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Alicia Juarrero - Why Context Changes Everything · Mahon McCann

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: At the beginning,
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: the first systemic properties were mechanical,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: in a sense,
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: were the notion of a machine as a holistic unit.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a big difference,
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: and that is usually a machine can be brought to its knees,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: metaphor,
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  SPEAKER_01: bad metaphor,
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  SPEAKER_01: with one part that gets damaged.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas somehow these conflict dynamical systems that emerge in the universe, whether it's
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Physical Bernard cells,
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: chemical BZ reactions,
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: living organism structures,
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  SPEAKER_01: they tend to degrade more gracefully than a machine.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: They kind of go out of kilter for a while,
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: but there's a persistence that allows this hanging together relationship,
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  SPEAKER_01: allows them to persist.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Alicia Uraro,
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  SPEAKER_00: thank you very much for joining me today to discuss your latest book,
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Context Changes Everything.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll probably mention Dynamics in Action as well,
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: which is like a huge,
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: huge book,
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: really,
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  SPEAKER_00: for intentionality and like a massive,
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: a massive work.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I suppose to start off with the framing of In Context Changes Everything,
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: you have a bit called the backstory,
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: which is kind of spelling out,
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: what's gone wrong?
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: What is it?
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: This worldview?
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: I had written down a load of things,
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
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  SPEAKER_00: materialism,
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  SPEAKER_00: nominalism,
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  SPEAKER_00: reductionism,
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  SPEAKER_00: efficient causality.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
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  SPEAKER_00: Causal closure, determinism, no free will.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's this huge thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: So I wondered,
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  SPEAKER_00: could you tell us a bit about how you see that backstory,
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  SPEAKER_00: what went wrong,
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  SPEAKER_00: and maybe we'll go through it kind of bit by bit for the first while.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think it boils down to two issues.
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  SPEAKER_01: The refusal to allow context and the role of context
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  SPEAKER_01: in our intentions, our behavior, our identities.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the dismissal of context from philosophy.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I think the reason that happens is twofold.
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  SPEAKER_01: One is,
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  SPEAKER_01: I think it happens because very early on,
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  SPEAKER_01: whether it's Aristotelian substances or Cartesian substances,
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  SPEAKER_01: the notion that essential properties that are internal to a stuff thing.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: So there's that part of it too.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's, we tend to reify everything and we have forever.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: I always joke around and say,
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: but that's because Parmenides won and Heraclitus lost way back within,
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: right?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: If we thought in terms of process, we might not do that.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: But,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because we think of properties as exclusively internal,
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: that also means that all the causal relationships,
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: the heavy lifting,
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  SPEAKER_01: or that phrase from somebody and I can't remember,
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: the heavy lifting,
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: maybe Wimps,
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  SPEAKER_01: Heavy lifting is always done from the bottom up,
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  SPEAKER_01: from the essential particulate properties,
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  SPEAKER_01: and of course,
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  SPEAKER_01: whether they were atoms,
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  SPEAKER_01: and now they are subatomic particles,
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  SPEAKER_01: or whatever the foundational,
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  SPEAKER_01: fundamental,
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  SPEAKER_01: tiny little invisible things are,
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  SPEAKER_01: then everything should issue from the bottom up,
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  SPEAKER_01: causal-wise.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_01: But that means that, therefore,
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  SPEAKER_01: You cannot have what I call coherent holes.
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  SPEAKER_01: That's the back story for that.
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  SPEAKER_01: Because if all the causal lifting is bottom up,
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  SPEAKER_01: the implication there is that there is no top down from whole to part causes.
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  SPEAKER_01: Why?
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  SPEAKER_01: Because holes are nothing but aggregates.
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  SPEAKER_01: If all is particulate at the bottom level, then
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  SPEAKER_01: Anything that seems like a coordination,
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  SPEAKER_01: like a synchrony,
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  SPEAKER_01: like a coherent holism must be illusory,
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  SPEAKER_01: must be our way of organizing the world,
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  SPEAKER_01: but it's not really real.
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  SPEAKER_02: Epiphenomenal.
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  SPEAKER_01: Epiphenomenal, to use a technical term, it's causally powerless.
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  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I think part of that, well,
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  SPEAKER_01: In the backstory in both books,
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  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned Kant,
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  SPEAKER_01: when he's looking at purposiveness,
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  SPEAKER_01: he realized that there's something about parts and wholes and wholes looping down
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  SPEAKER_01: to act on parts,
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  SPEAKER_01: and he uses the example in the Critique of Practical Reason.
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  SPEAKER_01: He says it's very curious that the tree as a whole,
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  SPEAKER_01: and that's what he means,
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  SPEAKER_01: produces the leaves,
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  SPEAKER_01: but the tree itself is in turn produced by the leaves.
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  SPEAKER_01: But
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  SPEAKER_01: Then Kant says, that is a form of causality unknown to us.
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  SPEAKER_01: Meaning what?
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  SPEAKER_01: Remember, Kant gets awakened from his dogmatic slumbers by Hume.
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  SPEAKER_01: Hume believes in linear mechanistic causes.
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  SPEAKER_01: So the notion of recursion in general,
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  SPEAKER_01: circular or spiral or whatever you want to call it,
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  SPEAKER_01: causality,
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  SPEAKER_01: simply cannot be allowed.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I think
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  SPEAKER_01: that goes hand in hand with the elimination of context.
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  SPEAKER_01: Because I think if you think of a whole as other than,
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  SPEAKER_01: a separate fund,
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  SPEAKER_01: its parts,
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  SPEAKER_01: that's the only way you can understand efficient causality,
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_01: Aristotelian efficient causality,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is what we had left with after the Newtonian science dismissed formal and
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: final cause.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: And
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  SPEAKER_01: People think I want to bring back formal and final codes,
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: but not in an Aristotelian sense,
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  SPEAKER_01: not in a Catholic Church sense.
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  SPEAKER_01: I want to rethink it in a contemporary science sense.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: So as soon as you have the inability to loop back down and feedback and Bayesian
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  SPEAKER_01: reasoning in the epistemology and feedback in neural networks and so on,
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  SPEAKER_01: then you have no way to understand a whole
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  SPEAKER_01: that is different from but not other than the parts that made it whole.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And my best example there is homeostasis.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: What is homeostasis?
