Been so baffled that gurdjieff hadn't been grabbed onto much in this generation. Glad i was wrong, going to look much more into mr Pascal.

When is the book going to be available in electronic format?

"G" was a Shepard, who walked in the lions den and taught them the Oral Tradition How do i find the Oral Tradition and its history and teachings, ? Well you have to remember them your self That's the thing when dealing with objective truth, its the same eternally

Layman Pascal is definitely fun

It's interesting that you both come from a Christian upbringing that you left. I'm 37 and arrived here in the same place only having very recently been convinced of "God" beyond time and of universal salvation. I've been tacking with metamodernism for 7 years now and it was helpful to me in integrating Christianity. I was brought up without Church and without any mention of God in the household, although culturally Catholic in many ways, so it never really occurred to me. But now that I look back i've been trying to re-construct spiritual practice forever. Keep up the good work.

As my life draws to a close, I realize that the liberal, open-minded, warm,-hearted mainline protestant Christianity in which I was nurtured was an immense gift not only to me but to American society in general, at least in the northern half of the country. I have yet to come across a single deconstruction video from one raised in such a mellow religious environment, which enabled and encouraged young people to build their own form of Christian faith from the ground up, piece by piece. Is this endeavor to create a metamodern Christianity, I wonder, another form of "hauntism" that in reality is creating nothing essentially new but rather deeply desires--almost desperately desires--to escape from the neoliberal postmodern nightmare into the much more beautiful, human-scaled past, similar to all these cover versions of the classic songs of the 60s and 70s. To which I'm sure many younger folk would reply, "OK Boomer."

delightful, thanks

So happy Wolpert planted the conversation with the background

I can see how these developmental models can get neocolonialist real fast if only wyte westerners get access to this manual or training and then they start speaking amongst themselves as if they are catching all their blindspots. This needs to be in the hands of as many non-wyte people as possible. That's why I'm super irritated that this knowledge is behind paywalls and organizations or needing to have a specific post-graduate degree, etc. Because we all know has the time and resources to focus on these materials.

51:00 I can't stand when wyte folks present this excuse that earlier cultures did it, why couldn't we? That's not the point. The point is nobody has ever dominated and destroyed the planet at the capacity Europeans have. We can't accept that? That's so annoying. Yeah the Bantu dominating the central and southern Africa is just globally damaing as France conquering West Africa and Haiti? Who are still feeling the boots of colonialism to this day. Please answer.

Is it called meta to avoid saying post-postmodernism?

bla bla

《 Arrays of nanodiodes promise full conservation of energy》 A simple rectifier crystal can, iust short of a replicatable long term demonstration of a powerful prototype, almost certainly filter the random thermal motion of electrons or discrete positiive charged voids called holes so the electric current flowing in one direction predominates. At low system voltage a filtrate of one polarity predominates only a little but there is always usable electrical power derived from the source, which is Johnson Nyquest thermal electrical noise. This net electrical filtrate can be aggregated in a group of separate diodes in consistent alignment parallel creating widely scalable electrical power. As the polarity filtered electrical energy is exported, the amount of thermal energy in the group of diodes decreases. This group cooling will draw heat in from the surrounding ambient heat at a rate depending on the filtering rate and thermal resistance between the group and ambient gas, liquid, or solid warmer than absolute zero. There is a lot of ambient heat on our planet, more in equatorial dry desert summer days and less in polar desert winter nights. Refrigeration by the principle that energy is conserved should produce electricity instead of consuming it. Focusing on explaining the electronic behavior of one composition of simple diode, a near flawless crystal of silicon is modified by implanting a small amount of phosphorus on one side from a ohmic contact end to a junction where the additive is suddenly and completely changed to boron with minimal disturbance of the crystal pattern. The crystal then continues to another ohmic contact. A region of high electrical resistance forms at the junction in this type of diode when the phosphorous near the ĵunction donates electrons that are free to move elsewhere while leaving phosphorus ions held in the crystal while the boron donates a hole which is similalarly free to move. The two types of mobile charges mutually clear each other away near the junction leaving little electrical conductivity. An equlibrium width of this region is settled between the phosphorus, boron, electrons, and holes. Thermal noise is beyond steady state equlibrium. Thermal noise transients where mobile electrons move from the phosphorus added side to the boron added side ride transient extra conductivity so the forward moving electrons are preferentally filtered into the external circuit. Electrons are units of electric current. They lose their thermal energy of motion and gain electromotive force, another name for voltage, as they transition between the junction and the array electrical tap. Inside the diode, heat is absorbed: outside the diode, an attached electrical circuit is energized. The net energy in diodes connected in consistent alignment parallel is aggregated. The maximum energy is converted from ambient heat to productive electricity when the electrical load is matched to the array impeadence. Matched impeadence output (watts) is k (Boltzman's constant, ~1.38^-23) times T (tempeature Kelvin) times bandwidth (all to a natural limit ~2 THz @ 290 K) times rectification efficiency. Aloha

