For what purpose? So that the process of what Becker calls “self-transcendence” may begin. And he describes the process of self-transcendence this way: Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism …. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness … to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance. …This invisible mystery at the heart of [the] creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. “This,” he concludes, “is the meaning of faith.” Faith is the belief that despite one’s “insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force (90, 9 1).” This, then, is what we might call good faith, not a flight into some immortality system. And clearly, some Christians, some Buddhists–at least the Zen Buddhists Becker himself mentions!–have faith in this sense, a faith that Becker characterizes as growing out of tasting one’s own death, embracing one’s own nothingness, and affirming–not a known ultimate meaningful–but an “invisible mystery” of ultimate meaning.

Above all, Becker says, adopting a phrase from Luther, you must be able to “…taste death with the lips of your living body [so] that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die (88).” Then quoting William James (who is himself quoting the mystic Jacob Boehme), Becker further describes this “tasting” of death as a “passage into nothing, [a passage in which] a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one (88).” Thus in this process of self-realization, Becker writes, the self is “brought down to nothing.”

We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art, the truths of science, immutable philosophical verities, the law of self-interest, the pursuit of happiness, the law of survival; cosmic energy, the rhythms of nature, the gods, Gaia, the Tao, Brahman, Krishna, Buddha-consciousness, the Torah, Jesus. And all of these, Becker says, function as “immortality systems,” because they all promise to connect our lives with what endures, with a meaning that does not perish. So let’s accept Becker’s thesis: that fear of death and meaninglessness, and a self–deluding denial of mortality, leads many people to these “immortality systems.”

as members of society, we tend to identify with one or another “immortality system” (as Becker calls it). That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade–preferably kill–the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice versa; upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on.

Human beings are mortal, and we know it. Our sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic anxiety, even a terror, about our situation. So we devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of our mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is to help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. That suppression of awareness plays a crucial role in keeping people functioning–if we were constantly aware of our fragility, of the nothingness we are a split second away from at all times, we’d go nuts. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making us feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. And in Becker’s view, some of the personal and social consequences of this are disastrous.

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08:58 - Migrant gene DRD4-7R* Allele and correlation with the pursuit of novelty

04:04 - American Mania: When More is Not Enough

42:28 - Perception-action cycle

39:38 - Issues with current U.S. education system

37:35 - Evolutionary benefits of habits

36:10 - Waste from electric cars

35:41 - The problem with infinite economic growth

34:11 - Rats and cocaine experiment

31:15 - The importance of trust and empathy for human societies and self-constraint

30:15 - Why it’s so difficult for us to constrain ourselves

28:19 - We try to compete for status with our peers

25:32 - We have no social constraints anymore

24:40 - The proximate vs the ultimate

23:45 - The neurology of chemical addiction can also apply to things like gambling and shopping

22:23 - People are addicted to “more”

21:27 - We are just as smart now as we were in the ice age

20:19 - Loss aversion

18:07 - Adam Smith - The Theory of Moral Sentiments

17:30 - Feedback loops

14:12 - Evolutionary Psychology

11:32 - Reflective vs reflexive thought

08:11 - 1800s Irish migration 

04:27 - The Well Tuned Brain

Peter Whybrow: “When More is Not Enough”

dalai lama has said i'm in a wonderful public talk um madhyamaka approaches emptiness from the side of the object of knowledge while yoga chara approaches emptiness from the side of the subject i think that's a great way 00:28:26 to see matters and so i'm going to present uh yogachara here as supplementing um yamaka rather than as conflicting with with it and i think that this approach makes good sense of the most important differences between 00:28:39 majamaka and yogachara it shows us how to reconcile the difference as well and the difference is this while majamaca takes emptiness through the emptiness of intrinsic identity or intrinsic existence yogachara takes 00:28:53 emptiness to be the emptiness of subject object duality or the absence of externality to the mind of the object of mind

what happens um when we're thinking about our inner states one of the things that we need to recognize is that our introspection when 00:22:54 we we become aware of our beliefs our desires and our hopes and our fears and so forth is all done through language and on the model of language when i decide that i believe that john dunn 00:23:07 gave a great talk this morning when i believe that hal roth is a great scholar of zen and when i believe that alan wallace gave us a beautifully inspirational talk about the role of practice and contemplation in the 00:23:19 understanding of the self and i introspect that way i'm using those sentences alan gave that great talk john gave us a great talk about pramana and so forth as models for my inner states and i'm not 00:23:32 doing that because i looked inside and saw little english sentences in my brain i'm looking i'm doing that by using language as a kind of introspective model that's a matter of self-interpretation 00:23:44 it's easy to forget that because it feels so immediate so language gives us the concepts that we use to think about the world but it is also the model for the concepts of our propositional attitudes like belief 00:23:58 desire knowledge and so forth and as a model we have to recognize that the model the map isn't the reality to go back to what john uh reminded us of he reminded us of earlier introspection in 00:24:11 terms of language gives us an interpretation it doesn't give us an independent reality that is being interpreted and when we think about the madhyamaka 00:24:23 of nagarjuna and chandrakiri we remember that to be empty is to be empty of any intrinsic nature and if we follow chandra charity as i suggested earlier that means that it is to exist only 00:24:37 dependent on conceptual imputation and what i am suggesting now is that all of our inner cognitive states that we introspect we encounter only through a conceptual imputation only through 00:24:50 interpretation only through language and that is they exist conventionally not intrinsically even though they might appear to us to exist just as we see 00:25:02 them and to do so intrinsically

another aspect to cognitive illusion here is the illusion um that our sense perception is something that 00:22:02 is transparent and simply delivering us a world as a telescope does and not as a cognitive not as a kaleidoscope does as a consequence then the sense that we 00:22:15 know our own cognitive states directly and accurately through inner sense as well of outer sense has got to be a cognitive illusion as well are of the the sortals or the concepts that we use 00:22:28 in order to introspect are just as opaque to us as our senses are and give us just as a non-transparent access to our inner world as our senses give to the outer 00:22:42 world

another way to put this is um that if you think about using a telescope an example that alan offered us a little while ago to examine celestial objects as indeed did 00:20:37 galileo you can only interpret the output of that telescope the things you see in the telescope correctly if we actually know how it works that's really obviously true about 00:20:48 things like radio telescopes and infrared telescopes but it's true of optical telescopes as well as paul fire opened emphasized if you don't have a theory of optics then when you aim your telescope at jupiter and look at the 00:21:00 moons all you see are bits of light on a piece of glass you need to believe to know how the telescope works in order to understand those as moons orbiting a planet 00:21:12 so to put it crudely if we don't know how the instrument that we're using uh if we don't know how the instrument that we're using to mediate our access to the world works if we don't understand it we don't know whether we're looking through 00:21:24 a great telescope or a kaleidoscope and we don't know whether we're using a pre a properly constructed radio telescope or just playing a fantasy video game

the illusion that pervades our sense perception is that what we experience is something external to us that somehow 00:20:10 we've got a world that exists as it is independent of us and that we simply happen to be perfect world detectors and we wander through it detecting things just as they are

our mind functions as dharma yearly 00:19:43 emphasized as an instrument through which we have access to the world

these four philosophers in very different ways but 00:18:14 in ways that intersect in very intriguing ways um emphasized that with knowledge sensory knowledge perceptual knowledge isn't the direct access um to sensory properties or descent or 00:18:28 objects around us but rather is always the result of a complex cognitive and perceptual process mediated by our sense organs our sense faculties and our cognitive processes 00:18:41 and just another way to put that this is a way that paul churchill puts this but also um paul fire robin also sellers is that the objects we experience the 00:18:52 world that we inhabit the world in which we find ourselves embedded is not a world that we simply find it's a world that we construct and whose constituents we construct in our central nervous 00:19:06 systems in response to sensory stimulation transduced by neural impulses that is somehow our bodies interact with other bodies in the world um our and through various kinds of 00:19:19 cognitive processes

each of these folks in different ways has emphasized that our perceptual and our conceptual apparatus function as we know the world as measuring instruments a word strikingly like the sanskrit 00:18:01 pramana

he distinguishes three dimensions of dependent origination and this is in his commentary on the guardian of malama jamaica carica called clear words he talks about causal dependence that is every phenomenon depends upon causes and 00:16:19 conditions and gives rise to further causes and conditions um myriological dependence that is every phenomenon every composite phenomenon depends upon the parts that uh that it 00:16:31 comprises and every phenomenon is also dependent upon the holes or the systems in which it figures parts depend on holes holes depend on parts and that reciprocal meteorological dependence 00:16:44 characterizes all of reality and third often overlooked but most important is dependence on conceptual imputation that is things depend in order to be represented as the kinds of 00:16:57 things they are on our conceptual resources our affective resources and as john dunn emphasized our purposes in life this third one really means this um 00:17:09 everything that shows up for us in the world the way we carve the world up the way we um the way we experience the world is dependent not just on how the world is but on the conceptual resources 00:17:22 as well as the perceptual resources through which we understand the world and it's worth recognizing that um when we think about this there are a bunch of um contemporary majamakers majamikas we 00:17:34 might point to as well and so paul fireauben who's up there on on the left well really an austrian but he spent much of his life in america um willard van norman kwine um up on the right wilford sellers and paul churchland

so first i'm going to really focus on that allure of immediacy and then move into this kind of arc from yamaka through yogachara and into zen and my aim is going to be 00:09:49 um to show you that i think the buddhist tradition gets the all of these issues roughly right that is i'm not simply going to be characterizing what buddhists say about this i'm actually defending it and i think that we can 00:10:02 therefore learn a great deal about subjectivity through very careful attention to the multiple ways in which buddhist philosophers have considered this issue so i'm going to try to be shedding light 00:10:13 on contemporary debates as well by attention to buddhist resources

let's start with the allure of immediacy it's really easy to see 00:10:25 both why people believe as the spontaneous way that we have immediate vertical access to our own perceptual and cognitive states

so in this essay i'm going to explore the what i take to be the very most profound illusions diagnosed in the buddhist tradition and one and the most difficult to overcome and the primary one will be the illusion 00:08:58 that we have immediate access and vertical access to our own experience that we have a direct first-person access to our own minds that gives us our minds just as they are that the duality between subject and object that 00:09:11 structures our understanding is primordial this is the illusion that we're subject standing over and against the world rather than um interdependent beings in the world that's the conviction that we might know 00:09:24 the external world only through the mediation of our sensory and cognitive faculties but that we know the world only in virtue of immediate access to the outputs of those faculties

when we attribute sensory experiences to 00:06:39 ourselves for instance like the experience of red or the experience of seeing blue the model is external properties and we think of there as being inner properties just like those external properties that somehow we are 00:06:52 um we are seeing immediately

american philosopher wilford sellers is this way that impressions and thoughts appear to be simply given to us as the events they are as instances of the types they instantiate 00:05:48 and this i take to be the deepest form of what sellers identified as the myth of the given the most difficult one to extirpate we always forget that our knowledge of our own states is as mediated by 00:06:00 language and conceptual apparatus as any other knowledge so when we attribute beliefs or knowledge when we attribute cognitive states when we attribute even sensations 00:06:13 to ourselves or to others we're always i'm going to suggest uh engaged in an active interpretation a kind of self hermeneutics or a hermeneutic of the other and we use 00:06:25 language to model our inner life we use external properties to to uh model our inner life and we're always modeling our inner life we don't simply have it as it is

another way to put this and we're going to go there in a moment um is that we could say that we're tempted just overwhelmingly 00:05:09 tempted to believe that to believe that when we have perceptual experience including introspective experience of our own minds we think that we know that content immediately the idea that to be in a 00:05:22 cognitive state is to know that state and the idea that our inner states present themselves to introspection even trained introspection just as they are

buddhism is first and foremost a solution to a problem the problem is the 00:02:47 ubiquity of suffering in samsara and buddhism is all about trying to solve that problem and famously there's a diagnosis of that problem where the immediate conditions 00:02:59 of suffering are attraction and aversion but where the root cause the thing that gives rise to that attraction and aversion to those pathologies is a profound confusion about the nature of reality and it's that confusion that 00:03:13 leads us to the attraction and aversion that takes us into samsara and since it's an illusion we should pay attention to the classical indian understanding of what illusion is and 00:03:25 that is something that appears in one way but exists in another that is an illusion isn't something that's completely non-existent it's something his mode of existence and his mode of appearance are discordant from one 00:03:37 another and we're going to be focusing on that a great deal in this talk but the idea is that because this primal confusion this illusion lies at the root of suffering the only way to end the 00:03:50 problem of suffering is to extinguish the illusion and what i want to talk about today is how that illusion manifests in the case of our own minds and what i'm going to argue is is this 00:04:03 that that confusion manifests as a conviction that we have an immediate knowledge of our own minds that we can be indubitably aware of the contents of our own minds and the second aspect of that delusion equally pernicious is that 00:04:16 it involves the sub the superimposition of a subject object duality on experience that is uh primordially non-dual um so that primal confusion can be 00:04:28 thought of this way um it's taking that which is impermanent to be permanent that which is a source of suffering to be a source of happiness that which is only conventionally real to be ultimately real that which is 00:04:42 interdependent to be independent and the important point for our purposes is that the thesis that our own experience is permeated with illusion applies to our experience of our own minds as well 00:04:55 that's what i want to emphasize here

cognitive illusion and immediate experience perspectives 00:01:44 from buddhist philosophy

ind outside Brain:a radically non-dualist foundation for distributed cognition

Rather than starting from particles or pieces of matter, the action ontology is based on actionsor reactions. These are elementary processes that lead from some initial condition X to asubsequent condition Y:X → YThese conditions can in general be decomposed into conjunctions of more elementaryconditions. Adopting the notation used for reactions in physics and chemistry, we will denoteconjunctions by the “+” operator:a + b + ... → e + f + ...

The thesis of this paper is that you can have your cake and eat it: it is possible todevelop an understanding of the mind that is both non-dual and analytic—in the sense ofbased on clearly defined, formal distinctions. To achieve that, we need to replace thevagueness of process metaphysics by the concreteness of what has been called actionontology (Heylighen, 2011; Turchin, 1993). That will allow us to “extend” the mind not justacross notebooks and social systems, but across the whole of nature and society

us, they lead to the emergence of ever more sophisticated, meaningful and adaptive forms.This evolutionary worldview is very different from the lifeless, static picture of the clockworkuniverse, where inert pieces of matter follow predetermined trajectories. In such an evolving,interconnected world, mind no longer appears like an alien entity that cannot be explained byscientific principles, but rather as a natural emanation of the way networks of processes self-organize into goal-directed, adaptive systems.This is of course not a novel idea. It has been formulated by philosophers such asWhitehead, Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin under the label of process metaphysics(Rescher, 1996; Teilhard de Chardin, 1959; Whitehead, 1978). But analytically trainedphilosophers are understandably not very keen on these rather mystical and obscure theories,preferring the clear distinctions of logic and mathematics to these poetic and grandiloquentwritings. Therefore, analytic philosophy has tended to stay firmly rooted in the reductionistapproach of Newtonian science. The problem is that this leads it straight back into an implicitdualism, and its apparently unsolvable mind-body problem.

Descartes formulated his philosophy of the fundamental duality of mind and matter in thecontext of the mechanistic worldview that was emerging at the time. In Descartes’s view, thebody was merely a complicated mechanical system, an automaton essentially similar to aclockwork in which one gear passes on its movement to another gear

he aim of the present paper is to propose a radical resolution to this controversy: weassume that mind is a ubiquitous property of all minimally active matter (Heylighen, 2011). Itis in no way restricted to the human brain—although that is the place where we know it in itsmost concentrated form. Therefore, the extended mind hypothesis is in fact misguided,because it assumes that the mind originates in the brain, and merely “extends” itself a little bitoutside in order to increase its reach, the way one’s arm extends itself by grasping a stick.While ancient mystical traditions and idealist philosophies have formulated similarpanpsychist ideas (Seager, 2006), the approach we propose is rooted in contemporaryscience—in particular cybernetics, cognitive science, and complex systems theory. As such, itstrives to formulate its assumptions as precisely and concretely as possible, if possible in amathematical or computational form (Heylighen, Busseniers, Veitas, Vidal, & Weinbaum,2012), so that they can be tested and applied in real-world situations—and not just in thethought experiments beloved by philosophers

We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualistperspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artefact of the outdatedmechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency,intentionality, or feeling. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceivesmind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentionalstance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires,intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which moreover exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the specific caseof social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation ofchallenges. The distributed cognition that emerges from this interaction cannot be situated inany individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalizes processmetaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences andmathematical models of action, self-organization, and cognition.

so this is white light passing through a dispersive prison and this is a visible spectrum from about 420 nanometers in the violet through 500 nanometers and 00:00:18 the green 580 yellow 610 and orange and 650 red and some of the slides that have this along the bottom axis so how dependent I'll be in color what do you 00:00:30 think we depend on color a lot a little lots okay

I want to start with a game. Okay? And to win this game, all you have to do is see the reality that's in front of you as it really is, all right? So we have two panels here, of colored dots. And one of those dots is the same in the two panels. And you have to tell me which one. Now, I narrowed it down to the gray one, the green one, and, say, the orange one. 00:00:41 So by a show of hands, we'll start with the easiest one. Show of hands: how many people think it's the gray one? Really? Okay. How many people think it's the green one? And how many people think it's the orange one? Pretty even split. Let's find out what the reality is. Here is the orange one. (Laughter) Here is the green one. And here is the gray one. 00:01:16 (Laughter) So for all of you who saw that, you're complete realists. All right? (Laughter) So this is pretty amazing, isn't it? Because nearly every living system has evolved the ability to detect light in one way or another. So for us, seeing color is one of the simplest things the brain does. And yet, even at this most fundamental level, 00:01:40 context is everything. What I'm going to talk about is not that context is everything, but why context is everything. Because it's answering that question that tells us not only why we see what we do, but who we are as individuals, and who we are as a society.

so here's a straightforward question what color are the strawberries in this photograph the red right wrong those strawberries are gray if you don't 00:00:12 believe me we look for one of the reddest looking patches on this image cut it out now what color is that it's great right but when you put it back on 00:00:25 the image it's red again it's weird right this illusion was created by a Japanese researcher named Akiyoshi Kitaoka and it hinges on something called color constancy it's an incredible visual 00:00:39 phenomenon by which the color of an object appears to stay more or less the same regardless of the lighting conditions under which you see it or the lighting conditions under which your brain thinks you're seeing it

Mobilization Systems:technologies for motivating and coordinating human action

argumentation mapping allows large on-line groups toinvestigate very complex issues, such as climate change, by linking issues with arguments andcounterarguments in a growing public network (Iandoli, Klein, & Zollo, 2009; Klein, 2011).

coordination can be defined as the arrangement of actions across people,places and times so as maximize synergy and minimize friction. In earlier work (Heylighen, 2012b),we have analyzed coordination into four components: alignment, division of labor, workflow andaggregation.

