Video: THE LOGIC DIALOGUES (1): Metaphysics of Adjacency (w/ Layman Pascal) (DocDrop)

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foreign I'm super excited to be here with Lehman Pascal um Lehman and I have had a few conversations before uh both on uh his

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channel and on mine specifically about Nietzsche and today we're going to be talking about um Hegel uh who's a philosopher that's been an important part of my

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intellectual Journey uh I've already taught through philosophy portal a course on hegel's phenomenology of spirit which is you know to sum it up very quickly as sort of his attempt at a

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science of experience um and actually I'll be leading a course on the science of logic uh starting January 16 2022 and Layman will be actually a teacher in that course as

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well so um if you're interested in learning more about that course and what both I and Layman will be bringing to it you can check a link in the description for more about the signs of logic and also just

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listen to this podcast as hopefully it will be a window into some of the ideas me we might want to dive into deeper and have more uh exploration of in in 2023

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um how I want to start this conversation uh specifically about Hegel science of logic and connecting it here in relationship to to Layman Pascal's work on the metaphysics of adjacency

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um Layman wrote a great article on on what he calls the metaphysics of adjacency which I'll also leave a link in the description to where he defines it as recognizing a post-metaphysical era uh

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which is related to a widespread shift in the sense of Truth uh one way of thinking about this as Layman writes it in the article is it's a shift from what

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is with a capital is meaning here the absolute one the essential Unity and fusion with that essential Unity to

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uh what is you know a practical pragmatic reality and um a emphasis on closeness as opposed to Absolute Fusion um this really interesting framing for

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Layman's work is something that made me think a lot about what Hegel wrote in the preface to his science of logic where Hegel recognizes that the scientific era had killed metaphysics

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and by metaphysics he means the ultimate truth you know the one and he claimed that the twin forces of Science and pragmatism had replaced metaphysics but that that was a mistake because you know

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in a certain colloquial sense Hegel thought man cannot live by science and pragmatism alone his basic claim is that metaphysics is

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logic and logic needed updating um and that logic had been left untouched by both science and pragmatism that all that was left of logic was an empty form without any real psychic

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content and so a lot of what the science of logic was about was to make logic alive again for the spiritual world for our life world and that required a type of science of logic that would open up a

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new conversation about science pragmatism and most importantly the way we think about the truth so here connecting this back to Layman's metaphysics of adjacency

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what I see is connecting these two is this widespread shift in the sense of Truth and a difficulty to understand what is truth how do we um approach you know and

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I guess in the more popular discourses we've been going through in the last five years the type of recognition of a post-truth world so in that sense there's a lot on the line here uh both for you know people who are hyper

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interested in philosophy people who are perhaps in a meta modern or meta-spiritual Community um but also for people at large you know of course the truth affects all of us so the first first I'll welcome you here

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Layman uh and second I'll sort of ask you in the context of this framing about how you understand post metaphysics and also the Paradox of post-metaphysics as

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a it's still kind of a metaphysics uh yeah thank you nice to be here with you again nice to be part of your course um Hegel is a tricky topic it's kind of a Thicket

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there's a lot of ways in and people draw a lot of different conclusions and there are a lot of people who know Hegel much better than I do but I think what I could say in general is particularly in the science of logic what it and the metaphysics of adjacency

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have in common is an appreciation of incompleteness as a coherent structural feature of the relationship between apparent Alternatives and the use of that to rebuild philosophy and Society

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in accordance with the implications of contemporary science and the assertions of a transcendental spirituality so that's the kind of overview when it comes to post metaphysics it's an inherently ambiguous phrase it doesn't

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mean anti-metaphysics it means a kind of metaphysics that takes a critical position after or in response to some other metaphysics uh you could say that every metaphysical approach is post-metaphysical relative

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to the systems it hopes to supersede saying hey some of the categories and entities that you assert are not real or misleading so in the minimal sense every paradigm shift is post-metaphysical to what came before it

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when we get to what we might call post-modern culture the pluralistic the multi-perspectival socio-critical thinking aware of foreground background Transitions and sensitive to marginalized categories etc

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etc that there's a post-culture that requires and implies a metaphysics that could be considered to be post-metaphysical in a stronger sense

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the metaphysics of a world that is um flexible and relativistic and not bound by any singular overriding self-consistent sense of a totalized one

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and then you have attempts people have made to rebuild or refine a metaphysical system that could incorporate this relativistic cultural and intellectual mood these are attempts integrative thinking meta theories in general Hegel

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might be an example of this all the sorts of things we could call Trans relativistic thinkers are from one point of view clarifying deepening and expanding the underlying assumptions of

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the multi-perspectival universe uh so that's where I came into this I was a participant years ago invited in by Bruce Alderman to projects around integral post-metaphysical spirituality

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the simplest form of that was it's a project about spirituality as something you enact rather than something you have to believe in but the whole time I was up against this question of what is the metaphysics presumed by a

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post-metaphysical worldview so what do pluralistic and integrative and non-dual spiritual worlds even if we think of them as primarily enacted and agnostic and inherently interpreted

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experiences what underlying reality do they imply in order to operate so that's what I named the metaphysics of adjacency because I saw a basic conceptual thread implied by all these

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attempts and that thread was essentially the affordances provided by intercontextual proximity to be a pluralist or a post pluralist or even a non-dualist you have to have this

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experience and Assumption of the ability to move between and affirm multiple reality tunnels whether they be so far apart they could barely register each other close enough to challenge each other or so close it's basically

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impossible to tell them apart the presumption of all those kinds of Worlds is that there's an interspace that can handle and provide interactions and Alternatives between fundamental types of perspectives

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so to change our mind to consider a left out perspective to build and integrate a world view all of those acts would be impossible unless your underlying presumption about reality was that

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perspectives and contexts have a space-like availability for interaction around and between them and this space permits varying degrees of proximity for some of those alternatives are so unrelated it makes virtually no

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difference to compare or contrast them and some are so close we feel an intense need to decide between them so I started to think about the various Dynamics involved in a metaphysics of

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adjacency what would it mean to situate Concepts like next to or near or almost or approximately or sort of as being ontologically fundamental more fundamental than the apparent options

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that they mediate between and this has an interesting feature of fitting very well with an emergent cultural mood that comes from relaxed complex thinkers who seem to find it necessary to say sort of about almost

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everything they encounter right so what does fundamental reality look like in that sense relational reciprocal variable gradient interactive field like Basho as the Kyoto school

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might say non-absolute accepted it's not absoluteness and generative at certain thresholds of proximity and in between that's everywhere uh so that's that's my initial sense of the metaphysics that

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underlies post-metaphysics it's the it's the implied assumptions that allow you to be post-metaphysical in some of the various ways that people like to be post-menaphysical fantastic and my first reaction to that

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is something I wanted to emphasize not just on the level of sort of your personal propositional ideas in terms of you know let's say metaphysics of

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adjacency as a world view but in terms of how I've experienced you personally how you've related to me um since I've since you know since we've been relating in the last you know

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however many months or maybe up to a year and also how I see you move in this larger space um in my view does embody these ideas you know in in some sense in in in

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specifically in the sense of um you do a very good job I think of including people who um might not necessarily fit well in certain categories or fit well within

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certain communities but nonetheless there's interesting links there's interesting ideas to explore and and and so um my point here is that that not only

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do I think you've you do a good job of of explaining what a metaphysics of adjacency is um I think you also have done a good job of of of

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showing others through your actions how what are the consequences of this metaphysics for moving in intellectual spaces let's say um and maybe before I ask another question I also maybe want to situate

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this view within sort of my relationship to the history of philosophy I've got this Triad I haven't actually written a paper about this but it's an idea which I

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think is worth writing a paper about it it's sort of a reflection of three major areas of philosophy or sorry three major eras of philosophy the ancient the

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modern and the postmodern where you have figures like Plato Hegel and Duluth and Plato here represents the absolute one the truth in another world uh the you know you could say the

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dualism um of of platonic thinking and that has a certain effect and consequence on the ideational structures of the ancient world you move

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to someone like Hegel and that one becomes well radically imminent and non-dual in the sense that it's not a truth a totalizing truth in another world but actually involves the

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historical movement of spirit um and that obviously reflects you know a lot of how we think about the cognitive structures of the modern world then you come to someone like DeLuise

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and what you get is much more an affirmation not on a one but on a many ones and you get an emphasis on a multiplicity a plurality an affirmation of all that plurality and all that and

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and that and that ref represents sort of the the postmodern experience of reality so I feel like in some sense the metaphysics of adjacency engages with this long history of philosophy and the

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way in which you know our worlds are becoming in need of new levels of inclusion of Multiplicity new levels of inclusion of affirmation of different points of views of course difference is

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a essential category for Drillers as well so um when you think about here the base of your metaphysics um in terms of how I've heard you describe it it's kind of like a variable

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intensity relational space um you know it could be that the variable intensity relational space in uh the ancient world or in the even in the modern world

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was not in need of intense philosophical reflection but it could be that that's becoming more and more important so when you think about the metaphysics of adjacency and specifically starting with

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this variable intensity relational space um could you unpack how you how this influences your philosophical development and and um yeah just how you how you think in

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general hmm I think when we look at the Ancients we we see a variety of different opinions right that uh as everybody from Nietzsche onward has pointed out the

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tradition that might come down from heraclitus looks a little bit different than the tradition that comes down from Plato and Socrates and so on so there have been thinkers in the ancient world that have focused a little bit more on

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the dialectical interactions between things that I would suggest imply the kind of adjacency that I'm talking about you see it in taoism you see it in the garjana right

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um and I think you see it in Hegel as well as you see it in things like integral Theory and quantum mechanics and Duluth as well um what they typically didn't do the Ancients were very pragmatic in a way

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right they tended to think of things in a kind of colloquial fashion it wasn't actually very important for them most of the time to clarify the fundamental accuracy of what things were they just had to clarify how do we interact with

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this thing so they tended to think in terms of of single solid organized objects and then if they got a little bit more sophisticated a little bit more complex they would think in terms of some kind of dynamic relationship between

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opposites what they normally didn't bring to the surface was what's the underlying Assumption of a vision that allows the interaction between opposites to occur