WHAT DO YOU MEAN GRANDMA......

When I'm crossing the road the sound of a car carries much more semantic information than the pizza on my table at home.

Metamodernism sounds like its still being taken hostage by Scientism.

Paul is Amazing ....

I appreciate your Perspective, from my Perspectives. Something is smelling fishy...... 🐟

i do not understand this lecture. it does not seem to be saying anything new? it is obvious that some information is useful for survival and growth? did this require a paper?

Where he was arguing the language was not doing justice to his theory, i think he couldn't explain how his theory stands up against your argument. It's not semantics. It's that you don't need to assume value as a sort of cosmological constant to justify the basic biochemically driven first principles to life and therefore as it scales up to more complex organisms, more complicated systems of values. That's not to say that it's all materialistic, just saying start from there if you're going to try and argue for an underlying telos as it is a fundamental problem in the theory as i understand it.!?!?!

Powerful. Real. Insightful. Thank you both so much 🙏🏾🫶🏾🙌🏾🧘🏾🧡🤎

@49:00 sounds a lot like the thoroughly discredited IIT theory (for consciousness). For a materialist you need at minimum, I would think, the notion that the "system" has an internal model, both of it's "self" and the environment it interacts with, then a minimalist semantics is possible, you might (as a paltry definition) say "meaning" is obtained when the internal model produces a set of relations between internal "symbols" (careful to define them, not easy! Fodor and all that) that bear the same relations the objects in the environment bear to one another in some rough measure. But this is an impoverished view of the life we know at least as humans, which is one full of mental qualia, which are not mere physical models or information theoretic symbols (physics, by definition, cannot generate qualia). The symbols and their relations are never the semantics. Semantics implies a subjective knower, and that's beyond physicalism. If you do not have any pf this, then you can still easily have "life". Most living organisms have no need for mental semantics, since most have complexity classes that are within computability (we can well enough model them with a blind algorithm, e.g., ant colonies etc, which probably means a lot of Douglas Hofstadter stuff is pure fantasy nonsense, though nice for cyberpunk stories). They can be essentially zombies. They might even be zombies, we'd never know.

Islam=Jesus+commandments. Prophet Muhammad =Moses and Jesus in one. ان الله يحكم ما يريد God is omnipotent to command whatever He chooses to.

Syntactic information is dual to semantic information -- information is dual. Syntax (objective, absolute) is dual to semantics (subjective, relative) -- languages or communication. If mathematics is a language then it is dual. Syntropy (prediction) is dual to increasing entropy -- the 4th law of thermodynamics! Teleological physics (syntropy) is dual to non teleological physics (entropy) -- physics is dual. Categories (form, syntax) are dual to sets (substance, semantics) -- Category theory. "Only the Sith think in terms of absolutes!" -- Obi Wan Kenobi. "Always two there are" -- Yoda. All messages in a communication system are predicted into existence according to Shannon's information theorem -- a syntropic process, teleological. Making predictions to track targets, goals and objectives is a syntropic process, teleological. Cause is dual to effect -- causality.