This is likely to keep theattention ready for “surprises”, thus avoiding a sense of monotony setting in.More generally, the flow paradigm lacks the notion of adventure (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen,2012a), which can be characterized by a sequence of unforeseen challenges (dangers, opportunities,surprises...)—as contrasted with the foreseen challenges that we call ‘goals’. It is theunpredictability or unexpectedness of these challenges that creates the excitement that we typicallyassociate with an adventure, and that forms the basis of full emotional involvement. Adventure isassociated with the notions of exploration, curiosity and mystery: mystery can be defined as a lackof prospect that incites the emotion of curiosity, which in turns incites exploratory action(Heylighen, 2012a). Mystery and adventure are common features of game design (Dickey, 2006).However, their role will need further analysis if we want to apply them systematically tomobilization, given that they imply a level of uncertainty that—if experienced too intensely—mayproduce the anxiety that mobilization systems are trying to avoid.

Therefore, any feedback signal, even if negative, boostsyour effectiveness, and therefore self-confidence, in continuing your activity, adding to the sense offlow. (

boredom, as it does not fully engage the attention, while a too difficult one produces anxiety, as theperson becomes afraid to fail. Only a task that is challenging enough will engender the level ofintense, but tranquil, concentration that characterizes flow. There are two ways to control thebalance between challenges and skills: changing the intrinsic difficulty of the task, and changing theperson’s ability to cope with the task. At first sight, balance could be achieved by proposing arelatively easy task at which the person is not particularly skilled. But a more advanced model seesflow as emerging from high skills applied to difficult challenges (Fig. 1). In this more complexmodel (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002), limited skills applied to limited challenges merelyproduce apathy, as there is not much to create interest.This means that a good mobilization system not only should present goals that are difficultto reach, but provide the additional abilities necessary to handle that difficulty. This is the “newskills” feature that characterizes a truly compelling technology: you will feel most stimulated to usea tool if it allows you to tackle challenges that you could not tackle without it—albeit in such a waythat its use is fully intuitive and transparent. Eventually, a good tool should start to feel like anaugmentation or extension of yourself—the way a stick extends the reach of your arm, a telescopeextends your vision, and a notebook extends your memory.

An important aspect missing in typical flow models is that in order to produce enduringcommitment a goal should correspond to something truly valuable. For example, while the goal ofshooting a maximum number of spaceships in your game of Space Invaders may be clear, it doesnot satisfy any real needs. Therefore, playing games, however enjoyable at the time, if continuedlong enough will eventually leave you with the feeling of having wasted your time. One way gamedesigners try to overcome this limitation is by creating a sense of “epic meaning” (McGonigal,2011), i.e. situating the game action in a narrative context which implies that something truly greator valuable is being achieved (like saving the world from alien invaders).

The formulation of goals seems the most obvious requirement for focus and commitment: the goalfunctions like a target or “attractor” for the course of action, determining the direction for all futureactivity (Heylighen, 2012a). It is this directing influence that precludes the hesitation that wouldotherwise be elicited by an overload of choices. For example, for a rock climber trying to reach thetop, the direction is clear: up! On the other hand, for a tourist sauntering through a strange citywithout specific destination, every crossroads presents a dilemma: left, right, or straight on?

Possibly the most useful paradigm to understand individual drive is the psychological concept offlow, which was derived from numerous observations of how people feel while performing differenttypes of activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). “Flow” refers tothe pleasurable state experienced when the activity, while intensely focused, proceeds in aseemingly effortless, flowing manner—because every action immediately elicits the next action,without any hesitation, worry or self-consciousness. In such a state, continuing the activity becomesthe only real concern, while everything else is pushed to the back of the mind. That is exactly thekind of focus and commitment that we expect from a good mobilization system. The gratifying,addictive quality of computer games is commonly explained by their capacity to produce flow(Cowley, Charles, Black, & Hickey, 2008).The basic conditions needed to generate flow are:• the activity has clear goals;• every action produces an immediate feedback.• the degree of difficulty or challenge of the task remains in balance with the level of skill

tap into real needs (e.g. combating the dangers of obesity)• present clear goals (e.g. realistic weight targets)• make it easy to do what is needed (e.g. prepare healthy meals)• give feedback about the progress made so far (e.g. compare your present weight with yourinitial and ideal weights)• provide clear visualizations of potential means or ends, so that users can easily imagine theeffect of their future actions (e.g. a computer-generated photo of how you would look afterlosing all that weight)• make use of social pressure (e.g. by pointing out the achievements of others)• provide timely triggers to stimulate their users to do something (e.g. alarms to remind you toexercise)

More generally, a persuasive system can be seen as an implementation of what has beencalled the extended will (J. Heath & Anderson, 2010). This is a generalization of the idea that weuse various information technologies as external memories, so as to “extend our mind” into theenvironment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Heylighen & Vidal, 2008). But mind encompasses morethan memory and information processing capability: it also includes the motivation, concentrationand determination needed to act effectively—i.e. what is conventionally called “will”. In ourpresent environment full of distractions and temptations, our willpower is heavily taxed. Therefore,in general we need external support if we want to make sure that we stick to our intentions (Allen,2001; J. Heath & Anderson, 2010).

competitions or leaderboards, where players can compare their achievements with those ofother players, so that they are incited to do better than they did up to now• narratives, in which the challenges are situated within a concrete context or storyline, so thatindividual actions become part of an extended course of action within a meaningfulenvironment (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen, 2012a)• epic meaning, in which the impression is created that the player is working to achieve a goalthat is particularly important or awe-inspiring (McGonigal, 2011)• trophies or virtual goods, in which players receive virtual presents as a reward for theirachievement• gifting, in which players get the opportunity to give virtual presents to other players, thustightening links of friendship

Communities too sometimes use gamification techniques to boost participation. The Avaazwebsite, for example, exhibits a continually updated ticker listing the latest people to sign a petition,together with the total number of signatories, so that contributors feel they participate in anefficient, globally advancing movement. A more sophisticated example is Stack Overflow, acollaboratively edited question and answer site—initially about programming problems, but laterextended via Stack Exchange to a network of sister sites covering such diverse topics as cooking,physics, photography and language (Mamykina, Manoim, Mittal, Hripcsak, & Hartmann, 2011).Participants in these communities can ask questions, propose answers, and vote on the questionsand answers from other participants. As members contribute more good questions and answers andreceive more positive votes, their status as recognized “experts” increases via a point system. Thisallows them to reach increasingly advanced levels of privileges, so that the more active andconstructive contributors can make changes in the site organization that are impossible fornewcomers. Thus, every member has a continuing incentive to provide high-quality contributions,making the community remarkably fast and effective in dealing with its problems (Mamykina et al.,2011).

But educational applications are merely the beginning: the recent development ofgamification applies the mechanisms of game design to enhance focus and motivation for nearlyany kind of activity (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011; Zichermann & Cunningham,2011). It is used in particular by businesses and organizations to goad people into performing tasksthat are useful for the organization—but not intrinsically rewarding for the individual. Examples areparticipating in surveys, filling in forms, or joining customer loyalty programs. While performingthese activities, respondents are given the kinds of points, “badges”, or bonuses that are used assymbolic rewards in games. This constant feedback motivates them to contribute additionally, so asto attain ever-higher total scores. Moreover, the more points they have gathered already, the lessthey are inclined to lose these points by prematurely stopping the activity—a psychological bias forcontinuity known as “sunk costs” (Garland & Newport, 1991).

The result is that the best games tend to be addictive, as playersare so strongly motivated to continue the play that they find it difficult to get back to their normalactivities (Grüsser, Thalemann, & Griffiths, 2006; Kim, Namkoong, Ku, & Kim, 2008).

While Internet communities typically emphasize collaboration and sharing, there is another type ofmobilization system that emphasizes competition and rivalry: gaming environments. The gamesavailable on the web are nearly infinite in their variety, but they all share the objective of scoringpoints or winning, i.e. doing better than the others. This too is a powerful motivator, whichenhances focus, commitment and persistence. But games exhibit a variety of other motivators,given that by definition they have been designed for enjoyment, i.e. for providing stimuli thatpeople find intrinsically pleasurable, so that they seek to collect as many as possible. Since the earlydays of personal computers, gaming has become an increasingly popular pastime. This has ledprogrammers to create an ever-greater variety of ever more sophisticated games.

he only thing needed is a shared medium or workspace in which clear traces of the work areregistered (Heylighen, 2011a; Parunak, 2006). The aggregated trace functions as a collectivememory that keeps track of the different contributions and indicates where further work may beneeded. This function is typically performed by the community website, such as the Wikipedia site.A more advanced example of this functionality can be found in the issue queue used byDrupal developers (Kiemen, 2011; Zilouchian Moghaddam, Twidale, & Bongen, 2011). This is acommunity-maintained, ordered list of feature requests or problems that need to be addressed,together with the status of the work being done on each. The issue queue makes it easy forcontributors to see where their contribution would be most helpful, and to keep track of theadvances made by others. It can be seen as a more spontaneous, self-organizing version of the jobticketing systems that are commonly used in technical support centers, where each incomingproblem is assigned a “job ticket”, after which the ticket is assigned to one or more employees, andmonitored so as to make sure it is adequately dealt with (Heylighen & Vidal, 2008; Orrick, Bauer,& McDuffie, 2000).

What these communities have in common is that they collectively produce very useful—and typically high-quality—applications and information, but this without any financialcompensation or legal organization. In other words, these communities consist purely of volunteerscontributing on an informal basis to a common project. From the perspective of traditionaleconomics and organizational theory, this is paradoxical (Heylighen, 2007): why would anyoneprovide such valuable services to others without being either paid or ordered to do so? Severalauthors have investigated the motives that incite people to contribute to such communities (Ghosh,2005; Lerner & Tirole, 2002; Weber, 2004). These include curiosity, altruism, free expression, needfor belonging, desire for status and recognition, and the hope for future financial rewards for privateconsultancy after being publicly recognized for one’s expertise. More interesting for our purposethan these individual motivations, though, are the structures and processes that encourageindividuals to take part in such a collective enterprise, i.e. the underlying mobilization system.A first analysis (Heylighen, 2007) points at two fundamental mechanisms: feedback andstigmergy. By contributing a question, comment, answer, program, photo or any other input,participants hope to get a reaction from the other community members, because that would givethem an indication of whether they are on the right path, or need to make some correction. Suchfeedback provides valuable information that allows participants to get better in whatever they areinterested in. For example, a programmer who contributed a piece of code will benefit if a userpoints out a bug in that code, suggests a way to extend it, or simply confirms that the job was welldone.Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous coordination between actions, where the result ofan individual’s work stimulates a next individual to continue that work (Parunak, 2006; Bolici,Howison, & Crowston, 2009; Heylighen, 2011a). For example, a paragraph contributed to aWikipedia article may incite a later reader of that paragraph to add a reference or further detail,which in turn may elicit further contributions from others.

hereexist a range of behavioral methods to effectively combat distraction, procrastination and lack ofcommitment, while increasing focus, motivation and coordination (e.g. C. Heath & Heath, 2010;Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). When these techniques are implemented in ICT, the result may be calleda mobilization system. According to the Oxford dictionary, to mobilize means to “organize andencourage (people) to act in a concerted way in order to bring about a particular political objective”.Given that any valuable objective deserves concerted action, the only generalization we need tomake is to leave out the adjective “political”. A mobilization system can then be defined as: asocio-technological system that motivates and coordinates people to work towards a givenobjective—thus efficiently rallying their efforts.

While the term “mobilization system” is new, the underlying ICT techniques have beenexplored for at least a decade or two, under labels such as “persuasive technology”, “collaborativetechnology”, “user experience”, and “gamification”. This paper will first review a number of suchexisting approaches and then try to distill their common core in the form of a list of mobilizationprinciples. Finally, we will sketch both potential benefits and dangers of a more systematic andwidespread application of mobilization systems.

Recently a number of techniques have been developed that stimulate people to act towards specificobjectives. These include persuasive technologies, gamification, user experiences, and various methods andtools used in open-source and other communities to encourage and organize participation. After surveyingvarious examples of such applications, we generalize these approaches by proposing a new theoreticalframework. The basic concept is a mobilization system, defined as an ICT environment that motivates andcoordinates the actions of people, so as to increase their focus and commitment, while minimizing distraction,hesitation and procrastination. We then analyze the fundamental mechanisms of (individual) motivation and(collective) coordination, starting from Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and the mechanism of stigmergy.The basic requirements are clear goals in line with real needs, immediate and rich feedback, challenges inbalance with the user’s skill levels, and a shared workspace in which all tasks and results are registered forevery contributor to see. We conclude our review of mobilization systems by pointing out their potentialdangers, such as addiction and political or commercial exploitation, as well as their potential benefits, indomains such as work, health, education and research

The overall result is that it has become much more difficult for people to commit to anyparticular choice, and much easier for them to get distracted and abandon whatever they are busywith. The combination of distractability, lack of commitment, and procrastination (J. Heath &Anderson, 2010) results in poorly focused, inefficient, unreliable, and stressful work. Theseindividual effects are magnified at the social level: when several people suffering from such lack ofdedication collaborate on a common project, the result can only be poorly coordination, since noone knows exactly what to expect from the others. Thus, we come to the conclusion that while ICTundoubtedly has increased the mechanical productivity of work, it may well have decreased ourpsychological and social productivity, together with our overall level of involvement, satisfactionand well-being.

choice overload (Schwartz, 2005): as the numberof available options for documents to read, products to buy, services to use, people to connect to, ordestinations to visit increases, people need to invest ever more effort in deciding which option theyshould choose. Even when a decision is finally made, the decider is typically left with the gnawingfeeling that perhaps there was an even better option, thus feeling less satisfied with the choice. Theresult is continuing anxiety, and a tendency to avoid or postpone such stressful decisions. Thisphenomenon can be illustrated by a classic experiment in which prospective buyers are offered totaste either half a dozen or several dozen types of fruit jam. Paradoxically, given the larger choice,people are less likely to buy a pot of jam than given the smaller choice! (Schwartz, 2005)

transience: nowadays people are both quicker to adopt and to abandon newtechnologies, services, jobs, and even relationships, presumably because: (1) it has become mucheasier to change such commitments; (2) there are so many more options to be explored; (3) new,and potentially better, options appear at an ever faster rate.

nformation overload, a form of mental bombardment that (Shenk, 1998) aptlycharacterized as “data smog”, since it obscures rather than enlightens, while damaging health byincreasing stress levels. It is typically accompanied by a barrage of interruptions or distractionscaused by incoming emails, phone calls, text messages, tweets or “status updates”.

What is so maddening is that there are alternatives. There is an abundance of theory and arguments that could lead the way. The latest IPCC report had an entire section that doesn’t propose technofixes but instead explores how energy demand could be managed to ensure that everyone has enough to thrive while ensuring the biosphere doesn’t die. 

The assumption that we can safely overshoot, then recover temperatures back down by the end of the century, is seriously misguided. Alas, this is the story that we are telling ourselves.

Most academics continue to insist that it is still – barely – physically possible to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C. There are strong incentives to stay behind the invisible line that separates academia from wider social and political concerns, and so to not take a clear position about this.But we need to clearly acknowledge now that warming will exceed 1.5°C because we are losing vital reaction time by entertaining fantastic scenarios. The sooner we get real about our current situation and what it demands, the better.

Some studies estimate that we could be spending trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to drag temperatures back down to 1.5°C. Will rich, industrialised nations spend that much cash when they cannot even forgo the modest economic impact of not putting the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place? 

So what can we make of politicians who continue to argue that ‘1.5°C is still alive’? Are they misinformed or are they simply lying?I believe many are in denial about the types of solutions the climate crisis demands. Rather than do the – admittedly – very difficult political work of eking out our supplies of fossil fuels while accelerating a just transition to post-carbon societies, politicians are going all out on technological salvation. This is a new form of climate denial, which involves imagining large-scale carbon dioxide removal that will clean up the carbon pollution that we continue to pump into the atmosphere. While it may seem much safer to stick to the script and say that it is still physically possible to limit warming to no more than 1.5°C, while pointing out that the scale of change demands much more political will, I believe that this can no longer be a credible response to the climate crisis.We have warmed the climate by 1.2°C since pre-industrial periods. If emissions stay flat at current levels, then in around nine years the carbon budget for 1.5°C will be exhausted. And, of course, emissions are not flat – they are surging. 2021 saw the second-largest annual increase ever recorded, driven by the rebound in economic activity after Coronavirus lockdowns. We did not ‘build back better’.The clock has been stuck at five minutes to midnight for decades. Alarms have been continuing to sound. There are only so many times you can hit the snooze button.

