This conversation was prompted by the book “First Values and First Principles” by David Temple.
It was recorded in the patio.
Transcript
So let’s go back to first principles and first values of cosmo-erotic humanism! And so they are like first order principles that are considered fundamental characteristics, first principles here may help spark some interesting conversation. So we’ve got perspectives—first person, second person, third person perspective are primordial to cosmos constitutive to all more complex perspectives. So there is the super-additiveness as well. But it’s just like constitutive of more complex perspectives. So, it’s like if you share all of these, it’s sort of like the best perspective.
Good, more of the whole view.
Like the meta-layers as well. We get temporality and eternity. I think these are considered like almost paradoxes. You get the past; therefore, the past, present, and future are inextricable aspects of cosmos, which supervene on an internal dimension in all areas of cosmos that is beneath and beyond time. Hidden and revealed, there is a mystery and knowledge in all areas of the cosmos. Unknowability is not an epistemic failure but an ontological reality. We have this in our values—we know that we don’t know. Hidden and revealed—oh yeah, the first pathway. A whole in parts. Reality is composed of [wholums?]; there is no part that is not itself a whole, and no whole that is itself a part, and as such holarchy emerges. Again, that’s a bit about the connection as well; it’s very different. The tree is not independent; it has to live within a whole ecosystem of things.
The polarity and reality are composed of opposites, joined at the hip… Joined at the hip, yes.
That’s a terrible metaphor for reality.
That’s true. Wisdom is like the capacity to hold paradoxes together and navigating those
Holding paradoxes: interior, exterior, consciousness, and matter serve equip-primordially aspect of cosmos and always in ratio constitutive of time and space. They keep talking about the sense of interiors, the sense of exterior being actually the two things that can explain the deeper truth. One is not better than the other because they work together. Mind and matter—you cannot have one without the other. And then you get value, like the last first. order principles. Value better or worse, i.e., meaning desire and need. Value is something that cares—something that rises. We’ve got it, yeah.
Yeah.I mean, the thing is, you need to have a PhD in epistemology to understand half of that stuff.
There is a problem with the way they’re writing this, yeah, which is why I think it’s good that we’re doing this too.
We’re making it accessible
Or at least it will talk to some other people who wouldn’t get this, right? And then they have second order principles, and it’s like they have them as dynamic equations. So, you get uniqueness, and an example of that—not just for all the equations, but an example of uniqueness.
Uniqueness = emergent distinction from the field of universal reality x radically new value (quality + consciousness) x new capacity (attention + eros + function + integration).
That’s because the reason you’re doing that is because they know its ever-changing, the field of grammar to express those principles needs to be constantly redefined.
Maybe we need a formula in a sort of “meaning = consciousness connecting / paradigms broken through times…” and see what we come up with.
Or just put them in a house (i.e. framework with columns and a greek roof).
So, they’ve got uniqueness, eros, (meaning: love running through all things, like big, big L) intimacy, desire, relationship, evolution, harmony, personhood, freedom, story, and integrity. Yeah, it was definitely an interesting read because,
I mean, you have to work through it.
So it’s not that bad—it’s a bit of a read until you get into the stage.
It’s like small paragraphs, small chapters as well. They’ve laid it out so that it builds up, you understand it.
They’ve actually got formulas for all of these.
Freedom = paradox, causation / telos + design, contingency + choice / choice lessons x eros, which is transformation / creation and destruction, x value and uniqueness. There’s your freedom.
Sorry, that’s impenetrable.
I had even forgotten the concept of freedom halfway through that equation.
They try to be conscious of the fact that freedom can mean different things for different people, for different cultures. But also, what does freedom mean in biology? What does freedom really mean in physics? They tried to talk to the mind and the matter.
What does “cosmo-erotic” mean again?
The love of the cosmos? For them, they think that the next evolution, the next step… from Homo Spaiens to Homo Amor.
Deep Why. That’s their deep why.
I think they’ve given up on the notion of Homo sapiens. I think we’re not Homo sapiens yet.
What is sapiens again?
