Collective Intelligence: Angels in Scientific Terms | with John Vervaeke 

I always love the moment where Jonathan just lays his cards on the table and says things like "there is a god behind the internet" or "the ocean has an angel."

"Pay attention" is itself a phrase indicating sacrifice; one gives up their attention to another, "paying" it to them.

You can just see how Jonathan's beliefs that we have heard from him many times are being cumulated here and built upon by John. Very great conversation. Now THIS is a psychedelic conversation.

FIRST! And very excited about this! :)

Boy oh boy, John and Jonathan are about to start speaking the same language. I look forward to that day when the 2 worlds truely collide, they have never been as close as this and i am enjoying the ride.

I’m Muslim, but my friend (studies Christianity and Buddhism) sent me a link to your video with Jordan and the Bishop. Well my interest was peaked and so I’m now a new subscriber. Excited to hear this.

John Vervaeke is amazingly honest and able to use his cog sci framework to grapple at a reality that is ultimately larger. In contrast to someone like Sam Harris who uses his very limited framework to constrain reality in it.

Saw the "Four Horsemen..." as well. Just excellent. As an Orthodox, I am solidly in Mr. Pageau's corner. But Dr. Vervaeke was on fire! Just wonderful. I could listen to these discussions all day. Thank you all.

John and Jonathan, These conversations have been the access point for so many of us to set our eyes on things above. I have watched as the insights from your dialogues have played a key role in improving my life. Please continue to have these conversations with each other!

Guys, guys, you are spoiling us! Any chance of inviting Iain McGilchrist into your circle?

“Deep calling to deep,” was so deep it made me cry

I'd pay so much money to see these two in conversation with Dr. Iain McGilchrist and Dr. Bernardo Kastrup.

Verveake is a gift to humanity.

On the notion of attention being the thing that rules in and rules out: it occurred to me that the word praise is etymologically related to the word appraise, which means to judge or to qualify, even to catalogue or describe. From the dictionary “assess the value or quality of”, essentially to rule in or rule out.

My head is exploding from all the meaning beamed into me from all the cool videos the last days

Thanks a lot for the kind words and for all the support over the years, John and Jonathan. I wonder how closely John would come to the western Christian view of angels as unchanging. In Aquinas for instance, because angels are unchanging, I don't think we would associate 'consciousness' to them in any straightforward way. They're 'intellects' and they have the kinds of effects described in this video, but calling them 'consciousnesses' would be a bit of a stretch. Anyways, thanks a lot for the discussion! It's the closest thing I've ever seen to a dialogue between Aquinas and Maximus on angelology!

16:00 There's a guy on RU-vid called MemeAnalysis that does symbolic interpretations of memes. He says the Internet is a DEVOURING MOTHER - ready to give you anything you want but never lets you go. It's the collective anima. What do you think about that?

Attention in worship, paying close attention to the words that I sing in the choir during the Divine Liturgy, leads to having the experiences that the words speak of…”Let us who mystically represent the Cherubim, and who sing the thrice holy hymn to the life creating Trinity, now lay aside all cares of life!” “Let this communion be neither to my judgement or condemnation, but to the healing of soul and body.” And it is…

Bishop Barron AND John in the same week? Thanks Jonathan!

John Vervaeke has really grown on me.... And I didn't dislike him at all before! Johnathan- You as well! Thank you for this one.

11:17 this was an intuition I had a while ago actually about many things in the world. I'm not explicitly a Christian, but I was raised as a Baptist so to a certain extent those ideas are baked into my psyche and I'm not one to say I believe in God in the traditional sense, but Jonathan's example of social media acting as a giant, decentralized will possessing an observable telos is how I see most of the universe. Essentially, whatever one can say about God and Satan, they are definitely AT LEAST "giant, decentralized wills possessing an observable telos." They could in fact be far more than that, and obviously the Christians have a thoroughly fleshed out system of ideas that states exactly so (including the alteration of "personal" rather than "decentralized"), but I think anyone who's been paying even a modicum of attention can't reasonably say they are any *less* than that. My intuition specifically was that there are at least two of these things and they seem to be at war with each other. They seem to represent chaos and order in a very Petersonian sense. I wouldn't say either is good or bad, but they have clear goals that oppose each other. Part of me is tempted to attribute the Christian god to the will that pursues order, thus making the will that pursues chaos Satan, obviously, but any self-respecting Christian would probably bring up the fact that things are way more complicated than that. In any case, I think it's undeniable that there are certain forces in the universe that are at war with each other, and on the most grand of scales I think there are fundamentally two of them. There could be an infinite number of them for all I know, at either lower or higher levels of resolution compared to the two I mentioned previously, but I just can't get away from that feeling that something like that is going on.