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  SPEAKER_01: Homeostasis is a holistic property of an organism.
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  SPEAKER_01: No one cell is homeostatic.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Homeostasis is the property of a systemic, coherent, synchronized, coordinated whole.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: But coordination, synchrony, and holism, as I am using it, are systemic properties.
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  SPEAKER_01: They are collective properties.
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  SPEAKER_01: They are not properties of individuals.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I think all of the backstory backs up to that.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I was mentioning that I'm writing something now, and it would have been too long because
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: The French have a term that l'esprit de l'escalier,
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  SPEAKER_01: which means,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: after somebody insults you at a dinner party and then as you're going down the stairs,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: you go,
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
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  SPEAKER_01: I should have said this.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_01: I should have retorted in this way.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And it's sort of an esprit de l'escalier chapter.
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  SPEAKER_01: It's too long.
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  SPEAKER_01: And in a sense, I think there's so much about positivism and our inheritance of positivism.
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  SPEAKER_01: That was a whole section in the backstory that I left out, sort of the 20th century.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so you get
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  SPEAKER_01: Why sense-statem theory in positivism and verificationism?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
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  SPEAKER_01: Because everything has to be particulate.
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  SPEAKER_01: Not only the ontology has to be particulate,
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  SPEAKER_01: but therefore our epistemology has to only work in a particulate,
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  SPEAKER_01: you know,
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  SPEAKER_01: the smallest gauge possible.
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  SPEAKER_01: And so, anyway, I can go on with that forever because it seems to me that in America,
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: existentialism,
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  SPEAKER_01: phenomenology,
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  SPEAKER_01: Bergson emergentism,
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  SPEAKER_01: Freud,
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  SPEAKER_01: Marx,
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  SPEAKER_01: all of these people were relegated to literature departments,
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  SPEAKER_01: psychology departments,
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  SPEAKER_01: sociology departments.
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  SPEAKER_01: God forbid they should be allowed into Anglo-American philosophy departments.
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  SPEAKER_01: And it's the same problem.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same problem.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: So we have to have some kind of
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Respectable,
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  SPEAKER_01: science-based,
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  SPEAKER_01: and the reason I say respectable is because the last attempt at this ended up with
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  SPEAKER_01: dualism in a sense,
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  SPEAKER_01: and in dualism,
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  SPEAKER_01: then how does the mind,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is supposed to be an entirely separate and distinct substance,
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  SPEAKER_01: because of course you need two entities with their own essential traits,
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  SPEAKER_01: correct?
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: How does this one,
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  SPEAKER_01: which is outside of the realm of physicality,
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  SPEAKER_01: insert itself into the physical so that my arm rises when I intend to raise my arm
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  SPEAKER_01: without violating clausal-clauser?
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're bringing in, that violates conservation of matter and energy.
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  SPEAKER_01: You're bringing in something from outside.
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  SPEAKER_01: You can't do that.
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  SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't work.
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  SPEAKER_01: But that's because we had no understanding of what holes could be.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: If I can keep going,
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  SPEAKER_01: when I first read Order Out of Chaos by India Prigogine and the whole notion of
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: dissipative structures,
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  SPEAKER_01: I happened to be reading it on the same day.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_01: It's a long story.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: I was in jury duty.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: I was bored.
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  SPEAKER_01: I had nothing to do.
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  SPEAKER_01: I took a whole bunch of books I had to read.
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  SPEAKER_01: I wanted to read.
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  SPEAKER_01: And I read Kant's Pratique of Practical Reason,
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  SPEAKER_01: where he says,
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: look,
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  SPEAKER_01: this is a form of causality unknown to us.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: And here's Prigogine talking about Bernard cells and BZ reactions, which are exactly the same kind of
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Looping,
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  SPEAKER_01: recursive processes that allow holes to emerge,
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  SPEAKER_01: to self-organize,
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  SPEAKER_01: and loop back down and control their component parts as holes.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: We're going, that's it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: That did it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: That did it.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what precipitated dynamics in action.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: But that one was focused mainly on intentional causation.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: What I wanted to do was to think more broadly in this one.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_01: And think about, well, how does that apply more broadly than just intentional causation?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: So sorry, I'm long winded.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: You should just interrupt me.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: No,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean,
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: you've touched on most of the main points there in terms of this kind of circular
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: causality being excluded from the efficient causality paradigm.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's interesting that you don't root that specifically in Newton.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because it kind of seems like that it goes back even further in terms of Western philosophy,
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  SPEAKER_00: this idea of primary properties as internal properties,
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  SPEAKER_00: that then kind of leads to this later.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
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  SPEAKER_00: it might be a bit of a tangent,
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  SPEAKER_00: but I don't know if you know the work of Ian McGilchrist,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: the master and his emissary.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_01: I do, I do, I've got it here someplace.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
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  SPEAKER_00: I spoke to Ian before and he makes kind of a point about this particular kind of
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: materialist worldview where he argues for different epistemologies for the left
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: hemisphere and right hemisphere,
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: basically one that's more a type of attention that's very particular focused and
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: another that's focused on the wider picture.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And this particular one really seems to be very much within that tradition.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's like a very much a narrowing down of reality focus.
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  SPEAKER_00: to whatever is at the bottom of it,
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  SPEAKER_00: this kind of dead dirt matter,
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  SPEAKER_00: and that that's the really real thing.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: But that seems to ignore our own role in seeing that,
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  SPEAKER_00: understanding it,
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: comprehending it,
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: can't explain the entire of our own consciousness.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: I wonder if those ideas are, I mean, how do you see epistemology in that?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: I would like for epistemology to piggyback on ontology,
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: but I think that's the wrong way around since Kant.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: People tend to think of it the other way around, right?
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: You think conditions of possibility of cognition and so on,
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  SPEAKER_01: and then let's see what that suggests about reality.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_01: I can afford to say, you know what?
