I love you John, quite deeply actually, but you're loosing me a little with the jargon. 'The one one-ing' doesn't really trigger insight within me. Is it a form of phenomenological glossolalia, are you having a stroke... what is happening?
I am trying to convey an experience of the One as the oneness behind everything. The use of oneing is to convey that you are experiencing this oneness as running up and down the sense of emergence and emanation. All things are moving towards being one as we understand/ realize them and every single thing is receiving the oneness that makes it a real thing as opposed to just a pile of things. That is the experience of the intelligibility-realness that is usually implicit as explicit and impressive.
@@johnvervaeke That makes a little more sense. Thanks. Of course it immediately makes one's mind (pun intended) jump to all domains in which things as we understand them seem to be undergoing a process of division or entropy rather than one of one-ing like, say, humanity on so many levels. But I suspect I might be making a category mistake in doing so?
@@suneasmussen2650 For life it's always both simultaniously. One can aspect shift to see new levels integration too, even on the level of humanity, for example - we are able to view these lectures from John from all kinds of places in the world, the interconnectedness of humanity has risen simultaniously with new divisions. This is what John would call complexification - differentiation and integration happening at the same time. In general it's never just entropy for life as we know it. As Shroedinger famously noticed, life does indeed decrease entropy locally.
I love this episode. It reminds me of acting class, where we had to do improv and it was scary because there was no script. The only rule is accepting what is: “yes, and…” A truly generative stance. Where you actually participate and feel a scene coming into existence because you are relating to space, objects and people in the here and now with the simple frame of: create something. Going through middle age and getting rather burnt out on the scripts handed to me on what it means to be a good/successful woman, this episode is exactly what I needed. It confirms that the (thinking) scripts are always less important than the “yes, and” of oneness. Don’t let other people’s petrified scripts get in the way of generative grammar. Thanks! This was inspirational.
John, I feel like you should have given a warning to people starting your lecture series. Through both After Socrates and Awakening from the Meaning crisis, you have completely altered the framework which I use to think about the nature of reality and the manner in which the psyche makes reality intelligible. I have no other term than spiritual with which I can describe the experience of the depth of the insights you have shared. I was raised catholic but denounced it in my teens, and now feel that you have intellectually mind fucked me back into a Christian again. From the core of my being, thank you!
My favourite of all the After Socrates lectures thus far! You really couldn’t have gone any more fundamental than this, reaching the utter limits of what can be known or described but nonetheless a demanding but warm invitation to participate in it. Thank you John!
With every episode I get the sense that this is the most in depth thing about reality I have ever heard. However, with every new episode, I get to witness something even deeper and more mindblowing and profound then what was before, which I did not think it was posssible, yet it is, and I get speechless in way in which I never expected. Thank you for everything you do for us. Your work is truly the most remakable think I've ever seen and I find that my life is worth living simply because I got to live in the same time period as you and got to witness this firsthand.
Your work has built a bridge from where I stood to what I could see but not touch. You have helped bring me into contact with truths that may only have ever been a whisper on the edge of consciousness. Thank you, thank you.
Amazing episode, John. You are now explicitly proposing these ideas that I was already resonating with after Ep. 1 of AFTMC. The Grand-Unification of Plotinus was the Pearl of the Axial Age. I sense a symmetry in the modern awakening and reconstruction with these ideas. A tiny seed of promise to a Technocratic world that is in dire need of a Pearl.
I'm stunned, another fantastic episode! I don't think I've been this intensely focused for such a long stretch of time in my life before, had no idea I was even capable of that
Thank you John for this episode and this series. You present a really clear argument, even though it's a very complex one, on how to acquire an ecology of practices and how they can all be interconnected and belong to an overall philosophical framework. It is astonishing to see such a complex ''system'' being integrated in such a comprehensive and yet clear way. Thank you for this. I hope you're still getting enough time to do your own practices as well! All the best!
I'd love to ask here a question to John: if having a meditative practice is essential to achieve a meaningful life, and thus happiness, and if the western tradition doesn't really have any such practices, do we conclude that no traditional westerner has ever found meaning in life or true happiness? Or is it that the west had some practices akin to meditation, which produced similar results thus affording meaning? If the latter is the case, which practices, frameworks, are those? I ask because I am trying hard to properly acquire an ecology of practices following this series and many podcasts featuring John, but I tried in the past to meditate daily for several months and I did not find what I was looking for. My latest realization is that I was trying too hard to fit into an easter tradition that I was not actually made for. Now, instead, I am trying to explore western wisdom in a deep way. I seem to fit in the ''western'' shoes much better. Thanks for all the wonderful work you do John! You are positively and greatly impacting many people's lives.
When you spoke of the structure being like a tree suddenly i understood. Well done, John. I just want to give props to the production team. The sound and lighting and quality is absolutely great 👍
Fantastic episode, John! I feel like having a refresher of the Awakening From The Meaning Crisis now to recap where in history we got lost as it's a shame we're now thinking so counterintuitively and binarily about the different layers of reality. I'm already looking forward to the next episode and can't wait to see how this story keeps unfolding.
I must say that I don't grasp a lot of what you try to convey in this episode, but I strongly resonated with the part where you talked about bottom-up emergence and top-down emanance happening simultaneously, and that epiphenomenalism is sort of self-defeating because if minds are just an epiphenomenon then science is just an epiphenomenon and then every argument about logic/rationality falls apart xD Thank you for your effort, John.
I could barely see you this entire video.... you were so far over my head, I thought your wings might melt and you'd fall to the earth.... Going to need to either rewatch and hyper-focus, or else set it aside and revisit this episode again in a year or so.... being a newbie, maybe I'm trying to consume too much too quickly.... Proverbs 25:16 comes to mind.... In any case, I'm indescribably grateful for your work in this series. I'll get there someday.