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right there has to be some space in which things can be connected without being the same that's the fundamental underlying Assumption of an oppositional view whether you're thinking of the masculine and The

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Feminine or the yin and the Yang or contingency and necessity all of these things in order to be compared or contrasted in order to be treated as a broken dualism or as a

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functional Dynamic interlock paradoxical dualism in all of those cases there's the same underlying assumption about the ontology that's not inspected if today we wish to

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inspect that so that we could bring a higher degree of accuracy to our calculations then we need to bring that forward and also say why it was necessary at each of those previous phases

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so for me um I think there's a a huge field of things like quantum mechanics that have made explicit progress by bringing this underlying assumption into the

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foreground and we would want to be able to do that across the different domains of our knowledge acquisition and also in a way that connects with for me personally what I think are the ethical

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behavioral relational and spiritual implications which is a way of being with each other that's non-dogmatic and non-separative uh it's a way of maintaining a certain

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kind of flexible Dynamic interaction you know in that sort of Buckminster Fuller tensegrity sense uh and a way of appreciating that everything is relational and everything

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is open and that there are thresholds within that reciprocal Opening space that allow the activation of new functions a super simple way to think about that

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is the way they teach people to do Chi work um right you go your hands are too far apart they can't sense each other they don't start you like this they have you bring your hands into a distance where they start to get activated by each

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other and that's where you do your training is in that special distance and I think we could be thinking about special interactive threshold distances as a fundamental ontological category

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that has these direct correlations to spiritual social intellectual philosophical and scientific practical knowledge domains right I think

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um it would be interesting to go into the the space of or the nature of these special distances specifically as it relates to um this emphasis on proximity over

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Fusion because you know the big oppositional determination as I experience it and and I suppose as I try to think it as well is

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special distances are hard to cultivate and that most people either especially when it relates and here I'm thinking as it relates to Intimate Relationships of all kinds uh Intimate Relationships of

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the family Intimate Relationships of of of sexuality or or you know intimate Partnerships uh even friends uh colleagues co-workers and so forth is

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that either we have a if something difficult comes up either we have an absolute separation or a desire for an absolute collapse into each other and you know cultivating those special

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distances takes a different um perhaps sensibility or or or way of perceiving the one and the other uh maybe if you want to jump in here uh yeah I mean we could we could call

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this a tantric disposition if we wanted to uh there's certainly something about relationships that is uh lived and the way we live it is either

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successful or unsuccessful but it's usually met with a totalizing or catastrophic form of thinking that is insufficient to what we actually do it's one of the reasons we always point to the insufficiency of the left brain mode

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to describe the dynamic complex processes of the right brain holistic world is that it tends to break down into more separate or we're unified we have these two goals

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which are sort of hasty they come out of you know that Reiki and armoring they come out of a clumsy attempt to just simply grasp or simply reject and when that's reflected at the level of our

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thoughts um it becomes very intense but it also becomes insufficient it lacks accuracy so like if if you're with a lover the simple way to think about this is you

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might say I want to be United with you I want to be fused I want to be one with you but you don't actually want that right you don't want your pancreases to occupy the same space you don't want Total unification what you want is an

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increase of proximity to the point where an additional function is generated right you want to be so close it becomes as if it were something else and if you talk to people who do sort of

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sex education neotatra and things like that one of the things they're instructing people to do a lot of the time is to be very sensitive to these different threshold distances right there's all kinds of things you can

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learn at each of these thresholds if you're attentive to them so that's one sexualized example of how we think about trying to find the right distance trying to think in a clearer

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Way by assuming that the goal we are after the energy the process the transformation we want comes from that particular distance we're trying to find and if we think about it as an All or

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Nothing proposition of we're separate or we're together that's too clumsy to be able to grasp that difference properly yeah and I think it's extremely

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interesting to think in this way in the context of what uh perhaps has its epicenter in North American culture wars but certainly has its ripple effect around the world that is sort of the

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underlying tensions which make for example woke or anti-woke a thing at all you know when you think about for example you know you brought up in your metaphysics of adjacency paper which again I'll link below

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um the need to for example include previously marginalized background communities like I think you name women people of color uh different different all these different different categories

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um and when we think about tensions um that are generated within so-called woke or anti-work culture I think a lot of the time these tensions are being produced by

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um the lack of special distance spaces let's say to have difficult conversations about what it means to uh be fully inclusive or something like that so I think this way of thinking you

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know and oftentimes we do get literally Fusion mentalities or we get um totally separatist mentalities when it comes to you know when we when we get to the extreme edges of these culture

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War uh discussions so uh what do you think about the application of this way of thinking two things like the culture wars you might give other examples uh yeah I think we see all kinds of

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different interpersonal and social dimensions in which we what we actually need is to more intelligently negotiate the appropriate distance in any given context rather than to think in terms of

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identity or separation from identities you know uh the opposite example of the of the sexual intimacy example is when two people are in some kind of extreme emotional Clash right and one person

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will make with you I said I'm done with you we're we're have nothing more in common I'm done I'm leaving this relationship and they storm out and then they come back 20 minutes later they just needed to get some air go for a

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drive whatever it was right so there's this this what they actually needed was to adjust relative to the context the proximity that's the underlying structural dimension of it and what they

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instead did from the mental Dimension was go into these extreme category catastrophic identity examples and we see that all over in the political domain right I mean it's very simple to

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go to that classic with us or against this kind of binary mentality and the problem with the with us or against this binary mentality is not that there's a polarization between what's included in

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the firm and what's excluded and critiqued the problem is it seems like a simple switch rather than some kind of flexible gradient that's modified for particular circumstances to produce more

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or less optimal results and I think we see that in uh you know physics we see that in the material world the philosophical world the political world that the solutions we need come from

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undermining the sense of a switch back and forth between this or that identity category into a more nuanced gradient of some kind not everyone has to be included all the time but essentially

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from a bigger point of view everybody is in relationship and you have to figure out what those distances are for any given situation right and I think that

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connects really well to another sort of um I think important dimension of uh what you call the metaphysics of adjacency as it relates to um the category and correct me if I'm

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wrong in pronunciate pronouncing this but meta themes metaphines yeah metapheme is a word I came up with to describe what's been called Vision logic structures in some integral

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thinking it's a stable pattern of active adjacency so a metapheme shows up typically where two variables cannot be defined apart from each other philosophically that could look like contingency and necessity as it does in

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Hegel it might look like subjectivity and objectivity physically it could look like space time or the indeterminacy between position and momentum what happens is the Discovery in any field of knowledge the two

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conventionally opposed or conventionally unrelated patterns of information cannot be articulated more precisely without each one articulating the other across some kind of Gap so it turns out to be an apparent this

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very hegelian in science and life it turns out to be an apparent insufficiency within the self-definition of things and ideas and selves but it's not exactly an insufficiency it's a flexible Gap that orients toward a

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seemingly external other thing idea or self which in turn is having the same problem and the Gap is precise this is why it can become a science it defines how

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close together two ideas have to be in order to operate at a deeper level of precision so in quantum theory position and momentum are part of a shared condition that works at a specific difference a

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fraction of a Planck unit away from each other in terms of their definition there's an exact degree of adjacency between these seemingly alternative physical facts which allows as long as we don't collapse it by saying they're

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the same or they're uncorrelated as long as we preserve the appropriate distance of mutual approximation we get scientific results more precise than did our ancestors so this is very close to hegel's attempt

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to formulate a trans oppositional scientific logic that exceeds conventional thinking but avoids the Trap of mere critique it builds in a dialectic but supersedes the dialectic

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in a new speculative fact that can take philosophy and Science and Society to the next level yeah absolutely and I like that you're connecting this here with with quantum mechanics because one of the things that

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impresses itself on my Consciousness so strongly as I'm building out the science of logic courses just how uh it seems like hegel's logic moves in a in a

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Quantum way uh and and it it it's interesting here um to open up the conversation as I think slavoy does a good job of uh insofar as how helpful Hegel might be

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for thinking the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics but I think you define here The Meta Meta themes as units of analysis that resemble paradoxes and in terms of

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thinking about metaphines as paradoxes and thinking about reality as paradoxical one of the things that I always was um and this will lead into a question but one of the things I was always

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um sort of wrestling with during my doctorate was the way in which it seemed like the conventional scientific attitude thought of paradox as something to be resolved as opposed to something

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more fundamental that needed to be um worked with as such that you know that Paradox was a feature not a bug sort of thing which is I think something we've already alluded to in another way but um how would you relate to Paradox

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within a metaphysics of adjacency yeah one of the ways we could do hegel's three moments of thought um is to think about it in terms of ordinary life where people don't deal

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with paradoxes things just are what they are and then a more sophisticated dialectical interrogation of ordinary thinking which points out that there are paradoxes all over the place Socrates is

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constantly pointing out uh logical flaws or implicit paradoxes in the local Athenians that he's dealing with now it seems like from that middle range and you get this a lot in contemporary

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academic scientific mathematical social theory that the Paradox is somehow a limitation on our knowingness right so the Paradox either tells us about an implicit limit that we can't

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get Beyond or it presents a puzzle that we have to resolve in order to get rid of that structure and yet there are structures we know about that have the paradoxical form which are not dysfunctions or

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limitations right the Mobius strip is a perfect example of a paradox-like structure that defines a functional self-consistent operation and the question would then be how many

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kinds of things in existence actually have a functional structure of that kind when viewed from a larger multi-perspectival Vision right it could be I've proposed this that all boundary

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conditions are in fact Mobius like in their function and until you've found the thing that looks paradoxical you haven't actually found the structure of how a thing operates uh and sometimes people have found something like that

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and interpreted it as a limitation on knowing when in fact it's an opening up to a richer kind of knowing we see this in the quantum domain which is um a lot of people really naively feel

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like Einstein's relativity and Heisenberg's indeterminacy or uncertainty points to the fact that our ability to know the world is fundamentally limited we used to think we could know it and now it's been

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proven that there's a limit because we run into a paradox shape but actually relativity Theory and indeterminacy have allowed us to make more accurate predictions than any of our ancestors