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care if I've got this wrong.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: I can play around and let's, what have we thought?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ontology first, and then hopefully the epistemology would piggyback on it.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: And in a sense,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_01: you have that,
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  SPEAKER_01: as you just implied,
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: suggested with Aristotle,
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: because the reason why Aristotle
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: did not want circular causality was because that would mess up his first cause prime mover.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that goes all the way through Western.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know,
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: what you need is,
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: all right,
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: so all the causes go back,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: but then there's got to be at some point where the cause of that is completely
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: other than.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if, in fact,
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: coherent dynamics can self-organize then we're talking a whole different game and
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: that's what i find so fascinating about dissipative structure theory the whole
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: notion of complexity theory and i think that sort of goes back to when i was doing
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: my dissertation again back in the day and the i
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: The idea was it cannot be that one neuron pushes another neuron, which pushes another neuron.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: Even if you have the two hemispheres, it can't work that way.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: And at the time,
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_01: even engineering and operations research were talking about network dynamics,
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: network theory,
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: systems dynamics.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's got to be a system.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow,
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: these neurons have to organize into a system,
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_01: meaning a network-type property that has emergent properties.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so once you allow that the network has emergent properties,
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: which if you read,
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: do you know the work of Carl Gillette?
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Carl Gillette suggests that even the physics has finally grudgingly allowed that,
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: for example,
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: superfluidity,
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: superconductivity,
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: that they have properties that the component parts don't have.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: But Carl Gillette,
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: in that book of his,
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: it's 2016,
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: he says,
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: even the physicists are reluctant to this day to allow that the
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: Dynamic as a whole can affect the components.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think complex dynamical systems theory gives you a way of understanding that
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: kind of top-down causality of the homeostasis as a systemic emergent property.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you will, in my view, does sort of set the parameters.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, all right.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: This is the range of viability and health of an organism.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: If you're right in the middle, you're probably the healthiest or thereabouts.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you start hitting the edges, then you're hitting the edges of your adaptive range.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: But that parameter becomes a normative thing.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: Homeostasis, in a sense, sets the normative conditions of what health is.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can't find health in a variable, in one organ.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: Health is this parametric possibility space that if you're within this subset of
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: all the ranges of each of the organs and each of the connections and so on,
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: then you are a healthy person.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you start, you can bear a little bit.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I like it because it gives me
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: In a sense, we start focusing more on waves rather than particles, right?
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And do you think you focus more on biology than physics?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you start off with the physics and then go the other way,
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: that's where you end up with,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: but now this is kind of going back.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you cannot blame every science.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Every science wanted to be physics.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: Economics, sociology, psychology, everybody was looking for
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_01: universal,
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: eternal,
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_01: unchanging laws that you just could plug in the initial conditions and crank out
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: the output as if you were cranking out eclipses.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because after all,
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_01: we're so little and the universe is so big and yet we can predict these eclipses so
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_01: far ahead.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, you can't blame people for... Isn't that the first philosophical realization as well?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Tales or something?
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: You can't blame people for thinking that way.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: But even Stephen Hawking...
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: suggested,
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: I think,
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: at one point that the 21st century would be the century of complexity,
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: and in a sense,
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: it'd be the century of biology.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the more appropriate metaphor or model, I think, is the biological.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it took until we started to understand ecosystems and through flows of
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: energy and matter flows and ecosystems and how
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_01: People thought, oh, let's say the, I don't know, the coral reefs.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, but this one little plankton really doesn't much matter.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's not right.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: We're shedding the coral reef.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, until we realize the coral reef is nothing but so much more than both.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: All of these,
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: including the,
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: so once we started understanding that you can't just say,
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: we can dismiss this one thread in the tapestry.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And as soon as we realize that it's the interweaving of these that matters,
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: then,
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: and I think maybe the newer generation,
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: which has been more used to the emphasis on ecology,
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: on this sort of thing and this problem,
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: that it rings more easily to them than...
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: than it did two others.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think there was more of a mechanistic kind of metaphor going on?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_00: This idea of like the universe is a machine, a clockwork universe, the weirdest machines.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Those two just sort of went beautifully together.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, in a sense, you get Tycho Brahe and you get Kepler and you get Newton and so on.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it all worked out beautifully.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think at the beginning, the first systemic
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Properties were mechanical in a sense, were the notion of a machine as a holistic unit.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a big difference,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: and that is usually a machine can be brought to its knees,
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: metaphor,
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: bad metaphor,
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: with one part that gets damaged.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas somehow these conflict dynamical systems that emerge in the universe,
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: whether it's physical Bernard cells,
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: chemical BZ reactions,
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: human or living organism structures,
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: they tend to degrade more gracefully than a machine.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: They kind of go out of kilter for a while, but there's a,
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's a persistence that allows this hanging together relationship,
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: allows them to persist in a way that if you want to add the other science,
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: and that is old classical thermodynamics,
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: that everything was winding down to thermal equilibrium and heat death.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot fathom.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's curious because classical thermodynamics in Darwin were sort of contemporary.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yet Darwin shows an increase in complexification,
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: and classical thermodynamics argues for an inevitable degradation of energy
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: potential into homogeneity.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas we get increasing heterogeneity as the universe has evolved.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's kind of where the agency comes in as well,
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: because it's like when you point out like a machine,
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_00: like with a lot of the artificial intelligence stuff,
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: it's like,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: OK,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: it's great at playing chess or it's great at playing Go.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: But like if you try and teach it, you know, to draw a picture and do chess, it's no good.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like it doesn't generalize,
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: whereas we're capable of doing maintaining our self-organization and increasing it
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_00: across many different domains.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Despite the fact our environment changes,
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: we seem to be able to adapt to the environment and to become qualitatively,
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: not entirely different,
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: but certainly to develop quite rapidly and adaptively,
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: whereas dead material things don't really seem to do that.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: But you wonder, I absolutely agree.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: AI, as of today, does not generalize that well.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: that well compared to a four-year-old, a three-year-old.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: But once you add not just text, which is what the LLMs do right now, the large language models is text.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Once you add sensory cameras and speakers and audios and microphone and so on and all of that,
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: gets fit back into a loop.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: Then you wonder what might happen.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in Dynamics in Action,
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: and even in this one,
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mentioned the notion of deep dyslexia and surface dyslexia,
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_01: and how these machines can make the kind of mistake where they preserve semantic meaning,
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: which to me was unbelievable.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's Jeffrey Hinton's work from the
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: 80s or thereabouts it's a it's a long time ago and notice that jeffrey hinton is at
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: the front of ai work and he was the one who resigned from was it google or whoever
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: uh because he's concerned and so on so you know i i'm not that i'm not that quick
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: at dismissing ai automatically um
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_01: But it's going to take a while.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly the problem of generalization is an issue that we need to understand.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, I mean, I totally agree with you.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: The computational model of AI, I think, is very limited by those things.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: But if it was on a more biological basis, I think they could probably overcome some of them.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: But I guess just in terms of its comparison to us,
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think that trying to create artificial intelligence has made us realize how
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: different we are to just these kind of computer.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: the computer metaphor of the mind,
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: basically,
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_00: which seems to result when you apply the worldview that you're talking about to
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: human beings and to our,
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: like it's failed to explain really how we function.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: Would you say that's fair?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's fair.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think that once we got neural networks and these backprop algorithms and
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: then it's not, they're not really programmed.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that old-fashioned programming that, you know, here's the lookup table a la Turing, right?