51:56 parece una teoría de la Relevancia, pero le tocó realizarla filosóficamente y teologicamente casi, porque solo el alcance del método científico no abarca la complejidad de la teoría. 👍🏼👏🏼 Un genio
I turn the cc on so i can read along. with my adhd reading is incredibly hard but read along with a voice helps alot. kinda a paradox of my own haha appreciate your time JV ❤🍄
15:27 I was able to access the abstract, but the full paper is paywalled at Springer Link. The key sentence from the abstract is this one: _In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization._ Shared tradeoffs are often a potent indicator of deeper kinship, but not always.
I've spent years attending a Unitarian Universalist church. It allowed for many uncommon, sometimes eclectic, usually beautiful and sometimes transformative sermons from all walks of life and spiritual paths. I can say that this lecture would land wonderfully from behind a pulpit in any UU church around. There's a huge ally in wait. John, you should look into doing a Voices with Vervaeke with someone from the UU community. They serve as hubs for many spiritual paths already. Almost like the dojo you and Rick Repetti were talking about. There are all kinds of small groups that meet within the walls of UU churches. Small group meetings, everything from liberal Christians to various focus groups to all sorts of druid and pagan groups. All welcome under one roof. Anyway just a thought. I'll think more on it. I can't thank you enough. Please keep up the good fight 😉🙏🏼✌🏼
Of course, I strongly resonate with the general thrust of what you are saying even if I may have quarrels with such things as that in my view the importance of selection by random mutation in overall evolutionary process
Learned ignorance "...pressed to give it a name, we might call it a “knowing of non-knowing.” It is the point at which the self is truly on its own home-ground. Here plants and trees have penetrated to the bottom to be themselves; here tiles and stones are through and through tiles and stones; and here, too, in self-identity with everything, the self is radically itself. This is the knowing of non-knowing, the field of emptiness itself." -Nishitani Keiji
Gregory Bateson: "Information is a difference that makes a difference." What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them. J.R. Lucas: "Information is a difference that can make a difference."
John, thanks for yet another extraordinary episode. I am not in a position to get most of the books on Plotinus that you have recommended. I have the old Stephen Mac Kenna translation of the Enneads. Do you have an opinion on whether it is usable for this work (at least in the short term), or is it so inaccurate as to be misleading?
We have not discovered what things are, we don't know for sure if particles exist. We are naming behaviors, not things. Wheeler called Feynman in the middle of the night and proclaimed, " I know why every electron is exactly the same, it's because there is only one of them".
Made it to 15 minutes before having to come up for air; took me 1.5 hours to get that far lol VvK: "Do you remember what generative models are?" Moi: Married couples! Edit: 18:55 Reminded me of Pageau's model of the Symbolic World; I'll go watch that again now as I think I will understand both models better
Thanks, John. Really interested in buying Perls book on the Ennead, but cant seem to find it anywhere. Is it out of print? Read Theophany, and it really got me into neoplatonism. Brilliant book!
Great lecture. Super interested in Proclus for next time because I’ve read Plotinus, Augustine and Dionysus, but never him. I’ve also always agreed that science doesn’t fit a world view. I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as the scientific worldview. Since science, as great as it is, excludes us. Science gives us a picture of the world, but never a picture of how it does that.
Thanks John very deep waters indeed. A question though is even tho we can say emanation and emergence are intertwined, that is only first step as we might then which is the more fundamental process.. because once we have got rid of scientific reductionism, then surely we are back to saying that emantation is the important thing as that is the process that causes and explains emergence... why do forms emerge ? Because the Form exists and emanates... why do spheres exist in the world because the Forms of "equal distance from a centre" exist abstractly. If that abstract structure was not possible then no spheres could emerge...
Forgive me. I have a moderate TBI that can give me directional confusion. When you are going on about vertical and horizontal dimensions; am I to be applying some extra understanding of the difference beyond say, A and B? If so, can you recommend something in any format that explains vertical and horizontal in a way a dim 6th grader could understand? I'm afraid my confusion seriously distracted me during more than a few of these videos. I am prepared to revisit them once I can fully grasp what is meant by the vertical and horizontal. Thank you for any advice you care to give.
What if all this points to Wheeler and his U? The two sides of the U communicate with each other, like push and pull technologies, to bring us to something like Hegel's Absolute Spirit.
John, Queestion: can a child in the womb be used as an example? He/she is ONE with the mother, but can not “know her”, only after birth when they are distinct/separate/ out of comformity with the One/mother can he/she know it/ her?
If the distinction between feminine and masculine can be contained in a single person, can the so-called patriarchy and hypergamy also be collapsed into a single understanding? If couples that are unbalanced are the source of ecosystem imbalance, by acting as fulcrum and lever that express in physical actions, driven by a dichotomy between ideals and actions. This is about feminine and masculine, not others, females or males. The feminine embracing complexity as emotional, the masculine proportioning the object (emotional object goes to physical object) as groupings as rational actions, building the house or structure so the home may emerge. But if the masculine loses faith in the feminine need it becomes patriarchical (physical power as the sole attribute of the group, and the person reduced to that and found wanting compared to the group, and the information barrier that limits the scope of the individual in acting) which I think Hobbes meant as a good thing, a larger "house" built for the home to emerge. He didn't know about plastics. But humans are very efficient at providing and excluding, so the feminine need is easily satisfied, and instead of the person playing that role in the relationship then evolving to a balance inside themselves of feminine/masculine, they are forced into a masculine black and white removal from complexity where appearance matters above all, to which the hypergamy is directed. The masculine role is lost by the "gaming feeling" which seems to be an emotional need coupled with cynicism, instead of a rational proportioning for the feminine to approve. The materials last longer. The single understanding might be that each person has feminine and masculine characteristics and the built environment feeds back, and couples as two individuals as one set can be very effective at creating a built environment that excludes or includes according to how each person responds to the world, allowing diversity of response and then balancing that with a partner doing the same, taking turns. Instead of the world simplified to appearance coupled to brute force as the non-human action. Thanks for the video!