Ugh my full time job is getting in the way of me dedicating all my attention to these videos lol

I am very touched and moved by how this conversation demonstrates the enactment of good faith from both parties. Beautiful.

Wow! The convergence of attendance made me think about the Divine Liturgy - all of the senses are activated during the Liturgy - see the beauty of what is happening, touch the icons and the candles, smell the incense, hear the Word of God being sung throughout the entire Liturgy, and it all comes together with the sense of tasting the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. And we experience all of this together when we come together at church to worship God together. It is how we trust our experience of God as being Truth. So cool!

If we just substitute spirit for hyper -object, all kinds of things make more sense. Applying hierarchy to spirit and consciousness seems to work really well, I'm not sure why John doesn't see how well that works.

Great conversation! In the truest meaning of the term “conversation”. Unfortunately it ended way too soon.

The 4 Horseman episode was great, loved watching. I also really appreciated Jonathan having Bishop Barron and John on afterwards, also for those interested please check out Paul Vanderklay's breakdown as it was very helpful for me at least. God bless you all

58:00 - John's point is spot-on here. A great eye-opener for me was realizing that "images" of space are almost entirely greatly marked-up/false-colored images if not total artist renditions.

You have to continue this! Amazing. Cutting edge of this whole conversation !

I LOVE the clarity about attention! This conversation is poetry

I'm really looking forward to part 2!! Thanks to all involved.

This Conversation was so Intense It Might as Well Be Psychedelic too! Thanks guys.

Excellent! Can't wait for Part Two, and John's discussion with Bishop Barron.

I feel like I need to watch these videos multiple times to fully grasp the messages. This is such valuable stuff!

Great discussion-I love how these talks give me so much to think about and ponder.

What a fantastic discussion! I feel so lucky to be able to listen to such clear intelligent thinkers 👍

Oh, finally the question. Are transpersonal beings conscious? That is a key question! Haven’t got there yet just excited to see it in the description 😄 EDIT 1: And yes John that was a great point! Meditation is one of the triad of concentration/meditation/contemplation and people can create an imbalance if they focus on only one. EDIT 2: Finished when you were getting to the crux of the matter. I hope you start with the consciousness question next time.

Thank you very much for this conversation. I thoroughly enjoyed it because it didn't go so far over my head that I couldn't understand it. I particularly enjoyed seeing or feeling a movement of relationships as fluid. Thank you.

I really hope you guys talk about Rupert Sheldrake and morphic fields and how that relates to angels & Neoplatonic thought and church fathers. He wrote a book with Matthew Fox called “The Physics of Angels”.

I was glued to this conversation and at the end I realised that pretty much no other topic matters.

I was waiting for this one! Truly fascinating conversation and hope you both have many more.

Glorious dialogue. More please.

that hour flew by! I was in the zone the whole time, its crazy that John also mentioned Vygotsky who coined the term the "zone". Very much looking forward to part 2, thank you Mr.Pageau!

There is something very special to have tracked john and jonathan over a period of years and to have seen dialogos over time

God Bless . The Four Horseman, Thank You.

This was amazing. One of my favorites from either Vervaeke or Pageau. Generally my perspective lines up moreso with Vervaeke, but there are points here where I relate strongly with Pageau's propositions. This terrain between their ideas feels quite relevant to me. I'm pretty excited for part 2.

Wow! You are spoiling us Jonathan!!!