Is it not the wise man? I mean wise man. Yeah, but we’re not wise yet. We’re Homo Intelligica or something like that. But not wise. Yes we can build tools. Yes we can reflect. We have the capacity for wisdom. But at scale, at the global planetary scale, civilization is not wise, so we failed there. We failed in applying all substances to a structure. Is it an understandable failure when, early on, we’re referring to going back 10,000 years to the composition of people, what their concerns would be, the perimeter of their area, even though they, in some sense, were more connected to that defined area in which their perimeter lay, and they might, of course, cause less damage to the whole because of that, because they were concerned with the upkeep of that. But then if people’s minds are on that and then the group and… It’s kind of like the type of love that God has, the love God has. You know, it’s like that love. And in a way, for years, the next evolution is to… We manage through our senses, we manage to develop good technologies, but we don’t have the god-like love to achieve those technologies in the best direction, which is probably why some people in Silicon Valley are spinning off into the idea that you might be able to create AGI, and that itself might be, and is as contentious as that. But that is the idea. Like, they would talk about these people who are transhumanists, and you fall out already, and these people… It’s interesting whether we want to see what we’re doing with the R. The positioning technology is god up exactly, and we shouldn’t; it’s the way the R2 is. Unless it could be another tool that gets us closer. But in part, with them, I think that was Viveki’s early experiment when he was talking about AI. But could you use it as a dialogue companion in some way to impart wisdom? In order to do that, you need people to feed these ideas to build here rather than build ways. Right. So, you need them, or I’m all for them, that’s what they mean. Yeah, you need them. Yeah. Yeah. I was talking to Neil about that briefly yesterday; I was mentioning the models and what they’ve been trained on so far. One obvious point is that the contents of the world are filled by the incentives, or it’s constrained by the incentives, so what’s being produced is a scattering of beautiful things, worthwhile stuff, some knowledge, and a lot of, potentially, a lot of books. What do you, what would be the way to feed the next machine if we do what I… But then you’re kind of playing into the hands of the transhumanist ideas. You’re conceding that it might be possible to create this god through AGI and god-like technology. But beyond the fact that it’s possible, like, should we do it? That’s where the wise man needs to come in. It’s not because you can do it. Yeah, not only because they get the means to crush that person, but what’s the belief behind it? The belief is that if we surrender our capabilities to some sort of firepower, this is what humans have always fought in some respect, isn’t it? Then that will take care of us; we’ve been evident. But then there’s a paradox in that as well: it could also be the devil. There’s a nice analogy with the Islamic world, where they blocked the printing press, and then they basically stayed in the Middle Ages until now. Was that wise or not? I think it was probably wise enough to accept it at first; it’s like moving at a slower pace, like AI, for example. We should put a stop to development and figure out what we really need to do with it. But the problem is they never came back to it, or they came back too late to integrating the printing press. How’s it? Yeah, it was, yeah. It was like a decision that was made without thinking that we could change the decision in the future. Well, yeah, and also thinking that you’re an island and you can be protected in this paradisical little wise island, and it is not the case because it’s going to come charging through no matter what; someone else is going to do it and charge through with potentially worse values or better, maybe, I don’t know. Well, that’s just so special for a ready team. You cannot protect yourself anymore from all of this stuff when you lose day in the nation. So, it’s interesting here, and it goes back to the hero mythology, which is the non-zero-sum games of the hero. So, how does everybody win that? How does the hero actually navigate so that we all, you know, with this new reality or a new thing, burst through whatever work until we actually win some kind of heroic journey in that rather than… Well, it’s also the adventures, and it is a sort of calling to adventure with results. This new AI stuff—there’s something that you’ve taken on quite readily, quite eagerly. I haven’t actually taken it on that much, actually. But it seems to me that, in that respect, going into the unknown, finding what’s your end value, boom, and sharing that with everybody else—that would be the thing to do. That would be the meaningful thing to do so that other people win. If you don’t do that, if you just find stuff for yourself to win, that’s where you are unwise. Absolutely. Yeah. I think it’s a beautiful loop, Bertrand Russell. Changing, to living in a changing world, or new hopes for a changing world. What he talks about there, that poverty can be raised—all the fact that you can help others, all the countries being prosperous instead of the colonial world. I am taking it. It was supposed to be full of light and prosperity, and I think that’s it now. Anything in today that has the thanks of it, you mentioned. So the world would be better off if everyone was from the first place. As long as there’s a sense of it—some shared human values—I guess that’s what we’re positing with this. We’re positing that there’s a set of values if you’re aligned around seeking more and creating a beautiful world. We’re suggesting that there are some values there that can be uncovered as useful values too. But yeah, I suppose to suggest that I think that’s been the sort of tragedy of humanity in certain ways, isn’t it? Is it all a matter of inequality and different levels of exploitation? Or is it also wildly different values playing out? And are those values playing out at a superficial level because they’re codified in culture and so on, and actually, there is something deeper than that, that we all share? Which I suggest there is. There might be some ill-defined values, but if you go to the core values for every culture, I’ll think they’re the same. I truly believe that. I truly believe that people care about the future of their tribe. I truly believe that. They want to be able to contribute to prosperity and their own progeny to prosperity and their own projects. They truly care about life, nice women, and sharing with