Plotinus had to use proposition and cohesive lines of reasoning to tell us that we shouldn't think cohesively along lines of reasoning... Doesn't all language and first principles thinking work this way? It may be different in the East, their language uses less nouns and more verbs.
I really had some old feelings of solipsism fade during this video. Since the ego really needs a rock/ground upon which to crack/discharge. That the ego will find this in direct contact with the knowing of the world it finds. Then adding a dimension through which it may ascend 🤯 oh course only when a learned ignorance can be rested on. Only through the ego, not in spite of it. The part of the video on quantum physics was well spoken. Science doesn’t exist on that scale 😂 wow science needs a stable frame in which it can ever know 👌
Hmmm. I wonder why the distinction between subject and object is so inviolable. Why did the ancients think it's not possible for subject to know itself as object and to also know itself as subject. Relationships can be categorized as object-object, subject-object, and subject-subject. Why is an internal subject-subject relationship not acceptable? Why do some think that it's not possible to know that you are participating or to watch yourself participate while actively evaluating and adjusting the manner of participation? More to the point, why is there such a strong tendency to reduce everything to units of one? One unified field, E=mc2 - it's all energy, one oneing - it's all one consciousness, experience, awareness, cognition - it's all consciousness. Why the push (or pull) to reduce reality to some myopic, over simplified version of reality that only expresses a partial truth?
14:30 This is a strange way to frame the history of cognition. Working in secrecy at Bletchley Park in the 1940s, Alan Turing never came to such a dumb conclusion. He was off to the races on a unit of information he called "nats" (bits to the base e) and a framework of certainty aggregation suggestive of Bayesian inference, in which all sources at all levels are combined together by the best available heuristic. I'm sure he also understood that "good" heuristics were thick on the ground, and that the one algorithm to rule them all (e.g. Solomonov induction) was transcomputable, meaning absolutely not-ever in this known universe. Call him a pragmatist, if you like, for ruling out a solution path best described as "not-ever in this known universe". To make that slightly more concrete, imagine you have your two finalists in a beauty pageant. One identifies as male, the other as female, but it doesn't matter, because they both shave in all the same places. In principle, you can finally tell which contestant is the more beautiful contestant, but only if you allocate so much time to the skills competition that the skills competition does not end until _after_ the heat death of the known universe. Welcome to Solomonov induction. Never wrong, but the postal delay is a bugbear. How long? If you have to ask, you're living in a universe too small to contain the answer. Okay, so Turing was already hot on the scent in the 1940s. Next question. How was Turing single-handedly smarter than everyone at MIT put together during the 1950s? Those were the people who turned this upside down, until we starting to ask which came first, the letter or the word. The main difference, as I see things, is that Turing rarely had to write a grant application. He did one time find himself forced to participate in a job action (along with three other colleagues) in which they wrote directly to Churchill (October 1941) to break a resource gridlock, resulting in Churchill slapping one of his famous "Action this day!" red stickers onto a memo barking out Make It So - meaning twice as fast as any rector at Oxbridge ever divided up the tea money. Over at MIT, in bounteous post-war America, things quickly reverted to the pre-war standard where people actually had to promise shit to get shit. Fortunately, the shit you promised rarely had to pass the smell test for more than the length of a single committee meeting. Every Tuesday, they would gather up a fresh sheaf of applications for one of these newfangled electronic calculators (each and every one megabucks and megawatts), and then quickly engage in triage. "Okay, let's grind through this pile of grant applications before the heat death of the universe." Everyone nods in unison. "The physics department wants one, and they bring in all the big contracts from Los Alamos." Easiest lay-up of all time. Approved. "The meteorology department wants one, and they bring in all the big money from the Air Force, on _top_ of spill-over grants from Los Alamos." Second easiest lay-up of all time. Approved. "The linguistics department wants one and, uh [chair squints for a second at the fine print], they are helping to permit America best absorb the fugitive European intelligentsia that Hitler scattered to the four corners of the Earth, such that America will soon become known as the greatest scientific powerhouse in recorded history. Okay, that's a strange way to frame it, but we've all had recent contact with the Teetering Tower of Babel on the Old Continent, so we get their overall drift." Approved, with a side order of "Hear! Hear!" Meeting adjourned. A dirty little secret of academic computer science back in the day was that they never delivered a working system to the industrial world that wasn't architected on the box model, not until the early 21st century, despite decade after decade after decade of grant applications made entirely out of green cheese. It's hard to name a field more innately allergic to the box model than linguistics, but man how they tried. They actually did deliver a linguistic system based on the box model to NATO, capable of automatically translating the morning weather forecast into all the major European languages. Complexity of semantic domain? Well, let's just say it's possible that your television weatherman _invented_ mass ironic culture, so as to distract the audience from the daily divination of half-dried paint. In the box model, letters are inside of lexemes, lexemes are inside of words, works are inside syntax, syntax is inside grammar, grammar is inside semantics, semantics are inside discourse, discourse is inside of getting laid, and getting laid is inside Nietzsche's will to power. This is why every budding Napoleon is gifted a set of colourful wooden blocks at age two, with ornate letters carved on most sides. Grandparents grok the box model. It's a cultural universal. I get awfully frustrated with the history of cognition filtered through the bullshit starving academics wrote on their grant applications for the sixty year period where the new shiny was far too paltry to wrap its arms around the giant sprawling mess of human language. And that's how the _real_ AI winter lasted six decades: from Turing until the first GPGPU worth a hill of beans, while the page count of human-language content on the Internet went turbo MacDonald's: brillions and trillions of pages served. Turns out, 50% of natural language competence pretty much falls out of scale (as we see now with ChatGPT), once you've fired the last malingering linguist on your programming team into the sun. Some people intuit that if the stork dumped half the fat baby on our doorstep pretty much yesterday, another stork will dump the other half of the fat baby on our doorstep pretty much tomorrow (the whole baby, fully assembled, would be AGI). I have strong doubts that Turing would have numbered himself among the mouth-breathers. What if one stork hails from the West: statistical inference at scale, and the other stork hails from the East: Solomonov induction for the young and the restless? Turing glances up slightly from the gaze at his own shoes. "Yes, at some point, this all gets difficult fast." How fast? Clearly invented before the PC revolution (1962, as it happens), the busy beaver comes straight out of the study of Turing machines. No beaver in all of computer science has more stamina than the busy beaver (it's a proven theorem). For the busy beaver, "ludicrous speed" from _Spaceballs_ is the intermediate setting on the windshield wipers. We haven't even depressed the clutch pedal yet to select a forward gear. Then it will chirp so hard, we'll have one foot deep into an Einsteinian metric tensor before we exit the parking lot. However, all this speed is a giant illusion. From our rear tractor-beam, we are towing an entire ring world (Larry Niven's famous ribbon-section of the Dyson sphere) packed to the outer air walls with snack food, and still we're slightly afraid we will eat it all before we reach the first numbered exit. Pippin: What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? The busy beaver knows about them, doesn't she? Merry: I wouldn't count on it. AGI. On the menu soon? Perhaps.