We Need to Stop Pretending we can Limit Global Warming to 1.5°C

some people will 01:52:34 read nagarjuna as allowing for the existence of true contradictions that something can be both true and false at the same time and uh graham priest is a philosopher who has a 01:52:46 uh reading of nagarjuna as under his uh dialethis logic which allows for certain uh contradictions to be true um [Music] i don't think that actually works in the 01:52:58 case of i think nagarjuna seems to presume the principle of non-principle of non-contradiction in order to run these kinds of reduction reductio absurdum type arguments um by drawing contradictions and incoherencies within 01:53:11 a given concept under analysis and then showing how it leads to contradiction so we should reject that concept um uh yeah do you have any thoughts about uh about 01:53:23 you know quantum physics is is sort of notorious for seeming to violate basic laws of of logic like say the law of non-contradiction or law of excluded middle or uh and so on and 01:53:35 so do you think that um our conventional logic you know it's like say classical logic is uh in if if there is no ultimate reality for madhyamako or for your your 01:53:48 understanding of uh quantum physics slash medium um then should the tools of classical logic what are the tools within conventional discourse broadly speaking as well for um 01:54:01 capturing um what madhyamaka is saying or what quantum physics as you understand it are saying so yeah let me answer specifically um uh 01:54:13 nagarjuna uh main negotiations from one perspective can be viewed as a logician right i mean it's a it's it's a his way of presenting things 01:54:25 uh uh it's it's a characteristic of somebody who's uh who's a legitimation you use logic uh but from from where's the perspective the first first of impact it sounds strange because uh his main tool is the 01:54:38 tetra of course which um somehow uh presents uh the impossibility of four alternative one being a something i don't know time exist uh one being non-a say time does not 01:54:57 exist and the third being um neither a nor not a and the fourth is uh both a and known a so it seems that wait a moment uh we we 01:55:09 we we are talked in logic 101 um that uh uh either a or not a and there is um beginning of logic so it seemed to be a clash here uh my 01:55:23 impression that there's no clash is that the known of non-a is not the same known as uh um as they restotelien known and we can uh we can think of innumerable uh everyday experience in which this whole 01:55:36 possibility it's exactly what we would uh we would consider so the exhaustive thing is the four there's four possibilities i don't want to go technically specifically but so it's not a an alternative logic here it's just a 01:55:48 different way of using known um so i don't see any clash between what we call logic uh in in in it's an interesting articulation but not 01:56:00 any any club it's not a mag logic um the same is true with quantum mechanics uh people been arguing that we can understand quantum mechanics by changing the logic i find it yeah but i find it 01:56:13 it's not really particularly clarifying um it's true i mean the particle doesn't go here normal goes there so if we think of these are two alternative quantum mechanics can be thought of can be 01:56:25 phrased if an alternative logic but all the alternative logic that i found they can be rephrased in terms of logic with different definitions so i don't i don't i don't think that this is the point um that's this is this is the 01:56:38 answer to your your question about logic you know the uh mutha madhyamakar karika his main treatise which we're talking about nagarjuna's text um 01:56:50 it's very short as you mentioned carlos and some of the things that are not there that are not written that are implied and also make it such a difficult text to understand is that he's refuting many different schools 01:57:05 of understanding an essence in reality and so when he does the tetralemma one of the usages is to be complete in terms of all the different you know 01:57:17 traditions or schools that are claiming some essence in reality to refute them and some do say that there's nothing you know not neither alternative and some say things 01:57:29 do exist and do not exist the both so i think he's using that more pedagogically if you will to um to refute all possible understandings 01:57:40 of an intrinsic existence and that's some of the beauty of his work and it's some of the difficulty in understanding it because you know unless you're really well read and really 01:57:53 understand fully all the different positions uh you it's hard to really know what he's doing at any one time um i could comment on this because it could be interesting um 01:58:08 so there is this uh sense in which barry explained that uh somehow answering 12 possible counter arguments at the same time and there's also a very simple way that you can see that this is not really 01:58:20 about a different logic so take the double slit experiment in quantum mechanics what's the point there that you try to explain a certain set of experimental data 01:58:32 by saying where does the particle go does it go through slit a does it go through slit beam let's go through both does it not go to neither and none of these four possibilities explains what you're seeing on the 01:58:45 screen so what do you do there it's not that you've reached the conclusion that everything is wrong is that you uh throw away the presupposition what was the presupposition that the particle 01:58:56 is somewhere so this straightforward use of logic it seems to me that i don't see any [Music] weird logic going on there yeah 01:59:08 you also throw away the the notion of a particle then if particles are that which have to be somewhere no you throw away the doctor there is an intrinsic reality that's what nagarjuna does if you continue doing that then you throw away 01:59:22 everything i i don't agree with uh personally if you ask me i agree that there is no interesting reality um [Music] in the sense that whenever you assume 01:59:37 such a thing you're going to fall into contradictions

we cannot have a discussion about reality unless it's it's it's it's a discussion there's courses involved 01:35:20 but all the discussions i didn't know about reality um as far as i know happened um through sounds or writing in which atoms were 01:35:32 moving so we cannot have a discussion without atoms right um and so on i could i could so then atoms are fundamental no uh 01:35:44 the fact that something is it's it's part of our discussion about this doesn't mean that uh it's primary with respect to the rest i think we have to take this that's my that's my own personal um 01:35:56 view of that so of course we talk about uh from today from within our consciousness of course and of course we have information about reality from within our senses and of course we talk in 01:36:08 english we talk in tibetan we talk in pali but that's not because english tibetan empire consciousness or atoms are a necessary starting point for understanding the rest i think it's uh 01:36:20 that's exactly the uh the the uh what i read in a gardener's uh uh uh chapter about the self um 01:36:33 it's uh we recognize his dependence uh of of i i would i would say levels of the pieces of the story one respect to the other one 01:36:45 and uh uh but also at a clear at a clear logical analysis this is what nagajuna does none of this stands up as primary with 01:36:57 respect to the other that's my reading uh professor halcyas georgios my dear friend and colleague um i agree with you when we talk about reality we are we are talking not about 01:37:13 reality uh we're talking about reality it's not reality and that is not the reality of the uh of nagarjuna nevertheless it's very useful because 01:37:35 without this conventional reality of words and concepts that are correct in understanding nagarjuna without that it's very difficult for us to have that experience that non-conceptual experience of reality so you know 01:37:49 there's a kind of a metaphor that's used is you you know you take a boat and you cross the river and then uh you leave the boat or the other analogy is you you're out in the forest and it gets cold and you 01:38:02 take two sticks and you rub them together and with a friction you get fire and the fire then burns the sticks so the sticks are conceptuality as was the boat that got you across the 01:38:14 river not any conceptuality but very clear understanding of nagarjuna and of course the buddha his discussion on on the buddhist wisdom

i think we must bear in mind that any any sort of verbalization about reality um is dependent on consciousness it's not possible to have a discussion about what is real 01:33:02 and not have consciousness in the discussion uh especially when we are to verbalize it i mean of course any reality that is independent of consciousness is not dependent on consciousness 01:33:15 is beyond verbalization and i think the buddhist position is very clear on that and i think arjuna if i read him correctly it's very clear that the when it comes to the ultimate reality to um 01:33:28 it's something that actually we cannot talk about and basically all discussion all this course is very much uh within the level of conventional the conventional real 01:33:42 uh so this is a very interesting i think um a point that i wanted to make that i think i can also raise it as a point for the two of you to respond uh from your respective uh 01:33:54 perspectives um because if consciousness from my understanding is primary to this discussion of what is real uh and if consciousness does not inherently exist 01:34:07 right well at least i mean barry also talked about the different kinds of minds um then how does all this discussion about 01:34:20 what is real what kind of claims can we ultimately make about what is reality now i think i have a feeling that carlos comes from a different perspective 01:34:31 then barry in answering that question so i'd like to really point to this question about can we make any claims about reality and if so based on what 01:34:44 from your respective disciplines so that's my um my question and comments

let me make a few comments if i may about time from nagarjuna's perspective there is no 01:25:52 time i don't think i can be more brief and how does he support that he says well when you're in the present moment there's no past and there's no future 01:26:06 if you dissect the present moment even to a more granular present moment some of that's going to be passed some of that's going to be yet to come and then you have even a finer more 01:26:18 granular present moment if you keep going on with that granularity you end up having no time you have no past no future and no presence so that's kind of in a nutshell some of the arguments or 01:26:32 logic that knock arjuna nagarjuna uses to establish no time now of course what he means is there's no absolute time there's no time on a some there's no essence of time um there is you know 01:26:46 time from the perspective of of of conventionality um cause and effect is reciprocal so when we have a cause we have an effect or we know there's 01:26:59 going to be an effect but also from the point of view of the effect the result we know that there must have been a cause so this reciprocality is something unique to the highest 01:27:10 school of prasannika majamaka uh within the fourth highest school of majamaca i just wanted to mention that to to round out one of our previous discussions

i was particularly struck by the fact that barry didn't say the mind is this this and that okay barry said well the mind is many things 01:19:18 uh look there's this and this this and this and there's a sort of layers also in some sense in which we can talk about it or or have some understanding partial media 01:19:30 understanding about it some wisdom about it and this layering i find it it's uh absolutely brilliant from my perspective 01:19:43 uh because it it dissolves the wrong question which is what is the mind period what is the thing which is the mind here is the thing which is mine uh let's just 01:19:55 define it characterize it and understand what it is that's a wrong that's a wrong way of thinking about it it's when we say when we think about our mind of course we think something you you unite somehow 01:20:09 it's the set of processes that happen into me and it's about my thinking my emotions but it's not one thing it's a complicated layer there's many layers of discussion possible about 01:20:21 that i don't want to enter into the specific but i found this fascinating and let me go to time immediately because uh it's it's deeply related i got the book of time which is a um 01:20:34 the audio of time in which i carlo this carlo is very timely because we're also kind of running low on time absolutely absolutely 01:20:46 and and and in the book i sort of uh try to collect everything we have learned about time from science from special activity from generative statistical mechanics from other pieces and and what we 01:21:00 tentatively uh learn about time with quantum gravity which is my uh specific field once again you have to sort of uh put your hands on the notion of time and the main message of the book 01:21:12 in fact the single message of the book is that the question of what is time is a wrong question because when we think about time we think about the single thing okay we think we have a totally clear idea about time time is a single thing 01:21:25 that flows from the past to the future and the past influence the president the president of the future in the present this is how things are the reality of the present entire universe is a real state in that and we learn from science that this way 01:21:37 of viewing times is wrong it's factually wrong okay it's not true that uh we all proceed in in in together from 01:21:48 moment a to moment b and the amount lapse amount of time lapses between a and b is the same for everybody and so on and forth because we learned from from experiences especially activity generativity statistical mechanics and 01:22:01 other things so the way to think about time is that it's a very layered thing but with this thing we call time is made by layers um conceptually and when we look at larger 01:22:14 domain the one of our usual experience some layers are lost so uh some aspects some some properties of what we call time are only good 01:22:25 uh are only appropriate for describing the temporal experience we have if we don't move too fast it doesn't look too uh to to to too far away if you don't look at the atoms too in detail as a single 01:22:38 degrees of freedom and so on so forth so the notion of time opens up in a in a in a set of layers which are become increasingly 01:22:53 uh general only if you go down to the bottom level um some aspect of time like the universality of time uh uh only makes sense if if we don't go too 01:23:06 fast velocities for instance um so this is a similarity and that's why the the opening up of what the mind is into layers seems to be uh 01:23:19 the right direction to go right when if if i ask uh does a cat has a mind or does a fly has a mind it seems to me that the only answer is uh to get out of the idea that the 01:23:31 answer is either yes or no i mean i i suppose that certainly a cat has a certain you know a sleepy feeling in the morning and the moment of 01:23:43 joy when he sees his fellow cats but i suppose a cat doesn't go through a complicated intellectual game of trying to understanding what is reality and debating about that so there is some aspect in common uh either not break up 01:23:56 this this notion in in pieces once again uh i mean the the topic is what is real uh 01:24:08 if we start by saying time is real it's a beautiful chapter why you cannot say that time is an intrinsic existence uh we just get it wrong if we think well then atoms are real or the mind is real 01:24:21 all these answers we got it wrong we can say that things are real in a uh in a conventional sense within a context within a within a um 01:24:37 and and then we when we try to realize what you mean by uh something is real this is certainly real in a conventional sense but we realize that um reality the reality of this object 01:24:49 itself it gets sort of broken up into interdependence between this object and else and its different layers 01:25:02 and and that's the reality that as a scientist i can deal with not the ultimate reality the the conventional reality of course conventional reality is real as uh perry 01:25:15 was saying this is not a negation of reality uh it's a it's a it it's a freedom from the idea of the ultimate reality uh 01:25:27 the ultimate uh sort of intrinsic inherent reality being there on which in terms of which building progress

when we die we go through eight stages according to the buddhist understanding and each of those stages the first four the elements the sort of solidity if you will i we know they're 01:16:07 not solid but from a conventional perspective the solidity elements the liquidity elements the thermodynamic elements the movement the kinetic elements those all dissolve as we die in 01:16:19 the first four and when that fourth one happens there's no more circulation of blood or of air so we don't breathe we have no circulatory you know blood pressure so we're declared clinically dead but 01:16:30 there's four more stages we go through and those are when the mind becomes successively subtler and those are when we get into the non-dual minds that are the most subtle minds and the last 01:16:43 eighth stage it's called worser in tibetan and we translate that as luminosity or clear light it's not light it's not you know but it's the most utter clear clear mind 01:16:57 and that mind if it goes on if we don't die if we meditate on that luminosity and sustain it through our meditation infinitely we can become a buddha and that's why the buddha is 01:17:09 sometimes called a buddhism an enlightened buddha is a deathless state because you don't actually die so those would be the non-conceptual and non-dual minds and just for completeness 01:17:23 those last four minds are called these are technical terms so it won't make much it won't have much give you much understanding white appearance red increase black near attainment and then this worst air this 01:17:35 luminosity so that's kind of the the the road map if you will for for mine and it's not the brain now on the gross level of thinking in our sensory minds there's a very close 01:17:48 connection with you know meant with the brain okay but when you die the brain is supposed to be dead and you're still alive okay and so these more subtle minds 01:18:01 are not related actually to the brain so we could really say that mind is experience it's awareness it's knowing not knowing something but 01:18:12 the act of knowing so the qualities of mind the most important qualities are awareness and clarity so that gives you just some rough idea of the buddhist understanding of mind or consciousness

for example i'm talking so my primary mind now is going 01:14:37 to be an auditory mind okay and then there's going to be a whole constellation of next secondary ones which are basically positive and negative or harmful uh positive non-harmful and harmful uh 01:14:51 qualities or attributes or emotions or thoughts or attitudes and then the next moment i'm looking at my screen so i have a visual mind and the constellation will change you know some of those 01:15:04 positive and negative qualities like i'm feeling a little sleepy or i'm very alert or i'm feeling jealous or i'm feeling very happy and connected you know with this 01:15:16 conversation those would be part of the secondary minds and then you know you have this infinite continuum everyone every living being every as you rightfully said sentient beings a living 01:15:26 being with a mind carlo um has um its own mental continuum um so it involves it's a big picture of mind it involves you know our 01:15:40 our thinking it involves our intellect it involves our heart feelings emotions uh and it involves those deeper levels in that sixth primary mind mental consciousness such as intuition and 01:15:53 deeper minds

the question you were asking was what is mind or consciousness so here we're using the words synonymously um and from a buddhist perspective uh there are 01:11:50 six what we call primary minds and then there's a whole slew of secondary minds and some of the more common systems include 51 in the secondary minds now please understand that mind like 01:12:04 everything else that exists in the world doesn't exist permanently it exists there are a few exceptions okay but essentially everything that exists in the world um is not permanent therefore 01:12:18 it's changing moment to moment therefore everything exists as a continuum including mind so that means there'll be a moment of mind followed by a next moment of mind etc 01:12:31 and the next moment of mind is determined primarily but not solely by the previous moment of mind so from that we can extrapolate a continuum an infinite continuum and mind is an 01:12:43 infinite continuum from perspective of buddhism and that means that we've had that implies suggests rebirth and it suggests we've had ultimate we've had infinite rebirths there's been no beginning 01:12:56 and so this then comes up again with the notion of a beginning creator if you will a so-called you know god there are some some problems here to resolve this um 01:13:07 and so mind is a continuum it's infinite now each moment of mind is made up of a primary mind and a constellation of secondary minds these six primary or the five as you read from nagarjuna the five 01:13:22 sensory minds of seeing hearing smelling tasting touching tactile right these five plus what's sometimes called the mental consciousness and that has live different levels of subtlety on the 01:13:34 grossest level is thinking if we go a little bit deeper a little bit more so little subtler we have dream mind which seems like these senses are active but actually 01:13:46 when we're sleeping the senses are inactive so it's just something coming from our sixth or mental consciousness it seems like the senses are active in dream mind that dream mind is a little more subtle than a wake mind awake 01:13:59 thinking mind and then if we go more subtle we're talking now again about awake mind we we talk about intuition when we're in intuition we're not thinking right it's a non-conceptual 01:14:11 mind uh in that sense and deeper yet our minds we call non-conceptual and non-dual where there's no awareness of a subject or an object so subject object non-duality so 01:14:25 that's kind of the rough sort of you know lay of the land

there's a crucial distinction between what barney called three and four that's what uh captured me so 01:08:55 if you take the mind as fundamental as existing the only existing thing where where the the movie of the world is reflected into i am not happy 01:09:08 my my culture uh rejects then as a useless point of view to do science that's what but there is an alternative much more interesting and i find much more 01:09:21 deep in which which i read in a garage you know which is what uh barry seems to be is calling the fourth alternative in which the mind is not the fundamental thing in which everything is it's 01:09:32 reflected it's just one part of this uh uh uh interdependence now namely it's not the things that not intrinsic existence but mind has intrinsic existence that's not the 01:09:45 the the there's a more interesting answer namely that mind itself has no intrinsic uh uh existence uh and so it's just uh uh 01:09:57 it has an existence but is is it of course it's an existence my mind exists and i exist but uh and and and and if i think in terms of groups to say i mean all sentience being or all 01:10:10 human beings whatever um together uh which is an ideal also some some some some western philosophy that you know um it's collectively that through language and 01:10:22 that would create a vision of the world but i want to think of this as one aspect of the ensemble of things which is existence where uh uh nothing of that has um 01:10:36 uh has intrinsic existence so i want to think about my mind it's my brain my sensation my all my my my love people loving me the the image that people have of me my instead of the set 01:10:48 of processes uh uh which part of the world and it seems to me that the belgian allows me to think at me as part of the world at the same sense of the same ground as the world being 01:11:01 reflected in my consciousness without having to choose one of the two perspective to be the true one the intrinsic existence um 01:11:12 all all perspectives are uh uh empty they're all good but they are um they are not the the one on which the rest is ground they 01:11:24 each of one i can understand dependently on something else so marios you read a a verse or two from the third chapter of nagarjuna and uh let me comment on that

let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

i just wanted to interject that uh could i come at this point carlo i would like to insist a bit on this because i'm i'm not quite clear 01:07:22 on whether you are agreeing or not on the question of the mind um thank you this is also i wanted to ask him the same question mario uh so by just raise the question 01:07:40 specifically all right so let me okay since we're talking about nagarjuna now i would also like to uh read some simple verses that he has and get from both from barry and you what do you 01:07:53 think so this is from chapter three examination of the sentences seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and mind are the six sense faculties their 01:08:04 spheres are the visible objects etc like the scene the herd the smell that tasted and the touched the hair sound etc and consciousness should be understood so actually i'm confused from both of 01:08:18 you first of all barry is the mind anything special in buddhist philosophy or is it just like seeing and hearing and carlo are you saying there is anything 01:08:31 special about them right