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then you plug in the input here and it'll kick out the output there.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: If you notice, the terminology that tends to be used here is they're trained.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I find that fascinating because I keep going, so what's the difference between that and my parents?
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Hits the back proper.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: He said, no, you did that wrong.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: You're this far away from getting it right.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that was the constant.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so sooner or later you start.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: What happens?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: You start learning.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: A human starts learning.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think what that means, and this goes back to Plato's notion of the amino and everything else, right?
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_01: What that means is that
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_01: We start organizing categories in terms of which we organize the world because,
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: grant you,
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: that's the data set we got,
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: correct?
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_01: I always say,
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: when I lived in California,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: where there are so many Asian people,
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: after two or three years,
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: I got pretty good.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: at distinguishing between Cambodians and Japanese and Chinese and Vietnamese,
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: I could tell the difference.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: They did not all look just East Asian.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: Correct?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: But once you're back in the East Coast where there are not that many Asian Americans,
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: I notice I've lost that ability to create finer and more precise categories,
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: if you will.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: So,
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: So we start organizing the world into categories.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And at the beginning, famous example, you know, you're teaching a child dog.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_01: You go dog and point to a boxer.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Dog, you point to a chihuahua.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_01: Dog, you point to that.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_01: And then all of a sudden a cat goes by and the kid says dog.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Why?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_01: Because the category of the kid is simply four legs, little ears like this, and that's a dog.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, that's a cat.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so now they've got to differentiate more precisely, correct?
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, that's what learning consists in.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: And the advantage of that is that the category you're learning is kind of like homeostasis.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: What I mean by that is homeostasis as a normative value can be satisfied by a lot
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_01: of different combinations of,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: well,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: if the glucose is a little bit too high here,
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: but well,
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: if you
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: lower this other enzyme on the other side, then it'll balance out.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there are a lot of different, it is what biologists call degenerate.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: I love that we're a lot of different paths to get to the same emergent output.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: I was very tempted to call this book In Praise of Degeneracy.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: Don't push it.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: Don't push it.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: But do you see what I mean?
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_01: So in a sense, our categories, our epistemological categories are degenerate, meaning
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: You've got the notion of dog,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: and that allows an awful lot of variations within it to the point where I remember
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: the first time Shar-Pei's,
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: those Chinese dogs,
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: were brought into the United States.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody had ever seen a dog that looked like that all wrinkly,
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: but nobody had any problem identifying it as a dog.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: So how do we do that?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: We do that because the categories that we organize are...
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: The word I use,
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: which I wish I could find...
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: The other word was degenerate.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: I wasn't going to use that.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's multiply realizable.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_01: Correct?
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: There are multiple ways of realizing, of actualizing the category dog.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: But that's true for homeostasis.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: There are multiple ways of realizing...
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_01: the category of homeostasis.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: There are multiple ways of realizing the category hurricane or tornado.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I always joke with Stan Salty, who's a good dear friend, who's a biologist.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I said,
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: people instinctively realize that there are similarities between hurricanes and
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: people because they named the hurricanes.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the reason I say that is because these complex dynamical systems
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: seem to have the same antecedent conditions,
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: but if they're off by any minuscule amount,
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: they will take oftentimes entirely different trajectories.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: Entirely different trajectories.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And in a sense, that's the individuation of a hurricane.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it happens because of the
• 29:34
  SPEAKER_01: environment, the context it traverses as it goes along.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: But that's probably true.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: We become increasingly individuated over time as we grow up and become more
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: ourselves because we acquire these context-dependent characteristics that are
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: unique to that trajectory.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_01: In a sense,
• 30:03
  SPEAKER_01: what I wanted to do in this book is point out how I'm not convinced there's a sharp
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: qualitative leap between the non-living and the living,
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: or the living and the human.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: I think there are a lot of gradations in between, which is not to say that at each stage
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_01: Transition, you don't get novel emergent properties.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: That I absolutely want to maintain.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: But you get novel emergent properties at the chemical level, which you didn't have at the physical level.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: You get qualitative emergent properties at the biological level you didn't get at the chemical level.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_01: You get qualitatively emergent properties at the human level,
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: which you didn't get even at the chip level.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how we make those kinds of distinctions.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: Where are the qualities?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: that characterize the parameter that we're interested in,
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: the category that,
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: and I think those categories are real.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: And hopefully we acquire knowledge if we get it right, get the ontology right.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: and I mean,
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_00: in terms of like,
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_00: can we,
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: I heard Vervege talk about it before in terms of evolving the meta trait of evolvability.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: Our capacity to, you know, other animals can evolve, but then we can evolve our capacity to evolve.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: Correct.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: I love William Wimsatt's work on the notion of evolvability,
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: and he talks about it in terms of generative constraints,
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: which I really like a lot because one thing I try to do in this book is
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I started doing that in Dynamics in Action so many years ago.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that is, stop using the terminology cause because I just don't want to battle the physicists.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to battle the,
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: the scientist who's going to say,
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: as soon as I say,
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: the environment is,
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: and all that's not a cause.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, because for them, the concept of cause is exclusively energy transfer a la efficient cause.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to battle that because I'm going to lose that battle.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: So all right, so what terminology am I going to use?
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right, so how about constraint?