Let me first say that I have a lot of respect for John's work. But for me John's speech (especially in this new series) is unnecessarily convoluted and contains too many neologisms that make most of the material inaccessible. I can't help but think that if the ancient greats like Plato or Plotinus had delivered their materials in a similar way, they would not have had many students or any following. There has to be a simpler way to explain these concepts.
The ability ți turn the dialectique of the dialogue into the notion of good, requires a type of trading with the energetic principles taking place în words. Now let s make a conventional language which stoods from the fact that cognitiion ia like a morfologic category of words which acts horizontaly, and reality is the sintactic way the posibility of the morfoligy works, according also to the vast posibility of asseigns different semnificants with the signs onto morfology. If the LOGOS resulted has coherence, we may say it is good, otherwise it is bad, but containg already the posibility to reorganize itself. I am trying to say, we try to make a single principal path towards this complexity. That s because reality and cognition are în such a great motion, that we need halidrons to observe it s quantic level and also we can separate fenomenology we are already into it s constituitional primordial parts.
Sorry for adding another explanation; morgology it s represented by all web domains we already identified as human knowledge, a noetic organism we rely on.
I think I understand. The important part for emergence is the progression of letters as objects, as symbols of something in the world, to words as objects becoming sentences with grammar and thus meaning at that level because of the space created is intersectional. This "meaning" being a relational space of trading kinetic energy of an observed object, together with an approximated shape and an intelligible frequency that helps to pin "objects" down. But, if I see green as the color of a plant I'm seeing what that plant has jettisoned, not used in it's object. The human observer infers from this, approximating shape and proportioning the kinetic received, back into the part more taken by the plant and invisible to sight but not smell for instance. Balance of process within an object and centering of that object in the outer world.
@@projectmalus Balance of the process within an " object "and than centering the object into the world. Indeed, everything take place aș a process, even after self centering în to the world. Sensation is also a perception aș everything else; when is recognized în a word description, if the author is good enough to put it as descriptive literature you ve got it, even it subjective. subjective. Feeling is also a perception, which have a common language, because more or less humans feelings are the same😊 Oh yes, the letters energetic, I believe it s a code, far more important than every other ones
From TH-cam video; A Different Universe - Bob Laughlin (SETI Talks) 34 minute mark the moral this story is that the things that matter to us often are discoveries and in the physical science where I work those discoveries are laws so we're not discovering technologies a technology is is something you make and often is actually something you swindle people with but must not go there but laws are not something you swindle with because they are measurements they're relationships among measured things that are always true that no one knew before you and my own experience is such that I know they're out there and heaven knows how many just because you haven't found them yet doesn't mean they don't exist this is one that was just under everybody's noses and nobody thought to measure it so he did and he found that the answer was was always the same to one part in 10 billion as a ratio of two measured numbers now that my friends is a law
Nothing novel or interesting happens unless it is on the border between order and chaos. Punctuated equilibrium is barely a hypothesis. There is an organizing principle at work in the cosmos. The universe behaves more like an organism than a machine.
Have you taken a look at the chaos theory/fractal literature? There seems to quite some overlap with the argument you're making. The border of order and chaos appears to be a generative factor of reality at every level of resolution or analysis that I investigate it on. Whether it be at the level of DNA mutations leading to new species, or at stars collapsing and producing new planets. When casting that level of depth of the notion of order and chaos into the mold of ying and yang, one can start to understand how it is meant as a symbol to represent all of reality in a single image.
I love you John, quite deeply actually, but you're loosing me a little with the jargon. 'The one one-ing' doesn't really trigger insight within me. Is it a form of phenomenological glossolalia, are you having a stroke... what is happening?
I am trying to convey an experience of the One as the oneness behind everything. The use of oneing is to convey that you are experiencing this oneness as running up and down the sense of emergence and emanation. All things are moving towards being one as we understand/ realize them and every single thing is receiving the oneness that makes it a real thing as opposed to just a pile of things. That is the experience of the intelligibility-realness that is usually implicit as explicit and impressive.
@@johnvervaeke That makes a little more sense. Thanks. Of course it immediately makes one's mind (pun intended) jump to all domains in which things as we understand them seem to be undergoing a process of division or entropy rather than one of one-ing like, say, humanity on so many levels. But I suspect I might be making a category mistake in doing so?
@@suneasmussen2650 For life it's always both simultaniously. One can aspect shift to see new levels integration too, even on the level of humanity, for example - we are able to view these lectures from John from all kinds of places in the world, the interconnectedness of humanity has risen simultaniously with new divisions. This is what John would call complexification - differentiation and integration happening at the same time. In general it's never just entropy for life as we know it. As Shroedinger famously noticed, life does indeed decrease entropy locally.
This man is the contemporary Plotinus
I can’t say it enough: your work is a blessing, John. It is truly a gift to be able to learn from (and with) you.