but before we do that let me talk about something that's even more fundamental um and helps us to understand the progression of thinking through those four schools to the what's 00:42:10 usually considered the most sophisticated in my jamaica school um and that is the distinction which is really important between existence and intrinsic existence 00:42:23 and the ex and the distinction between no existence and no intrinsic existence so this is these distinctions um if one doesn't fully comprehend the the 00:42:37 majamika system uh not fully comprehend but have some idea of the of the uh my jamaica system one then usually make is not able to make these distinctions so 00:42:49 let's talk about them for a moment um so existence um we when we talk about existence we talk about our ordinary understanding of what's real okay that things are 00:43:03 objects uh things are you know they may be in relationship but what's in relationship are two different distinct objects or entities that are in relationship and that's kind of our normal understanding of existence 00:43:15 so lacking inherent existence or intrinsic existence begs the issue to understand what is intrinsic existence okay and that's the 00:43:27 object of negation for the buddha for nagarjuna and for all those following in this tradition of nagarjuna the uh the majamika school and so 00:43:39 that's not so easy to wrap our heads around uh what is intrinsic existence in a way it's so close that we miss it you know it's it's a little bit like you know 00:43:51 staying in a in a new hotel room in a new city waking up and looking for your glasses and you can't find them and then realizing that they're already on your faces and so 00:44:05 intrinsic existence is things existing independently things existing uh through relationship um things not not things existing dependently not in independently 00:44:19 and so if we look at dependence now we can look at that at several levels and the more obvious levels you've mentioned that carlo is cause and effect causality okay but there are also more uh 00:44:33 subtle levels of dependence that the buddha and nagarjuna talk about and are real central to the philosophy so the second level is the relationship between whole and parts and parts to whole it 00:44:46 goes both ways okay that's a a a little bit you know another level if you will of of dependence uh in the particularly you know highlighted by nagarjuna and 00:44:58 then the third level which is the most uh subtle level the subtlest level which is really what we have to start to understand because the opposite of that is this independent or intrinsic 00:45:10 existence okay so this third level we call dependence through designation or sometimes called dependent designation but it's dependence through designation 00:45:22 it's a type of naming or labeling so for example barry we label or name barry my parents gave this name to barry based on a body 00:45:34 okay maybe a little tiny infant body at that time right and also uh in terms of maybe some kind of behaviors or you know how they thought this emotional structure is for this little baby right 00:45:47 he's very calm or he's very you know he's acts out a lot he's very active or you know all those things so upon all that a name is placed in this case barry okay 00:45:59 so that relationship of you know dependence through designation is really what nagarjuna is talking about when we talk about dependence um and so that's very uh 00:46:11 important to understand so the opposite of that coming back to understanding this inherent or intrinsic existence there are many words in english we use synonymous for 00:46:23 ranging not existing intrinsically or inherently or independently or from its own side those are all synonyms um to the tibetan 00:46:36 terminology that i just mentioned um so when people don't have a good appreciation for intrinsic existence and you say then so the second there were two comparisons 00:46:53 the second comparison is uh non-existence and not inherently existent so when when when when regarding says no inherent existence what often people interpret is no 00:47:07 existence at all and they fall into a nihilism that nothing exists at all so they haven't fully under appreciated this notion of um intrinsic existence so they're throwing the baby out with the 00:47:20 bathwater right when we're throwing out or negating uh intrinsic existence that they don't quite understand what that really means they think it's all of existence and therefore they you know think that nothing exists they throw the 00:47:33 baby out with a backlog so that's that's okay can i interject something before you go ahead and you you you promised us before uh the full schools before uh but but can i 00:47:44 can i make a comment here um of course about you to say because this is free flow so yeah yeah so we you know we gave the title uh 00:47:56 what is real to this uh to this i that seems to me um that's exactly that distinction that that you you made between existence 00:48:09 and intrinsic existence um inherent existence it's a it it's it's uh it's idea that that i found central and and and 00:48:22 essentially essentially useful for me for for the following reason first of all um i mean the notion of reality the notion of existence here are close i mean what what exists is what is real what is that i want to say a couple of things one is 00:48:40 that um we make a distinction with an illusory and real in our everyday life uh which it's well founded i mean if i if i see 00:48:53 the chair and there's a mirror there and i see a chair of the other side of the mirror there's a precise sense in which the chair in which the other side of the mirror is not real well this chair is real 00:49:06 um this distinction has a meaning because i can sit on the chair i can touch that one but i cannot sit on that and touch that one but 00:49:18 then we realize that some aspects of what is illusory in the chair in the mirror also are shared by the chair which i just called real which is also illusory in 00:49:31 some other sets um for instance uh the fact of being a chair uh it's uh cut out and back on so i missed you up until now please could you repeat it oh 00:49:44 uh for where for where did you be speak uh when you were saying this distinction between existence and inherent existence and non-existence non-inheritances is 00:49:56 very helpful uh and then after that i lost you yeah i wanted to um make a couple points one is that uh we use a distinction between illusory and real in everyday life for instance we say that 00:50:10 a chair but then i was saying of course then um through science uh we realized that there are illusory aspects in the chair which are just called real as well 00:50:30 but then one is tempted and that's um to say all right so there are many luxury aspects of that chair but there is a a more fundamental level in which uh 00:50:45 there is a description of what is going on there which is a real one and edinton uh made it very very vividly in a well-known uh distinction between the scientific table 00:50:57 and the everyday table when he says look i have two images two tables there there's a table of which i eat which is solid and then there's a table which i view with my scientific eyes which is made by atoms 00:51:09 uh and is not solid there's a lot of emptiness of of not emptiness negatives empty completely different sense i i've heard that that emptiness is 99.9 to the 12th 00:51:20 power based in the atom is that right yes yes but that's of course not negative emptiness that's just the lack of presence of atoms yeah um and adidas says and people use that 00:51:34 by saying the the the the chair of my uh the chairman which i see the solitude is illusory the real chair is the atoms uh this way of using the notion of real and the 00:51:49 notion of um of uh existence so what exists in the atoms uh is dangerously misleading that's what 00:52:01 i uh because uh it uh um it pushes us to try to resolve the relational and illusory aspect of reality that we see 00:52:15 in terms of some basic fundamental physical reality from which to derive it or in western subjective idealism 00:52:28 in terms and its derivation in terms of some sort of uh fundamental mind or fundamental subject which is a real existing entity 00:52:41 the cartesian mind that is certain of existing itself um or the kantian subject or even the the the fundamentality of the perception 00:52:53 itself in whosoever uh and in phenomenology so there is this western need to anchor um the uh what we mean by real or something final 00:53:07 so uh to to realize that there is dependence but then there is some basic grounds on which everything builds up on which to uh on which to sit and this is what i take emptiness 00:53:23 the notion of empty negative notion of emptiness to be useful uh to to get rid of this urge of finding beyond the uh 00:53:35 the illusory aspect of the world a a basic level which is not um uh real in in in the uh 00:53:47 in the sense of uh uh of of uh uh in which this chair is is real compared to the uh to the chair uh in the mirror but but really the fundamental way so the the the bottom line of the story the 00:54:02 the solid terrain on which to anchor the ultimate um uh uh the end point of the line of dependence the line of dependence ends to some point that's what is real 00:54:15 and and what is this nagarjuna is that that's the wrong question i mean uh it's not only that the chair the table is empty because i can understand it's something else but it's 00:54:26 also that something else is also empty because i can understand it's something else until the point in which there is this emptiness itself it's a it's empty because we shouldn't take it as a 00:54:40 as a fundamental sort of metaphysical principle on which to ground all the rest so this putting this this is yeah just putting this in slightly different 00:54:51 terminology emptiness is where it allows functionality emptiness is the lack of any kind of essence even on a you know atomic level and i agree with you what you said 00:55:04 that's i think very true um right and this is a look at when we look at the chair versus the reflection of the chair in the mirror it gets a little more complicated because both of them of course lack any 00:55:17 independent existence both okay they're both empty uh in terms of shunyata having said that the metaphor that the buddha used he gave about 10 different 00:55:29 metaphors for you know something to be illusory and one of the important ones that he used was reflection you know he used the reflection of the moon or the full moon in in the still 00:55:41 water that it looks like the moon but in fact of course it's not it's a reflection he used such things as water in a mirage sound of an echo and you know things 00:55:55 like that to illustrate okay now um let me mention two experiments if i may and you correct me where i'm wrong i'm a 00:56:07 pop physicist from the new york times okay um and one is the uh the thought experiment of ed edwin schroedinger okay the so-called shorting her cat paradox 00:56:21 or thought experiment and you have double steel box in which you have a cat there's no doors no windows right and you have a vial of very powerful acid that's 00:56:33 connected to a radioisotope the half-life of the isotope is the same duration as the duration of your experiment your thought experiment so the chance of the cat so if the radioactive material 00:56:46 decays 50 chance it you know somehow pulls a lever and the acid spills killing the cat if that radioisotope does not decay there's no spillage of the of the 00:56:59 of the acid and the cat remains alive so quantum physicists call this superposition where the cat is both alive and dead when you crack open this steel box 00:57:13 then um you observe what's inside and then the cat is either dead if the radio isotope you know decayed and knocked over the acid or 00:57:25 it's alive it didn't okay and it's it's either or whereas when you can't observe it it's both it's superposition okay second is the double slit you know you you shoot these electrons or photons you 00:57:40 know through two slits in a metal thing and then you have a screen behind and you look at the the pattern and if you have a little camera observation device at the slit level of the slits observing 00:57:52 you find a pattern below on the back on the screen that suggests what passed through the splits were particles whereas if you remove the observation device you have an interference pattern 00:58:05 suggesting what went through this list were waves okay so these two experiments at least in my very uh you know superficial understanding tell us that observer dependence is very 00:58:18 important in terms of reality okay that whether or not there is or isn't or or maybe you can what type of observer you know presence there is very much influences and determines what's real 00:58:31 and so that then uh jumps into the four you know buddhist schools of philosophy and if we go from the so-called least sophisticated up the third one would be the one you alluded to that's somewhat 00:58:45 similar to bishop barkley in the west and other idealists that say that everything is consciousness everything is mine and things that seem to be solid out there in an external reality are nothing more than projections of our 00:58:58 mind and that's actually a very sophisticated philosophy it's a very sophisticated philosophy one of the things it starts to do is it breaks down this notion of a solid external reality 00:59:10 okay but it's con it's it's critique as you have you also mentioned is that it takes the mind you know to be somehow you know uh absolute or ultimate you 00:59:22 know existing and so then the highest if you will most sophisticated school of mediumica says well what the chidoma modulus the mind-only school says that's correct up to a point but the criticism is 00:59:36 there's no uh you know absoluteness about the mind either so then you end up with that you accept an external reality you accept a mind but both you know that is every existent thing uh exists 00:59:49 without having any uh exist in relationship without having any independence or objectivity um and so that's very roughly the at least the the the last two of the three buddhist schools the 01:00:03 third one is divided again into prasannika madhyamaka and spatrontikamanjamaka using tibetan terms that are borrowing from the sanskrit um and the prasangika mud yamaka is considered the most 01:00:16 sophisticated where nothing at all has intrinsic existence the whereas the uh svaltronticom and yamaka they say that some uh conventional reality does exist uh 01:00:30 from its own side having some essence uh so there's a little bit of a distinction in the debate there um so just wanted to to mention those things i'd like you to comment

you're quite unique there are maybe a few quantum physics physicists that have interest and you know but few that i think have really read nagarjuna particularly from the 00:41:08 beginning to the end of his uh you know opus magnus is his major treatise of the six we have all of those actually translated into english and you know some of them will deal more with the 00:41:20 compassion side also um so i applaud you for that

et me put it one thing do you think that uh uh it's there's anything wrong let's put it bluntly this way in in in in trying to take that from the 00:37:55 godzilla and and uh letting the thing letting this a bit of wisdom small bit of wisdom that i can get out of it uh influence the 00:38:07 rest but uh using it directly because i think that that's my that's what i think is my contribution somehow uh look there is in this uh 00:38:19 in this large uh aspect of midfield there is a there's a part of it which is definitely very relevant uh for modern physics that could be used for it and 00:38:30 um uh and from modern philosophy and you know the people in modern philosophy the people in cambridge the people in the us um not only garfield but 00:38:42 west of the others who who who are using uh a idea from the guardian in the philosophical context 00:38:57 i i think this is dialogue and i don't know if i don't know if anything could be useful in the other direction in a sense but it's uh you know i think culture is a dialogue it's a dialogue in which uh 00:39:09 in which uh uh we keep learning from from else whether it's a tradition whether it's a different school whether it is nature itself because we interact whether there's us talking to one another this constant exchange 00:39:24 that in my opinion makes the beauty of of of of culture but also uh but also the that's how we learn that's how we know that how we change

it works on on logic essentially and shows look if you if you take this entity as existence you get into a contradiction for this and this reason 00:36:31 and it slowly demolishes all the possible foundations of our thinking not only objects but also causation itself also time itself also the self 00:36:44 itself and so on and so forth one one by one um showing that uh thinking that they are foundational they're they're they have intrinsic existence uh doesn't doesn't hold

by the way this um uh this is talking to me at the at a more 00:32:02 large level or more personal level uh because it does change my my sense of being in the world and one way in which it does is uh um 00:32:15 is is precisely because it it uh it changes my understanding of myself of the self and and and and the relational aspect between what i am and and the rest of the world and what i am and and 00:32:28 the other beings living beings sentient beings around around me somehow um uh 00:32:38 it it suddenly uh takes away a little bit of the anguish that change impermanence causes 00:32:54 or produces by um by making me think that there is no permanent me 00:33:07 who is a threatened by impermanence um and it uh it pushes uh myself and interpreting myself as as 00:33:20 a part of a network in which i am produced by the interaction with the others and it resonates with my larger uh uh pre-existing western 00:33:34 uh political uh ideas that any uh interpretation of our human and social life in terms of uh 00:33:45 you know competition and maximizing our own good of the good of our own nation or the good of our own people um against the other uh it's badly misleading for ourselves 00:33:59 and for for everybody at a number of a number of levels so there is a interdependence of of the reading of social human relations which goes 00:34:14 together with this deep interdependence separated but it's it's a it it resonates i want to say that because i must say i'm not totally deaf to 00:34:26 the compassion side and the larger side of the story

this is useful to me enormously both in terms of context but also in the 00:29:42 most positive way um i take this as a criticism uh in in in a positive way which which i'm happy with uh 00:29:54 let me translate uh what you said into a criticism it's like uh you were saying look her uh fine you're finding like a june or something interesting but you missed the 00:30:06 the uh the um some uh more valuable aspect of what is around there because the uh the 00:30:19 the wisdom it's uh makes sense uh together with the compassion um and this of course is um uh is uh 00:30:31 uh it's a fault which is common in me and in a lot of intellectual tradition which i accept

and then the deepest level is what's maybe more relevant for our discussion 00:27:04 we call it we call it all pervasive it's a conditioned kind of suffering and it's conditioned by ignorance the ignorance that does not understand reality correctly okay and that's really 00:27:17 what we're that's the opposite of what we're talking about when we talk about you know shunyata or emptiness uh this ignorance is 100 180 degrees opposite um so in that last level of suffering is 00:27:32 really the underpinnings of all the other sufferings okay so if we can address and remove that level of ignorance then all the other sufferings fall away 00:27:43 and you could also see it as all of our attachments that get us into trouble our aversions that can end in anger hatred and now we see so much violence in the world all that and 00:27:55 and our selfishness and our greed and you know on and on all that just falls away when we begin to get rid of this ignorance and we begin to not only intellectually understand emptiness but 00:28:08 we put it into our lives it percolates down and it starts to be part of our attitude the way we think the way we feel it permeates every aspect of our sleep and wake life and when that happens it's 00:28:22 it's like a revolution i don't speak from personal experience because i don't have that but according to the great saints and masters who have it's like a total revolution it's full of joy it's complete love and compassion 00:28:36 there's no moment where there isn't and it's always bathed in this wisdom of emptiness taking things as you said so beautifully in the beginning of your remarks carlo that everything is 00:28:48 in relation there are no discrete entities at all there's no independent existence i think those are the words that were used by david bohm who was a very close friend of his holiest the dalai lamas and as 00:29:01 you know a well-recognized quantum physicist um so those are just some contextual opening remarks to put us in in the in the right ball field if you will uh as a 00:29:15 with an american background baseball field right could be a soccer field

the reason to understand and put into practice nagarjuna's wisdom of emptiness is really all about compassion because it's a way that we can be more 00:21:56 useful to others in terms of bringing happiness and eliminating suffering

i got from that book for responding about issues about quantum mechanics where people tell me come on curly you think about quantum mechanics systems how they affect one 00:17:35 another but the two systems should exist by themselves this should exist by itself anything they should think otherwise how could they affect one another and now got an answer to that and i 00:17:47 the second point i am fascinated by the overall uh anti-foundation is with nagarjuna which i found it extremely liberating

i read that book 00:11:08 in the translation by garfield and it was a shock for me it's an incredible it's a it's just a fantastic book so it really blew away my mind and i 00:11:21 spent a while as a a summer uh immersed in that book trying to read everything i could get nakatuna and thinking about that and i ended up with two ideas um which i just would put on the table and to to 00:11:35 discuss one smaller one larger one smaller is that in nagarjuna there are some basic ideas which are helpful uh to make sense of about quantum mechanics not not because the cartridge 00:11:48 knew anything about quantum physics of course it didn't uh but i think that to do science we need we need ideas and philosophy is very useful and uh we get from philosophy uh 00:12:01 conceptual structure way of thinking uh that as usual to make sense of of of better ways of understanding about the world and and and what is useful in nagarjuna is the idea 00:12:14 of uh what you do for quantum physics is the idea that uh it's it's better to think of the world not as entities or substance or or things of god or 00:12:27 whatever matter uh that has its own properties but only um through the interdependence of of things so you don't understand anything by itself if not connected to the others 00:12:39 that's uh in fact it's even more i think what nagarjuna shows that uh if you think that their relations with you think that things affect one another that's the only way of thinking so the idea of 00:12:52 of a thing by itself of things existing uh independently of anything else of a fundamental reality it's uh it's not useful and it's 00:13:08 i think the guardian argues contradictory that's a that's a specific idea this is the bigger idea which i i found uh wonderful and that completely captured me 00:13:20 is that uh this is a for me fascinating philosophical perspective because it starts from the day of separating uh sort of a conventional reality and 00:13:31 and an ultimate ultimate reality uh which is very common uh in in a very common perspective also in science and western philosophy um 00:13:44 you can also read some of the evolution of science or western philosophy trying to search for this ultimate life is that matter is that god is that spirit is that the mind is that language is that there are many other circles is that phenomenology or 00:13:58 the whosoever whatever you want and nagarjuna the book of nagarjuna is not a positive construction it's a negative destruction every chapter takes away something look this by itself doesn't stay together 00:14:12 this there's a state together it takes away it takes somebody takes something and so the suggestion here is that maybe the question is wrong um we should look for the ultimate value the ultimate value doesn't exist in a 00:14:24 sense it's the same thing as a as a conventional reality that i found fantastic it's a it's a dissolving um it's dissolving a fake problem in a 00:14:36 sense and opening up a sudden uh uh coherence as i read it and with all my superficiality it's not denying reality right it is here i mean this pen is his pen 00:14:48 it it denies the fact that this is ultimate reality in this pen or in something on which this pen is based including the mind which is uh there's a superficial buddhism a view of 00:15:01 beauties in the west uh which is just everything is the mind the mind is it's everything is is uh if you think it's a self and everything you know um where you were born in hollywood so 00:15:12 the illusory aspect of the walls i wonder if you got it from buddhism from hollywood i don't know but this is this idea that you know the the world is a big cinema and everything is is in the mind of berkeley 00:15:25 and this is a there's a chapter in in in nagarjuna which denies that completely because the mind itself is not um it's not uh doesn't have an ultimate reality so you cannot found anything on the mind nor on the dharma or the 00:15:39 on anything up to the point and then i conclude so my reason of my fascination throwing my fascination from the guardian on the table in this passage about the view this uh 00:15:51 this comments the emptiness of emptiness which was the real moment in which the guardian captured uh captured me so it's a point in which uh you know translated the way i read it or probably superficially is that all 00:16:04 right so everything is empty in the sense of doesn't not having an intrinsic reality so therefore this emptiness is the foundation of everything and regardless of the words no no no wait this is this 00:16:16 is a this is the view uh which you which is itself empty in the sense that it depends on else this is suddenly extremely liberating i think uh and i found it it hadn't 00:16:31 impacted me intellectually suddenly i have a i have a way to take take away from my intellectual search and anguish finding the foundations uh which i find liberating and even 00:16:43 personally i mean it's thinking about myself not as an entity but as a combination of other things uh has definitely an effect on me on a on a on a human being 00:16:55 and uh so i guess what what finally fascinated me in a gardener is this anti-foundational aspect it's taking away the starting point um it's absolute radicality 00:17:08 uh when he says that nirvana and samsara themselves are sort of illusioned in some sense empty in his own sense devoid of intrinsic reality