Truly beautiful dialogos, exemplary with true love, charity and affection between them. Agape. Truly beautiful dialogos. Very excited to witness the follow-up after the initiation of the topic. It's a conversation I've been having with myself for forty years. Intentions set to truth and re-uniting science and Christianity. Braiding the cord, weaving the web.

I so appreciate Jonathan’s, John’s, Paul’s, And Jordan’s conversations on these topics. You are all, always 100% sincere and open in your conversations above all else. This is so rare and appreciated in these times.

Weird synchronicity as I see the notification for this while watching a music tutorial by a completely different channel actually titled "Collective Intelligence"

You guys are both wonderful, and wonderful together!

Great conversation, can’t wait for part 2. I noticed this isn’t on the podcast yet, hope you can keep putting them out at the same time

Amazing, the 4 Horsemen of meaning is really enrich me. New subscriber here, and I like your video with Bishop Barron. This is a new enlightment....

Thanks John and Jonathan!

Thank you Gentlemen for a fine discussion. The reflections on the use of social media and its platforms were thankfully sane and circumspect ( or so it seemed to me ). Prof Vervaeke's articulation of attention, intention, and how it works with prioritization, salience, etc., was helpful and , I believe, how it really works. Somewhere around 8 or 9 minutes in Prof Vervaeke spoke of people who are becoming aware of "connectedness" and attention, with the issues of salience and relevance realization, but not necessarily embodying these "qualities" to their own flourishing, and to that of their communities. There may be good reasons for this, and some may find it impossible to make "the connections" that their communities want to "bind" them too. And you both went on to talk about the positives and negatives of community and individuation somewhat. Very helpful. One of you made a reference to Hitler and the hypnotic attention he accessed in large crowd events. It is chilling to read what he wrote about propaganda and the psychology of its use in his book. I don't know nothin about angels and principalities, but all I can write about that is . . . hold it . . . someone's knockin at the door. Gotta go.

I love u guys, this honest probing for truth just fills me with joy and hope. I don't care what we find, just the fact that we search, honestly search is a wonderful thing. 🙏

So interesting! Thank you. I'll watch this a couple of times, because I know I missed things and I need some time to get other things right.

Thank you so deeply for everything you do for us ♥️

I cannot wot for part two. This was the best conversation ever. Thanks

Thank you Both for continuing to explore these topics and sharing this amazing chat with us meere plebs 😃

Vervaeke and Pageu have the most generative conversations in this space of any other two interlocutors. Can you please have a conversation at least twice a month?

I'm at the point in listening to so many Jonathan Pageau videos that I take notes on the insights I'm getting, including additional insights that arise in my own mind on the same subject but relating to something else. The video continues to play in the background and while I'm writing my additional insight down one of the next things out of Jonathan's mouth has to do with the same additional insight I'm in the process of writing down. It sure feels like were participating in a shared experience of the logos together. Wild stuff.

Can't wait for part two! Great content, thank you.

That was great - you complemented each other and that afforded me sense of dawning understanding of what you were talking about. I would love to see Jordan Peterson involved into that discussion of the reality of the hyper-objects/forms/archetpyal patterns and hierarchy and the participation in Christ. This metaphor in particular I found compelling: like my finger is to myself, I am to the ideas/values that inhabit/possess me. I would also like to hear a evolutionary argument for how distributed cognition co-evolves with the personified patterns of reality and how these afford the individuals better perception of and conduct in allignment with these patterns. Thank you both for doing this!

50:00 I feel like a (mostly) veiled aspect of the Hyperobject we all live in has been revealed, become more apparent, in just the last 2-5 years.

The idea of attention also makes sense in regards to how the Orthodox talk about dealing with the temptation of demons; not to pay attention to them, not to let them land in your mind and instead focus on God.

With good health and cheer in mind, if my finger is twitching without my conscious control due to illness then healing it might involve consistent rehabilitation exercises to train the muscle and the brain to work together again. In the same manner with higher beings, if my day-to-day life is unhealthy, then training myself with religious exercises or a physical discipline like yoga can help put me back in order with the higher aspects of life that connect us all together. Thank you for sharing your discussions, they are helping me sort through my first things.