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it's massively increased the consistency coherence and certainty of our ability to operate pragmatically in the world because it's taken these seeming paradoxical structures and instead of

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viewing them as a limit condition have viewed them as the fundamental forms of a new kind of knowledge but you have to be able to cognitively track a certain kind of

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simultaneous multi-perspectival interaction and emotionally you have to be able to put up with the sensations that are produced in Us by paradoxical experience but if you can handle both of those things that

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have the shape of paradox are actually an opening to a new kind of knowledge rather than a failure of the old kind of knowledge this is very hegelian in the sense that the thing that seems like it

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thwarts our knowing is in fact the key to a more enhanced knowing yeah exactly and and and I in my own yeah that's an interesting um again I like the way you're connecting it to relativity and quantum mechanics and

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um I've often had the um uh uh assumption I suppose that one of the biggest roadblocks or one of the biggest you know obstacles I suppose to

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um commute not not not intellectually communicating this information is related to the emotional sensitivity required to take this on board as a as a way of being it's it it does require a

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different level of emotional sensitivity um but I I I've sort of tempted to give an example of how um this Mobius like strip structure um is related to to boundary conditions

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and and that might also be interesting to think about in relationship to the absolute or the way in which people think in terms of absolutes um it's

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so well I'll give the example first it's that um there's this Republican convention I remember watching this uh political talk show where they were talking about a republican convention

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um in somewhere in Florida and uh this dating app grinder which is for homosexual relations uh spiked in its user rate at the the center of the

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Republican convention which was specifically focused on at the time Banning gay marriage so there is this weird Paradox where the people who were dead focused on Banning gay marriage

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were at the same time being motivated unconsciously to use this grinder dating app where they're going to hook up and so forth with other of course repressed homosexuality and again just making this point that

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repressed homosexuality especially in certain cultural context is connected to that desire inside yourself so again this other side of the Mobius Loop where on one side of the Mobius Loop you have a sort of professional identity which is

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against gay marriage on the other side of the Mobius Loop you have the desire to have homosexual relations and so this Paradox emerges and I'm not using that example specifically for political motives like being anti-republican or

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something like that but just saying that absolute identities as such might have this weird twist in them where what it looks like on one side is the opposite on the on the other side

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and there's lots of examples like this but um I wanted to ask you specifically in this context about adjacency being non-totalizable and that it improves you say

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um a way of conceiving absolutes um and I think that like the way I would I mean well first I'll just ask what do you mean by this um in relationship to Paradox and and stuff like that you have these absolute

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paradoxes uh yeah they're actually relative paradoxes and they adjust as we go uh I I joke in the metaphysics of adjacency that 99 is the new hundred

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percent which is a way to remember to think without totalization uh if you were to remove zero and one hundred percent from your reasoning process then what does that look like that's a good way into thinking and

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adjacency terms so you're always dealing with degrees of approximation that are never absolute they're never because an absolute is a kind of cut off it ceases to be relational it ceases to be alive

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it's either completely this or it's none of that and there's actually no thinkable conditions that obey those constraints right one of the interesting examples is if you think about the question of

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whether the universe begins in order or begins in chaos that's an interesting provocation to consider but you can't actually decide either way because if you were to reduce the amount of order

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to the point where you had a universe initially consisting only of chaos it still would not consist only of chaos because it obeys a minimal ordering constraint which is that it's all chaos and not order it has that specific

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orally homogeneity that characterizes it so you would not be able to remove all order from the early conditions of the universe or any situation you could radically minimize it but you could

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never remove it because Order and Chaos aren't definable apart from each other it's fundamentally a meta theme it's a single concept that has to be viewed in this sort of mobius-like shape and so as

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a result anywhere within the system that obeys that Mobius like CIS constraint is never a point where it's absolutely something or absolutely not something else it's always some degree of that

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so there's a number of different ways that um thinkers in the last 100 or 200 years have criticized basic identity structures um challenges to the equalsness of the equal sign so to speak do one-on-one

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really perfectly make two or is there still some slight difference that's a really interesting set of critiques and in a way for me it goes along with a shift from algebra to computation

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where instead of just looking at an equation as a symmetry on a chalkboard that's held in stasis we're thinking of those things as representations of a computational

00:37:56

dynamic process in which you start at a one position and you add a one to it you end up at a two position but the resultant position is not identical to the first position it's the result of a process but the fact that it's a result

00:38:10

makes it distinct from the first one so there's there's a little bit of let's say inaccuracy there's a little bit of non-identity that's possible even between one plus one equals two the one

00:38:22

and the one are even visually distinct from the two we can say that they functionally have some kind of shared identity but that shared identity is imperfect

00:38:35

it approximates a perfection right and so the thing we need to do is understand that we can separate the functional power and the certainty feeling that we hitherto attributed to

00:38:49

absolutes we can separate that from the concept of the absolute we don't need to think of completely absent or completely present completely separate or completely unified in order to get the

00:39:01

thing that we were using those Concepts to get for us so a great example of that is the way that leibniz really emphasize the infinitesimal right which is to say you have something that's indefinitely

00:39:13

receding toward a vanishing point and you can use that thing as if it were a complete whole integer of some kind you can use it functionally it can guarantee

00:39:24

you the operational and felt certainty that you need in order to operate but that doesn't mean that it is that Unity because it never it never reaches

00:39:38

it right the infinitesimal like the digits of pi it never reaches its end State there is no end State it's an endless sequence of approximations but you can use endless approximation to

00:39:50

operate as if it were a whole thing we just have to remember that the reason it can do that is because it doesn't actually ever achieve its completion State there's no achieved completion

00:40:02

States there's no necessary absolutes and that's a difficult thing initially to grasp until you can Source the functionality and the feeling we used to get from absolutes to something like a

00:40:15

special threshold within the indeterminacy adjacency relational space so much to say there um in regards to sort of saying the absolute the in the difference between the absolute Paradox and the

00:40:30

relativistic Paradox I suppose what I was trying to get it is that they're it's experienced intuitively as an absolute Paradox but then logically it's a relativistic paradox and you have to and you have to make that that's the

00:40:42

emotional sensitivity Dimension I suppose of of and and also how you ended there sourcing the functional feelings or sourcing the functional intuition um uh of of that of that that that

00:40:54

experience towards a a more logical way of um interpreting it um and and so many interesting things you said there actually uh represent an interesting way to connect this to Hegel science of logic specifically The Meta

00:41:08

theme as this analysis of a single paradoxical um concept and the example you were giving is ordering chaos at the beginning of the universe Hegel actually makes that same uh

00:41:22

critique of of content his categories in regards to you know Kant saying that uh when we get to the beginning of the universe ordering chaos we're left with these fundamental contradictions and he said no we have to think about it from

00:41:35

the perspective of the concept as such the you know the Paradox of the concept uh as such and then also Hegel even uses the example you gave about algebra to computation in terms of the difference

00:41:47

between thinking about static identities uh to computational Dynamics where the result is non-identical to uh the the the the the the uh the beginning of the origin of the process

00:42:00

um so it's just really interesting to think about all of these things and like the Practical consequences they have for the way we think about the underlying philosophy of mathematics or the underlying philosophy of the concepts of the beginning of time and what what does

00:42:14

that even mean I think these are the types of things that we want to think about more in in the course itself um I think the next logic and even there are other things that I can connect that

00:42:25

to a question though so this way you emphasize this endless approximation of never achieving completion and that it requires a sort of perspectable shift on on the end

00:42:38

State basically so that you can use the whole process I think this comes up in hegel's science of logic as well specifically as it relates to the bad what he calls bad infinity and true Infinity where bad Infinity is this

00:42:50

endless approximation and true Infinity is sort of conceptualizing it from the point of the the whole process um how do you make sense of the emotional Dimension that's involved in

00:43:01

you know this endless approximation where you think you're going to get to the end and the perspective will shift on this dynamic foreign yeah I think

00:43:16

um there's two ways to come at that emotional question one is can you tell yourself a story that explains why you can get the things you need from approximation that you used to think you

00:43:27

needed to get from absolutes right that's sort of what I just laid out over the last few minutes which is if if 99 is the new hundred percent then everything we met by a hundred percent

00:43:39

was actually provided by 99 which is the symbol of an appropriate threshold whatever that is so you can tell yourself a story where it's emotionally acceptable because all the things you needed from a hundred

00:43:52

percent or zero from Identity or non-identity as fundamental opposites you can get all of that stuff through the approximation process so part of it is telling yourself is a narrative that redescribes metaphysics in a way that

00:44:05

guarantees you can get the things you need from it even though we move into this flexible model of Truth as a relationship the other part of it is more

00:44:18

psychophysiological is your is your body is your muscle armoring is your self-regulation fluid enough flexible enough to operate in that space right we see this uh come up in every kind of

00:44:32

therapeutic Dynamics which is when you're facing a situation in life a situation with another person a situation with an issue are you capable of relaxing to the degree you would need

00:44:45

to relax in order to function well with that person that issue that object in a way that doesn't foreclose your ability to handle it in a nuanced fashion I think Chuck M trunkpaw said

00:44:57

this thing about how do you ride a horse well you hold on tight but not too tight that's true of everything that's true of things physically relationally cognitively we need to be able to

00:45:10

um continually enter into a space emotionally where we are adjusting to try to find that what John verbaki calls the optimal grip you're looking for the

00:45:23

utility of a dynamic threshold in that in between space and that's something you can emotionally allow yourself to do but it takes a risk right there's a feeling that you're

00:45:34

going to lose what you would get by the grasping clinging craving armored hold that you might otherwise have on um the completeness or the renunciation

00:45:47

of something you have to be able to undergo the risk which is as much physiological as it is emotional of letting go of your over grasp but the beauty of that is it facilitates

00:46:00

uh the emergence of a new skill set that's better able to handle the nuances which are necessary in order to develop expertise in any particular domain yeah that's uh it's it's a it's a nice

00:46:16

metaphor here the the the grip um and and also the example you gave about riding a horse uh you want to hold on tight but not too tight um there's a metaphor that um uh

00:46:30

Michelle Garner of OG Rose uses about who owns a bird the person who grabs the bird from the legs or the person who the birds sitting in their open Palm uh and