let me first say how why we're here um 00:05:01 and first point out that barry and carl have never met before this is the first time you will discuss

i didn't know anything about nagarjuna and uh i know very little about buddhism and buddhist philosophy so i am 00:09:04 very i'm here without any potential of saying anything uh beyond extremely superficial uh about buddhism to apologize for that i i in fact i i look forward to to to to 00:09:18 to getting from you um ideas and and take away some of my uh superficiality um i and i have a lot of buddhist friends because my catholic friends back in 00:09:30 italy many have converted or changed into buddhism somehow and i i read about maine buddhist idea but i i knew little about uh uh derek arjuna in particular 00:09:41 in fact i didn't even know that his book existed um but i worked on quantum theory on the foundation of quantum theory and i have been fascinated by a particular way of 00:09:53 viewing quantum theory which is called the relation interpretation of quantum theory in which [Music] one of the central thing one of the central ideas is that objects systems 00:10:06 things whatever by themselves do not have properties in some sense do not exist by themselves they only exist because they interact with something else and uh this is a 00:10:19 it's an idea which is not completely absent in in in western philosophy but it's not easy to frame in philosophical uh id western ideas and i've been 00:10:31 writing and talking about uh relational quantum mechanical relation contemplation of quantum mechanics and so many times after a talk people will come to me and say have you read nagarjuna 00:10:44 and i said no and i am not particularly excited about attempts to mix you know modern physics with eastern idea because uh things i've read about that i always found very 00:10:57 superficial superficial way of putting both but after you know the twentieth time i heard have you read nagarjuna i think well maybe i should read that

embodied cognitive science has been greatly helped by an article written last year by elmo felton mined after ook school a foray into the world of ecological psychologists and an 00:23:44 activist this shows you how this work from the 1920s appears to contemporary embodied cognitive scientists and we're going to have the good luck that elmo will join us in class so we should have a very 00:23:58 productive discussion about the very strange world of jakob von ogsku

he um belt has two sides to it which are not separable in german they're the merkveld and the virgvelt the merkwelt is the umvelt considered 00:19:24 from the aspects of semiotics or signs or meaningful stimuli things to differentiations one might draw distinctions one might draw that are available to one the virgvelt is the same thing 00:19:37 considered under a different aspect which is the space of possible effective actions to draw a distinction is now to move in knowledge of that distinction 00:19:49 this notion of the virgvelt will will appear later in ecological psychology with the notion of affordance and and again a concept that follows totally nails long before it appears in the literature 00:20:02 so when you hear umwelt try not to think entirely visually but to recognize that we we're dealing here with a concept which must be understood as a sort of a stereoscopic fusion 00:20:14 of the idea of meaningful appearance meaningful showing up and capacity for action because of the difficulties in disciplining this view of this emerging 00:20:28 view of the subject you won't find it easy to interpret vulnerability in terms of personal experience he vacillates here and our vocabulary is still not great here but the umvelt has 00:20:40 this important character of being neither a theory of perception or theory of action in keeping with all embodied theories later perception and action are absolutely indistinguishable but we can characterize them in this 00:20:53 with this dual aspect manner so when you encounter sketches like this he's full of bold imaginative sketches in his work

e's trying to begin to find the vocabulary to elaborate how we can speak of meaningful 00:17:53 being in the world without a subject there is no meaning his notion of the umvelt or the world as it arises for a specifically embodied organism 00:18:07 is not the same thing as environment he tries to make this distinction clear it's not entirely successful but here you can see he distinguishes on the left between what we might think of the environment of a honeybee which is a 00:18:20 field of flowers and on the right he's tried to draw the umvelt of the the field of flowers from i'm going to use this word from the point of view of the bee now it's unfortunate to have to use 00:18:33 visual metaphors there that's our language that's the way we talk about these things the processes are much more generic but we will inevitably use the language of vision when we're talking about such 00:18:44 things so he's tried fancifully to draw a meaningful umvelt as it might appear to a be we keep falling into this visual metaphor when we're when we talk about um subjectivities 00:18:59 we keep coming back to the notion of seeing which is most unfortunate when we discuss the umwelt you shouldn't think of something which the b see

read just a little quote from him now we might assume that an animal is nothing but a collection of perceptual and effector tools connected by an integrating apparatus 00:17:02 which though still a mechanism is yet fit to carry on life functions he's saying that you can build up a mechanistic picture of the functioning of the body in in that world 00:17:15 but he said this is indeed the position of all mechanistic theories whether their analogies are in terms of rigid mechanics or more plastic dynamics and one might mention pretty much all contemporary psychological theories 00:17:28 they brand animals as mere objects the proponents of such theories forget that from the first they have overlooked the most important thing the subject which uses the tools perceives and functions with their age

if we've looked at the synthetic a priori of time he also addresses the synthetic a priori of 00:15:46 space and one very interesting distinction he draws is between animals who have semi-circular canals in their heads somewhere and animals which don't now we do fishes do 00:15:58 limpets don't for an animal with semicircular canals the word this the nature of space is to have right left up down forward backwards it's to be suspended or the 00:16:11 head to move through a volumetric space that we is so familiar with us we think of that as space as simply existing an animal not so endowed with no 00:16:24 semicircular canals encounters space in an entirely different way and he discusses how space arises for something like a limpet or a paramecium so he has taken the synthetic a prioris 00:16:36 of time and space and reconsidered them in a manner appropriate to the 1920s and 30s paying keen attention to the structures and processes of the body 00:16:48 this is work that we still need to do

he's built a little toy he's built a treadmill for a snail isn't that wonderful he's a genuine scientist he's doing lots and lots of experiments with 00:11:27 animals they're very creative experiments in this case he's built a treadmill for a snail so the snail is held by a vice on a rotating ball and the snail is then um approached by 00:11:40 the investigator who chucks it under the chin like this and if you chuck the snail under the chin like this the snail will recoil not surprising i 00:11:52 would recall it as well but as you speed up the frequency of these chucks under the chin at about five hertz once you pass a frequency of about five chucks per second 00:12:05 the snail's behavior changes remarkably instead of being perturbed and trying to withdraw it tries to crawl onto onto something the qualitative nature of what's happening 00:12:18 to the snail has changed for the snail and its response or it's it's um sense making is altered and it's tried it perceives seems to perceive now a constant surface onto which it might 00:12:32 crawl now that might seem strange to you but i'll remind you that if we flash a light for you five times a second you'll see a light flashing and if we speed up the interval 00:12:44 then we shorten the interval between flashes to make them faster there comes a critical point at about 20 site flashes per second where you no longer perceive individual flashes but you 00:12:54 perceive a continuous light something like this underlies the magic that happens with moving pictures as well where you know that the action you see in the cinema is a bunch of projected still pictures 00:13:09 but they um have this character of continuous movement for you likewise in sound if we play that for you you hear a bunch of disconnected claps but if we shorten the 00:13:22 interval between the claps and speed it up there comes a point at which it changes into a continuous low pitch and that happens again about 20 hertz at about 20 cycles per second now for this snail 00:13:35 that border is at a different place it's at about five cycles per second what this shows is quite profound remember kant's synthetic a prioris 00:13:46 time for this snail is different than time for you the time that arises as a function of the body of the snail has this border at about five hertz where you have one at about 20 hertz 00:14:01 his basic insight is that worlds arise for snails that are not commensurable with worlds that arise for humans with which are not commensurable with worlds that arise for earthworms 00:14:15 the notion of an umvelt we get to determine a minute is used to describe this bodily specific arising of a world together with time and space 00:14:28 now i said it's rather weird to think of time being fundamentally different for an animal of a different constitution but i'll remind you that we can use our cinematic tricks to make ourselves aware of our own 00:14:41 limitations on the left there through high-speed photography we managed to make perceptible an event which we cannot otherwise see the event that you see there with the splash is 00:14:53 perfectly real but we can only make it manifest through high-speed photography similarly whoops there are processes going on around us 00:15:05 that we do not perceive and we can use time-lapse photography to make those to speed them up so that they become perceptible to us something like the blooming of a flower or the battles intricate battles fought 00:15:16 between brambles and hedges these make us aware that we perceive time as unfolding at a rate dictated by our own metabolism and bodily processes so this idea that time and space 00:15:32 are considered very different from count but very much tied now to the body this is quite radical

now we go back to jakub von ogskul and we find him critiquing exactly the 00:09:20 same thing for exactly the same reasons 30 years after john dewey there on the left he has picked out the reflex arc pointing out that it is a linear throughput which leaves no room 00:09:34 for subjectivity no room for intentional action no room for meaning to arise if you if the middle is only animated by inputs then it's a puppet 00:09:47 he replaces this with a model on the right that will whose terms will not be entirely clear to you as you read the article but i want you to notice one thing about it it's circular it's not a linear 00:09:59 throughput it's circular he starts by noting the embeddedness of the body in the world and the fact that the activity of the 00:10:13 body is meaningful at all times and not separable into inputs and outputs his replacement of the linear throughput with this circular model that he elaborates in various ways 00:10:25 is remarkably prescient of the basic cybernetic insight that will arise after the second world war in which it's all feedback systems positive feedback systems negative feedback systems 00:10:37 homeostatic systems um reciprocity is always involved the fact that you do something and something is done to you at the same time that that we dance in the world 00:10:50 rather than standing apart from it and recording a movie of it so his um uncovery of this basic cybernetic principle with which one might approach the body and its being in the world is 00:11:02 remarkably prescient but these profound ideas of vulnerable are often hidden because he's well frankly so charming well he's a problematic character as we'll see lately 00:11:14 but he tells a good story and he does cool experiments

i want to take you back to our lecture on cognitivism where we surveyed among other things the origins of this notion of a psychological subject within our inner architecture 00:05:52 that comes into being in 1896 john dewey wrote a very famous article called the reflex arc concept in psychology you may have missed it it's listed it's provided on 00:06:06 the page for cognitivism and what dewey was doing was surveying the very many very diverse uh research activities that were beginning to bring into being something like a 00:06:19 psychological science there was so many questions so many methods and a single theoretical construct had emerged that many people were leaning on to and was acting as a kind of a unified 00:06:32 construct with which notions of mind and body might be brought together that notion is the reflex arc now the reflex arc you may be familiar with from physiology if you touch something hot 00:06:45 then we can follow a physiological path from the receptors in the skin in this case if you touch a hot stove we can follow a very short path that goes through the spinal cord and immediately causes you 00:06:58 to move your hand away no thinking involved that's a reflex and you're familiar with the notion of reflex but that notion had been elaborated and was being developed by many people into a picture of the an account of the 00:07:11 embedding of the entire body and nervous system in the world john dewey was saying don't do that stop doing that it's a serious critique of this input output model and the 00:07:25 reflex arc starts with a stimulus and results in action and as a one-way throughput john dewey correctly said that an input output model reduces 00:07:40 the intervene the thing in the middle into a puppet there is no subjectivity possible here now this is a fundamental critique as the fundamental shift in perspective we're adopting in 00:07:53 this module which is to get away from the silly notion of the body and person and subject as being driven by inputs producing the 00:08:05 ghost of the cognitive sandwich there we go you've got the cognitive sandwich you've got sensation providing input you've got action on the output in between you have a great big mystery stuffed into the head it's very easy to make fun of this as 00:08:18 susan hurley does with her term cognitive sandwich it's much more difficult to make fun of exactly the same thing when we draw it like this there is an orthodox belief in our 00:08:30 society our society works on the assumption that there is the psychological subject who has inner processes of perception feeding into inner processes of higher cognition 00:08:43 all fueled by the world through senses and this model doesn't even have an output such constructive psychological representational stories typically 00:08:55 ignore action altogether so the cognitive sandwich may be ridiculous when we look at it in one way but it is also the most wide held belief in our society about the person and we 00:09:08 institute our laws our education systems our workplaces are built on this problematic model

the task of biology consists in expanding in two directions the results of cancer investigations by considering the part played by our body and especially by our sense organs 00:04:47 and central nervous system you can see the basic parameters of what we now call cognitive science are coming into being here and by studying the relation of other subjects to objects 00:04:59 it's the subject that kant wants to take seriously that notion is still very undefined and notice here the term animal other subjects so the 00:05:10 animal is a subject here he's trying to take a stance that is not that doesn't traffic in human exceptionalism that takes the embodied being seriously and for him that means something that's 00:05:23 straightforwardly an animal a dog a cat a scientist a limpet and he's going to consider them all with much the same theoretical vocabulary he's pitching in here in 1926

we need to understand what the tradition is that he is feeding from and how what his orientation is he is 00:01:21 taking his own work to be an extension of the work of immanuel kant now if you have not noticed anything in the history of philosophy of mind please 00:01:33 notice descartes and kant those are the two principal landmarks so many others but kant had died at the very start of the 19th century kant was working within a 00:01:46 physical framework that was newtonian in which space and time are simply blocks containers within which things unfold mechanistically that was the metaphysics available to 00:02:00 kant was asking with that metaphysics how do we come to know anything now he had the cogito of descartes very much on his mind but also the the empiricists 00:02:14 concerns with the role of the senses following the tradition of hume and kant attempted to resolve this by noting that there were some things that could not be learned from the world that had 00:02:27 to be in place before any knowledge of the world can happen at all he called these the synthetic a prioris those things that well nothing forces the manas but we can't begin to make 00:02:38 sense of the notion of knowledge without prior notions of time and space and causality this is a difficult position to occupy and can't argumentation was developed in very many ways and gave rise to very many 00:02:53 different kinds of science thereafter for the thing in itself this shell is not knowable rather i encountered a phenomenon of the shell the phenomenon of the shell 00:03:11 through mediated through the senses and the body and i can never thus get to the shell itself this is of course the paradox underlying all representational theories 00:03:22 of perception which is that they seem to leave you estranged from the world and not in contact with the world all knowledge seem to be mediated through the sensors so it need you need 00:03:34 to bootstrap knowledge with these synthetic api ras for accounts this is immanuel kant dies at the start of the 19th century and then about 00:03:45 1870 something like scientific psychology starts to emerge and there's a wide variety of approaches they're drawing among other things from kant but they're not following one 00:03:58 unified agenda funux comes in here and he sees himself as taking kant seriously and he's going to develop in his context in the 1920s and 1930s 00:04:10 the notion of a synthetic a priori changes now instead of the physicalist model of time and space and as containers that we have with kant the body is the ultimate synthetic a 00:04:22 priori for von neux cool epistemology or how a being comes to know the world will only be ever understood through careful attention to the structures of and processes of the body

you are probably somewhat unfamiliar with the term biosemiotics is not in widespread use um and but it represents a very very 00:00:17 important reference point when we come to theories of embodied cognition the founder of biosemiotics is typically held to be jacob von xcool 00:00:29 biosemiotics is a field within the broader domain of semiotics which considers the manner in which meaning arises through various forms of mediation such as signs indices indexes 00:00:42 symbols and the like

to bring it to the present you know the news cycle is about russia and ukraine yeah there are propositional things there about what's the capital of 00:01:15 russia what's the capital of ukraine where's the border then you have sort of procedural um how how do you discuss this matter or or how do we make decisions about this what are the things in play and then you have 00:01:27 um question perspective like how does it look in moscow how does it look in kiev how does it look at the u.n yes and then you have something about participation what's it like to be at the border in the east of ukraine for example yeah 00:01:39 yeah what identities are you assigning what identities are you are are you assuming what roles right yeah yeah i mean it's not nothing immediately politicized i just mean to bring it to bear that in any given context there are 00:01:52 always these multiple ways of knowing that are a big thing

it's a how we know it in some way so it's different forms of how yes it's not based on the content of it so there's different ways you can do taxonomies and people often want to monkey with the taxonomy they said no no like you can make a 00:00:50 taxonomy however you want like if you make the taxonomy on the basis of content you're going to have like you're going to have like you know knowledge about australia knowledge about the solar system and right right now that you're right this is much more about the 00:01:03 manner and the mechanisms of knowing than it is about the content

so that's me trying to do a synoptic integration of all of the four e-cognitive science and trying to get it 00:00:12 into a form that i think would help make make sense to people of the of cognition and also in a form that's helpful to get them to see what's what we're talking about when i'm talking about the meaning 00:00:25 that's at stake in the meaning crisis because it's not sort of just semantic meaning

Dogen and Nagarjuna’s Tetralemma #6 of 21

When we see the world from the vantage point of all-at-oneness, always right here, we can be said to be like a pearl in a bowl. Flowing with every turn without any obstructions or stoppages coming from our emotional reactions to different situations. This is a very commonly used image in Zen — moving like a pearl in a bowl. As usual, our ancestors comment on this phrase, wanting to break open our solidifying minds even more. Working from Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, Spring and Autumn, we have an example of opening up even the Zen appropriate phrase — a pearl in a bowl. Editor of the Blue Cliff Record Engo ( Yuan Wu) wrote: A bowl rolls around a pearl, and the pearl rolls around the bowl. The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute.   Dogen: The present expression “a bowl rolls around a pearl” is unprecedented and inimitable, it has rarely been heard in eternity. Hitherto, people have spoken only as if the pearl rolling in the bowl were ceaseless.

I have always liked the weaving loom as a metaphor for weaving the absolute and relative together into one cloth. The absolute can be the warp, the relative can be the woof, and the shuttle or the jade works , can spin them all together into one cloth. It’s not that we have to make them into one cloth, they are always manifesting together in simultaneous realization . The jade works is the activity of life itself, the total dynamic functioning of the activity of the universe. Sometimes translated as: The Whole Works. Always right here. All-at-oneness.

This is the paradoxical practice of Zen. How can we take care of the ordinary things and people in our daily life with care and attentiveness and still understand and know their impermanence? In practicing these two views simultaneously, we can come to understand freedom and to completely inhabit our one precious and unique human life. They mutually support each other and yet retain their distinctive qualities. We don’t call something that is white, black and yet we understand that white and black share the same essence. This understanding defines a good Zen practice. We take care of cause and effect from the basis of operation of boundless, timeless, open awareness.

The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute

We can cultivate in ourselves: Trusting in the process of our awareness and attention Trusting that I am Buddha Trusting universal functioning or basic goodness Trusting the “knowing quality of the mind” – that part of our mind that is connected to universal functioning, to DNA, to our intuition. Trusting in cause and effect. We can take good care of the smallest seeds of wholesomeness. Being devoted to taking care of the wholesome seeds, we can trust that there will be a wholesome result, sooner or later.