Thank you for your conversations.

I’m gonna need to listen to this talk a couple times to really get what’s going on fully but when they started talking about hyper objects representing the shared parts (if I’m not mistaken) of a system or people etc it was surprisingly clear to understand and helped to tie everything together

I think this may be one of the better conversations I've heard on metaphysics which is what this is I think. John V understands there are limits to materialism and it's what allows him to converse w Jon P in a meaningful conversation.

Woah amazing timing to drop all this new content! I’m sure there have been many newcomers to the channel over the last few weeks

...really enjoying these discussions...

Some stunning insights around addiction in this

You absolutely have to continue at the spot you ended the discussion. That point feels like the furthest point you can go as a "non-religious" person without becoming "religious" in the sense that Jonathan is a "religious" person.

Delightful video! Thanks to you both!

Great discuss between Jonathan and Ed Helms.

The IQ bell curve of thinking about God is Left: God is personal. Middle: God is abstract or impersonal. Right: God is personal. The fact that we are personal beings and the most intelligent beings we’ve encountered (the closest thing to god) suggests that the being or intelligence that made us is likely even more personal than we are, not less

Thanks, guys!

my spirit is lifted hearing this

Top 10 conversations of all time

I do my inner work with the Angels and Ive found that they all have directions and applications that ultimately build the House of God when used together.

Fantastic conversation!

Loved this!

As I mull on it, the idea that principalities are as real as ourselves trips me out as it starts making sense

Just as you got going...! Darn cliffhangers. I can’t wait for part two.