00:46:43

of course the person with the open Palm the bird can just fly away or come back or not come back but the person who's holding the bird here the bird can't fly away but at the same time wants to fly away and I think that that's a really

00:46:56

interesting way to think about relationship Dynamics other other other things um yeah and I would just add to that that that's like there's a way to do it very simply which is to suggest that the

00:47:07

the risk of the open Palm is the move and that's not always the right move but that risk has to be undergone because in reality we're looking at a a flexible variation of moves that go from gripping

00:47:20

very firmly to barely gripping at all and it has to be constantly adjusted in that space because the bird will be changing and you will be changing and the circumstance will be changing and if

00:47:31

you take that flexible gradient of moves and you were to say situated inside the essence of an equal sign then you'd have something close to the metaphysics of adjacency

00:47:44

right yeah okay then there's some yeah paradoxes with the completely open palm and and and just here thinking about again bringing it back to I think what the metaphor points to is you know this

00:47:59

and then related to what you talk about this desire to be close and the desire to hold but you don't want to hold too tightly and maybe here um the metaphor of of how to ride a horse well is is a little bit better

00:48:13

um but you want to be um you want to be close without suffocating you want to hold tight but be able to let the other person breathe and and and

00:48:24

all of these this nuanced space that you're you're speaking to I think um requires that emergence of a new skill set um is that something that you have taught or been teaching or

00:48:37

um supposedly cultivated in oneself uh I work on it as part of everything that I do so when I do spiritual or physical or intellectual work either on myself or with people that I'm trying to

00:48:51

suffuse it within that General approach uh and partly because that's simply what works with people in order to guarantee the maximum amount of uh multi-dimensional exchange that's

00:49:03

mutually empowering to people because when you when you when you drop that when you're no longer attentive to that flexible gradient then you suddenly start acting from a position

00:49:14

where you're trying to absolutely impart your wisdom to someone else and have them duplicate you or there's somehow a fool that is sundered from the operation that you're undergoing so at any situation in which you take

00:49:29

the other seriously and respect the other in a dynamic relationship is a situation in which you're embodying something that the metaphysics of adjacency would have to describe so you know partly there's conscious teaching

00:49:42

of it uh but partly it's simply the fact that if you're not doing that then you're gonna end up failing to have a good time with other human beings right yeah I think it's absolutely

00:49:55

crucial um and it seems to be related to the next thing I wanted to talk about which is this minimal level of otherness that it seems like when we want the like in

00:50:07

the example you just gave us the the other as a fool or the other as completely duplicable um it's uh we could approach it in many other ways as well but it seems like in

00:50:20

the example of where the other becomes completely duplicable um you want this fusion into Oneness and when the other is a fool you want this complete separation or or complete distance

00:50:33

um but there is a way in which to interact with other humans well and to cultivate long-term relationships I think there is this necessity of including within oneself minimal otherness so

00:50:46

um yeah what do you think about this well I think it's true and there's a lot of different ways to approach it right you can approach it from the angle of uh developmental psychological structure right and we could speculate that as

00:50:59

many people have that in order to detect the experience of the self you're sort of running that through a loop of encountering the other first right you you learn the experience of the self as the self is for another

00:51:13

so that even as you grow and develop a lot of substantial individuality there's still this residual of the ability to turn on yourself as if the other was present which you learn from developing

00:51:27

within the context of the other so the other is always there at least as a virtual Trace right and then there are all the elements in which we say we gain all of our language came from

00:51:40

somebody else so even when I use it as my terminology the other is present there in in the core attempts by me to language myself it's also someone else's

00:51:52

language and then those are very psychologically practical sociologically practical uh in a more spiritual sense we open up to the transcendental

00:52:04

Dimension that's afforded by relational Dynamics the thing that these sort of masculine and feminine togetherness of Tantra is meant to symbolically evoke for us is the sense or or even the

00:52:16

Christian notion of love that the fundamental spiritualized ontological condition is relational it's not an isolated condition and to fuse completely with the other would

00:52:29

also be an isolated condition because the other would vanish as soon as your identity was completely fused with it so what you actually have and what's actually proposed by most of the great mystical Traditions is to increase your

00:52:43

capacity to occupy and refine and then radiate some kind of relational Dynamic but there is no relational Dynamic unless there's some sort of uh experiential connection between the self

00:52:57

and some kind of other right you can't remove that if you remove that all you get is a dysfunctional situation it doesn't matter whether you remove that by trying to completely separate or whether you

00:53:09

remove that by trying to completely fuse in both those cases you lose uh all of the intelligence and all of the feeling flavor that comes along with deepening into the relational Dynamic of reality

00:53:24

I mean when I think about a lot of what is said about our very strange modern social life which I don't think can be thought

00:53:36

in the abstract separate from the new technological digital environment that we're in and and the emergence and the proliferation and ubiquity of the internet is that there is this sort of idea that at least part of the Mental

00:53:51

Health crisis is this collapse into separation like that we all feel like we're we're well there's a paradox of like we're all connected by the internet but we're all becoming more separate and we're we're all becoming more isolated

00:54:05

and and large-scale social groupings are becoming more difficult um what do you think about the way we can cultivate this minimal level of otherness in our current techno-social

00:54:16

landscape I think remembering that it's the implication of the position we find ourselves in is a useful uh thought to have

00:54:27

right if we adjacency is a a very apt way to think about metaphysics of the world in a network age because interlinking is the underlying techno-economic structure that's running our societies now

00:54:42

and even though you're isolated even though you're sitting there just on your phone in your own hunched little world uh you still are objectively dependent upon the incoming sources of the

00:54:56

information the other to whom you are reacting the other who is the source of your entertainment the other who has built the device so there's a sense in which you are performatively enacting a relationship to the other

00:55:07

and you might physiologically mentally and emotionally be withdrawing from the fact of that interaction so one thing to remember is through observation and insights to constantly

00:55:20

teach ourselves that where we feel separate we are actually in some kind of connection like I can't I literally can't separate from something that I'm not connected to that's the precondition of my separative gesture sometimes I say

00:55:34

the separator is the connector if I put up a fence between us that fence now connects Us in some way it's something we share so I actually can't get myself out of the relational condition under

00:55:46

which I would negotiate proximity if I can remember that situation then I have a better chance of thriving as a human being under the conditions that are suggested to us by our economic and technological situation

00:55:59

but we can actually expand that a little bit more because there are different dimensions of otherness that might come into play this would lean more towards the spiritual work that I do your own body might seem like it's

00:56:12

another to you right it's one of those things where the simplest way to help mitigate against over Investments compulsively in digital interfaces is to remember the sensation of the whole of

00:56:25

the body it's an ancient classic spiritual developmental technique to re-engage your nervous system with proprioceptive somatic interceptive intensities when you remember that your body is here

00:56:38

then you're actually here and suddenly you're regulating your heartbeat differently you take a different breath you have some kind of flexible distance re-established between you and the interface device but that was predicated

00:56:50

upon you remembering that there is some other feature of yourself that you're not including and you could as I've done analyze spiritual practice as a whole

00:57:02

set of ways in which we experience the self-otherness within ourselves um yeah it's extremely important and I love the logic uh again I think it's an interesting paradoxical logic of the

00:57:16

separator is the connector I think that's um it resonates very strongly in me personally when I think about the way um

00:57:28

desire for separation requires a connection and uh and and and and and and just the paradoxes involved in those relational Dynamics are um I think more uh common than than many

00:57:42

people uh presuppose um and that brings us I think to the topic of of boundaries um I think that when it comes to to you know like you you mentioned sort of a for separation is also the way in which

00:57:56

two people are connected and of course offense is a a static boundary but uh you emphasize a lot in the metaphysics of adjacency the importance of thinking of boundaries as actually fuzzy um empty

00:58:09

Fields permeable thresholds uh spaces of constant negotiation so for example if there's a fence separating two people or you put up a fence separating you from the other that that is actually the result of a space of negotiation that

00:58:23

that space came to be through uh certain mediation of a self-other boundary so um how do you think this way of thinking about boundaries is is is useful here

00:58:35

or inside yeah I mentioned earlier that it's would be intriguing to think about all boundaries as having more like a Mobius shape another way to think about it is in that field sense it's very famously if you if

00:58:49

you zoom in on two things that are physically in contact closely enough with a microscope you'll discover they're not touching they're what you're looking at is entangled electromagnetic fields that don't quite make direct contact and that there's a little bit of

00:59:02

variability in there and that sense that the contact points whether those are contact points that strike us as positive or whether those are contact points where we're trying to put up a defensive boundary of some kind

00:59:15

nonetheless it's more like a field of spatial opportunities in which we have to negotiate partly because everything's moving and you have to if you if you made a perfect boundary and everything else is Shifting then five minutes from

00:59:29

now that boundary is no longer perfect it's like if you put something um I mean the continents themselves are shifting so to speak right the underlying structure of the world is dynamic and in motion so you can't hold

00:59:41

a fixed boundary even if you wanted it to perform just an absolute boundary condition you would have to constantly feel out where its new position is because everything that it's in relationship to is shifting I know this

00:59:54

becomes very practical in terms of things like personal boundaries uh where you can't know it in advance right you could make only a hypothesis only a speculative suggestion of where the boundary is in order to actually find it

01:00:08

you would need to experientially overshoot it and retract multiple times you'd have to negotiate back and forth to find out where at the moment your boundary currently is and what that

01:00:20

suggests is the presumed idea behind that is a space in which that boundary exploration flexibility is necessary and you can't find an actual boundary unless you're able to move back and forth in a

01:00:34

region of potential boundaries you're looking for an activating threshold that is currently appropriate within that space but unless you could do that unless you have that flexibility the boundary

01:00:46

itself will fail so the boundaries are um alternatively and simultaneously ways of connecting and ways of dissociating which should be understood to be versions of the same phenomenon

01:00:59

connective dissociation is all we encounter in a non-dual sense in the world all separations are connections and vice versa but how you deal with that practically is you need to be able

01:01:11

to negotiate back and forth around the boundary that the boundary itself is an opportunity afforded by that negotiative space I mean I'm tempted here to ask a question about