In order to trust, we have to find a connection with the perspective of life that is larger than our personal desire systems. We have to feel connected with peace and harmony, or the total dynamic working of the universe, or universal perspective. We know that things are working in that largest sense. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west every day. Our hearts are continuously pumping, our neurological system is working underneath our consciousness in every moment. Astronomy or any of the sciences really points to the incredible mystery of life that is working in peace and harmony underneath the surface conditions of our human stories.  In order for a human being to cultivate trust and the ability to let go, we have to stay connected to this harmony that is beneath the appearance of things.

Well, it’s pretty obvious to most of us that we can’t entirely trust in the world, in people and in appearances. The world of appearances is filled with the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. Sometimes, our closest people have betrayed us. The world as it appears in conditioned reality and ordinary life, is filled with unpredictable and often unexplainable occurrences that definitely go against how we wish things would be. Because of our unfulfilled desires, we suffer. When I was teaching recently at the prison sangha, The Unpolished Diamond Sangha, one man laughed at me and said, “You might be able to trust out there, but in here, that’s seems almost impossible. There is almost nothing and no one that can be trusted.” That has stuck with me. How to respond to that? Is there something unconditioned that we can trust in?

What do we trust in?

This teaching has helped me understand Dogen’s cubism and also how we enter into the present moment. Uchiyama Roshi calls it “opening the hand of thought”. We do not enter the present moment through thinking. If we debate the philosophy, we circle around the truth like a hawk circling around its prey. We circle around the diamond but never enter the center – the intersection of time and space. The first section of the fascicle “Going Beyond Buddha” is about talking and listening, or talking and hearing, or hearing and non-hearing.  These first few pages are Dogen at his wackiest – his almost impossible-to-follow writing.  But I find if I keep in mind the Diamond sliver and these charts, I can find my way through the dense contradictory sentences.  He is showing us the prism of understanding intellectually and the presence of being in the center of the chart.

Dogen will take all the 4 positions of Nagarjuna’s tetralemma (either, or, both, neither) and present them in one sentence or one paragraph. He might even debate the righteousness of one point of view and then combat it with the other point of view. He breaks up our attachment to our point of views and points his finger at total dynamic functioning.

I have written previously about the issue of “both”. In one sense, interdependence and total dynamic working implies that everything is both form and emptiness simultaneously. But the problem is that you can’t PERCEIVE both form and emptiness at the same time. They are both there supporting each other but our discriminative thought can only see one or the other; like the front and back foot in walking, like the old lady and young lady optical illusion, or the front and back of a hand. Both sides are always there. We have a whole hand but you can only see either the front of the hand or the back of the hand in a single moment.

These are the four positions on the diamond shape; the opposites, both and neither.  We swing around and around the diamond shape if we stay in language and our thinking. This is the swirling world of thinking and samsara. To enter the truth, we have to get off the diamond shape and enter into the center of the chart. The center of the chart is, as Katagiri Roshi always said, the intersection of time and space. It is the truth-happening place, the only true reality – the present moment. When we find our heads spinning around all the prism of viewpoints, we can simply enter into the intersection of time and space and let “understanding” go.

After bringing the opposites to our consciousness, we then want to decide; do they happen as “both” (at the top of the chart) or neither (which is at the bottom of the chart).  Is it the truth that everything is annihilated by the word “neither”?

First we have to understand that the opposites need each other, revolve around each other, actually make one complete dynamic. Form is on the left and emptiness is on the right of the chart.  Form needs emptiness and emptiness needs form. They are actually not separated but intellectually we conceive them as separate and opposite.

Dogen is constantly and repeatedly trying to knock us off our intellectual center and interrupt our thinking.  He does not confirm any one solid view of so-called reality. He doesn’t want us to get stuck to one side or the other in the dynamic pivoting of life’s opposite. Do not cling to the absolute or the relative truth. They dynamically and mutually work with each other. Dogen would describe this interaction as “The Whole Works.”

The place of the here and now IS the true reality and that can’t be described by any of the words above or by language.

Dogen can be very difficult to read or understand. That’s why we often need a commentary or teacher to introduce his way of writing and the underlying teaching. I often say he’s a thirteenth century cubist. Just like Picasso or in the writing world, Gertrude Stein, he tries to show all sides of the story in one paragraph or even one sentence. That is why he repeats himself and contradicts himself all in the same paragraph. If you are looking for the “right” understanding, you become confused and lost in his prism of various interpretations or views. Dogen’s “right” understanding is that there is none.   No one point of view is “right”. According to conditions, any view can be the right view in the right circumstance. Dogen really wants to take away our solid idea of a fixed ground of reality. It is not form or emptiness. It is not both or neither. There is no one right, fixed view. That is our “clinging”.

THE LOGIC OF THE CATUSKOTI

Jan Westerhoff on Nāgārjuna

No Four Ways About It: Nāgārjuna’s Tetralemma

if we build this   kind of knowing we become knowledgeable which is  good for lots of things but it is insufficient   because we also need to know how to do things and  the second P is procedural knowing this kind of   knowing is knowing the procedures that achieve  results and it doesn't get us truth it gets us   power an easy way to see it is the difference  between knowing lots about bikes and knowing   00:02:09 how to ride a bike you see this procedural  knowing gives us the power to ride around   and we all know people with great theory but can't  turn it into great practice and with procedural   knowing it's getting that embodied sense of how  specific actions reliably get us specific results   we call these skills and building our procedural  knowing building our skills we become experts  

the first kind of knowing he describes is the one  that we usually talk about knowing knowledge and   he calls it propositional knowing because it's  the kind of knowing that exists in books where   there are propositions facts beliefs concepts  rules is how we win an argument persuade someone   of something or describe a theory it's thinking  knowing knowing about things in science philosophy   00:01:40 history management we are in this business  of knowing what is true

okay so imagine a person learns a lot about  hammers and becomes very skillful with using one   00:02:38 this is useful but is every problem a nail  we might need another kind of knowing that   sees the situation we find ourselves in  and knows what skills are appropriate   John Vervaeke calls this perspectival knowing  it's not about knowing the truth or knowing how to   enact something it's knowing how to perceive the  world how to take it all in from our perspective   and with this we will know how things feel  and we can appreciate then what really matters   00:03:04 or sense what is needed in the situation it's not  just thinking about our perspective but really   inhabiting it getting a taste for how things  appear to us the result of perspectival knowing is   presence and with presence we also appreciate  the limits of our perspective and the value of   other perspectives we become more aware we see how  things fit together we put things in perspective   we become perceptive

there's a fourth  kind of knowing that's not about seeing but being   00:03:34 the p is participatory knowing knowing our place  in the world being in a right relationship with   the arena we're operating in being in a dynamic  connection with other people who have their own   perspectives and being in flow with what's around  us notice how different it feels when you're   out of sorts in a situation versus when you're  really at home or in the groove in a situation   when we know how to participate in an arena we  can see what is relevant and anticipate what is   00:04:02 next and we can improvise with little or no  self-doubt or hesitation because we aren't   thinking about it we know it and with this kind of  knowing we're not just observing the world we're   impacting it but not in that simple procedural  sense we are dancing with the situation both   influencing and being influenced and here we  can handle complexity and ambiguity and novelty   we can face things with good humor because we're  at home in the arena building our participatory   00:04:29 knowing we become co-creators with life

we often have too narrow an appreciation of   knowing focusing too much on one or two kinds  of knowing but to live well in a complex world   we need to effectively engage with four kinds  of knowing and perfectly they all begin with a P

i think there's a lot of latent potential in this coordination mechanisms layer um especially i think there's a bunch of really good ideas around um things like futarki and other struck 00:17:59 i'm not necessarily sure that that particular construction will work but i think we need to a lot of experiments with those kinds of governance structures to see if there could be ways of governing systems algorithmically 00:18:11 and and with a way of aggregating a lot of our perspectives and thoughts and values um in a much more systematic way than sort of like uh very brittle representative democracy that like doesn't really scale to to 00:18:23 millions of people um and i think you know in terms of a lot of the mechanisms and structures that that we want to build um there's a lot more theory that is needed there's a lot more implementations that 00:18:35 are needed there's a lot more rigorous study and assessment of of performance and so on that is needed so um really encourage you to kind of pick out any of these

i really think this last one the coordination systems how do you get large groups of people to organize much better 00:16:44 that holds some of the most promise

to do our own work to develop our own teams to 00:13:48 grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative 00:14:01 systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks 00:14:13 so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i 00:14:26 want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three 00:14:37 events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so 00:14:50 in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded 00:15:02 and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh 00:15:15 thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been 00:15:28 to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so 00:15:41 a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same 00:15:53 level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um 00:16:05 idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've 00:16:19 created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is 00:16:31 maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much

just to give you a feel for how powerful these systems are just think of the bitcoin energy consumption and realize that that 00:09:48 just drops out of two components in bitcoin one is the block reward impact evaluator and two the price of bitcoin so those two things yield this tremendous energy 00:10:00 consum consuming system this was kind of an accident this was a an accident of nobody quite intended this this device to um consume this this amount of energy and waste this amount of energy uh but 00:10:13 this gives you a sense of the power of these these uh systems first off we should fix this and you know get out get to uh better systems that that actually uh make this this um energy use uh useful 00:10:25 uh but this i use as an example to give you a sense of like the level of power that comes from these incentive structures and their operation at scale in falcon we're very familiar with these kinds of structures we use the same component and we've gotten a feel for how powerful 00:10:38 this stuff is um in just a couple of years we ended up organizing the build out of a massive hardware infrastructure for providing storage to the world um with again just using one 00:10:51 core incentive structure a block reward uh so all of this makes me really really hopeful um that we'll be able to build um these kinds of incentive structures that can scale to solve extremely large planetary scale 00:11:03 problems um by designing incentive structures and structures warping the incentive fields and getting us to little by little problem by problem scale by scale um solve challenges 00:11:17 and so i think i greatly encourage you if you aren't already in this uh world to try it out to try creating some smart contracts and deploying them um to try uh working with other projects and so on 00:11:29 to get a feel for how powerful these these systems are um i i'm very hopeful that things like this will have a huge impact on planetary scale problems like uh climate change um i've become very hopeful that 00:11:41 these systems will let us coordinate massive action again millions of people billions of people whole industries by letting us have the full power of law and economics and so on in a fully 00:11:55 programmable environment i'm also very hopeful that we can get to accelerate science and technology development by using these kinds of structures to create instruments to incentivize areas of the innovation chasm that are 00:12:08 underserved areas where it's extremely difficult to get funding for certain projects or where it's extremely difficult to get long-term rewards or long-term success many of you have probably heard me talk 00:12:21 about this science and technology translation problem and the lack of incentive structures in that in that period in the castle in the middle and i think a lot of that just comes from the lack of reward structures there that make it impossible for 00:12:34 groups building groups building building projects there to raise capital um because there's no good incentive for capital uh to to deploy there so uh what brought us to so knowing all 00:12:46 of this knowing that this is a critical century knowing that um this critical decade and year um and knowing that crypticon is extremely powerful um why are we here why are we in funding commons so we thought about this problem last year and 00:12:59 we saw that the scale of problem of um of blockchains and the kind of rapid pace of development in industry and the emergence of things like defy and dials and nfts and so on 00:13:10 and especially the the broad adoption by hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people of these tools gave us a very promising um landscape to be able to solve these kinds of problems 00:13:23 and so we have the potential to solve all these massive coordination problems but we're lacking good mechanisms we need way better governance structures we need way better funding mechanisms and uh and so on we need to study these things with much 00:13:36 deeper theory and much deeper experimental analysis and so on

Understanding our situatedness, blowing up assumptionsWhat are the things your brain has been conditioned to believe as “true”? What should you re-examine, pull apart and re-assemble with intention?

Although several studies have documented theareas on Earth where unprecedented climates is likely to occur inresponse to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions24,25 , our understandingof climate change still lacks a precise indication of the time at which theclimate of a given location will shift wholly outside the range of his-torical precedents.To provide an indication of the projected timing of climate depar-ture under alternative greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, we havedeveloped an index that determines the year when the values of agiven climatic variable exceed the bounds of historical variabilityfor a particular location (Fig. 1a). We emphasize that although ourindex commonly identifies future dates, this does not imply thatclimate change is not already occurring. In fact, our index projectswhen ongoing climate change signals the start of a radically differentclimate.

Climate is a primary driver of biological processes, operating fromindividuals to ecosystems, and affects several aspects of human life.Therefore, climates without modern precedents could cause large andpotentially serious impacts on ecological and social systems 1–5 . Forinstance, species whose persistence is shaped by the climate canrespond by shifting their geographical ranges 4–7 , remaining in placeand adapting 5,8 , or becoming extinct 8–11 . Shifts in species distributionsand abundances can increase the risk of extinction 12 , alter communitystructure 3 and disrupt ecological interactions and the functioning ofecosystems. Changing climates could also affect the following: humanwelfare, through changes in the supply of food 13 and water 14,15 ; humanhealth 16, through wider spread of infectious vector-borne diseases 17,18,through heat stress19 and through mental illness20; the economy, throughchanges in goods and services21,22; and national security as a result ofpopulation shifts, heightened competition for natural resources, viol-ent conflict and geopolitical instability23. Although most ecological andsocial systems have the ability to adapt to a changing climate, themagnitude of disruption in both ecosystems and societies will bestrongly determined by the time frames in which the climate will reachunprecedented states1

Ecological and societal disruptions by modern climate change are critically determined by the time frame over whichclimates shift beyond historical analogues. Here we present a new index of the year when the projected mean climate ofa given location moves to a state continuously outside the bounds of historical variability under alternative greenhouse gasemissions scenarios. Using 1860 to 2005 as the historical period, this index has a global mean of 2069 (618 years s.d.) fornear-surface air temperature under an emissions stabilization scenario and 2047 (614 years s.d.) under a ‘business-as-usual’scenario. Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries, highlighting thevulnerability of global biodiversity and the limited governmental capacity to respond to the impacts of climate change.Our findings shed light on the urgency of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions if climates potentially harmful to biodiversityand society are to be prevented.

the following eight leverage points yield dis-proportionately large effects: (i) enabling vi-sions of a good quality of life that do notentail ever-increasing material consumption;(ii) lowering total consumption and waste,including by addressing both populationgrowth and per capita consumption differ-ently in different contexts; (iii) unleashingexisting, widely held values of responsibil-ity to effect new social norms for sustain-ability, especially by extending notions ofresponsibility to include the impacts asso-ciated with consumption; (iv) addressing in-equalities, especially regarding income andgender, that undermine the capacity for sus-tainability; (v) ensuring inclusive decision-making and the fair and equitable sharing ofbenefits arising from the use of and adherenceto human rights in conservation decisions;(vi) accounting for nature’s deterioration fromboth local economic activities and telecouplings(70), including, for example, internationaltrade; (vii) ensuring environmentally friendlytechnological and social innovation, takinginto account potential rebound effects andinvestment regimes; and (viii) promotingeducation, knowledge generation, and themaintenance of different knowledge systems,including in the sciences and indigenous andlocal knowledge, especially regarding nature,conservation, and nature’s sustainable use.Although change at some of these levers andleverage points may encounter resistance indi-vidually, action at other levers and leveragepoints can enable such changes.The review also revealed that innovativegovernance approaches that are integrative,inclusive, informed, and adaptive (105, 106)are needed to effectively apply these levers toleverage points. Integrative approaches focuson the relationships between sectors and poli-cies and ensure policy coherence and effec-tiveness, and inclusive approaches, includingrights-based ones, reflect a plurality of valuesand thus promote equity. Informed govern-ance entails new strategies for knowledgeproduction and coproduction that are inclu-sive of diverse values and knowledge systems.Last, adaptive approaches—including learning,monitoring and feedback loops—help copingwith inevitable uncertainties and complexities.

A comprehensive set of five levers (95) forthis transformative change emerged from ourunprecedentedly broad and rigorous analysisof the many possible levers that have beenproposed previously: (i) developing incentivesand widespread capacity for environmentalresponsibility and eliminating perverse incen-tives; (ii) reforming sectoral and segmenteddecision-making to promote integration acrosssectors and jurisdictions; (iii) taking preemptiveand precautionary actions in regulatory andmanagement institutions and businesses toavoid, mitigate, and remedy the deteriorationof nature, and monitoring their outcomes;(iv) managing for resilient social and ecologicalsystems in the face of uncertainty and com-plexity to deliver decisions that are robust in awide range of scenarios; and (v) strengthen-ing environmental laws and policies and theirimplementation, and the rule of law moregenerally.

evers and leverage points fortransformative changeOur assessment—the most comprehensive car-ried out to date, including the nexus analysisof scenarios and an expert input process withliterature reviews—revealed clearly that re-versing nature’s ongoing decline (100) whilealso addressing inequality will require trans-formative change, namely a fundamental,system-wide reorganization across techno-logical, economic, and social factors, makingsustainability the norm rather than the altru-istic exception.

Our analysis suggests that it is possible toachieve many of the global biodiversity targetsand sustainability goals related to food, energy,climate, and water at local and global scales.The complexity of the challenges calls for anintegrative (nexus) approach (89) that simulta-neously examines interactions among multiplesectors along with synergies and tradeoffsamong goals. An example of a key nexus arethe simultaneous needs to mitigate climatechange, arrest biodiversity loss, and ensurethat all people have adequate nutrition onone hand, and the potentially negative con-sequences of large-scale land-based climatechange mitigation on the other. Even moder-ate warming will likely be detrimental forbiodiversity (90) and associated benefits topeople (91). However, most scenarios projectedto limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C by the end ofthe 21st century rely on large-scale mitigationmeasures on land, in the form of bioenergycrops, reforestation, and/or afforestation, neg-atively affecting biodiversity and also foodproduction and water demand (19, 92). At thesame time, expanding the amount of landdevoted to agriculture to ensure that all peoplehave adequate nutrition would negatively af-fect biodiversity as well (93) and would furtherexacerbate climate change (19, 92). Both land-based climate change mitigation and agricul-tural expansion, when deployed at the largescale, can undermine local livelihoods, createaccess problems, and intensify social conflict(94). A suite of possible actions could be ef-fective in navigating these tradeoffs (19, 95)—for example, focusing on regeneration andrestoration of high-carbon ecosystems (aswell as reducing waste and overconsump-tion) rather than massive bioenergy mono-culture plantations—to achieve climate changemitigation (19, 96, 97).

Projections also omitinterconnections among species, which maycause domino effects that amplify the loss ofdiversity (88).

We comprehensively reviewed both explor-atory and target-seeking scenarios (81) offuture change in direct and indirect drivers.These scenarios resulted in starkly differentimpacts on nature and its contributions topeople and, in combination, enabled syntheticconclusions about the need for transforma-tive change.

The vast area of the world managed by In-digenous Peoples (at least 25 to 28% of landsurface) (Fig. 4) under various property re-gimes is no exception to these trends. Becauseof their large extent, the fact that nature isoverall better preserved within them (60), andbecause of the diverse stewardship practicescarried within them around the world (Fig. 4,A to I), the fate of nature in these lands hasimportant consequences for wider societyas well as for local livelihoods, health, andknowledge transmission (67).