@14:30 smokin' weed there? Utility functions are not well defined. I quite often put my life lower than other concerns. Luckily utility ranking is not always deterministic for life or death. A science of subjectivity --- which I believe, by definition, can never exist, but if it could... --- can not be founded upon the nebulae of utility functions. Utility functions have a place in modelling, and that's where they should stay.

@8:00 this "exogeneity" is really a cloaking for subjective qualia. Without a consciousness there is only functionalism with no meaning. aka. Formalism in math. aka. Operationalism in science. By contrast, all semantic meaning implies a subjective _knower._ No science has ever accounted for subjectivity, and never will, because it is not objectively specifiable. If you redefine "science" to include subjective phenomena (as some are want to do) you are being dopey, and abusing the very _subjective_ meaning we all have of "science" (which is dealing only ever with objective phenomena). On our subjective qualia science must remain silent. (No science will ever explain _what it is like_ to see in mental qualia a blue sky as opposed to a red sky.)

ACTIVE INFERENCE…. Get on board guys,… this is the future.

We already went through this. The will to power is more fundamental than the will to live. Life doesn't seek maintenance, stasis but growth, power.

Quantum and quantified. Try to differentiate mathematical and linguistic information. Then try to put them together. Which comes first? Mr. Wolpert relates a conversation he had with his professor. The gist, i heard, was that math was more "exact" than language. Which corresponds to science's explanation of color as opposed to the conscious experience of color. In other words the frequency of electromagnetic waves corresponds to certain colors. Red is really a range of wavelengths of electomagnetic waves. Which meaning is more exact and which is more true? Are both meanings true? Are both meanings meaningful? Are both meanings a "means" to an end? Turning the color red into a number is an axiological exercise of meaning. Turning the number red into a conscious impression red? Turning syntactic information into semantic meaning sounds more plausible than turning numbers into language. I think the semantic into syntactic information, feedback sounds plausible. Math into alphabet. When i try to put my head around turning information into consciousness? I cannot get around the thought that consciousness must come first. Numbers can't be turned into consciousness without also figuring out where the operations of math come from. Addition, exponentiation, derivative, Wronskian, divergence, etcetera. Can addition be turned into a number? No it cannot. Not currently, i think. Is there a "means" of turning the operation of addition into a number? Maybe. When physicists find ..."fine-tuning" waves are composed of dark energy and anti-matter interactions maybe we'll finally turn the plus sign, +, into a number. Math is not a subset of language. Math is a subset of the linguistic mind. The Contents of consciousness can be correlated. Can correlation be used to "seize" consciousness? It doesn't make sense. The chicken and the egg are both contents of consciousness. Only consciousness can provide the answer to "which came first". The correlation of causation hidden in the question of "which came first" is given by consciousness. Does causation determine consciousness, chickens and eggs?

Not the first "spiritualist" to throw around vague word salad and so he can sell some stupid book. Just read the Tao Te Ching - available free online. It will tell you 90% of what you need to know.

Great interview!

The way Brenadan doesn't shy away from the harder details and guides the conversation to the actual details of the paper is refreshing.

Paradoxically, it seems to me that the emergence of agency always involves both individuality and collectivity (ie, Whiteheadian "societies") across various scales, and that this emergence always already presupposes the ingression of novel potentiae (what Vervaeke has been calling "emanation") that are not present in the past environment of said agency. Tim Jackson and I have been covering a lot of what Wolpert was introducing over on my channel. Great conversation, btw. The takeaway for me, though, is that there is still no way to get this statistical model going without assuming a "utility function," ie, that organisms want or desire not only to survive but to maximize their lives (ie, to grow, learn, transform their environments, etc.). You can't explain this function by using the model because the model presupposes it. Such models can then offer wonderful mathematical accounts of how an organism is causally embedded within its past environment, but remain limited by what is *not* present in that past, ie, novel potentiae!

Setting up post-Christian movements is not new. Examples are the Unitarian-Universalist church, the Ethical Society, and in a way, Vedantism or Buddhism as open to outsiders in America. 12 Steps movements. Etc. But what is different appears to be the compassion aspect--compassion for people who are struggling. Thank you!