01:01:27

um perhaps the formal nature of the institution I have this feeling like the institution today perhaps it's a symptom of the meaning crisis perhaps it's um related to the emergence of online

01:01:40

digital Technologies just even what we're doing right now uh would not have been possible and for example the 90s or something like that but that a lot of the implicit boundaries of the institutional

01:01:53

structures of our world uh are in need of new negotiation new open conversations new ideas about what's inside what's outside what does it mean to constitute an inside versus an

01:02:06

outside um so how does the metaphysics of adjacency view or how do you view the Contemporary institutional landscape from the perspective of the metaphysics of adjacency

01:02:18

yeah there's a number of ways to go at that I mean one of the things when we look at institutions today we find that some are reasonably functional but a lot of them have become deficient and how you would discover the new form

01:02:31

that they should take we might say that it has to be more complex more inclusive more organic or whatever kinds of adjectives we want to throw at that we nonetheless have to be able to take

01:02:44

the existing structures do something to them that shows us where the boundary condition should currently be and then try to instantiate those knowing that they will change going forward and the way we get that information about where

01:02:58

the boundary should be now as opposed to where they previously were is we need individuals to transgress those boundaries without breaking those boundaries right you have to have agents you have to have information streams

01:03:10

that move back and forth across where the boundary was negotiating in that space in order to figure out where it's applying where it's not applying and in order to trace out where the new

01:03:22

contemporary boundaries ought to be so that's one thing in terms of setting up the form of institutions but there's also implications in other areas where we might think how do we make Collective decisions together right

01:03:35

have we correctly negotiated the informational boundaries between the opinions of individuals when we try to put them together into a collective decision The Proposal made by The Advocates of democracy is here's a more

01:03:49

intelligent way to have people be both simultaneously Collective and simultaneously autonomous the previous systems or simpler systems might have symbolically one person being

01:04:02

autonomous and everyone else being collectively subjugated the Democratic idea is to adjust that and if we start to see things in those terms we can look forward in institutions to other ways to

01:04:13

make a similar adjustment if you and I wanted to come institutionally to a collective decision how would we going about how would we go about doing that we need to think about new ways to be simultaneously the same and different

01:04:27

with each other how do we produce a collective intelligence an implementable shared decision that's smarter than both of us without sacrificing either of our individual perspectives on the subject

01:04:41

one of the problems we get with simple majority democracy is it ends up eliminating a lot of the information from a lot of the population if 40 of the people vote and 51 of those

01:04:54

elect a certain party there's no way in which that party represents the community in general most of the information from the other individuals has been lost by what's now being presupposed to be the collective

01:05:06

decision so I'm just pointing to the fact that there's uh an enormous range of ways we could think about using the interactions between uh apparently separative and apparently conjoined

01:05:19

entities negotiating in between that space to try to work out new ways and new formalities for coming to Collective decisions together because I think that's the driver underneath a lot of

01:05:31

our institutions if we have institutions that seem very Advanced even very contemporary and they make decisions in the old-fashioned way then we're probably going to get a lot of bad results and if you have things

01:05:44

that are more amorphous they don't even quite look like institutions but they're able to make decisions in a smarter way a way that doesn't sacrifice autonomy to get communion or vice versa then we've got something we might be able to get

01:05:56

behind but the key there is to be able to increase autonomy and communion without sacrificing one for the other and then that's sort of um an instantiation of this fundamental

01:06:09

idea that you can't choose between one or the other on that front you're never going to be able to opt for Liberty and autonomy against communion or vice versa as soon as you have that thought as soon as you have the emotion that

01:06:22

goes with that thought then the strategy you're going to produce is not going to work with reality because reality is is a ultimately entangled flexible situation between those apparent opposites

01:06:35

yes I've always been um kind of sympathetic to the idea that one of the most Salient features of post not post-modernism as an ideology but

01:06:47

I'd rather think the post-modern condition um is the way in which the transgressive becomes the norm like that you you include transgression

01:06:59

to such a degree that the old boundaries completely fall away but then that transgressive act becomes its own Norm I've I saw that and I experienced that paradoxically when I was doing some sort of I suppose quasi-anthropological

01:07:11

investigations with Anarchist communities where the anarchists would totally transgress the Norms of of the normative Society but then they would have their own weird Norms inside their own total transgression that would just

01:07:24

reproduce sort of Dynamics and structures that you would see that they were against you know on the inside but there's this way in which again you know um there has to be a more fluid relationship between the dynamic of

01:07:38

transgression and the dynamic of forming boundaries and I think this relates I can relate to this personally a little bit because in some sense what I'm trying to create with philosophy portal okay I'm creating a course on Hegel

01:07:50

science of logic you might think about that as something that would be formally integrated into the institutions of Academia but in some sense I've tried to transgress those boundaries and tried to

01:08:01

reassert new boundaries in my own way and I think what's interesting for me here is to think about I'm not alone in doing things like this I know other people who are doing little digital startups related to people call

01:08:14

have called me extra academic or post-academic or something like that what's the relationship here between the institutional Dynamics within Academia and these sort of weird online spaces I

01:08:28

mean you're doing online courses as well so you know I think it's interesting to think about what is the dynamic in these spaces maybe I'll ask you what before going into the next question or uh the next scheduled question I have what do

01:08:40

you think about that reflection there I think it's a subset of the general idea that Vitality occurs in Borderland conditions right and there's lots of different

01:08:53

kinds of borders some of those um intermediary conditions could appear to be within the heart of Academia but generally speaking we think of them as being at the edges of things just like in the uh you know whether it's true or

01:09:07

not we've collectively had this fantasy that maybe life evolved on the beaches and sort of the interstitial condition where the land and the Sea were creating overlapping blurred conditions for new

01:09:18

things to arise that's certainly how the symbolic sexual process occurs is that somewhere in the space between the masculinized and feminist you get the production of new energy or the

01:09:30

production of a new being of some kind so I would expect just on the face of things that the um intermediary the trans-academic condition would be the condition under

01:09:43

which the new forms of Academy the new forms of intelligence are being generated something that is not wholly trapped within the form nor wholly dissociated from the form and I think it

01:09:56

has a higher chance of being able to do that well and at the Leading Edge if these efforts understand themselves to be in a position that cannot be wholly separated or wholly immersed in the

01:10:08

structural form of the academy so my sense is that what you're doing what we're doing what a lot of people are doing and what all the great thinkers have done more or less throughout history is trying to operate

01:10:21

in that edge Zone because that's where that's where the Flow State learning is that's the proximal sweet spot right makes a lot of sense to me um and I think that leads really well

01:10:32

into this topic which I think is perhaps um particularly um uh interesting or particularly important for you is the dimension of spiritual practice spiritual practice comes a lot up and I think your

01:10:46

teachings and and your courses and and your general presence um And in regards to a spiritual practice you make this distinction between and we've touched on it already a little bit but

01:10:59

this distinction between armored absolutistic boundaries versus um a liberating relational spaces of undoing reactive boundaries I mean the question or the rather the the meme I

01:11:12

want to throw at you here uh for reflection and maybe some um I don't know uh interesting thought is you know I came across this

01:11:24

meme in in that was representing the relationship between spirituality and religion and the meme was a fish in a goldfish Bowl in and the Goldfish Bowl was in an

01:11:36

ocean and it said the Goldfish Bowl was religion and the ocean was spirituality and it showed the fish jumping out of the Goldfish Bowl into the ocean you know out of the gold out of the the let's say the armored boundary of

01:11:49

religion into the liberating open space of spirituality but I think there's a paradox of this meme which is that as soon as you jump out of the Goldfish Bowl the fish might get eaten by a shark or something like that so I'm just saying here that there's some

01:12:03

interesting um relationship between the need for boundaries and the need for Liberation from those boundaries what do you think about this distinction

01:12:14

uh yeah that's uh that's a fun meme it's probably not how I would Define religion necessarily but I think there is a very uh important Sweet Spot between having and releasing

01:12:31

boundaries right one of the things we want to do is challenge our boundaries challenge our ego challenge our reactive patterns but we don't want to lose our ability to be

01:12:42

a good container and it's the same in spirituality as it would be in exercise if you become uh over condensed and non-mobile non-flexible then your system

01:12:56

can't operate well the organs can't communicate they don't have room to move but if you try to become a complete jellyfish then you don't develop the tone that's needed in order to organize

01:13:08

your system properly right we need to be able to relax and we need to be able to benefit from waves of stress so in physical and neurochemical exercise we see these patterns we see a

01:13:21

similar thing in spirituality where you need to be able to open and release and transcend but you also have to be a container or a landing pad in which the benefits of those exercises can find a

01:13:33

good solid container in order to show up in a human life uh so that's from that point of view of tone but uh where it comes where adjacency comes into spiritual practice for me is

01:13:47

usually more in terms of either non-duality applied to all of our Lives rather than treated as a specific state that you can get into or to what I've called the integration

01:14:00

Surplus model which is a way of thinking about spirituality as a kind of production from among our subjectively active internal systems and we can analytically break down ourselves in

01:14:12

different ways we could say right brain left brain we can say chakras we can say heart mind body there's a number of different ways to analytically dissect the individual but when you've done that you can think of what's normally

01:14:24

considered to be the individual self as concealing this plurality of different functional systems and an improved relationship between these functional systems can generate a level of collaboration

01:14:37

that creates something like it's more than the sum of the parts which can then be lensed as a higher self or a new energy or some kind of imaginal other or something like that but in order to get

01:14:48

this production of extra numinous coherence is how I would phrase it you have to do work in the in between spaces in the adjacencies between these things that were previously experienced to be

01:15:00

just yourself so where you have these different systems and they're too packed together they're too entangled you can't tell them apart then you don't have the ability to locate them as things that

01:15:13

could be in relationship to each other so then you just have what we would call the ego one of these things gets triggered they all get triggered if they're too far apart and they have no communication with each other then there's no potential for them to

01:15:27

harmonize in new ways to produce some extra quality so if you can use practices exercises or even your direct experience of Consciousness and sensation to negotiate

01:15:39

the in between spaces between these different identified systems that have different qualities then you can allow them to cooperate in a way that helps them become a better team and when they