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because it does seem to me that mechanical engineers use the term constraint.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of them use the word constraint.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: But it's usually been used to mean a restriction of the possibility space,
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: a contraction of what is possible.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not true for the biologists.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: The biologists from way back when,
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: Howard Patti,
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Stan Salty,
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: Niels Eldridge,
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: a whole bunch of them,
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: talk about enabling constraints.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: Constraints that...
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: allow opening for new possibilities to arise.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that there are two kinds of enabling constraints, and one is spatial, one is temporal.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: The temporal example is the example I love,
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: which is the child on the playground swing,
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_01: which to me is a beautiful example of it ain't all efficient causality.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's more.
• 33:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not discounting efficient causality.
• 33:24
  SPEAKER_01: I want to say there's something else.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: The child needs to learn that it's not how hard the child kicks on a playground swing.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's when it kicks.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that timing does not impart energy.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: And yet, without that timing, the swing won't swing.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: Correct?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: And spatial constraints are the same.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: I ended up using two examples from playgrounds.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that is a teeter-totter, as the Brits say, or seesaw here in the United States,
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_01: depends on where the child or adult sits.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because of weight,
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: because of length of the plank,
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_01: because of all that,
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: that makes a big difference as to whether it can see so well enough.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: So spatial constraints matter.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: And over and above,
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like to use over and above,
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: but in addition to the energy efficiency,
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_01: the push off from the ground that the first
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_01: child on one end kicks the seesaw into action.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think that emergent constraints,
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: and since I started using that term,
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: people have asked me,
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: and I think I didn't explain it correctly enough,
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: because there seems to be a common tendency to say,
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: enabling constraint is anything that helps me do something.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, no, that's not what I mean by enabling constraint.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean by enabling constraints,
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: processes that do not impart energy directly,
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: but that contribute to linking independent processes together such that a new hole
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: can emerge.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like the weaving of the thread.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what I mean by emergent constraint.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you think in those terms, then you start being able to explain how
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: What are intentions?
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_01: Our intentions are new.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_01: The technical mathematical terms is dynamical attractor in a complex space that has
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_01: emergent properties and that once you're entrained in that attractor,
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: then you will tend to behave in this way.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And the emergent properties of those attractors in the brain are semantic.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: They can be affective, like or not like, that sort of thing.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: And because it is that human level intentionality that it's kind of like trying to explain,
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: because that's really excluded,
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_00: from the more materialist model of like counterfactual imaginings.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like I can picture a goal state in my mind and train actions towards it and,
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: win a game of football or something like that.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: That ability to do that is, I mean, central to being a human being.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of the thing we, you know, are trying to foster.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: And, and, and.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: What is imagination?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_01: And imagination meaning meaningful and so on.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that entrains with coordination of muscle movement.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got two entirely different dynamics,
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: one having to do with conceiving of the future and the other one with entraining
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: muscle movement and neuromuscular positioning and so on.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: to turn that proposed goal into reality, right?
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that is certainly what we understand as typically human.
• 37:21
  SPEAKER_01: I am not sure that there's, again, that big a
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: qualitative leap between that and maybe precursors.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying they're the same.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_01: Precursors.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: But I think our interest in ecology and, again, in nature.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_01: This morning, the newspaper, or is it the newspaper?
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think in the latest issue of Science or Nature magazine, we're not talking People magazine.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking Science.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: respectable science magazines about they think they found that primates name each
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: other that they have individual names or calls obviously it wouldn't be whatever
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: the individual calls identify individuals now i don't think we thought they could
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: do that sort of thing um
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: There are, or the, you know, the old chimps.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I was just going to say the red dot test in terms of their self-consciousness.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, the red dot test, and now they're saying elephants can do that.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_01: So the question of, I would be very surprised if there was a qualitative discontinuity.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_01: I would suspect that we're,
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: that we're going to,
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: but,
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_01: but that doesn't mean that they're not qualitatively qualitative differences at
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_01: each stage of the game.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: And of course we would say that we're the apex.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure we used to say that.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure we do that much anymore because we're certainly not the kindest.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: We're certainly not most people.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_01: We're certainly not, and so on and so forth.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: So, um, but, but,
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: Once you start thinking in these terms about how these properties can,
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_01: how these dynamics can self-organize and how emergent properties can,
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: in fact,
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_01: look back down and can be explained in a perfectly scientifically explained way by
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: a reconfiguration of the possibility space,
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: a production of a new
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: in a trajectory space,
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: and I think I use it in,
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_01: it's the one image I use in both books,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: and that's Waddington's Creoles,
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: Waddington's adaptive landscapes.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: I think that allows us to imagine what that might look like,
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: and that is that we think of a possibility space,
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_01: and then
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of vague, and then it gets increasingly specified.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: We're specified as in specific and individuated and so on as we go along,
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: and that's probably true phylogenetically.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_01: See,
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: one kind of constraint that I think we ignore,
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: and that's due to the Newtonian backstory,
• 40:36
  SPEAKER_01: and that is temporal constraints.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: We forget that Elia Prigogine,
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_01: who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977,
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_01: I guess it was,
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: for these dissipative structures.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: I had the good fortune to meet him in person several times,
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: including he invited a group of us to his apartment for dinner.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: That was amazing.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he would say often,
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: and I've never seen it written down,
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: but he'd say it often,
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: these systems carry their history on their...
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas Newtonian science is ahistorical.
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: Individual independent entities are plunked into space and time,
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: and the equations of Newtonian science can go backwards as well as forwards.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas for Prigogine,
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: it's really important to understand that,
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_01: and that's why he kind of liked Whitehead,
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: the notion of apprehensions and stuff.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea that you carry your history on your back,
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: and so that doesn't mean you're determined by the past.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: Doesn't mean that your genetics deter...
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's always open,
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: but it does influence the possibility space,
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: and I think we all
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: intuitively appreciate that and yeah and it's like that it constrains the
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_00: affordances that we can see in the landscape like our personality our history our
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_00: culture you know it constantly that's that's like the world that we live in which
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_00: is struck me more and more is that there's a sense that because a lot of what i'm
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: working on obviously is the internet and social media and these things that are
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: creating new constraints and new norms i mean a lot of the problems with them is
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_00: that it's completely unconstrained it's just released this kind of new world and
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: with very little constraints in it and then people are learning norms from there
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: and then applying them in the real world uh which is yeah creating a lot of chaos
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_00: but um this kind of constraint uh well i wanted to i suppose to move a little bit
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: towards ethics and culture is because you describe
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: ethics as being about constraints, values being about constraints.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_01: About enabling as well as restrictive constraints.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think...