Thank you both so much for continuing to dialogue and sharing such rich insights; this was amazing. It seems like there's a contradiction in Jonathan's view, because he simultaneously claims that principalities are conscious beings that can exist independently of joint attention, in contrast to John's view of these collective intelligences as existing transjectively, lacking self-consciousness and activated through participation, and yet Jonathan also claims they require physical body, just as our consciousness requires embodiment. But then what happens when they become wholly forgotten, at the level of their body? Jonathan acknowledges that everything but God requires a body (and that God's body is the cosmos itself in a sense). Are they ontologically dependent on our attention the way the gods in Neil Gaiman are? That then conflicts with the traditional metaphysics of the patterns of reality as being part of its fundamental structure, part of the emanationist constraints ("heaven") that shape the creative potential of physical manifestation, and these are also normally describing as existing eternally. It would seem there is an equivocation and / or conflation between these two concepts occuring for aesthetic and / or doctrinal purposes. I think a way to resolve this is to understand the particular principalities as they manifest in creation through physicality as being partial aspects of the primordial patterns of reality. I think aspects of Whitehead's metaphysics (a theistic, process-oriented Neo-neoplatonism) are helpful here. The primordial patterns ("eternal objects" in Whitehead's terminology) are defined by their relation to other eternal objects. There is also a notion of the capacity for minds and circumstances to "cut" the eternal objects such that only aspects of them manifest. These could then be said to emerge in time and participate in the consciousness of it's body (the examples of gods of cities ect. as discussed), but there is no such thing as a discrete consciousness or even discrete agency in this sense, as each is a partial "cutting" of an eternal object that is already defined by relation. Now, in the sense that everything participates in God this is true in general (and that everything is part of the omniscient "consciousness" of God, only existing through participation in God in the first place) but here it is also true in a way distinct from analogies to human consciousness. Now, I would be fine saying the principalities become conscious when joint attention is given to them, and *through* the collective consciousness of it's "body" in a sense, and that outside these occasions they exist as abstract patterns constraining potential. The eternal objects in Whitehead (a rendition of Platonic ideas) can be "cut" in innumerable different ways; this would thus be similar to the Thomistic concept Jonathan mentioned of an angel manifesting for every relation between two beings. I'm actually happy with that Thomistic concept if understood in a non-anthropomorphic sense closer to Vervaeke's view, as it shows the primacy of transjectivity, but I don't think it's compatible with at least a simplistic image of Jonathan's proposal, in that it would imply an asymptotic infinitude of conscious beings either being created and retained or created and dying constantly, which would again conflict with the notion of discrete self-conscious agents that require physical bodies to exist in the former case and with principalities as part of the structure of reality in the latter. Our form of consciousness and cognition is tightly interconnected with our particular type of embodiment as humans, as John's work has so thoroughly articulated. Given the tight coupling of cognition / consciousness (certainly *self-consciousness*, see Bernardo Kastrup's work here for explicating this key distinction), and the history of the cosmos, with humans being a very recent development, I don't think one can simultaneously claim that principalities are: 1. Eternal patterns of reality 2. Conscious, especially self-conscious beings 3. Require bodies in the physical world for their existence Furthermore, I think it's quite clear that new patterns of reality emerge (or at least manifest) at various points in both cosmic and human history, which is further explained by the cutting metaphor for eternal objects. Eriugena, who John and Jonathan have a shared respect for, defined angels as "an intellectual motion about God and the causes of things." I think this accords well with the Whiteheadian process view I've presented. I think the concept Vervaeke proposed, that consciousness (or self-consciousness, in Kastrups's language) may only exist at a certain range of complexity and not above or below it, is on to something. Similar to how different emergence vectors (constrained by emanative eternal objects / forms) may have more in common with a vector / strata several away from it in either direction of complexity than one adjacent to it (see Alexander Bard, e.g.: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-fLqGNbiCasg.html and Gregg Henriques' Tree of Life model of the history of complexity). For example, cognition and sub-physics may actually have more similarities to each other than the vectors next to them (e.g. biology or culture [where I think this topic is mainly at, and it's overlap with cognition] on one hand, or physics on the other. This goes for communication paradigms as well; see for example the amazing work the Center for the Study of Digital Life is doing using Aquinas and McLuhan, on how, for example, the new digital paradigm "retrieves" the medieval scribal paradigm in sharing certain similarities to it, most notably memory (drawing on Thomas' ecology of the inner senses) in contrast to the electric paradigm's focus on imagination / fantasy. As to Jonathan's question on why cultures throughout history have treated gods the way he's describing: the spirit of finesse often affords better results, by treating them imaginally and poetically, and our ancestors obviously didn't have a grasp of cognitive science, among other areas of knowledge. Not all superstitutions are going to or should be retained in this new return to religion. How would the principality of a river or forest exist as something conscious when no one is attending to it? Furthermore, what about the principality of various groves in the forest? Individual trees? Things quickly become combinatorially explosive, at which point Thales' "everything is full of gods" is I think best taken in a Whiteheadian panexperientialist manner, and I'd argue the same goes for the topic at hand. A gestalt does not necessarily possess all the features that make it up *in the same manner* as that feature in isolation. To use Jonathan's favored example, the city of London may have a kind of gestalt agency you can describe using poetic terms, but that doesn't mean every feature in the city contributes because our cognition and consciousness (via Relevance Realization) is grounded in the fact that we are finite biological organisms that *care* about the information we intake. There is nothing strongly analogous to the discreteness of an organism here that affords it's cognition through the will to survive - the city limits are not perfectly defined, and the city's agency extends beyond it's bounds through people, mail, telephone lines and media, ect. Now, I can agree that the city has both a kind of agency, a gestalt form (with fluid borders), a collective consciousness via its inhabitants (including nonhuman ones in the panexperientialist sense), and participates in constraining forms / heavenly patterns / principalities / eternal objects, and in doing so acts as a lesser one at the level of manifestation, and that people's joint attention to a symbolic "face" or faces of the city (names, presiding god, capitol building) can function to help unify those participating in it, but would argue that further claiming that there is a separate, discrete, conscious - certainly self-conscious - agent behind it is grounded more in an aesthetic efficiency in the spirit of finesse than in coherence or plausibility. I also think a way to describe the matter that integrates or at least mediates both positions is that the principalities John and Jonathan described are, if they do have any sort of consciousness, are at the very least not conscious in the way we are conscious, as embodied psycho-somatic rational organisms. To assert otherwise would be a form of anthropomorphism / anthropocentrism. Again I think Whitehead is quite helpful here. Finally, on a somewhat different note, I appreciate, in all senses of the word, what Jonathan said about the activity of God as a constant call of your telos and your capacity to embody it rather than any action being purely God's or a creature's (other than creation itself I suppose). Its a synergistic model; not purely passive or active but a participation. This also maps to God's superjective lure in Whitehead's metaphysics. Thank you both again for the discussion; looking forward to part 2.