01:15:51

function as a better team it's like people singing in an orchestra you get an additional effect and that additional effect is a spiritual effect that can seem to permeate or supersede the field

01:16:03

of your perceptual and cognitive options and insofar as it's produced you can then enter into a kind of relationship with it that changes the way you generate meaning and the way you navigate through life

01:16:17

yeah it's uh kind of uh the effect of of Harmony would you say that's a very good way to think about it but that's also it's important to think about that as the outcome because one of the ways you might allow these parts to

01:16:32

come closer together without getting fully entangled is to allow them to argue right so a lot of the things you see in spiritual exercises throughout history is to embrace suffering to embrace cognitive dissonance to embrace

01:16:44

internal friction to let your angel and your devil fight each other so Harmony is the result but it's not always the process it's the result exactly yeah okay yeah that's that's no that's that's an important clarification

01:16:58

um and I suppose I can lead in here with the the Harmony and the conflict that perhaps I perceive um I don't know if you perceive as well between two giant thinkers uh of course

01:17:10

I'm I'm teaching a course on Hegel signs of logic he's had a particularly important impact on on the unfolding of my notion um and Ken Wilbur Who I think has had probably a profound impact on the

01:17:23

unfolding of of your notion and the larger integral community and and The Meta modern space um when I think about these thinkers there is a way in which I can I can immediately make a connection of their

01:17:36

similarity in terms of that they're both big think thinker philosophers both big picture philosophers um however I can also think of their differences in the sense of that they they often attract different thinkers

01:17:49

they certainly the people who are inspired by their work form different types of communities and perhaps are interested in in different things or approach perhaps the same thing from a different angle um in your experience and in perhaps in

01:18:02

just in your spontaneous ideology uh how do you see the relationship between um yeah a thinker like Hegel and a thinker like Wilbur do they have a shared space and what's their space of

01:18:15

difference there are ways in which they are similar and there are ways in which they are different obviously like you say they're big picture big history thinkers um they all they both deal with evolving

01:18:27

emergent understanding that attempts to unfold its Alternatives and predecessors uh they both try to integrate together structures out of conventional opposites uh they're both they both suffer the

01:18:40

kierkegaardian accusation of being too top down too systematic uh there's certainly different in terms of their cultural appeal right one is

01:18:53

European one is North American that's already going to draw different sensibilities one is fairly contemporary in terms of the technological and historical Niche the other is a couple hundred years

01:19:05

out of date but also available to see the emerging modernity so Hegel has an interesting Viewpoint from the beginning of modernity and Wilbur has an interesting Viewpoint looking back on modernity

01:19:18

Wilbur is more of a popularizer Hegel is more of a I don't know comprehensive intellectual purist in a way he doesn't make it easy for you Wilbur tries to make some of his stuff marketable which

01:19:31

is a source of uh admiration and critique Hegel maybe is more profound Wilbur maybe is more useful for this moment in history Hegel certainly works better with psychoanalysis but Wilbur maybe

01:19:44

works better with Eastern meditation and these schools of developmental psychology um so I think there are obviously some interesting similarities Wilbur would probably postulate that Hegel is very

01:19:59

much doing the same kind of thing he's doing just in a way that's slightly out of date I think that's um unnecessarily marginalizing and diminishes the unique contributions of Hegel to some degree

01:20:11

but it's certainly not foolish to say that they're operating in in the same broad Terrain of trying to appreciate science and spirit trying to build evolutionary

01:20:25

development and the integration of opposites into the fundamental method of approaching reality and trying to move forward from modernism into something that um

01:20:37

reappreciates spirit and produces new kinds of knowledge structures that modernity can't quite get at because of its limitations in terms of how it perceives the Opposites of its own knowledge attempts

01:20:51

I think there's so much I could also let me just say Wilbur worked out a lot so Wilburn is prime you take Hegel in a fight but but Wilbur now is is decrepit and old so it's hard to say but I think

01:21:07

there was a point where Wilbur was pretty buff yeah but maybe you're intimidating actually yeah okay okay but but there's so much good stuff there that I could could draw

01:21:19

from there and and I really appreciate some of the distinctions you made there and and spontaneously I um agree with with with the way you're seeing this situation I'm gonna choose to focus on the commonalities in the

01:21:32

broad Terrain um and I think that that brought and and that really connects well to the science of logic because I do think that where they do connect most clearly and most

01:21:44

importantly is in this relationship between science and spirit which I think is so um important and I think that um here the relationship is usually uh

01:21:56

situated in terms of a sort of naive scientific objectivity which leaves out the subject and a sort of spiritual subjectivism which takes into consideration our intuitions and our feelings and our emotions but leaves us

01:22:08

without a certain logical objectivity um so I know how Hegel tries to approach this Rift but I actually don't know how Wilbur tries to approach this riff so I'd be interested to know from your

01:22:21

perspective how Wilbur approaches the rift between science and and and spirit I could just say very quickly that as it relates to the science of logic Hegel is here saying um that science itself has forgotten to

01:22:35

turn its own gaze onto the very structures of logic which determine the human being or or come to determine the human being so um yeah what's your view on on on Wilbur's

01:22:48

approach to science and spirit yeah the way Wilbur comes at this is um from a couple of different directions I mean one of the things he's doing is trying to say these are the parts you

01:23:00

would need in a meta Theory so Aqua is a description of the types of vision logic structures I'd call them metaphumes that you might need in order to make sense of things and so each of those would have a different way of approaching it right

01:23:13

Wilbur has a developmental lens and from the developmental lens he would think of knowledge and Society being similar to piagetian set of Developmental stages

01:23:25

whereby you have essentially symbolic pre-rational forms of cognition you develop to have very rational modes of cognition and then you can develop into trans-rational modes of cognition which

01:23:38

are able to simultaneously cross fertilize between your magical and intuitive experiences and irrational but also carry the implications of your rational forward to

01:23:51

places that might be uncomfortable for the ordinary rationalists to go so that's that's how you'd view it through the lens of development is there's a as a movement of stages to the point where

01:24:03

um people have a cognitive complexity that can hold both rationality it's both science and spirit let's say there's also a lens of states where Wilbur would say there's uh like they do in the East gross subtle

01:24:17

causal non-dual right so there's certain gross realm there's certain physical material based knowledges and there's a kind of science you can get about the material there's another kind of science

01:24:29

you can get about the poetic there's another kind of science you can get about the um tautological extremes that you can find as states of consciousness

01:24:40

so there would be these different alternative ways of doing essentially what science is doing but in different domains that would yield different knowledge sets and so to be trans-rational in that

01:24:52

sense would be to be capable of acquiring experiential knowledge in domains that include but are not limited to the material

01:25:04

uh and then there would be this thing that he calls the quadrants you could use the quadrant lens as well which tries to say that singular plural interior and exterior are all fundamental dimensions of any arising

01:25:17

occasion in the whiteheadian sense and so you would need to incorporate shared and subjective experience alongside your objective knowledge in

01:25:29

order to flesh out your science in order to keep it from being reductionistic Wilbur has this notion of flatland and flatland is essentially modern or post-modern knowledge deprived of the

01:25:40

concept of depth deprived of the integration of subjective and inter-subjective experience alongside systemic and objective knowledge so those are you know maybe it runs together for people that aren't that

01:25:53

familiar with it but those are three different ways in which Wilbur would approach what I call transrational which is the integration of the scientific modern rational mind with these other

01:26:05

knowledge sets okay I mean the first question I have here is actually or I mean it's it's a technical question I suppose which I do think has far-reaching

01:26:18

implications and it's it's related to developmentalism so you know you you State uh Wilbur is a developmentalist and in in many ways I think Hegel actually not just in many ways I mean I could also say Hegel is a

01:26:31

developmentalist as well um however hegel's developmentalism is very strange and it's taken me a while to wrap my head around what type of development mentalism um he's trying to articulate

01:26:44

um and as is often helpful for humans metaphorical images is useful and the metaphorical image that Hegel uses is like the the development of an embryo into an adult human or the the

01:26:56

development of a of a seed into a full-blown tree and the logic here is kind of like that the form of the adult human is not actual in the the embryo but it's

01:27:09

implicitly there um and so so like the form of the full-blown tree is not actual in the the seat of the tree but it's implicitly there and so there's this logic that you

01:27:21

what you develop into is what you in some sense already are or something like that or you're you know the seed potential is is is already there so like this has a relevance perhaps in The Meta

01:27:34

modern sense to the idea of absolute knowing or the the the idea that what we potentially develop into perhaps you could call it trans-rational cognition of some kind is kind of has a

01:27:48

seed form in the earlier forms of cognition but it's it's already there how do you relate to this way of thinking I think we have to assume that the potential

01:28:02

for what we become is implicit in what we were but I think and this goes to some interpretations of Hegel that's only known retroactively and when you know it retroactively you can't naively presume

01:28:16

that it was there before you knew it retroactively um I think there's a lot of there's only certain ways to solve for Schwartz and collisions right the the

01:28:29

structure of reality only allows certain kinds of uh stabilizations of instabilities to occur so if you had a developing human being or developing tree or whatever else it

01:28:41

is it's it's got these potentials we don't know what they are and it's unfolding and it might run into a problem and it's going to struggle with that problem and whichever way the solution goes will be sort of

01:28:55

retroactively inscribed as the only way it could have gone and as the necessary unfolding that redefines what that potential was at the beginning however if that's not a purely arbitrary

01:29:06

process because there's only a couple of ways it could solve that stalemate condition and then those ways can be descriptively captured and proposed as sort of

01:29:18

unfolding stage-like progressions as long as we don't get too narrow and ladder-like about how we conceive that I think we need to for ourselves going forward emotionally embrace the sense in

01:29:32

which we are becoming the thing we were always destined to be but analytically we have to understand that that's to a significant degree added on to our experience of our past

01:29:44

by what we have become and that neither of those inhibit the other one that we need to somehow go ahead doing both of those being aware of the the radical contingency that retroactively defines

01:29:56

the necessity of its past and poetically believing in um the fact that we are fulfilling the essence of what we are I think that all I want to say is just that I I really like the way you're