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: One example somebody gave me once was,
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: in a sense,
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: the rules of the sonnet are very strict.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: But the rules of the sun allow us to create a beautiful form of poetry that was not possible before.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: So I think there are certain rules that open up possibilities.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: There are certain rules that infringe the old status quo and do not allow for change,
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: and they are restrictive.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Those, to me, are the top-down governing constraints.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the countdown governing constraints are necessary because you need stability.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_01: So if you allow enabling constraints to encourage and afford new possibilities to open up,
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: that you want those new possibilities to achieve some level of stability so you
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: don't get lost so you need some kind of ratcheting uh system that you don't go back
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: down all the way down you that you that's why the notion of scaffolding i think has
• 44:22
  SPEAKER_01: become popular because a scaffold in a sense is a point of stability that allows
• 44:27
  SPEAKER_01: the thing to stay stable for a while until the next
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: move happens.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you need that.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and I would assume that social organization is one enabling constraint like that, correct?
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you didn't have a social group,
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: maybe even minimal,
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: a family,
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: that sort of thing,
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: you can't,
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: there are a lot of things you can't achieve on your own.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: So you need the,
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: again,
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: you need the collective dynamic with its emergent properties to allow the
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_01: individual to flourish
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: and have their potentiality be developed more within that social organization than otherwise.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot be a citizen.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot be a teacher.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot be without a social organization.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: Those require social organizations before those features of a human person can exist.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: can even happen.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: They are conditions of possibility.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: But what you want to do,
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: and this kind of ties in with our generative notion of evolvability,
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: you want to make sure those top-down emergent constraints that then stabilize and
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_01: become constitutive or governing constraints are flexible enough to be responsive
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: to the context.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: If they're not,
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: if they're so rigid that they are totally irresponsible,
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: they are,
• 46:05
  SPEAKER_01: in a sense,
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: they are not fit for purpose because they're not.
• 46:10
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a very tricky metastability.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's not the stability of all-time thermodynamics where stability is,
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: think of a bowl on the bottom of a cup.
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_01: It just sits there because that's it.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: Nowhere to go and it does nothing.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: From there on in,
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: it might roll around at the beginning when you throw it,
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: but sooner or later it settles down to the bottom of the cup and it stays there.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's old classical thermodynamic stability.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: Thermal equilibrium.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: That is not what nature does.
• 46:45
  SPEAKER_01: What nature does is it achieves this level of metastability.
• 46:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's what homeostasis is.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's what a healthy ecosystem is.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: An unhealthy ecosystem is where it's lost,
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: where the constitutive constraints,
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_01: the enabling constraints,
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: the constitutive constraints,
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: the governing constraints of an ecosystem have lost their hold on the dynamics.
• 47:11
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing starts teeter-tottering until it finally disintegrates, unless it works.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: But on the other hand, if, and we see that most of all in social organizations or in families, where the
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: entrenched constraints are so strong that they become brittle.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_01: They become maladaptive.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_01: They become not fit for purpose.
• 47:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so then the value they had I think gets lost.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: And standard
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_01: Value systems have learned how to modify them so that they continue being fit for purpose.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_01: If you are in an Abrahamic tradition, you believe thou shalt not kill.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: But very quickly we say, thou shalt not kill except in self-defense.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we start finding...
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: exceptions to those rules that allow them to be more flexible and more fit for purpose.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_01: What people tend to say is,
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: ah,
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: you're opening up the door to subjectivity and the slippery slope to relativism.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_01: And my answer to that is what Aristotle, I think, once answered when
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_01: I remember he was a biologist and so on,
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: and there are treatises where he talks about medical education and so on.
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not suggesting we go back to classical medicine.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_01: But here's the point.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_01: Does that mean people shouldn't go to medical school?
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of course not.
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: You learn the principles, and the principles are true, and the principles hold.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: But the difference between a good doctor and a hack
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_01: is the one who,
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: when he then sees the patient,
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: cannot adapt those principles to this particular circumstance.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_01: When I used to teach this in class, the only way I could do this was go like this.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you get a feel for it.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: That interface between the principle and the practice, I'm not sure that can be taught.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that can be
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: uh algorithmized or whatever the term is and in that sense the point you were
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: making earlier about the ai might not generalize might not that's that's an open
• 49:49
  SPEAKER_01: question for me but that trend that that interface between the principle and how am
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: i going to implement it here context
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: Context.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so Aristotle's answer was very good in that regard.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_01: He had theoria, but he also had praxis.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_01: And he didn't think that there were three areas in life that he thought,
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: theoria,
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: but it's missing something.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: And one was medicine, one was law, and one was ethics.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: In all three of those cases, you need to add the context.
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: And therefore, instead of ending up having teoria, you end up having phronesis.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's the argument for phronesis, for wisdom.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_01: Wisdom being the ability to take the principle and apply it to these conditions at this moment.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why, in a sense, he thought ethics could only be taught
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: almost as an apprenticeship,
• 50:56
  SPEAKER_01: the way you would medicine,
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: the way at the time,
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_01: the way you would look,
• 51:00
  SPEAKER_01: because that's what the
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_01: Shoemaker, the cobbler's child learned.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the way the ironmonger's child learned.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: And what they learned was after years of seeing the particular,
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: you would see a lot of the exceptions that,
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: and then the mentor,
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: the teacher would say,
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_01: no,
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: no,
• 51:26
  SPEAKER_01: in this condition,
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: we don't do that.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: We do this.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: Or maybe the mentor couldn't even articulate that, but the mentor would do it differently and the
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: then the apprentice would see the difference in how in these cases that's what would happen.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_01: And clearly our attempt to teach ethics through Chekhov decalogs or Kant's
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_01: categorical imperative doesn't seem to take very well.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of a do as the rule says, not as I do.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't seem to be very effective.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_00: And it's kind of it's an argument for that Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition,
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: which is like the deontological aspect of it really seems to be very like almost
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_00: like natural laws,
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_00: like that there's moral laws that you can just apply infinitely in any circumstance.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Kant's categorical imperative is that.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously,
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_00: the famous example of Adolf Eichmann,
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_00: who said he was following Kant's categorical imperative,
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_00: kind of backfired on that.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_00: So with the virtue ethics, I mean, because context matters there, conditions matter, how you apply it.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_00: They're like skills, perspectives, character traits.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's a type of person that you need to become in order to be ethical, in a sense, a virtuous character.