I love this episode. It reminds me of acting class, where we had to do improv and it was scary because there was no script. The only rule is accepting what is: “yes, and…” A truly generative stance. Where you actually participate and feel a scene coming into existence because you are relating to space, objects and people in the here and now with the simple frame of: create something. Going through middle age and getting rather burnt out on the scripts handed to me on what it means to be a good/successful woman, this episode is exactly what I needed. It confirms that the (thinking) scripts are always less important than the “yes, and” of oneness. Don’t let other people’s petrified scripts get in the way of generative grammar. Thanks! This was inspirational.
John, I feel like you should have given a warning to people starting your lecture series. Through both After Socrates and Awakening from the Meaning crisis, you have completely altered the framework which I use to think about the nature of reality and the manner in which the psyche makes reality intelligible. I have no other term than spiritual with which I can describe the experience of the depth of the insights you have shared. I was raised catholic but denounced it in my teens, and now feel that you have intellectually mind fucked me back into a Christian again. From the core of my being, thank you!
This series is helping me make so much sense of my background in Christianity. So helpful
My favourite of all the After Socrates lectures thus far! You really couldn’t have gone any more fundamental than this, reaching the utter limits of what can be known or described but nonetheless a demanding but warm invitation to participate in it. Thank you John!
With every episode I get the sense that this is the most in depth thing about reality I have ever heard. However, with every new episode, I get to witness something even deeper and more mindblowing and profound then what was before, which I did not think it was posssible, yet it is, and I get speechless in way in which I never expected. Thank you for everything you do for us. Your work is truly the most remakable think I've ever seen and I find that my life is worth living simply because I got to live in the same time period as you and got to witness this firsthand.
Your work has built a bridge from where I stood to what I could see but not touch. You have helped bring me into contact with truths that may only have ever been a whisper on the edge of consciousness. Thank you, thank you.
Amazing episode, John. You are now explicitly proposing these ideas that I was already resonating with after Ep. 1 of AFTMC.
The Grand-Unification of Plotinus was the Pearl of the Axial Age. I sense a symmetry in the modern awakening and reconstruction with these ideas.
A tiny seed of promise to a Technocratic world that is in dire need of a Pearl.
I'm stunned, another fantastic episode! I don't think I've been this intensely focused for such a long stretch of time in my life before, had no idea I was even capable of that
Thank you John for this episode and this series. You present a really clear argument, even though it's a very complex one, on how to acquire an ecology of practices and how they can all be interconnected and belong to an overall philosophical framework. It is astonishing to see such a complex ''system'' being integrated in such a comprehensive and yet clear way. Thank you for this. I hope you're still getting enough time to do your own practices as well! All the best!
Thank you, John. There's so much good in what you're doing.
I'd love to ask here a question to John: if having a meditative practice is essential to achieve a meaningful life, and thus happiness, and if the western tradition doesn't really have any such practices, do we conclude that no traditional westerner has ever found meaning in life or true happiness? Or is it that the west had some practices akin to meditation, which produced similar results thus affording meaning? If the latter is the case, which practices, frameworks, are those? I ask because I am trying hard to properly acquire an ecology of practices following this series and many podcasts featuring John, but I tried in the past to meditate daily for several months and I did not find what I was looking for. My latest realization is that I was trying too hard to fit into an easter tradition that I was not actually made for. Now, instead, I am trying to explore western wisdom in a deep way. I seem to fit in the ''western'' shoes much better. Thanks for all the wonderful work you do John! You are positively and greatly impacting many people's lives.
12:50 The work of Plotinus as you describe it here reminds me of onomatopoeia, where the word itself "embodies" what it stands for.
When you spoke of the structure being like a tree suddenly i understood. Well done, John. I just want to give props to the production team. The sound and lighting and quality is absolutely great 👍
Fantastic episode, John! I feel like having a refresher of the Awakening From The Meaning Crisis now to recap where in history we got lost as it's a shame we're now thinking so counterintuitively and binarily about the different layers of reality.
I'm already looking forward to the next episode and can't wait to see how this story keeps unfolding.
I must say that I don't grasp a lot of what you try to convey in this episode, but I strongly resonated with the part where you talked about bottom-up emergence and top-down emanance happening simultaneously, and that epiphenomenalism is sort of self-defeating because if minds are just an epiphenomenon then science is just an epiphenomenon and then every argument about logic/rationality falls apart xD
Thank you for your effort, John.
Such a treat, John. I know how I'm going to spend my Friday night.
Thank you very much, John.
Brilliant! Thank you John🙏
54:39 y ahora una teoría de la Fé 😮. Eres el mejor ❤️🩹
Exceptional lecture. Thank you 🙏
I feel like my brain has been well plucked. Love it ❤️
I could barely see you this entire video.... you were so far over my head, I thought your wings might melt and you'd fall to the earth.... Going to need to either rewatch and hyper-focus, or else set it aside and revisit this episode again in a year or so.... being a newbie, maybe I'm trying to consume too much too quickly.... Proverbs 25:16 comes to mind.... In any case, I'm indescribably grateful for your work in this series. I'll get there someday.
51:56 parece una teoría de la Relevancia, pero le tocó realizarla filosóficamente y teologicamente casi, porque solo el alcance del método científico no abarca la complejidad de la teoría. 👍🏼👏🏼 Un genio
Btw John, if I could give more than I do to support your work I most assuredly would….monumentally important….immense gratitude
I turn the cc on so i can read along. with my adhd reading is incredibly hard but read along with a voice helps alot. kinda a paradox of my own haha appreciate your time JV ❤🍄
15:27 I was able to access the abstract, but the full paper is paywalled at Springer Link.
The key sentence from the abstract is this one:
_In this paper we use recent work on the diametric model of autism and psychosis to demonstrate that the tradeoffs inherent to precision-weighting are also inherent to relevance realization._
Shared tradeoffs are often a potent indicator of deeper kinship, but not always.