01:30:12

articulating this relationship between contingency and necessity and that I think one of the downsides of certain interpretations of Hegel is that you downplay the radical contingency

01:30:24

um that is at the heart of these processes um and so so I think that that well in my experience of of reading for example he does a good job of emphasizing this relationship between contingency and

01:30:37

necessity and for anyone who's interested I would point in that direction to further unpack that philosophically um but I think we're we're at least coming to the the close of of the questions that I wanted to ask and the

01:30:50

final one I wanted to ask was in relationship to the concept of nothing so the concept of nothing you know I actually remember when I was in my sort of scientific materialist days listening to

01:31:04

like pop physicists conversations where they would um Veer into philosophy like guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson or Lawrence Krauss and guys like that and and they had a sort of a physics panel talking about

01:31:18

nothing and they basically said it was a silly philosophical concept even Lawrence Kraus said something like philosophers are experts about nothing uh in a sort of derisive uh way but um

01:31:31

actually the concept of nothing features quite heavily in in hegel's signs of logic and actually it's foundational because he says that the entirety of his logic

01:31:42

um is based on the sort of unity between being and nothing and that that Unity of being and nothing It ultimately becomes a become is a becoming but it's a paradoxical Unity being in

01:31:56

nothing it's not a Unity that gives me this sense of like a Harmony without conflict it gives me the sense of a Unity which is constantly um flipping between paradoxical

01:32:10

opposites um and that actually you know when he goes into the relationship between being and nothing I can quite easily apply it to the experience of my own unfolding

01:32:21

development but um maybe before I ask the question what do you think of uh the um like question right what do you think of the concept of nothing and how does it come up in your metaphysics of adjacency

01:32:34

yeah I've always been fond of a a complaint that Henry bergson makes in Creative Evolution that the the abstract concept of absence that nothing is not thinkable right which you can sort of get if you

01:32:48

try to think of nothing and observe what it is that you do in that move this is bergson's complaint or you could try to think of everything and add to it the thought of removing everything you could try to think of a vast empty

01:33:01

spaciousness but that's still spaciousness so all of the things that people do bergson is saying that where they think they're thinking of nothing they're not actually thinking of nothing and you have to be a little bit more radical with the thought of nothing and

01:33:14

say that the thought of nothing not only is the thought of nothingness but it itself is a non-thought right that it's there is no nothingness that nothingness is more nothing than you even think it is it's in fact impossible to think and

01:33:27

when you think you're thinking of it you're actually thinking of something else you might be thinking of availability or spaciousness or indeterminacy or something like that or cancellation

01:33:38

uh so my my fundamental disposition is that uh when people talk about nothing they don't actually mean nothing but you can certainly have relative absences and presences of some kind

01:33:51

you can you can take a picture of a park bench without me on it now is that a picture of me not on a park bench well relative to a picture of me on a park bench it is but in a sense there's no absence in that picture that picture is

01:34:04

completely full no absence is actually presented except as a relative contrast so where does the concept of non-existence come into play it comes into play as a relative contrast to

01:34:17

existence and vice versa so from the adjacency point of view there's always some space of negotiation between these Concepts which are essentially the same concept the same metapheme right you

01:34:31

find becoming everywhere because you can't find anything that isn't in a way oscillating on some gradient between is and is not it's always in an ish kind of a space um so fundamentally things seem like

01:34:47

they are more relatively or seem like they are less relatively and none of neither of those absolutes are ever perfectly attained it never a hundred percent only is

01:34:58

it never 100 only isn't in order to deal with anything that's real we have to be dealing with something that is a functional negotiation between something like a relative absence and something

01:35:11

like a relative presence right and in relationship to that um you know there's this way in which

01:35:24

you articulate this shift of perspective as it relates to to nothing like and so like I can frame that in relationship to thinking about nothing in an absolute sense like something's you know 100 isn't two more of this gradient of is

01:35:38

and is not um where you say nothing matters from a negative valence to a positive valence you know where there's this perspectable shift on nothing matters and uh what

01:35:50

what do you what do you mean by this and and how does that show up in in your life yeah I mentioned that in terms of uh the film everything everywhere all at once because there's a sense in which if I

01:36:04

don't know if you've seen the film it's quite an absurdist romp through the Multiverse and the the villain is the one who's lived through all these different realities and therefore experiences

01:36:15

nothing as having any meaning nothing matters but the climax of the film is this person re-encounters through their own personal experience people they have intimate relationships with and they're

01:36:28

transformed into the idea that nothing matters right so nothing matters in that it doesn't matter or nothing matters in that it actually does matter it just has that same form that you were pointing to as nothing

01:36:41

and I think that's one of the things that's going on throughout meta modernism like meta modernism takes over the structural critiques of the postmodern but it no longer sees them merely as a critique it sees them as the

01:36:53

building blocks of a new sincerity so we get this idea of sincere irony in metamodernism right it's not irony as a distancing or limiting factor it's irony as the empowering factor of a new

01:37:05

sincerity and I think that's where adjacency comes in as well we used to think the Casual way of thinking and the professional way of thinking was that sort of an approximately an almost were some

01:37:19

unpleasant category that paradoxes were some unpleasant category that there was this uh intermediation space of edges and boundaries and approximations that

01:37:30

Were Somehow failures to provide uh discrete useful knowledge but I think we can look at that and go you're absolutely right the fact that there are all these different contexts different interpretations different reality

01:37:43

pictures this means that there is some ambiguity about what reality fundamentally is but that's not a limitation we can Embrace that we can have a good conscience about

01:37:55

that we can say in a way that the the sort ofness that almost can become the building blocks of our new cathedral that we we aren't stuck with them we can flip the valence on the same structure

01:38:08

and start to build up from it rather than simply gaze at it as if it were the limiting alternative to knowledge I would on that on the basis of that description I would I would say that

01:38:21

um the way you're relating to the difference between post-modernism and meta modernism is somewhat analogous to the difference between kantians critique the cons

01:38:32

critique of pure reason and Hegel science of logic because in some sense Khan's critique of pure reason is saying you know uh pure pure reason is impossible we're never going to have a

01:38:45

purely rational view of the thing in itself and the thing in itself is going to be forever at a distance from us we're only going to have approximations we're only going to have limited knowledge and hegel's saying that those approximations those limits are the

01:38:56

thing in itself so you it's just a perspectable shift on on in some sense the same thing and so yeah it incorporates the same structure but it attributes to it a different mealing meaning which accompanies a different

01:39:09

valence as well right and I think that that's very useful for thinking about the post-modern condition I think it to me it brings up and here I'm just trying to hear connect it to the signs of logic is that it it

01:39:22

connects to the logic of of the negation of the negation in the sense that post-modernism broadly speaking is a let's say trying to represent a condition where nothing matters and you

01:39:35

know for example I think the postmodern show par Excellence here would be something like Seinfeld where they're you know they're not only a show about nothing but within the show itself they're saying let's make a show about nothing and and they they and they do

01:39:48

the negation of the negation within the show itself um but but it seems like that you know uh it as it relates to how you're describing the meta-modern sensibility there is this type of negation of

01:40:01

negation where you're you know taking this negativity and flipping uh offering a minimal perspective will shift on the same situation absolutely the post-modern the

01:40:15

Brilliance of the post-modern is its ability to based on its own experience of Shifting between perspectives to identify the fact that contextual boundaries are not perfectly self-sufficient right that in order to

01:40:28

figure out what's going on you always have to step outside of a context into another context that it's negotiating with and that other context could be a bigger frame it could be some marginalized thing that wasn't included

01:40:41

it could be the hidden presence of the other and the opposite post-modernism is able to locate that and it tends to mobilize that location as if it was simply a critique and then we're stuck

01:40:54

with the fact that these additional perspectives and the intercontextual space between them is somehow an empty Barren landscape of infinitely receding self-reflections

01:41:06

uh and that's what it would be if you didn't take one further step back and ask how you could use all of that you do that kind of thing Hegel does to count which is say you have to step outside of the boundary

01:41:20

in order to accomplish the boundary that doesn't mean the boundary fails that means the shape of a functional boundary is the shape of stepping outside of a boundary that's what a boundary looks like and once you have that then you go

01:41:32

oh great now we have these things that we can actually use they just happen to have this particular shape now let's try to rebuild our science let's try to rebuild our philosophy let's try to rebuild our social and spiritual

01:41:44

practice out of things that have this particular shape if that shape is something we will always uncover when we look at any context or any meaning right and when we think about shape I

01:41:57

think that um in the philosophical sense we can use the word shape we can use the word form um and then that sort of brings us back to perhaps the original problem with Plato in terms of thinking the perfect

01:42:11

shape or the perfect form and a lot of this has been trying to think historical form the historical negotiation of form given multiple subjects so sort of um back to sort of the the starting point

01:42:23

of our conversation where you say the base of the metaphysics of adjacency is this variable intensity relational space and the shapes and the forms that we sort of negotiate throughout a life

01:42:36

process this feeds back to our entire conversation because there's a kind of reactive reluctance in people who've grown up reflecting their own emotional insufficiencies through the knowledge of

01:42:47

absolutes where they go well you can't have that you can't have fuzzy boundaries you can't have things that are dependent we would we would fail to be able to use the world if it was negotiable and fuzzy and dependent they

01:42:59

make that claim but in the example of making love that we used earlier it's not the case that you can't get what you want in a sort of space you absolutely can you lose what you want in a totally

01:43:12

dissociated or totally merged space the only place you can get what you're after is in a sort of in a blurring of that boundary and a Step Beyond The Boundary that still counts as the boundary I suppose then my my well I have two

01:43:28

questions if you don't mind um my first question is that I've seen in our pragmatic or sorry I've seen in our

01:43:39

very broad very broadly speaking online space intellectual space that there's um a deep Temptation for a return of

01:43:52

fundamentalist religion Orthodox religion and that and this temptation of Orthodox fundamentalist religion has come up throughout the history of post-modernism um how do you think about that

01:44:04

um within the context of the metaphysics adjacency that would be my first question the appearance of fundamentalist religion Orthodoxy yeah I think it um it can go two different ways right there's a sort of