• 52:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then I think Martha Nussbaum takes it
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: one step further,
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_01: when she looks at the capabilities approach,
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_01: when she says,
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: look,
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: and there are structural conditions that either afford the possibility of human
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: flourishing for everybody,
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: or they restrict the possibility of flourishing for everybody.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's not as if we're tabula rasa and we become people on our own.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_01: It's that maybe the structural conditions may be such that this is what I call the
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: context-independent constraints,
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_01: and that is they operate as sort of background conditions that are so taken for
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: granted we don't even realize that they are either affording or entrenching and
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: restricting because they're so accepted,
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: they're so commonplace.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: that you don't ever notice it and I think that's why in a sense port cities
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: historically have been the most innovative cities on ports because invariably the
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: port meant they would get visitors from the other side of the globe and all of a
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_01: sudden they would see something different or a
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_01: different way of looking at the world or a different way of eating or a different
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: way of behaving in certain ways.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it foregrounded what is normally left in the background.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that helps a lot.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so, in a sense, those are enabling constraints.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that you're in a port means you have an enabling constraint that
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: These are the sorts of people you're going to run into.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_00: And it's on that because there's a new,
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_00: well,
• 54:41
  SPEAKER_00: it's not new,
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: 2013,
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_00: Florida wrote a paper called Infraethics.
• 54:46
  SPEAKER_00: This idea that infrastructure,
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_00: that the new ethics or the ethics we need for this attentional age is about the infrastructure,
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_00: the invisible attentional infrastructure,
• 54:55
  SPEAKER_00: which really are these enabling constraints that you're talking about and the
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: affordances that they offer and don't offer.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: Correct, or don't offer correctly.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_01: And they're showing the background that people don't realize them.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was probably started by the deconstructionists sort of
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: foregrounding the margins in the background,
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: that kind of thing.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite a Marxist kind of thing as well.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not a huge fan of that, but it does seem to have some in a negative way.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm not either.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it suddenly occurred to me, as I say, I'm writing this other book,
• 55:33
  SPEAKER_01: added backstory,
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: and that is what all of these had in common,
• 55:37
  SPEAKER_01: phenomenology,
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: existentialism,
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: Marxism,
• 55:42
  SPEAKER_01: Freudian psychology,
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: deconstruct,
• 55:45
  SPEAKER_01: all of them somehow tried to bring context back in one way or the other,
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: or one misguided way or not,
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: but they all were trying to bring context back into the picture,
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: and certainly Anglo-American philosophy
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_01: Stop that cold.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: This is not the way we do things at Oxford and Cambridge and so on.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is not the tradition of positivism.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is not science-informed philosophy, which is what we're aiming towards.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_01: And it just stopped it cold.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: For a while there, I thought it was Anglo-American prejudice against the continent in Europe.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: But no, I've come to the conclusion it was Anglo-American prejudice against contexts.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: that's that's the real threat and the problem is it's messy see the nice thing see
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: the nice thing about newtonian science is it's so neat right i think that's also
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: the appeal of platonic forms it's so neat and tidy and perfect and set you know
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: it's it's perfect
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas complex dynamical systems are messy.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: Once you bring in context, you bring in locality.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: You bring in place instead of space.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_01: Or you bring in place in addition to space.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: And,
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: a family dynamic is a unique place that has nothing to do with the physical space
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_01: that might be around it.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's messy.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_01: And that means there's no clean, algorithmic,
• 57:26
  SPEAKER_01: look down, look up table that will give you all get, tell me what I should do.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: If this is the situation, this is what I should do.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's, that's what we all tend to want to do.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's why when things get messy, there's always politically the call for law and order.
• 57:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 57:43
  But,
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: but,
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_01: but the question then is when,
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: what kind of order,
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: like,
• 57:47
  SPEAKER_01: like shutting the whole thing down and freezing the whole thing.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that doesn't solve anything.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's not the way that nature, that nature does it.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: nature reorganizes and brings in more of what used to be externalities into the
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: system and creates a larger coherent whole,
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: which is kind of one thing I like about this idea.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's like,
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: it's as if Spinoza's Conatus,
• 58:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm getting into trouble by thinking this,
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: not convinced about,
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: but I hope this is the case,
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: Spinosus Cornatus is a sort of a tendency of the universe to create even more
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: comprehensive dynamic holes.
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: But those dynamic holes are not block universes.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_01: They are not rigid monoliths.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: They are articulated,
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_01: internally differentiated dynamics that allow for the integrity of each one of
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_01: those
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_01: while at the same time achieving a greater whole, a greater dynamic.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: I like the way that... I hope that that's correct.
• 59:07
  SPEAKER_00: Greater levels of complexity.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it does seem to come down.
• 59:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, is the universe complicated or just complex?
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like if we can algorithmically do the whole thing, great.
• 59:16
  SPEAKER_00: But it doesn't seem like that that's the world we live in or that's the kind of creatures we are.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: Complicated is...
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_01: In principle, it might be easy.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you look at it.
• 59:26
  SPEAKER_01: I gave a talk.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_01: I enjoyed it a lot near Houston in Texas.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been there.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the fields of those oil fields, how does anybody keep track of what flow is going through which pipe?
• 59:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is so unbelievably complicated.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not complex in the way that a little scum of pond in your backyard has a
• 59:52
  SPEAKER_01: lot more interdependencies that change the components.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_01: See, the components of those pipes in the Houston oil field don't change.