Many hotspots ofagrobiodiversity and of crop wild relatives arealso under threat or lack formal protection(58), jeopardizing the pool of genetic varia-tion that underpins the long-term resilienceof agricultural production and food systemsin the face of environmental change (59).

global biomass of largepredatory fish targeted by fisheries has fallenby two-thirds over the past 100 years (53)

The global biomass of wild mammalsis now less than 25% of that before the latePleistocene megafaunal extinction—and lessthan 10% that of the world’s current humanpopulation (52).

ests nowspan only 68% of their preindustrial extent

The biomass of the world’s vegetation (25)has halved over human history

On average, large terrestrialmammals have been extirpated from 75% oftheir natural ranges (40)

t what is an individual 01:13:07 okay so why why the why in the world would i why would we ask this question and why would i spend you know multiple pages in this paper even discussing like of course we know what 01:13:20 an individual is right or or maybe not like like that actually turns out to be a difficult question what is an individual and it's important to this and it's important to this discussion of societal 01:13:33 systems because who are we who what you know what is the purpose of a societal system what is it what is it who is it supposed to serve you know so you have to ask really like 01:13:45 it's it's good to ask if we're going to build a societal system who wh who is it that it's supposed to service you know like who are we what do we want you know it's part of 01:13:57 figuring out what do we want what do we value who are we start there you know i would say so so we've already kind of touched on these themes but 01:14:09 this idea of rugged individualism you know like from a certain perspective and a certain you know from a limited sort of time frame perspective sure there's there's a rugged individualism that exists right and it can be useful in 01:14:22 certain certain situations but by and large that's not what life is doing you know that's not what the the they're um we are we are 01:14:36 it's really even difficult to say like where if i'm a rugged individual where do i actually start and where do i end you know like where is where is me this you know even physically it's hard to say 01:14:48 because this physical me is really i think more bacterial cells than it is um human cells right so so uh like i'm a sieve i'm a i'm a process through which things are 01:15:02 flowing through i'm a i'm an ecosystem myself with bacteria and viruses and human cells and all of those components are necessary for me to survive today and for for 01:15:14 humans to survive you know over eons were like a mix we're a bag of of human-like things and bacterial-like things and viral-like things and 01:15:26 and we're porous and we're part of the carbon cycle and we're part of the nitrogen cycle and then you and then when you say like okay well how could you be a rugged individual individual when you're really 01:15:38 this this porous smorgasbord of things right

the two questions that we hopefully would uh try to answer with with this r d program is and and one of this i already 00:56:53 mentioned but out of all conceivable designs for societal systems so so so this isn't about capitalism versus socialism or something like that there's like i would think there's an unlimited 00:57:05 potential we're creative we're creative people there would be a million varieties of of societal systems and integrated societal systems that we might come up with 00:57:17 and some of those probably would work very well and some of them probably would work very poorly um so among those what what might be among the best and not the the single best that's not the purpose either it's not just to find one thing that works is 00:57:30 to find like a you know more of a a variety a process of things a mix mishmash of things that community the communities can choose to implement that you know 00:57:43 works well for them and that suits them and that works well for their neighbors and works well forever it works well for the whole really

so now finally we get to active inference all this discussion and we're finally getting to the point here right for his lab so um i had and i had already touched on 01:47:35 some of this before but um it would you know today if you're going to develop a really good ai system you're and you're going to have a you have a robot saying the robot has to act 01:47:47 in some environment it is pretty well understood that that if you program that robot to you give it a you give it a i mean traditionally you'll give it a a a fitness function or some kind of 01:47:59 valuation function and it's for example it's good if it it you know you lose points if you fall through a trap door and is and you get points if you uh you know whatever 01:48:11 find find the piece of cake or something well that's uh that's fine for extremely simple universes that your robot might work in but as soon as you get beyond you know as soon as you get to any kind of more realistic uh 01:48:24 universe that your robot has to work in that pre-programming pre-programming concept just kind of falls apart it is you you it would require the the the practitioner to think ahead of all the 01:48:37 things that the robot might encounter and then how to value certain you know value those situations in certain ways uh and that is really uh what active inference 01:48:49 offers is a is a kind of a cognitive understanding or a mechanism by which an organism will uh uh where its 01:49:00 fitness score is in a sense involves both uh you know achieving goals and exploring its world to for for for epistemic gain so 01:49:16 um that's what we would like the that's how we would like to program the robot in a sense so that it can learn from it can learn on the fly from its experiences it can it can alter its actions and 01:49:30 goals as it be as it becomes clear as it gathers more information from its universe as it as it meets new situations that were never never conceived of by the by the 01:49:42 programmer that it through through an active inference or an active inference like uh you know mechanism it can learn and explore and and critically balance exploration with 01:49:54 exploitation and then we come right back to that whole concept of criticality so you know what you would really like your robot to do is remain at that critical uh phase between 01:50:06 exploring what's out there and making use and gold directed behavior of what's in front of it and um and uh you know that's how you could program this world this robot to act in the world and be pretty good at 01:50:20 it you know if you if you build it well so that's what the systems of a society can help a society to do you you don't you it's worth talking about building new systems i think it would not be wise to say 01:50:32 this checklist of like we wanted this level of education we want to want this you know to react this way in this situation react this way in this situation and this level of uh you know whatever money and this level of this and this 01:50:45 level of that while those kinds of preferences can be a useful start society has to be alive in its moment you know in the moment as society is alive it's cognating it's 01:50:57 it's it's it's actively uh you know comparing what it's the result of its actions to the model that is in its head and uh so active inference offers this way 01:51:09 to uh to balance uh exploration and and uh and uh exploitation and remain critical and remain optimally cognitive right so that's part of it 01:51:24 uh and then part of it i mean and for me this the the the idea of the embodied uh you know the three four e's uh this is what i really am attracted to in 01:51:46 active inference is in a sense it's kind of a simple concept it's not really very complicated you know if you've studied bayesian uh theory it all it's kind of straight you know in a way it's kind of straightforward 01:51:58 but the the you know the way fristen has connected the dots and and and and uh extended that into the bigger picture of life kind of it it to me it is uh it is rich 01:52:11 there's a there's a lot yet to be learned and gained and explored in this umbrella of active inference

we'll go into an example here with self-organized criticality so the idea 01:40:03 there is that was coined by back back bak in 87 the term self-organized criticality and it's it's really not a controversial that that living systems and 01:40:16 and many most systems in life complex systems organize in some way but the idea of self-organized criticality is that the organism itself is adjusting is is keeping some kind of adjustment 01:40:28 uh to uh to maintain a critical state and by critical state i mean a state on the ver like you can think of a saddle point so if you drop a model on us on a saddle it's going to not stay there it's going to you know 01:40:41 it's going to change it's going to change one way or the other right so a critical state is like that that threshold where things are about to change from one way to another way and uh 01:40:55 it turns out with you know work and information theory and other other fields of recent in recent years it turns out that uh processing uh whether it's we're talking about a computer or some other 01:41:07 you know machine or or a brain turns out that processing is kind of optimal in a sense when this when the system is at a this this this this critical state and 01:41:21 some people call it on the edge of chaos because things are things can easily change and sometimes it's you can think of that threshold as a 01:41:33 as a as a threshold of a critical state you can think of it as a threshold of the threshold we say between exploration and exploitation like should i should i go should i go 01:41:45 find a new planet for humans to live on or should i fix the planet that you know should i fix the systems on this planet first you know how do we balance exploration of the new versus using the information we have to improve 01:41:59 what we already have so you can think of that as exploration exploitation trade-offs stability agility trade-off do we do we remain stable and use ideas from the old in the past or do we are we more agile and we're more 01:42:13 flexible and we bring in new new ideas so it's like you can call it old new trade old new trade-off but whatever whatever trade-off you want to call it it's this sitting at the edge of going one way or the other 01:42:26 maximally flexible of going one way or the other and it's at that threshold that level that point the kind of that region of criticality that information processing seems to be 01:42:39 maximal so if uh it's no wonder then that the human brain is is organized in such a way to be living on this threshold between agility and stability 01:42:52 and uh now here's an example of that from like a real world example so a a system that is at a critical state is going to be maximally 01:43:03 sensitive to input so that means that there could you know when just when that marble is sitting on the saddle just a little bump to that saddle from one little corner of its universe and right like just one 01:43:16 little organism bumps it and maybe that marble rolls one way or the other right so that one one little input had a major impact on how the whole thing moves 01:43:29 its trajectory into the future right but isn't that what we isn't that kind of what we have in mind for democracy i mean don't we want everyone to have access of engaging into the decision-making processes 01:43:43 of a society and have every voice heard in at least in the sense that there's the possibility that just my voice just me doing my participation in this system might actually 01:43:56 ripple through the system and have a uh you know a real effect a useful effect i mean i think like maybe maybe self-organized criticality can help to inform us the concept of 01:44:10 self-organized criticality can help to inform us of what do we want from democracy or a decision-making process right you know that just makes me think about different like landslides 01:44:22 and that's something that criticality theory and catastrophe theory has been used to study and instead of cascading failure we can think about like cascading neighborhood cleanups so a bunch of people just say 01:44:34 today just for an hour i feel like doing a little cleanup and all of a sudden one person puts up the flag and then it's cascading locally in some just you know unspecified way but all of a sudden you're getting this this distribution with a ton of small 01:44:48 little meetups and then several really large sweeping changes but the total number of people cleaning up is higher because you offered the affordance and the ability for the affordance to sort of propagate 01:44:59 that's right that's right we're talking about a propagation of of a propagation of information a propagation of action and the possibility that even uh you know just one or a few individuals could start a 01:45:12 little chain chain reaction that actually does affect in a positive way society now it's a little too it's almost too bad that sand piles were the original uh you know topic of 01:45:23 of this of self-organized criticality because as you point out it's not really about things falling apart it's about it's about if you think of again if you think of a complex system as a system more capable of solving more 01:45:37 challenging problems then more often you can think of self-organized criticality as a way to propagate information when it is really needed when the system needs to change 01:45:51 uh then information is you know it ingests information from its world from its senses and can act accordingly we we just um submitted an abstract with criticality and active inference and one 01:46:04 of the points was actually the existence of self-organized criticality implies a far from equilibrium system that's actively pumping energy in that's because it's a passive system that's not 01:46:15 locked and loaded

now we talk i talk about a few ideas good regulators requisite variety self-organized criticality and then the 01:35:04 free energy principle from active inference um and uh maybe i'll just try to briefly talk mention what's what those means for what those ideas mean for people who 01:35:15 aren't familiar so good regulator really came from the good regular theorem or whatever it's called really came from cybernetics ash ashby yeah a lot his law of requisite 01:35:33 variety and uh the it's the concept is that a organism or a you know a system must be must be a model of that which it but 01:35:47 that needs to control

there's a lot of discussion about complex systems you know we've been discussing complex systems and i just want to make a couple of points here because uh 01:31:28 commonly some it is not uncommon that someone will say a complex system well that just means that it's liable to fall apart at any moment you know it's just too complex it's going to crash uh but and that that obviously can 01:31:41 happen you know systems can collapse quite quite true but obviously life would not be doing very well if the if if the evolution builds complexity 01:31:53 in species and you know in organisms and ecosystems if life would be have a rough go of it if it was so fragile that uh complexity became a 01:32:07 burden and and uh you know come and then you know you reach a certain level of complexity and then you fall apart that's not really i don't think i mean that can happen but that's but but complex useful complexity 01:32:19 doesn't make you fall apart it actually just does the opposite it serves what we've been talking about all along and that's problem solving so we are anticipatory organisms we are problem 01:32:31 solving organisms it's our nature most of what the human brain does is to solve problems of one kind or another social problems physical problems whatever and maneuver in the world you 01:32:43 know in a useful way and complexity is what allows that there's a number of studies that i cite here that show that as an organism even as a robot you know 01:32:56 faces uh more difficult pressures from its environment it complexifies and complexifies by complexity then it's it's it implies 01:33:08 a greater number of parts coordinating or cooperating in some way uh to you know solve this new challenge and obviously as a human we're very complex we have 01:33:22 we have complex needs we have we can think not just what's going to happen in the next millisecond but what's going to happen we can think about what's going to happen in 100 years i mean part of this project is to think about what might be 01:33:36 happening over the next hundred years or even a thousand years so as an organism complexifies it become it at least potentially becomes a better adapted to solving more complex 01:33:49 problems so you could and from that sense you could almost ex equate complexity with problem-solving capacity you know at least in a uh you know in a 01:34:01 general sense and then i talked about well that just reminds me of in the free energy calculations that we um have gone over in various papers it's like accuracy is the modeling imperative and 01:34:14 then complexity is tolerated to the extent it facilitates accurate modeling so if you get the one parameter model and you got 99 and it's adequate and it's good then you're good to go and you're gonna go for simplicity 01:34:26 but then what you're saying is actually the um appearance and the hallmark of complexity in the world it means that that organism has the need to solve problems at a given 01:34:40 level of counterfactual depth or inference skill or temporal depth temporal thickness

society by you know by uh uh you know it's just that's necessarily shares a similar related intrinsic 01:29:58 purpose which is to achieve and maintain vitality maintain and maintain and by maintain i mean anticipate into the future maintain vitality which is accomplished through 01:30:11 cognition and cooperation so the self that we must keep vital is the extended self and it follows that the intrinsic purpose of societal systems like financial systems and other is to serve the intrinsic purpose of society

a biological i call it an intrinsic purpose but like from evolution by being the fact that we are a part of life we have a purpose because 01:28:53 all organisms making capability casual power causal powers and the intrinsic purpose of an organism is to achieve and maintain vitality a sustainable flourishing of self which 01:29:09 can include that extended self and we do that by sensing and evaluating states of the world and ourselves and implementing appropriate actions that that are based on anticipation we 01:29:21 we anticipate what will happen if we do or don't take an action and we choose if we're for functional we choose those actions that can serve our intrinsic intrinsic purpose of of 01:29:33 remaining vital into the future so anticipating vitality and that obviously implies some kind of modeling of the world anticipation implies some kind of modeling in the world so that's an organism's intrinsic 01:29:45 purpose

what is our purpose so so so over on the right there i just want to reemphasize we are anticipatory we are cognitive we are problem solvers 01:25:44 we are a we and then i have below that i am a we you know like i i am i can i am i'm intimately connected with this i'm i'm everyone in that sense you know 01:25:57 yep yeah the whitman um you know i contain multitudes and also gilbert at all i have a paper called um we were never individuals kind of on that wavelength that you were talking about with the sort of distributed systems all the way down 01:26:09 approach and also dennis noble no privilege level of biological causality similar uh basically realization that multi-scale perspective complexity science basically entails 01:26:22 either the choice of a priori level like saying it is multi-scale and humans are the best scale or gaia is the scale or quantum is the right scale that's a claim as well as it being a claim 01:26:35 actually there's no privileged level of causality so that's the sort of table as it's said right right right right right and you know what it's not that really 01:26:46 this this entire project you could say in like a sentence you could say this whole project is to help us be who we are more be more uh honestly who we are more real 01:27:01 to who we are right it's not the it's not to to have people behave in some unusual way or some altruistic way or anything like that it is it is to have 01:27:12 it is to be more more ourselves more fully ourselves more completely ourselves and then all of these pages all these things we're talking about is who that self is who who are we really and it's about the 01:27:25 adjacent possible for who we are who we are is not an essence that is uh there's uh seven seals and it's being unlocked it's actually something that's being drawn out through 01:27:36 inactive realization in the niche through niche modification through stigma through becoming and and then the adjacent possible is where the imagination and the planning comes into play and if people are hesitant to talk about 01:27:49 the adjacent possible for who we could be just think about chess it's the adjacent possible with the strategy on the board and we're talking about the adjacent strategy possible for who we could be in terms of our strategy 01:28:02 for you know all these recursive layers our strategy for how we think of ourselves and all these other things you're talking about absolutely absolutely and then and then ultimately serving the 01:28:13 serving the kind of fitness purpose of you know if we take action a is that going to reduce our uncertainty about those things that we that really matter you know that are that are the the 01:28:27 the key variables

what is our worldview what do we value and what is our purpose and then we've come to this question then okay so who the heck are we then you know we're we're and it and not only who are we but 01:22:42 who are we building these systems for you know what what what is what should societal system serve who or what should societal systems serve and the only reasonable answer that you 01:22:55 can come up with is that societal systems should serve the the extended self like not just the body not just the family not just the 01:23:07 you know the thousand people in a society or the ten thousand or a million or whatever but their environment the the society next door that they're engaged with and cooperating with and coordinating with 01:23:18 the society across the planet that they're sharing information with and learning together with and so it's the whole that we are metrics as we as leaders who 01:23:30 come to metrics those metrics have to represent both the cognitive process how good how are we cogniting how well are we cogniting are we functionally cogniting and are we 01:23:43 achieving through that cognition are we achieving the kinds of aims that is serving the whole is the environment improving is the you know quality of air improving is the quality of life 01:23:56 improving for individuals right um yes so uh we are so this in a nutshell we this is the world view in a way we are in intimate with our greater world we are individuals but of the nested overlapping variety 01:24:12 individual cells bodies groups communities ecologies nations and all of civilization we're not separate in any absolute sense and there's no privileged level or scale to any of that nor are we passive bystanders in this 01:24:25 unfolding this is not this evolution is not it's just a chance thing like by chance somebody does this one day and then evolution goes on another another avenue no there there are 01:24:38 there are opportunities in the environment uh that we can react to that lend themselves to to to providing 01:24:50 information or providing gain of benefit of some kind and and you know we are driven we are are we are consciously creating and you know 01:25:03 even a really great societal system that integrated societal systems would be consciously creating acting cognitive acting cognitive and consciously creating and it towards some 01:25:15 towards some goal and that goal then has to be you know the maintaining of vitality being the in the for the extended sel

that's something that insect with a six-legged version is now it's the whole super organism oh well the ant colony is society that whole frame is actually the shadow of 01:18:52 what the evolutionary reality is which is that the ant colony is an organism not a super organism and the ants are tissues and so which level we prioritize or do we say no there's no a priori level ant is just i'm not even 01:19:05 gonna say there's anything out there called ants it's it's you how you're thinking about it or do we get lost or are we going to find a ladder in that multi-scale yeah well the latter is you know the 01:19:17 latter is active inference because it doesn't say active inference doesn't say make a make an internal model of the world that is accurate that actually accurately captures all the all the 01:19:30 details of the world of the universe that's not the point that's not what the mind does that's not the point the point is to act under uncertainty 01:19:41 given some useful model of the world act under uncertainty so that your fitness score improves and by fitness score here we essentially mean you know and anticipated uncertainty so i i would 01:19:55 very much like to be have some certainty that i'm going to be alive tomorrow and if it's freezing outside and i don't have a coat on uh you know that that becomes iffy so uh i'm going to be happy 01:20:06 if i'm going to be i'm going to go find a coat because it is going to reduce my uncertainty about survival over the next 24 hours but you can expand that you know outward right we we need to act the all organisms are acting under 01:20:19 uncertainty and and we can think about that as we can think about that um we can think from that perspective as a society of what are we doing and how do we measure 01:20:31 success well we're measuring success by acting under uncertainty and then re and then paying attention to what happens and then acting the same or differently or you know some other way or somehow some were 01:20:45 then choosing to act again in this cycle of act uh you know act uh process act process act process you know model act model act model that reminds me of course of the ooda 01:20:57 observe orient side act model and other sort of cyclic models of action and perception and then i would say that active inference provides a few nice little benefits over other phrasings of action and perception 01:21:10 qualitative and philosophical ones like inactivism as well as quantitative ones like cybernetics and other kinds of control theories so i totally agree this