loved ones. Truly, then you might have, like, ill, sick people. Psychopaths don’t have a first option. For me, there are people in an ill-designed world. I personally want to say it’s a saint, isn’t it? They’re going to be adapted in sick society. You’re right, friend. The society is, unfortunately, pushing certain behaviors, people to behave in certain ways, dark contrary to actual equality. And I think that’s why they end up having mental illness and other illnesses because it is not in sync with what it has to be truly. So there is… I think there is… The problem is how do you express them in a way that resonates with different perspectives? You can’t do that. That’s why they take into account the basic equations the same because if you’re a refraction as a battle, whenever you communicate or sense it from a battle, you can’t do it. To someone that’s refracted through their mind, it comes in, bounces around with all of their priors and associations, and then their interpretation might be a little bit off. And this is the job of a shaman of that culture—to bring it and interpret it. You don’t need to do that for someone in this culture. I don’t know where to relax in the boundaries and the rituals come in, so there’s gotta be something in that. If you’re suggesting there’s a core set of values, I always use the analogy of going down, but it feels like if they get into this more complex space of cultural relativism, pieces and language games and whatnot, there’s more space for reinterpretation, misinterpretation, and it gets more complicated with the internet as well and the space of ideas and whatnot. It feels like you’re already waiting. To get past that and connect more deeply, you have to somehow go down. There might be different ways in order to do that. If you’re saying that deep down, the source of human values is the same, it’s buried deep, and how do you dig? That’s the thing. So yeah, you need to dig for it, right? You like ritual practices. But you need to also manifest it because it is an unnameable thing. Let me find the Tao with the name. You have to still have to with a grammar. That grammar needs to evolve as well. As you are refining all the time, really refining, hold on, hold on, hold on. What is it exactly that we care about? Yeah, I’ve got a rough sense of what fairness means. But does it mean the same thing today? So we don’t know this, but my friends, my friends. So I was like, different people. He has like three values: Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. No, I haven’t heard any president or any politician talk about those values and how they define them in the minimum sense. What do they mean? What do they mean? The essential, there should be a lot of conversations about them, right? But they’re not. Do you think there are other institutions that are doing a better job of rearticulating ancient values for the present time? For instance, your pastor friend? Some religions, yeah. Yeah. My friend is not systemic, and he’s not systematic. He’s not like a lot of pastors who would be very evangelistic and just apply the word as it is without trying to interpret it. We need to interpret them. We need to interpret what that means today, and that’s what the preaching is meant to be—use the Biblical text and try to introduce it and see how that resonates in today’s world. So that people can figure out if they are on the right path. It’s like you live the shaman, like you said. Is that it’s the figure of the shaman. But because of the institutionalization of religion, like in Catholicism, you have an overfill of interpretation for that because you get scholars and people who work on this, and then people reaching consensus. But why should there be consensus? Invested in trust, power dynamics, and a lot of different things. Actually, we’re going back to that. Like a lot of people have said, like my own father, he hates religion. I think he doesn’t hate religion. He hates the use of religion as a tool of power. Yeah. Or why do so many people say they’re against institutional religion, but they’re spiritual? They’re spiritual, they’re not religious. So you know there’s something imponderable there, and these things might be pointing at truth. But the way that it’s got core, it’s systemic levels of complexity and interpretation. That’s why we need to be careful in what we’re doing as well—not to be too dogmatic. Yeah. It has to be an inspiration for others to take on the long journey. To integrate, based on what we say, like just redefine them, research again, discover them. Inspiration through story of some kind, story and values, or values embedded in story to inspire others, to go on a journey towards the deep why, and then the process of people re-articulating what that means for them, so it becomes circular. It has to be like the cycle of life, it has to be like that, and that’s where the bureaucracy program maybe can come from, or breaking through trial and error. It’s just like, yes, hold on. Is it still like that? Is it still like… crystallized? Or is it just like stifled, calcified because of time, fossilized because of time passing through, and no one really like dusting, dusting away the air to make it, brushing away the dust that has settled down. Oh yeah, you can try that in my room at the time. So, yeah, Carol Donnelly’s not quite a lot of this out, I don’t say she can take it all, there’s little we can do. It’s a wrong man, yeah, thank you, you’re one of our ears, yeah. It’s disgusting. The experimentation, one of the interesting ones, was wrong. I don’t know if you’re interested in the conspiracy experiment, I don’t know if that you… …wants to explain to you. If people on this journey towards the deep why, what is the experiment and comment along the journey? Why is it expressed in the image? Tingles. Yeah, I wrote there. tingling use or swap science as well. I realized my gum is decaying, fucked on one side. Really? After a year of use, so don’t worry, that one’s not going to be a problem. When you first use it, it runs reaction. That stings a bit. For instance, the experiment is to explore and free your pieces of experience as ways to navigate the complex, the unknown, the chaotic. We can’t know all the relevant operations we need to realize to escape the game. But we can explore and cover what is interesting and see what we can make out of it. Again, it’s like it has a weird… resonance with the term “haphazardly”—like just navigate like this, you don’t follow a straight path, you bump into things, you can think of it as the flâneur approach, right? This is called the new places. Flâneur your way by the interestingness of what is quite interesting. We did some work. We did some work on the workshop, and we did a lot of work.