The concept of life having a "meant to be" quality, or a sense of destiny and purpose, has been explored by several philosophers across different traditions. Here are a few who have delved into this idea: Aristotle: Aristotle's concept of "telos" or purpose is central to his philosophy. He believed that everything in nature has a purpose or end goal (telos) it is meant to fulfill. For humans, this telos is achieving eudaimonia, often translated as flourishing or happiness, through the exercise of reason and virtuous living. Immanuel Kant: Kant's philosophy touches on the idea of a purposeful life through his concept of the "categorical imperative," which implies that individuals have a duty to act in ways that could be universalized and that contribute to the moral good. This suggests a kind of meant-to-be moral structure to life. G.W.F. Hegel: Hegel's philosophy of history posits that history unfolds according to a rational process, leading to the realization of human freedom. This can be interpreted as a kind of "meant to be" unfolding of human potential and societal development. Friedrich Nietzsche: Nietzsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" challenges individuals to live their lives as if they were to be repeated infinitely, which implies finding a sense of purpose and meaning in one's actions and existence. While he famously declared "God is dead," challenging traditional notions of destiny, his philosophy still engages deeply with the search for meaning. Viktor Frankl: Frankl, a psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, developed logotherapy, which is centered on the idea that the primary drive in human beings is to find meaning in life. His famous book, "Man's Search for Meaning," explores how individuals can find purpose even in the most difficult circumstances, suggesting a deeply inherent "meant to be" quality in human life. Jean-Paul Sartre: As an existentialist, Sartre argued that existence precedes essence, meaning that individuals are not born with a predetermined purpose. Instead, they must create their own meaning and purpose through their choices and actions. While this opposes a traditional "meant to be" notion, it still engages with the idea of constructing a purposeful life. These philosophers, among others, have grappled with the idea of purpose and meaning in life, each contributing to the broader conversation in unique ways.

Good, but do you need to be so pedantic in your word choices? Good communication is as simple as it can be.

Wonderful conversation and open exploration. I appreciate the point at 9:30- "communion with" still suggests "reifying or objectifying some thing." And your points at 10:20 about the different types of "non-duality." ...Thank you.

I took a look at the website. This is very cool. This idea of action towards a goal as the basis of meaning is interesting. However, I feel that the bottom might fall out at some point. It seems to me that there needs to be some solid "Prime Mover" to rest all other things against.

What you're describing is what I've been reaching toward for a number of years (a mystico-imaginal, mythopoetic spiritual praxis), but had no idea there were others doing this more publicly. You've given me a number of names to follow up on. Thanks for this summary Brendan!

Awesome! Great tie in of information theory, thermodynamics, and causal theory. This makes a lot of sense to me. I agree with others that evolutionary theory should be more explicit. I appreciate you bringing up the complexity stack, Brendan. You kept trying to get him to scale up his view!