I've spent years attending a Unitarian Universalist church. It allowed for many uncommon, sometimes eclectic, usually beautiful and sometimes transformative sermons from all walks of life and spiritual paths. I can say that this lecture would land wonderfully from behind a pulpit in any UU church around. There's a huge ally in wait. John, you should look into doing a Voices with Vervaeke with someone from the UU community. They serve as hubs for many spiritual paths already. Almost like the dojo you and Rick Repetti were talking about. There are all kinds of small groups that meet within the walls of UU churches. Small group meetings, everything from liberal Christians to various focus groups to all sorts of druid and pagan groups. All welcome under one roof. Anyway just a thought. I'll think more on it. I can't thank you enough. Please keep up the good fight 😉🙏🏼✌🏼
Truly. Thank you, John.
Thank you John.
Of course, I strongly resonate with the general thrust of what you are saying even if I may have quarrels with such things as that in my view the importance of selection by random mutation in overall evolutionary process
This last is very much related to mike Levin ideas of scale and scope of goals for nested selves
Thank you, very much!
Learned ignorance
"...pressed to give it a name, we might call it a “knowing of non-knowing.” It is the point at which the self is truly on its own home-ground. Here plants and trees have penetrated to the bottom to be themselves; here tiles and stones are through and through tiles and stones; and here, too, in self-identity with everything, the self is radically itself. This is the knowing of non-knowing, the field of emptiness itself." -Nishitani Keiji
Gregory Bateson: "Information is a difference that makes a difference."
What we mean by information - the elementary unit of information - is a difference which makes a difference, and it is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continually transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We may even say that the question is already implicit in them.
J.R. Lucas: "Information is a difference that can make a difference."
John, thanks for yet another extraordinary episode.
I am not in a position to get most of the books on Plotinus that you have recommended. I have the old Stephen Mac Kenna translation of the Enneads. Do you have an opinion on whether it is usable for this work (at least in the short term), or is it so inaccurate as to be misleading?
It’s beautiful poetry compensates for its lack of accuracy and makes it good for practice work.
@51:00, why start moving furniture? And overall the empty room/ audio echo effect is too much for concentration and enjoyment.
I'm realizing a connection, the Emanation is the we space the collective or a Power greater than me. Thanks John.
We have not discovered what things are, we don't know for sure if particles exist. We are naming behaviors, not things.
Wheeler called Feynman in the middle of the night and proclaimed, " I know why every electron is exactly the same, it's because there is only one of them".
From a younger guy trying to make sense of it all, fuckin thank you man
Made it to 15 minutes before having to come up for air; took me 1.5 hours to get that far lol
VvK: "Do you remember what generative models are?"
Moi: Married couples!
Edit:
18:55 Reminded me of Pageau's model of the Symbolic World; I'll go watch that again now as I think I will understand both models better
Thanks John!
Thanks Lee
Thank you
Thanks, John.
Really interested in buying Perls book on the Ennead, but cant seem to find it anywhere. Is it out of print? Read Theophany, and it really got me into neoplatonism. Brilliant book!
Sorry it may be out of print. His Thinking Being is also excellent.
Great lecture. Super interested in Proclus for next time because I’ve read Plotinus, Augustine and Dionysus, but never him.
I’ve also always agreed that science doesn’t fit a world view. I would go so far as to say there is no such thing as the scientific worldview. Since science, as great as it is, excludes us. Science gives us a picture of the world, but never a picture of how it does that.
Thanks John very deep waters indeed.
A question though is even tho we can say emanation and emergence are intertwined, that is only first step as we might then which is the more fundamental process.. because once we have got rid of scientific reductionism, then surely we are back to saying that emantation is the important thing as that is the process that causes and explains emergence... why do forms emerge ? Because the Form exists and emanates... why do spheres exist in the world because the Forms of "equal distance from a centre" exist abstractly. If that abstract structure was not possible then no spheres could emerge...
Forgive me. I have a moderate TBI that can give me directional confusion. When you are going on about vertical and horizontal dimensions; am I to be applying some extra understanding of the difference beyond say, A and B? If so, can you recommend something in any format that explains vertical and horizontal in a way a dim 6th grader could understand? I'm afraid my confusion seriously distracted me during more than a few of these videos. I am prepared to revisit them once I can fully grasp what is meant by the vertical and horizontal. Thank you for any advice you care to give.
Hello, just a note to anyone from the Vervaeke team that on Spotify this episode is mistakenly uploaded as a 1-minute clip version.
What if all this points to Wheeler and his U? The two sides of the U communicate with each other, like push and pull technologies, to bring us to something like Hegel's Absolute Spirit.
I wish I could read all these books :-)
John, Queestion: can a child in the womb be used as an example? He/she is ONE with the mother, but can not “know her”, only after birth when they are distinct/separate/ out of comformity with the One/mother can he/she know it/ her?
It is by agreement of phenomena that we move closer to truth.
If I see something different from everyone else, I should question my perception.
reality is dialectic into dialogos ... 🍃
Yeah they're beginning to dance alright. Thank you.
If the distinction between feminine and masculine can be contained in a single person, can the so-called patriarchy and hypergamy also be collapsed into a single understanding? If couples that are unbalanced are the source of ecosystem imbalance, by acting as fulcrum and lever that express in physical actions, driven by a dichotomy between ideals and actions. This is about feminine and masculine, not others, females or males. The feminine embracing complexity as emotional, the masculine proportioning the object (emotional object goes to physical object) as groupings as rational actions, building the house or structure so the home may emerge. But if the masculine loses faith in the feminine need it becomes patriarchical (physical power as the sole attribute of the group, and the person reduced to that and found wanting compared to the group, and the information barrier that limits the scope of the individual in acting) which I think Hobbes meant as a good thing, a larger "house" built for the home to emerge. He didn't know about plastics.
But humans are very efficient at providing and excluding, so the feminine need is easily satisfied, and instead of the person playing that role in the relationship then evolving to a balance inside themselves of feminine/masculine, they are forced into a masculine black and white removal from complexity where appearance matters above all, to which the hypergamy is directed. The masculine role is lost by the "gaming feeling" which seems to be an emotional need coupled with cynicism, instead of a rational proportioning for the feminine to approve. The materials last longer.