01:44:16

pre-trans fallacy to use Wilbur's terminology right there's a sense in which what we're doing as a contemporary society and even as very Advanced Leading Edge thought movements that are insufficient to the experiences needed

01:44:30

by a person to live a whole multi-dimensional life so if you're not getting those there is a temptation to regress to A Primitive form that you project as having some

01:44:41

kind of uh deeper more Dynamic meaning making capacity but you can also move forward into some kind of um traditional form in quotes right and a

01:44:54

lot of the best people who've occupied any of the seemingly traditional even Mythic religions have actually been fairly reasonable fairly relaxed people that didn't take it too seriously or they took it seriously enough to make it

01:45:07

workable but not so seriously that it shut down their thinking their heart or their relationships so there's a sweet spot in there that we can move forward into and I think um meta modernism or any attempt to be

01:45:20

post-post modern has got to find ways to give people useful patterns in their lives that bring back a lot of those things that human beings are built to go through and so that will involve a more adjacency or if it's works it will

01:45:34

involve a more adjacency oriented version of any of the inherited patterns but it doesn't have to that those are just some of the options it can also involve spontaneously producing new emergent forms that are more

01:45:46

idiosyncratic and more appropriate to the world moment I just want to take this moment when you're saying you know uh emphasizing this not taking things too seriously approach that there's this really useful

01:45:58

Axiom I've been um you know at least repeating to myself is is that this difference between our situation is uh serious but hopeful uh to the the the the idea that our

01:46:11

situation is is hopeless but not serious and I like I like the the second approach a little bit more but um or I find it useful anyway and then I guess the final question um I have for you is in relationship to

01:46:24

the meta modern space and um so how to frame this would be the way I've always thought about post-modernism is not so much that it's an ideology

01:46:36

where I encounter post-modernists who identify with it um but more the identification of a social condition or the identification

01:46:48

of a social symptom so like for example going back to leotards uh paper very well cited paper on um Grand narratives he's not sort of saying that people shouldn't construct

01:47:01

Grand narratives he's more saying that uh contemporary subjectivity um does not believe in Grand narratives in the way that subjectivity might have believed in the past you could say he's

01:47:12

saying uh subjects are are more complex now and our environment is more complex now than um is sort of um conducive to large-scale belief in

01:47:25

Grand narratives and when I experienced the meta-modern community I see more um art well I guess the question would be are you identifying a new social condition

01:47:37

um or are you identifying with um a world view or belief system does that make sense yeah it does make sense and it's a it's an open-ended

01:47:49

question right if you go among people who think about these things you'll find them leading in different directions I think that it would be very implausible that if we're seeing something start to emerge that that

01:48:02

thing isn't being driven by existing social conditions that are emerging part of which are technological some of which are media some of which are just the way that our brains are wired at the moment and the care we have to take now in

01:48:16

response to catastrophic possible circumstances so there's a lot of external variables that are forcing a new kind of response and that response also sorts between its options if

01:48:28

there's a whole bunch of things we've tried that clearly don't work then we tend to put those off the table and cluster around the few things that still might have potential um I think of it though as having some

01:48:40

elements of Developmental complexity so in models of Developmental hierarchy one of the things that characterizes them is you're embedded at a level you're able to see the levels prior to that level of embedding

01:48:54

right so that a post-modernist one way to think about them is responding to changes in the world circumstances pointing out what the hyper-modern agents lives are like but another way to think about post-modern is they're able

01:49:07

to see and or feel problems inherent in modernity that people who are still embedded in the modern sensibility can't detect and likewise you could say that there

01:49:19

are problems implicit in post-modernism that can't be detected from within post-modernism and so there'll be communities of people some of whom can see and identify and some of whom simply

01:49:30

feel that there's a an insufficiency in the post-modern and therefore they gravitate toward different kinds of models and different kinds of cultural practices all right and I'm tempted for another question but I'm really I'm satisfied

01:49:45

with that I guess my other temptation is what what are and you're probably the perfect person to ask this question to so I'm going to ask it because you know

01:49:57

what do you think is the block is there a blind spot of the meta modern condition and if so what do you sense into in that direction and is it even useful to sense in that direction

01:50:12

it's worth probing but I don't know that we could come to any clear answers yet because it's it's a fairly small percentage of the global population who are sensitive to that and the idea of trying to make

01:50:26

any conclusive statements about what would go beyond that uh is pretty dubious uh however there are some uh recurrent patterns of antagonism

01:50:38

within the field and it's uncertain how much those are structural elements and how much they are things that point to something that would go beyond it uh I think there tends to be

01:50:50

um over-reliance on the notion of individual level-like development there tends to be an exaggerated sense of the differences between let's say tribes within the community I mean that's one

01:51:02

of the things I see a lot maybe that's from my particular bias as somebody who finds it relatively easy to incorporate people who are doing different thematic work but there's a sense in which people think oh we're we're really doing this

01:51:16

thing it's integral or it's meta modern or it's whatever we want to call it and all those other people who are doing it in a different tone they just don't get it they're not really a part of this right so I if that over specialization

01:51:29

and internal divisiveness I think might be a sign that it's just beginning and it hasn't really been able to embrace itself as a totality but it might indicate um some unbearable line of tension that

01:51:41

will force forth another level of consideration at some point I guess I I guess I would throw forth the perspective at least the perspective the way I've historically personally

01:51:52

emotionally related to post-modernism is again not as an identity but more as sort of the recognition of a of a condition and and also I like the way you articulated that there are people

01:52:05

who are sensitive to that post-modern condition which may may be able to read symptoms in modernity that people in a modern frame can't sense um and I think that there's a lot of

01:52:17

utility to sort of being sort of emotionally attuned to that post-modern condition I I guess I would put put forward the idea that the way I sort of emotionally subjectively and historically relate to

01:52:29

the various ideas that could be grouped under metamodernism is again not so much a personal identity as sort of an emotional Attunement to a historical condition and what that historical condition might be as different from

01:52:42

post-modernism um uh yeah is does involve sort of a more uh integrative does I think involve um the the logic of the negation of the negation where

01:52:54

um nothing matters becomes nothing matters just this perspective no I I think of the metamoran sensibility as being an early juvenile stage of something that is both what

01:53:07

Hegel and Nietzsche were looking towards as well as many of the spiritual thinkers I think it is an adaptation to the world moment um and I think that to imagine beyond that is a useful exercise but the world

01:53:21

the next World moments is likely to be so much different than anything in human history that we can't really speculate too clearly about that right so if we're if meta-modernism is just starting unless it goes for 50 years or 100 years

01:53:34

on the other side of that what does human even mean right we're brain machine interface reading new species so look there there is something next but the something next at the moment stands

01:53:47

for us is just the threshold of utter strangeness I agree and and just to give a little plug for for philosophy portal the the first Anthology we we created

01:53:58

has the title enter the a alien and for me like um the signifier alien has had an increasingly important role in my cognition just has spontaneously become more important and I'm not thinking

01:54:12

about alien in the scientific materialist sense of a actual intelligent organism out there I'm also not thinking about alienation in the Marxist sense that we are sort of

01:54:25

separate from our essential substance that we need to reappropriate through our work energy or something like that I'm thinking about the alien as like the way you're saying that there's some way in which we're confronting a fundamental

01:54:37

otherness to what we think of as our current identity um and that you know there are many perhaps symptomal formations in our current Horizon like I would say two

01:54:49

interesting ones being the appearance of transhumanist communities and the appearance of transgender uh sort of activism as two examples of something that points Beyond you know fundamental

01:55:03

categories of our current identity but anyway yeah there's a there's a limiting condition to adjacency so when we start to think about going Beyond and going in trans and opening up these spaces that are between and Beyond there's a

01:55:16

threshold of intensity that it becomes utterly opaque to us which is similar to what happens in Supreme non-dual States is you're you know the Opposites are so close together you can't tell them apart and it becomes a limit on what could be

01:55:28

said or known in the conventional sense I had a conversation with Sean hargens who's sort of the integral guy who specializes in extraterrestrial studies and multi-dimensional entities and things like that

01:55:41

and as part of that discussion I said well imagine Wilbur's map on a carpet laid out it's the great ontology has all the different kinds of experience under that carpet is a mouse and it just moves around it's just a bump that operates

01:55:53

irrespective of our onological categories it's something there's a fundamental disruption of even the best kind of mapping that we could make and meta modern and adjacency theories can

01:56:06

make a space for that but at some point that's too intense and becomes utterly alien the bump as such no longer is it the bump in your mouth

01:56:20

but you're bump as much anyway um I'll I'll leave some space here so I'm really enjoyed this conversation and I think that there was many points in this conversation where we were able to make some interesting connection between

01:56:34

your work with the metaphysics of adjacency and what I hope to achieve in trying to teach the science of logic and again if you're interested in if you're interested in in learning more about that there'll be links in the

01:56:46

description and the course if you're still listening uh the course will start January uh 16th last day to sign up is January 15th so again Link in the description for that and thank you so

01:56:58

much for coming on to have this conversation I think there are very few people who I could have this conversation with and I'm very grateful um that I'm able to have it with with someone like you so um I guess the last thing I'll ask is if

01:57:10

you have any final thoughts or final Reflections on the conversation um go for it um well only two things I really enjoyed this conversation I like hanging out with you and I'll be trying to make some

01:57:22

of the connections with Hegel more explicit when we do the course material but one of the things when we talked about spirituality and we talked about tradition that we didn't really touch on is God and I think there's an interesting way

01:57:35

in which I hold God in quotation marks to be more profound than God without quotation marks that valence shift we talked about in going from nothing matters to nothing matters can also be done with the kind of typical

01:57:49

post-modern move of putting on a logically ironic syntax around something so that God shouldn't be taken as a diminution of its profundity but an amplification so one of the basic moves

01:58:02

suggested by the metaphysics of adjacency is that quotation marks should be taken as amplifiers of value and meaning it's the same move but the valence is the opposite this is the way forward is to put everything including

01:58:14

the absolute in quotes all right it's a nice way to nice way to think about it and a nice thought to leave our our viewers with so thanks a lot Layman and again links in the description to both some of the papers

01:58:27

we talked about as it related to the metaphysics of adjacency and more information about the science of logic course so with that I will end off