the 1911 paper by william morton wheeler is called the ant colony as an organism not a super organism because superorganism implies that nest mate would be the true organism

so society is an individual and we are part of society and we're talking about societal systems and so at that level that seems to be our level of focus here at that level we can talk about society as an organism as a cognitive organism 01:18:02 that is propagating information from the past into the future and from an active inference standpoint we can say uh under the you know under the fitness score 01:18:15 whatever word you might want to use for that of reducing uncertainty so we act to reduce uncertainty

there was an interesting paper that came out i cited in the in my in my in paper number one that uh was 01:15:53 looking at this question of what is an individual and they were looking at it from an information theory standpoint you know so they came up with this they came up with this uh uh theory uh and i think do they have a name for 01:16:09 it yeah uh information theory of individuality and they say base it's done at the bottom of the slide there and they say basically that uh you know an individual is a process just what's 01:16:20 what we've been talking about before that propagates information from the past into the future so that you know implies uh information flow and implies a cognitive process uh it implies anticipation of 01:16:33 the future uh and it probably implies action and this thing that is an individual it is not like it is a layered hierarchical individual it's like you can draw a circle around 01:16:45 anything you know in a certain sense and call it an individual under you know with certain uh definitions you know if you want to define what its markov blanket is 01:16:57 but uh but you know we are we are we are our cells are individuals our tissues liver say is an individual um a human is an individual a family is an 01:17:12 individual you know and it just keeps expanding outward from there the society is an individual so it really it's none of those are have you know any kind of inherent preference 01:17:24 levels there's no preference to any of those levels everything's an individual layered interacting overlapping individuals and it's just it's just a it's really just a the idea of an individual is just where 01:17:36 do you want to draw your circle and then you can you know then you can talk about an individual at whatever level you want so so that's all about information so it's all about processing information right

anticipations is key to 01:08:38 everything and attention is key to everything so every organism does that plants and everything else and it doesn't require a central nervous system 01:08:51 and and you i might add to this that not only is every organism cognitive but essentially every organism organism is cooperative to those cooperation and cognition 01:09:03 go hand in hand because any intelligent organism any organism that can act to better its you know viability is going to cooperate in 01:09:17 meaningful ways with other organisms and you know other species and things like that nice point because um there's cost to communication whether it's exactly whether it's the cost of making the pheromone 01:09:30 or just the time which is super finite or attention fundamentally and so costly interactions through time the game theory are either to exploit and stabilize which is fragile 01:09:42 or to succeed together yeah exactly and and and succeeding together cooperation is is is like everywhere once you once you understand what you're looking 01:09:54 for it's in the biologic world it's like everywhere so this idea that we're you know one one one person against all or you know we're a dog eat dog universe i mean it's you 01:10:08 know in a certain sense it's true obviously tigers eat you know whatever they eat zebras or whatever i mean that happens yes of course but in the larger picture 01:10:19 over and over multiple time scales not just uh you know in five minutes but over evolutionary time scales and uh you know developmental time scales and everything the cooperation is really the rule 01:10:33 for the most part and if you need if any listener needs proof of that just think of who you think of your body i mean there's about a trillion some trillion some cells 01:10:45 that are enormously harmonious like your blood pumps every day or you know this is a this is like a miracle i don't want to use the word miracle because i want to get into 01:10:59 whatever that might imply but uh it is amazing aw inspiring the the depth of cooperation just in our own bodies is like that's that's like 01:11:12 evolution must prefer cooperation or else there would never be such a complex uh pattern of cooperation as we see just in one human body 01:11:26 just to give one example from the bees so from a species i study it's almost like a sparring type of cooperation because when it was discovered that there were some workers with developed ovaries 01:11:38 there was a whole story about cheating and policing and about altruism and this equation says this and that equation says that and then when you take a step back it's like the colony having a distribution of over-reactivation 01:11:51 may be more ecologically resilient so um i as an evolutionary biologist never think well my interpretation of what would be lovey-dovey in this system must be how it works because that's so 01:12:05 clearly not true it's just to say that there are interesting dynamics within and between levels and in the long run cooperation and stable cooperation and like learning to adapt 01:12:17 to your niche is a winning strategy in a way that locking down just isn't but unfortunately under high um stress and 01:12:29 uh high uncertainty conditions simple strategies can become rife so that's sort of a failure mode of the population

in you know the main theme of this first paper is i've tried to lay out a world view that is cognizant of that reflects some of the latest developments 01:03:14 in in science and in a variety of fields and sciences in those fields would be like complex system science cognitive science evolutionary biology 01:03:28 uh in a you know a few fields like that information theory and a few things like that i i've tried to to outline a a a world view that makes sense 01:03:42 from that leading edge of science and i would say too that that science has gone through really kind of a revolution you know there was like it's kind of like there's the pre-1950s 60s science and then there's 01:03:56 what we have today and there's enormous jumps enormous leaps in understanding that have happened just in the last say 50 years or so and and and some of those leaps the 01:04:09 ramifications are only now being you know the they're now being felt right the the the the some of the concepts are a a distinct shift 01:04:20 from where we were in the you know the pre-1960s or pre-1970s or so and um obviously we there's also you know we we see the changes in our 01:04:34 lifetime you know like we i was watching an old show on tv the other day and somebody put money in a pay phone you know like they put a quarter and a pay phone to make telephone call and it's like okay well that's that's that's that's history you know so 01:04:48 there's all these technologies that have that are that are that i grew up with that are not they don't even exist anymore they've been replaced by entirely new frameworks and that's the speed of those of the speed of that 01:05:00 evolution is is exponential so it's tremendous changes happening very quickly and the task of the program oh yeah which one put on that would be 01:05:12 um potentially because you're taking such a broad perspective with complex system science and evolutionary bio you might say that society has always been a cognitive architecture but if you had asked in 01:05:25 1500 is society a cognitive architecture be like well no i mean you have agriculture you have this you have this you have that whereas now if you tell people hey telecoms are they run through everything and the internet of 01:05:38 things the internet people you know like all this sort of stuff you tell people actually it's a multi-scale cognitive architecture humans are in the loop and our algorithms are never independent from us they're in feedback with us it's like 01:05:50 yeah that was what the mainstream was telling me so actually it's a total alignment point because it reflects how rapidly things are changing that it's just undeniably obvious that the 01:06:02 communication infrastructure is the system that we're engineering right right absolutely yeah yeah communications have mind-blowing changes and communications and and that brings mind-blowing changes and 01:06:14 outlook but but i want to emphasize a few points to this worldview that that you know it's not it's not just that everything is connected like you know you go like i know what a complex system is it just means everything is connected and we're 01:06:27 all kind of whole and blah blah okay fine but but even for people who are in that ilk you know who understand the the basic concept there there's ideas 01:06:40 that are that have come out in the last decade or so that that are there that are even pushing that boundary you know right and and i just want to highlight a few concepts here and i think active inference really is 01:06:52 playing a you know is is like a in a sense a culmination of some of some of these ideas or an embodiment of some of these ideas the main thing i want to say is that life is intelligent 01:07:06 and whole so it's not just that everything's connected it's that everything is intelligent everything is a lot you know life is an intelligent information processing 01:07:20 thing everything is is is adapting learning deciding whether we're talking about everything is cognitive 01:07:33 you know and cognition really implies information and information processing so whether we're talking about a slime mold or a human you know there's there's in in everything in plants in 01:07:46 bacteria in mold and anything that has any life at all that can be considered alive is intelligent and is learning and reacting not just reacting but learning 01:07:58 reacting and also deciding and acting and remembering and all those things and you might ask well you know that's impossible bacteria doesn't have a brain you know it can't be it can't be cognitive but it is 01:08:14 cognitive but we just have to relax what we how we define cognition you know and when on the slide i have a little thing there that every organism 01:08:25 is cognitive in the sense that it displays capacities typically associated with human cognition such as sensing learning problem solving memory storage and recall

so let's suppose let's suppose your listeners are with me and you know we kind of agree like okay yes transformation's necessary and uh again i want to emphasize i'm not talking about reform i'm not talking 00:58:59 about a softer better capitalism i'm not talking about you know improved voter registration or like any of those things i'm talking about de novo starting over from scratch what might be 00:59:13 best and if it turns out that the old systems were better than anything that humanity can come up with well then you know that's the answer but i can't imagine that's true because the old systems were never designed in any kind of 00:59:25 you know thoughtful science driven [Music] you know process to to to test to explore and to come up with fitness like what is the you know we don't even have a fitness for our current society 00:59:39 much less of fitness for societal designs i mean we have the gdp but that's a terrible terrible limited fitness metric 00:59:51 okay so suppose you're with me suppose we're we're on board we we want to do this de novo design thing where do we start what's the what's what where do we even get off the 01:00:03 ground on this and i suggest that the way to do it is through first address worldview from world view once we understand what the world view is 01:00:15 what a reasonable useful world view will be for this project then then purpose derives worldview begets purpose once you understand what it is you want 01:00:28 what you value what do you value once you understand what you value then you can say well i value a and therefore the purpose is to 01:00:39 have a manifest in society for example so once you have purpose then you can think about what metrics how would you measure whether are you so 01:00:53 here's a new design is it fit for purpose does it do does it fulfill its purpose you know that's the question and then metrics go with some kind of fitness evaluation 01:01:05 and then finally last of all of those would be the design okay we know what we know what we value we know what this thing is supposed to do we know what the purpose is we know that attractor is supposed to you know plow the ground or something we 01:01:18 know what this is supposed to do we know how to measure success and uh now finally then let's talk about design what are the what are the you know the specifics and mechanics and 01:01:31 how does that happen and the the series is really kind of laid out this way the first paper really talks about world view and purpose the second paper talks about the you know the more the mechanics of things 01:01:44 like viability how would you make this thing viable things like that and then the very last paper that's titled the subtitle design okay so uh that's how we uh and 01:01:56 and maybe i will just mention here that i put metrics before design because we might have some ideas uh getting back to that preference factor we might have some ideas like we would like people not to die at 01:02:08 30 you know we'd like people to mostly live to a ripe old age and have you know enough water water to drink and food to eat and all that kind of stuff so uh you know what kind of design once 01:02:20 now that we have metrics to measure that kind of stuff longevity and nutrition and things what kind of designs would help us to reach those targets you know so that's one reason why design 01:02:31 why metrics comes before design okay

second question is uh by what and this is as of course the the 00:57:57 kicker is not only what systems might be best but what how would you possibly uh implement them what viable way is there to implement new system designs you know 00:58:09 like otherwise what's the purpose you know this isn't this isn't an academic this isn't just an academic uh you know excursion this is like let's change the world and that has to be practical in some you 00:58:21 know in some has to be viable so those are the two questions what what what might be best and how do we get there

the six 00:48:41 six big systems i've mentioned can be viewed as a cognitive architecture it's the it's the means by which the society learns decides adapts and 00:48:54 and this society's efforts this is the third underlying position the society's efforts to learn decide and adapt and be viewed as being driven by an intrinsic purpose and that's really key also 00:49:08 because it's not just that we're learning deciding and adapting willy-nilly i mean i mean maybe it seems that way in the world you know in the sense we're so dysfunctional it kind of is billy nilly but 00:49:20 but what really matters is that we learn decide and adapt in relation to whatever intrinsic purpose we actually have as as a society as individuals in a 00:49:34 society it's that it's it's it's it's as i will use the the term uh maybe several times today it's solving problems that matter that really that really 00:49:45 matter that's what we're after

maybe i should say having a having a checkoff list like you know there should be this level of education there should be this level of 00:52:40 [Music] health people should live this long and so we have our fitness and we're gonna uh we've decided in advance even before the system is running we've 00:52:53 now have a list of things we're gonna check off we're gonna score each one we're gonna come up with some kind of integrated fitness score from that and that's how we're going to move forward we're always going to refer to this fit this you know this fitness model and 00:53:07 the fitness vector and these and these kind of hard-coded values for what's good and what's bad so so in the world of artificial intelligence and in the world of active inference you know that 00:53:19 really doesn't go very far that doesn't work that doesn't work very well because what happens is we didn't you didn't think ahead you like you some something happens tomorrow and whoever came up with that list of 00:53:32 uh you know those values or that model didn't really include the fact that maybe spaceships from mars were gonna land and cause a new disruption and then we have to deal with that problem now too before we deal with 00:53:45 anything else so that wasn't in the you know that wasn't in the plan and now what do we do you know so there's right so so this is you know this is really where active inference plays into 00:53:58 that's one way that active inference plays into this is how do you evaluate and act in a world that is full of uncertainties right 00:54:10 the unknown unknown the unknown unknown is the temperature dynamics but you know it's going to be temperature and so how can you plan for what you know it will be in a distributional sense 00:54:23 right and make stabilization on that awesome right right so so yeah so you so you realize you know already you realize maybe that this is not a proposal to build a say like a model of uh of uh you know 00:54:37 like how society makes decisions you know that's that's not that's not it it is what is the process by which society cognates 00:54:50 and you know what kind of what kind of infrastructure and tools and and and you know mechanics can we use that would facilitate that but it's not to build a thing 00:55:01 it's to build it's to realize that we are in we are engaged moment to moment in a cognitive process society as individuals are and how can we 00:55:14 do that together as a society so that we're you know we we balance exploration with exploitation um you know so that we we learn about our environment we grow we learn 00:55:27 we explore we we make good decisions based on available evidence and based on knowledge based on cultural knowledge you know like all those things right so so this is a this is 00:55:39 the the the you know i think organisms are a process they're not a thing anyway right cognition is a process and societal decision making is a process 00:55:54 and really society is a process you know there's there's not too many things in this world there's mostly processes living processes intelligent processes so that's that's the that's the hope 00:56:05 that's where this is trying to go is to like with that in mind with that with that broad understanding or broad concept in mind how do we uh how do we 00:56:16 think about you know how we how we come together as society how we cooperate how we coordinate how we make decisions how we how we learn how we explore what do we what do we monitor what kind 00:56:29 of information do we seek you know what kind of experiments do we do all that kind of stuff great

first is that uh a society of any scale and and i don't mean society is in bill millions or billions of people i mean society as in a thousand people you know like a sub 00:47:23 sub city a community that is not even a whole city just a a group of like-minded people uh who are willing to give this a give this you know 00:47:35 a field trial ago a society of any scale can be viewed as a super organism so that's kind of fundamental everything really really works from there we are together we 00:47:49 are not just individuals connected we are a whole society is a whole and it's a and it's a whole with the environment and it's wider you know 00:48:03 sphere so as we'll talk about today you know this even the idea of an individual is it's okay to talk about individuals it's fine but it's kind of like an arbitrary thing an 00:48:15 individual could be an individual cell or an individual person or an individual uh species or an individual ecosystem but it's all with all deeply embedded and enmeshed 00:48:28 entwined with the whole so uh uh a society can be viewed as a super organism

the whole project is based on three underlying propositions

A key point I make is that that the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is not impermeable. It is open to political appropriation by less powerful groups. In other words, calling attention to the problem of strategic ignorance by elite actors – and demanding more accountability from those actors – can lead to a new "war of position", in a Gramscian sense. In my book, I term this argument the Lorde principle, after Audre Lorde, in homage to earlier academic and activist work that my argument builds upon. I suggest that the Lorde principle encompasses the way that unknowing can be a revolutionary force for good.

I define micro-ignorance as individual acts of ignoring, and macro-ignorance as the sedimentation of micro-ignoring into structural blind-spots that obscure uncomfortable truths from being more widely known. So, Blair shutting down the BAE Systems investigation is an example of micro-ignorance. But it’s not an isolated act – it has epistemological ripple effects. The halting of the investigation compounds the pretence that no corruption took place, and this contributes to a persistent and quite insidious form of macro-ignorance, which is the debatable belief that western governments are less corrupt than developing countries. Of course they’re just as corrupt, they’re just better at hiding it.

So, my specific definition of "strategic ignorance" is new, but the reality it speaks to is old: the fact that the power of any dominant group typically functions through strategic ignorance, through the ability to select which voices and forms of evidence to acknowledge and which evidence to dismiss.

Strategic ignorance is effective because it is hard to detect; hard to point out without seeming conspiratorial; and hard to prosecute because perpetrators successfully efface the evidence that could indict them, or, importantly, they thwart inconvenient evidence from emerging in the first place, like Blair’s halting of the BAE Systems inquiry. Most troublingly, we don’t empirically know how often strategic ignorance works and just how effective it is, because the most "successful" examples of strategic ignorance are, quite literally, the tactics that work so well that they can never be detected.

What is the "ostrich instruction"? It’s an informal way to refer to an important legal principle, which is that deliberate avoidance of knowledge about one’s own illegal actions should not be a valid defence in law. It’s one of the reasons why, just over 15 years ago, American executives at the energy company Enron were found guilty even though their direct role in malfeasance at Enron wasn’t clear. They should and could have known about fraud, and they were found guilty. Enron has been pointed to as proof that wilful ignorance does not pay. But in my book I stress that that Enron is a fairly isolated case. As a number of other people have pointed out, from journalists Matt Taibbi and Jesse Eisenger to legal scholar Rena Steinzor, US authorities have had an abysmal record of successful prosecution of white-collar crime in recent decades. An American legal scholar based in the UK, Alexander Sarch, is doing important work on this topic. But he is an exception, and I’m a little critical of mainstream legal scholarship in my book. I suggest that legal scholars themselves have been acting ostrich-like about recent shifts in the law. For example, the old adage "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is increasingly waived in US courts when it comes to complex financial and tax crimes. This shift is one of the reasons why I argue that for many powerful and rich people, ignorance really is legal bliss.

I suggest that the very term "free market" is a type of micro-ignorance because it conceals more than it reveals by purporting to reflect a phenomenon that has never existed and can never exist in actual economic reality. Of course we have never had a "free market", and more importantly, the largest imperialist super-powers of the modern age, and especially the US and UK, did not get rich through a "free market", but through different types of government interventionism and protectionism that have long benefited society’s richest groups, often at the expense of exploited workers across the world. This fact is both widely known and oddly ignored even today in economic theory and economic policy-making. In the book, I explore the history of economic thought over a 200-year period, from late enlightenment figures including Burke and Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, through classical liberals such as Tocqueville and Bastiat in the 19th century, through to 20th century figures such as Friedrich Hayek, to understand the ways that dominant economic theories of economic growth have obscured wider recognition of the role of governments in creating economic markets over modern history.