Just finished watching this video and it blew my mind! Have you possibly considered the handshake QM interpretation (The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics) to help explain how information flows between these domains-that of the infinite equilibrium pool of superpositions (noise) to that of the constricted semantically meaningful web of our lived ground ? Using Max Velman’s-reflexive monist-ground of being-as one conceptual template, it would seem that a lot of the “features” of our species specific Headset are “events” of our very core attributes as beings-embedded in that sublimated iceberg that is our “formed semantically meaningful” reality. Now that is ontological only in the sense that it captures our “filtered constructed reality”-but of course that is our reality for all intents and purposes. Whether aesthetics, capacity for language, higher cognitive functions-they are part of our filtering apparatus-most of it sublimated So what does our species specific “reality bandwidth”-and the cognitive semantic “conceptual constructs” derived from that constrained information flow-tell us ? And more important does it capture any true features of the absolute-the thing in itself? Semantic meaning in terms of emotions, ethics, aesthetics and relevant ideals may be completely a functional our species specific headset fiction-BUT perhaps there is bidirectional, and even retro-causal flow ??? -I was about to say platonic forms-but even that is highly questionable-perhaps as David Wolpert suggests it is the much more elemental dynamic of thermodynamics-the statistical process of equilibrium towards self organizing harmony (internal homeostasis) -a self sorting movement from chaos to order. This ordering of semantic meaning within the organism’s closed system-is the necessary boundary “chaos limiting” that comes out from the larger noise of equilibrium in the infinite syntactic pool. Now as Wolpert stated --attaining a state of thermodynamic equilibrium would obviously mean that you are dead....so it is in the very self ordering dynamics of homeostasis-which is our organism’s boundary state --to be dynamically on this creative boundary tension of chaos as the needed impetus of self organizing to occur and for life itself to exist. This speaks of perhaps a disjunctive tension --boundary--between that of the absolute-as being an infinite probability distribution as well as being in a state of perfect equilibrium-to that of a “collective world organism utility function"---whereby *being and it's manifest ground* is the very temporally constricted self organizing “dynamic” that needs chaos to get to any ordering of semantically meaningful "complexity” to happen-what springs from this is this “semantic ecosystem” a web of relationship between layered nodes and which forms what we call “grounded lived reality.” Now here I come to the retro causality feature-namely as a explanatory model for how this syntactic information, between these two domains-Quantum foam to classical world-can flow. If we use this retro-causal Quantum Handshake idea, then that would open up an intriguing “bidirectional channel” of sorts. So in this picture we see that the self organizing agent is “pulling” syntactic information from the infinite unformed and noisy (chaotic) information pool-but then also crucially the vital retro causal semantic “future morphological patterns” out of its own future! This then allows for the novelty of the chaos (implications for free will) to get filtered through a matrix of future relevance patterns-towards new creative ends. A Shakespearean play could never be randomly created through the brute power of infinite time together with an infinite pool of typing monkeys if they only have access to using syntactic bits of information -but if they have access to retro causal Morphic semantic “clumps of meaning”-then a new novel “semantically meaningful play” may arise. This is incidentally what a Michael Levin’s research in novel biological forms is pointing at. Also what comes to mind is Whitehead’s “Prehension concept” as the binding bridge for the creation of new novel occasions to occur.

With all due respect, Dr. Wolpert needs to brush up on how chemotaxis works. Here’s the Wikipedia:en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotaxis

Fantastic, I love that Wolpert and co. are interested in this topic.

Let's propose that all organisms exist on a spectrum of consciousness rather than simply a spectrum of "success in avoiding equilibrium." On one end of this spectrum is the least conscious organism, while on the other end is the most conscious organism. This spectrum is inversely proportional to the survivability of the organism (or ability to avoid equilibrium), i.e., the least conscious is the most probable to avoid equilibrium and vice versa. I claim this because, from a purely mechanistic point of view, bacteria and the entire single-celled ecosystem are far better at avoiding equilibrium in any environment than any multi-cellular organism. Species that successfully avoid equilibrium are those with mechanical, chemical, and syntactic information structures that are simply more probable to avoid equilibrium, like bacteria. If we set aside our human bias, we can see that bacteria-type organisms are the apex predators in all possible ecosystems, even the ones without any multi-cellular organisms or consciousness the way we experience it.

Thank you

I'm a bit surprised natural selection wasn't mentioned (until the very end). The 'trying not to die' seems to be an almost precise parallel. Also at 50 min mark he doesn't understand the question. I agree with you Brendan. The 'meaning' of the pizza slice has many many many more layers and complexities given the complex social environment background for example. For me the most interesting part was framing 'intelligence' as the ability to assign and recognise and process meaning.

I had some art school professors who were big on information theory.. that would vibe with Jung on complexes into archetypes.. and a kinda nominalist prism I was using at the time.

Thanks for sharing this. Fun conversation. You might want to edit out the plethora of ums and ughs in the intro.

A lot of this reminds me of Free Energy Pricipal sort of ideas, but maybe i have spent too much time listening to conversations between Karl Friston and Michael Levin 😅

Its a privilege to witness your scholastic hunt for insight, Brendan. I'm looking forward to finding out what your new book will have to offer.