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: They don't widen their diameter of the pipe or narrow it down or reconnect to
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: something else the way our brain,
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: you lose your hearing and all of a sudden that auditory part of the brain gets
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_01: filtered in by another modality,
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: maybe sight,
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember which,
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_01: gets connected to it.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_02: A machine does not do that.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas that seems to be sort of a tendency to preserve coherence and to find
• 1:00:43
  SPEAKER_01: coherence even when there's something that isn't quite right to try to make it.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's why when people,
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: in a sense,
• 1:00:50
  SPEAKER_01: when people talk about,
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: oh,
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_01: these AI systems confabulate and they hallucinate.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_01: Do you remember Gazzaniga's work on the split brain?
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what those flip-brain patients were doing.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: They were coming up with stories to try to make sense of the two totally different
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: inputs that they were not being able to coordinate in their own brain.
• 1:01:15
  SPEAKER_01: That's very similar, it seems to me.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: We have a tendency to synchronize, to coordinate, to... It's that sort.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_01: In fact,
• 1:01:29
  SPEAKER_01: if we believe that matter and energy are interconvertible,
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_01: then in a sense a molecule is nothing more than,
• 1:01:37
  SPEAKER_01: it's nothing other than,
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: coordinated,
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: synchronized atoms.
• 1:01:45
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think the problem is the substance ontology then?
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do we need a Heraclitus?
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, if we just mirror the nouns, we'll actually be better at understanding the world.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, poor David Bohm tried that.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, poor David Bohm, the Nobel Prize winner,
• 1:01:59
  SPEAKER_01: tried to what did he call it the real mode I can't remember what he called he said
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: what if we made our language be based on the verbs instead of the nouns right yeah
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_01: yeah yeah but but but I think ecosystem ecosystemic thinking helps a lot because
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: they're
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: we are now focusing on process and on the constraints on those processes that
• 1:02:23
  SPEAKER_01: enable them to cohere and the ones that destabilize,
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_01: that break apart,
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: that and so on.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe just if we focused on process and then that would mean that what we used
• 1:02:36
  SPEAKER_01: to think of as sub-sensors merely like the intersecting nodes,
• 1:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: of two processes.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_01: Those intersections are what we used to think of as a thing, but they're really just intersections
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: of dynamic processes.
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: And if we started thinking that way, but it's not easy.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: No,
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: and that's,
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think,
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: again,
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: what I was saying,
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_00: I have sympathy for you trying to articulate these things.
• 1:03:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's such a non-intuitive way to think when we've been trained for so long to
• 1:03:06
  SPEAKER_00: look at the world in a particular way.
• 1:03:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that is simplistic in a sense.
• 1:03:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's very easy to just, you know, box things up and one thing hits another thing.
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's how it all works.
• 1:03:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's so clean.
• 1:03:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's so neat.
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_01: It looks so nice.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: But it isn't because a lot gets left out.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's the problem.
• 1:03:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very filtered view of the world that leaves an awful lot of the mess out.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: But the mess is awfully important.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, an image, really.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 1:03:37
  SPEAKER_00: A reduction of,
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: and you said kind of at the end of the book,
• 1:03:39
  SPEAKER_00: you said that it was about clearing a way or clearing out a path for something new.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: Like, do you see what's going to fill that clearing?
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_00: Do you see it happening in maybe academia or in culture?
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know,
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_00: do you think that that...
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: Again,
• 1:03:55
  SPEAKER_01: I keep harping on the same thing,
• 1:03:56
  SPEAKER_01: but I really think that eco-ecology,
• 1:04:02
  SPEAKER_01: might be a way of clearing a path for even individuals to understand that they have
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: a role and a part in this in the health and the future of this planet and that
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_01: because again these are not block
• 1:04:31
  SPEAKER_01: These are not block universes that are rigid and are top-down determined from the top-down.
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_01: The component can change the quality of the overall dynamic,
• 1:04:43
  SPEAKER_01: and the overall dynamic,
• 1:04:45
  SPEAKER_01: depending on that quality,
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_01: will affect the possibilities of the component.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a two-way street.
• 1:04:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if we realize that... I remember when...
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_01: ecosystemic thinking started,
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: there was almost a,
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: at times in some people,
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: almost a quasi-religious feel for this is something that we have an obligation to
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: contribute to that's bigger than ourselves,
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: that we will leave to the next generation,
• 1:05:22
  SPEAKER_01: that kind of thing.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so if by thinking in terms of enabling
• 1:05:30
  SPEAKER_01: as well as constitutive and governing constraints,
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: as well as efficient causes that we bring those in,
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: if that opens up more of a clearing,
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_01: it seems to me that it's worth just trying that way of looking at things.
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah,
• 1:05:49
  SPEAKER_00: and even the therapeutic angle,
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: to be honest,
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_00: as a young person,
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose,
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_00: who grew up in a world where it's like there's a lot of chaos and volatility and
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_00: having the ability to take action and to have this conception of self that's not
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_00: epiphenomenal really seems key.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:06:07
  SPEAKER_01: The fact that a small fluctuation or perturbation
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: can get amplified by the overall dynamic if it's at the right place and the right
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_01: time to really cause a huge change.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_01: I live in the United States and I look in the last few weeks at this change in the
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_01: social attitude of the country.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_01: How does that happen?
• 1:06:40
  SPEAKER_01: How does this one small
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_01: change that you think everybody knew the vice president from before that you
• 1:06:46
  SPEAKER_01: wouldn't have thought that how does that it's the right place at the right time
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_01: with people and it can get it can can make a difference a small change of an
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_01: individual can make a huge difference um at the right time at the right place you
• 1:07:04
  SPEAKER_01: know of course there are times when people
• 1:07:07
  SPEAKER_01: come up and it's not the right time, it's not the right place, and the voice gets lost in the cacophony.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: But there are times when it can get amplified and make a huge difference.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's an argument for taking it seriously.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what's going to be the big thing and what's not going to be.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, well, at least, I used to tell my students, if you don't vote, at least don't complain.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you've lost your right to complain if you didn't vote.
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:07:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care what else happens.
• 1:07:37
  SPEAKER_01: Don't ever complain if you didn't.
• 1:07:41
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much, Alicia.
• 1:07:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'll include the links to all your work.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_00: I really encourage people to read and start grappling with these ideas because I think you're right.
• 1:07:51
  SPEAKER_00: It is a clearing for future science that includes the stuff that was left out previously.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much.