove
Oh, this has been. Man, I'm like charged up right now. I got chill bumps and all that. So where should we. I love this connection between social institutions and psychotechnologies So I guess let me ask one more question about this. So described the social institution as this ecology of psychotechnologies, procedures, et cetera, et cetera. The thought I had. And again, I'm looking at the printing press leading to the wider dissemination of literacy and numeracy, which led to the basically irrelevance of the medieval church and its ultimate collapse. Right.
- [68:05]
Jordan Hall
People just notice how religion had prepared for that too, because religion had already, like one of the things the axial revolution did was bind sacredness to literacy, the sacred writing, listen to this word. Scriptures, the written things. Right. So like it's again, it's. Right, it's a bit of a, again, the chicken and egg. Right. The fact that literacy had been, at least it had been sanctified and given a sacred status then also. Right. Also drives, you know, what's motivating people. What was the first thing they wanted to mass print?
- [68:48]
Robert Reedlove
The Bible, of course.
- [68:50]
Jordan Hall
Right. And you speak up. Right. And the holy word, the writ, the scriptures. Right. And so it's both. Right. Again, there's this deep interconnection between them. So there's this long history that predates. Right. The printing press. That's this history of a symbolic identification of scripture with sacredness that then helps to afford the printing press and then is also accelerated by the printing press.
- [69:20]
Robert Reedlove
Right, right, right, interesting. So it's almost. Okay, so let me just try to package this question that was very interesting though. When the psychotechnology becomes either more refined or more widely disseminated, we can get into a circumstance where the social institution that maybe even enabled it or nurtured it or, you know, because the, before the, again, before the invention of the printing press, the church was handling the reproduction of books in the Bible. Right. So it was necessary to get to the printing press ultimately. But then it, it burst the very thing that disrupted longer term. So is this, and I'm trying to think of this through a technological lens, is this social revolution or institutional collapse? Is this a form of collective software update in a way that people are just adopting new softwares and therefore they organize themselves under new institutional canopies?
- [70:25]
Jordan Hall
Yeah, I think, I mean that's again, all the important caveats about the software metaphor in place. I think what happens is you, you make possible networks of distributed cognition. That's clearly what happens that aren't. That weren't possible before. And one of the things they start to do, one of the problems they start to solve immediately is right, there's self formulation. Well, what are we, how do we work Right. And then so you get, you get this new powerful machine that tries to understand itself. And of course, when it understand. Don't be too anthropomorphic here. Right. But it's trying to understand itself. And as it's trying to understand itself, of course that means it's going to understand other distributed cognitive networks by comparison and contrast. And then you. Right, and then, yeah, it's very much going to start to. To potentially, at least. I don't want to make it sound theological, but there's a tremendous potential for it to begin to differentiate itself from its birthing distributed cognitive network matrix.
- [71:32]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah, yeah.
- [71:33]
Jordan Hall
Yes. Yeah, that makes. That makes sense.
- [71:36]
Robert Reedlove
No, it does, it does. And again, I'm picking up another thing I've really gotten from you is the metaphor and language. Like almost anytime I'm listening now I'm the metaphors and you hit understand. So it's like this social institution is in a way trying to understand its purpose. And if it creates something that's closer to that purpose, maybe like going from the church to the printing press, which it was just to preserve and proliferate this psycho technology of literacy in a way that it can create something that disrupts itself.
- [72:09]
Jordan Hall
Yes. Let's do the etymology, because I did. Right. The original etymology, although for us it's understand. And we use understand metaphors.
- [72:18]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [72:19]
Jordan Hall
The original meaning is interstand. To stand like it's to enter a field of distributed cognition. That's the original meaning of the term.
- [72:27]
Robert Reedlove
Interesting. So to see the world to the eyes of others.
- [72:33]
Jordan Hall
Basically the idea that understanding is ultimately done between people.
- [72:38]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [72:39]
Jordan Hall
Only derivatively within a person.
- [72:42]
Robert Reedlove
Yes.
- [72:43]
Jordan Hall
We used to have a virtue of being an understanding person, which doesn't mean that you've understood a lot. It means you have the particular capacity to afford. Right. Understand, like communication and connecting and communing between people.
- [73:01]
Robert Reedlove
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. You know, I was thinking about this too. Is it again, in the wake of psychotechnology, it's like almost as if all human interaction is we're swapping components of this software, right. We're. We're speaking through it, but we're also like the. Maybe the mode of thinking, right. This little or this little thought module that I have, I'm kind of throwing it over to you. You're spinning it around, snapping a few modules on and throwing it back and that's dialogue. And at some point, occasionally we have a breakthrough, right. Like, oh, we put this thing together this way and then let's publish it and then it just totally updates everyone.
- [73:44]
Jordan Hall
Yeah. I think that's very much what's going on. I'm trying to. With the help of Christopher masterpietro and Guy Senstock and Peter Lindbergh and Jordan Hall, a lot of people, I'm trying to combine the best cognitive science and the best history to try and say but how. How can we get. How can we create an ecology of practices that affords that kind of. Well, like that mutual system upgrade the co emergence where you and I both get to a place of greater understanding that we couldn't have got to on our own. And not only understanding of the ideas or reality, but the understanding of each other. This is the whole dialectic and the Dialogos project that I'm working on right now because I see that as part of what's going to be needed in Again, take this with a grain of salt. The religion that's not a religion about how can we afford people some of the deep and properly revered functionality that was present in religion that without binding them to questionable metaphysics. Right, A questionable metaphysics or dogma social policies procedures that they no longer find relevant or viable in their lives.
- [75:09]
Robert Reedlove
Interesting.