The single understanding might be that each person has feminine and masculine characteristics and the built environment feeds back, and couples as two individuals as one set can be very effective at creating a built environment that excludes or includes according to how each person responds to the world, allowing diversity of response and then balancing that with a partner doing the same, taking turns. Instead of the world simplified to appearance coupled to brute force as the non-human action.
Thanks for the video!
In my view Pierce was saying the same as Plotinus as was whitehead…this was perhaps his big quarrel with James?
Plotinus had to use proposition and cohesive lines of reasoning to tell us that we shouldn't think cohesively along lines of reasoning... Doesn't all language and first principles thinking work this way? It may be different in the East, their language uses less nouns and more verbs.
Btw so is Ian Mcgilcrist
So yes indeed emergence up and your term emanation down…causal relevance is a function ( not in strict mathematical sense) of spatiotemporal scale
I really had some old feelings of solipsism fade during this video. Since the ego really needs a rock/ground upon which to crack/discharge. That the ego will find this in direct contact with the knowing of the world it finds. Then adding a dimension through which it may ascend 🤯 oh course only when a learned ignorance can be rested on. Only through the ego, not in spite of it.
The part of the video on quantum physics was well spoken. Science doesn’t exist on that scale 😂 wow science needs a stable frame in which it can ever know 👌
Hmmm. I wonder why the distinction between subject and object is so inviolable. Why did the ancients think it's not possible for subject to know itself as object and to also know itself as subject. Relationships can be categorized as object-object, subject-object, and subject-subject. Why is an internal subject-subject relationship not acceptable? Why do some think that it's not possible to know that you are participating or to watch yourself participate while actively evaluating and adjusting the manner of participation? More to the point, why is there such a strong tendency to reduce everything to units of one? One unified field, E=mc2 - it's all energy, one oneing - it's all one consciousness, experience, awareness, cognition - it's all consciousness. Why the push (or pull) to reduce reality to some myopic, over simplified version of reality that only expresses a partial truth?
14:30 This is a strange way to frame the history of cognition. Working in secrecy at Bletchley Park in the 1940s, Alan Turing never came to such a dumb conclusion. He was off to the races on a unit of information he called "nats" (bits to the base e) and a framework of certainty aggregation suggestive of Bayesian inference, in which all sources at all levels are combined together by the best available heuristic. I'm sure he also understood that "good" heuristics were thick on the ground, and that the one algorithm to rule them all (e.g. Solomonov induction) was transcomputable, meaning absolutely not-ever in this known universe. Call him a pragmatist, if you like, for ruling out a solution path best described as "not-ever in this known universe".
To make that slightly more concrete, imagine you have your two finalists in a beauty pageant. One identifies as male, the other as female, but it doesn't matter, because they both shave in all the same places. In principle, you can finally tell which contestant is the more beautiful contestant, but only if you allocate so much time to the skills competition that the skills competition does not end until _after_ the heat death of the known universe. Welcome to Solomonov induction. Never wrong, but the postal delay is a bugbear. How long? If you have to ask, you're living in a universe too small to contain the answer.
Okay, so Turing was already hot on the scent in the 1940s. Next question. How was Turing single-handedly smarter than everyone at MIT put together during the 1950s? Those were the people who turned this upside down, until we starting to ask which came first, the letter or the word.
The main difference, as I see things, is that Turing rarely had to write a grant application. He did one time find himself forced to participate in a job action (along with three other colleagues) in which they wrote directly to Churchill (October 1941) to break a resource gridlock, resulting in Churchill slapping one of his famous "Action this day!" red stickers onto a memo barking out Make It So - meaning twice as fast as any rector at Oxbridge ever divided up the tea money.
Over at MIT, in bounteous post-war America, things quickly reverted to the pre-war standard where people actually had to promise shit to get shit. Fortunately, the shit you promised rarely had to pass the smell test for more than the length of a single committee meeting. Every Tuesday, they would gather up a fresh sheaf of applications for one of these newfangled electronic calculators (each and every one megabucks and megawatts), and then quickly engage in triage. "Okay, let's grind through this pile of grant applications before the heat death of the universe." Everyone nods in unison. "The physics department wants one, and they bring in all the big contracts from Los Alamos." Easiest lay-up of all time. Approved. "The meteorology department wants one, and they bring in all the big money from the Air Force, on _top_ of spill-over grants from Los Alamos." Second easiest lay-up of all time. Approved. "The linguistics department wants one and, uh [chair squints for a second at the fine print], they are helping to permit America best absorb the fugitive European intelligentsia that Hitler scattered to the four corners of the Earth, such that America will soon become known as the greatest scientific powerhouse in recorded history. Okay, that's a strange way to frame it, but we've all had recent contact with the Teetering Tower of Babel on the Old Continent, so we get their overall drift." Approved, with a side order of "Hear! Hear!" Meeting adjourned.
A dirty little secret of academic computer science back in the day was that they never delivered a working system to the industrial world that wasn't architected on the box model, not until the early 21st century, despite decade after decade after decade of grant applications made entirely out of green cheese. It's hard to name a field more innately allergic to the box model than linguistics, but man how they tried. They actually did deliver a linguistic system based on the box model to NATO, capable of automatically translating the morning weather forecast into all the major European languages. Complexity of semantic domain? Well, let's just say it's possible that your television weatherman _invented_ mass ironic culture, so as to distract the audience from the daily divination of half-dried paint.
In the box model, letters are inside of lexemes, lexemes are inside of words, works are inside syntax, syntax is inside grammar, grammar is inside semantics, semantics are inside discourse, discourse is inside of getting laid, and getting laid is inside Nietzsche's will to power. This is why every budding Napoleon is gifted a set of colourful wooden blocks at age two, with ornate letters carved on most sides. Grandparents grok the box model. It's a cultural universal.