Really great conversation.

I can't figure out which one of you two I love more :O)

Excellent!!!

This guys intro is amazing.

Hi Guys, great conversation, thanks. Just watched Ian McGilchrist giving a lecture on the co-incidence of opposites. fits in well with some of the stuff mentioned here. Highly recommend it.

31:00 Vervaeke's description of channels for creating trustworthiness (and meaning) relates to the problem Bishop Barron spoke on in the Catholic Church's loss of the sacred. They took away the beauty (visual channel), the incense (olfactory channel), the Latin/chant/sacred music (auditory channel), and the kneeling rails and communion on the tongue (touch/physical channel). These are just a few examples. If our senses help us create trust and engage in meaning, then it is no wonder why the Novus Ordo Mass has led to a decline in the Church.

This is fascinating given my recent immersion into Bhakti practices, thinking of the power of singing the holy names in a group. It explains a lot about the practice of deity worship and other group ceremony as well... @ 42:00 going into the train guru worship is considered so important as the gateway to Transcendence of perspective and self. Deep stuff here. Thankyou for expanding the consciousness. 🙏❣️ Haribol!

I can hardly wait for part II. You guys were at the crux of closing the gap between the top-down and bottom-up approach to grasp reality. You both have answers, how and if you two can reconcile your answers is the key.

Awesome! Glad to see this subject discussed. I think there’s a really strong case for internal/transjective experience of pieces of consciousness attracting input and operating as internal personalities. I think it’s an intersecting area between orthodox religion, Jungian/post Jungian thought, theosophy, and now science and psychology. A strong argument about one’s capacity for light, teleology and mentor ship is to be made here too, against certain elements of Jung, and the post Jungians, and it’s a nuanced argument that I think butts up against middle grounds and the total archetypal landscape that even Christianity had to integrate in many ways and cannot harvest the entire field. This leads to a difficult space where final ontological commitments and exclusions I think are going to have to be argued over, and co-exist with some personal and community elements being voluntarily chosen, and engendered by traditions, rather than just asserted on everyone beyond what can actually be asserted with finality. I think it definitely drives nails into the popular, decadent romanticism and chasing experience for its own sake, and solipsism, and can find a core meta-ontology that affords traditions, personalism, and exclusionary institutions. What I don’t think it will garner is “proof” of one religion and everyone returning to that and dismissal of anything outside it that complicates it’s final authority, or the way some of the comments and community just use these arguments to re-instate a religious positivism, and at a certain threshold level the arguments dilute and are captured by the two prevailing visions of our time, nested in modernity. I don’t think it’s all a conspiracy theory by mean old church fathers, and there are many, many, factors outside Christianity at play here, and these traditions have in many ways kept this concept alive, made sophisticated ways to access it, and deal with dangers, and there are negative effects of esotericism in our history, along with the discovery of science and power of it and technology itself. However, I don’t think you can avoid a runaway train of positivist and materialist sections of different Christian religions that upheld nominalistic, and Descartes for ownership of truth, and a logical endpoint of this with multiple non-Christian factors leading to a general, at net discarding of full cosmology, angelology, and personalization and mystical elements being discarded, because they were not always easily contained (in addition to legitimate concerns given over salience.)

This conversation makes me think of the Sistine Chapel. The spirit of Man and the spirit of God trying to find the point where they connect.

This had all my attention 👽

So good!

34:00 Interesting idea about joint attentions being less optimal over video only format. Still better than nothing at all. This bit of the conversation made me hope for a in person meeting of you you all. Still record it and share! I wonder if being in person would improve the problem solving abilities of those involved?

Mind blown from 42:00 through 45:00