I get awfully frustrated with the history of cognition filtered through the bullshit starving academics wrote on their grant applications for the sixty year period where the new shiny was far too paltry to wrap its arms around the giant sprawling mess of human language.
And that's how the _real_ AI winter lasted six decades: from Turing until the first GPGPU worth a hill of beans, while the page count of human-language content on the Internet went turbo MacDonald's: brillions and trillions of pages served. Turns out, 50% of natural language competence pretty much falls out of scale (as we see now with ChatGPT), once you've fired the last malingering linguist on your programming team into the sun.
Some people intuit that if the stork dumped half the fat baby on our doorstep pretty much yesterday, another stork will dump the other half of the fat baby on our doorstep pretty much tomorrow (the whole baby, fully assembled, would be AGI).
I have strong doubts that Turing would have numbered himself among the mouth-breathers. What if one stork hails from the West: statistical inference at scale, and the other stork hails from the East: Solomonov induction for the young and the restless? Turing glances up slightly from the gaze at his own shoes. "Yes, at some point, this all gets difficult fast." How fast? Clearly invented before the PC revolution (1962, as it happens), the busy beaver comes straight out of the study of Turing machines.
No beaver in all of computer science has more stamina than the busy beaver (it's a proven theorem).
For the busy beaver, "ludicrous speed" from _Spaceballs_ is the intermediate setting on the windshield wipers. We haven't even depressed the clutch pedal yet to select a forward gear. Then it will chirp so hard, we'll have one foot deep into an Einsteinian metric tensor before we exit the parking lot. However, all this speed is a giant illusion. From our rear tractor-beam, we are towing an entire ring world (Larry Niven's famous ribbon-section of the Dyson sphere) packed to the outer air walls with snack food, and still we're slightly afraid we will eat it all before we reach the first numbered exit.
Pippin: What about elevenses? Luncheon? Afternoon tea? Dinner? Supper? The busy beaver knows about them, doesn't she?
Merry: I wouldn't count on it.
AGI. On the menu soon? Perhaps.
Proclus was 18 when Augustine died ...but totally get your point of neoplatonism influence on Christianity
Let me first say that I have a lot of respect for John's work. But for me John's speech (especially in this new series) is unnecessarily convoluted and contains too many neologisms that make most of the material inaccessible. I can't help but think that if the ancient greats like Plato or Plotinus had delivered their materials in a similar way, they would not have had many students or any following. There has to be a simpler way to explain these concepts.
The ability ți turn the dialectique of the dialogue into the notion of good, requires a type of trading with the energetic principles taking place în words.
Now let s make a conventional language which stoods from the fact that cognitiion ia like a morfologic category of words which acts horizontaly, and reality is the sintactic way the posibility of the morfoligy works, according also to the vast posibility of asseigns different semnificants with the signs onto morfology.
If the LOGOS resulted has coherence, we may say it is good, otherwise it is bad, but containg already the posibility to reorganize itself.
I am trying to say, we try to make a single principal path towards this complexity.
That s because reality and cognition are în such a great motion, that we need halidrons to observe it s quantic level and also we can separate fenomenology we are already into it s constituitional primordial parts.
În the upper case, reality works conventional aș a vertical.
As în the electromagnetic principale, the way we decode light information.
Sorry for adding another explanation; morgology it s represented by all web domains we already identified as human knowledge, a noetic organism we rely on.
I think I understand. The important part for emergence is the progression of letters as objects, as symbols of something in the world, to words as objects becoming sentences with grammar and thus meaning at that level because of the space created is intersectional. This "meaning" being a relational space of trading kinetic energy of an observed object, together with an approximated shape and an intelligible frequency that helps to pin "objects" down. But, if I see green as the color of a plant I'm seeing what that plant has jettisoned, not used in it's object. The human observer infers from this, approximating shape and proportioning the kinetic received, back into the part more taken by the plant and invisible to sight but not smell for instance. Balance of process within an object and centering of that object in the outer world.
@@projectmalus Balance of the process within an " object "and than centering the object into the world.
Indeed, everything take place aș a process, even after self centering în to the world.
Sensation is also a perception aș everything else; when is recognized în a word description, if the author is good enough to put it as descriptive literature you ve got it, even it subjective. subjective. Feeling is also a perception, which have a common language, because more or less humans feelings are the same😊
Oh yes, the letters energetic, I believe it s a code, far more important than every other ones
From TH-cam video; A Different Universe - Bob Laughlin (SETI Talks) 34 minute mark
the moral this story is that the things that matter to us often are discoveries and in the physical science where I work those discoveries are laws so we're not discovering technologies a technology is is something you make and often is actually something you swindle people with but must not go there but laws are not something you swindle with because they are measurements they're relationships among measured things that are always true that no one knew before you and my own experience is such that I know they're out there and heaven knows how many just because you haven't found them yet doesn't mean they don't exist this is one that was just under everybody's noses and nobody thought to measure it so he did and he found that the answer was was always the same to one part in 10 billion as a ratio of two measured numbers now that my friends is a law
Eventually, the only relevant thing to learn in school will be relevance realization. AI will cheaply handle the rest...
🌚☄️❤️💫
Nothing novel or interesting happens unless it is on the border between order and chaos.
Punctuated equilibrium is barely a hypothesis.
There is an organizing principle at work in the cosmos.
The universe behaves more like an organism than a machine.
Have you taken a look at the chaos theory/fractal literature? There seems to quite some overlap with the argument you're making. The border of order and chaos appears to be a generative factor of reality at every level of resolution or analysis that I investigate it on. Whether it be at the level of DNA mutations leading to new species, or at stars collapsing and producing new planets. When casting that level of depth of the notion of order and chaos into the mold of ying and yang, one can start to understand how it is meant as a symbol to represent all of reality in a single image.
aporia,
internal contradiction
Most of all….the ecology of practices
N37⭕️
Realise and Actualise
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