Neoplatonism and the Path of Transformation | Dr. John Vervaeke
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- čas přidán 9. 04. 2023
- This is Dr. Vervaeke's keynote talk from the Consilience Conference.
This approach aims to cultivate wisdom through the connection between science and spirituality. Dr. Vervaeke delves into the importance of strong transcendence within naturalistic terms and proposes extended naturalism as a more comprehensive account of explanation. He outlines his plan to construct meta-convergent arguments to support his claims, including discussions on emergence, emanation, conformity theory, and the relationships between knowing and being.
Timecodes:
00:03:00 - Deep consilience as a connection between science and spirituality.
00:04:06 - Defining strong transcendence and its impacts.
00:04:44 - Extended naturalism as a comprehensive account of explanation.
00:11:42 - Generalization-discrimination trade-off and its importance.
00:15:22 - Probability in rolling a die and real information based on differences.
00:19:26 - Hole's argument about living things' causal power.
00:22:30 - Causal signals in living organisms and the need for higher level redundancy.
00:28:36 - Convergence of arguments supporting emergence and emanation framework.
00:32:31 - Where does actualization come from if the bottom level of reality is pure possibility?
00:34:22 - The need for both emergence and emanation in ontology.
00:38:14 - Emergence and emanation as completely interpenetrating.
00:41:34 - Pickstock's argument against gap-preserving distinctions.
00:44:22 - Debunking the theory-data distinction.
00:46:55 - Conformity theory and the interweaving of knowing and reality.
00:52:03 - Transjectivity being more real than subjectivity and objectivity.
00:53:14 - The inherently transjective nature of truth, relevance, life, and perception.
00:57:21 - Strong transcendence within extended naturalism.
01:02:17 - Reductionism as a presupposition causing difficulties in physics.
01:04:35 - Unifying knowledge and consilience for addressing the wisdom famine.
01:08:26 - Complexification of cognition and its relation to complexification in reality.
This brings ""As Above so Below"" to a next level.
What does that mean and where is it from?
@@peterrosqvist2480 its called the law of correspondence. Its from Hermeticism i don't fully agree with hermeticism and neither does John but from I can tell he is mentioning correspondence quite a bit
Lazy thoughts are powerful prompts. It's the most overlooked or insignificant thing that is odd in your day. I sometimes pray for people to notice one little thing about nature in their day, and if you catch one, it has magic in its meaning to self if an unknown problem arises. Thank you John.
Reductionism was the primordial nececity step în thinking for developing complexity level of it.
We could not develop complexity levels în thinking without it.
Anyway, it seems to me, at a moment, we must develop a new type of reductionism based on the new sintethis analized on complexity levels working together.
After all, the final reductionism must converge to the ONE. 😊
Concise, rich yet also very accessible. I see this new paradigm forming and not only here. Thank you! 🙏
In this articulation It reminds me of a paper I wrote in college about how I thought;
As we get the expansion of complexity we ascribe a higher moral standing to that complexity. ( we ascribe higher importance to the complexity of math, biology, thought in the minds etc...)
But as we go down in complexity we ascribe lower moral standing. ( we ascribe lower moral standing to micro organisms and as we move lower on the complexity pattern down into atoms and Quarks)
As we move closer and closer to 0 on the complexity levels we have a harder time 1. predicting through Schrödinger equation; that the system is even detectable and 2. Ascribing any moral standing to that system.
But as we move up the complexity of the pattern, it becomes detectable and as we detect the system we start have higher levels of understanding the system and how it manifests itself in the world. ( Sound slows down through a median for example)
As we become aware of the system starting at the 'bottom up' system, like John mentions near 26:33 the top down emination is how we can affect the system at the bottom.
And where we are able to affect the system we are actually interacting with that system at a higher ontilogical level. It seems to me that our higher ontilogical level is where we get the mobilization of Nietzches unmoralized "good and bad" Since we understand things at a higher level, anything under that level is seen as less than on the complexity of the observer.
While this is only the thoughts of someone with just a BA in philosophy, I still have a lot to learn to develop my ideas. And watch this a few more times to better understand because I could be completely off in how I'm understanding and articulating this Comment I'm writing.
The quote from this video I found profound was " You constrain probability enough it becomes actuality" I think if you applied this to all parts of your life you can create almost anything you want for yourself.
Thank you for sharing.
Scientific argument: If you increase the probability enough, it becomes actuality. If there is a 100% probability that the train is late, then the train is “actually” late. If there is only 20% probability it will be late, then there is 80% chance that it will actually be on time
Do you think that constraining is in any way linked to Xeno’s paradox? That you cannot move from A to B if you move in a series of successive steps, the same way that if you try to iteratively constrain probability that may be impossible. The train will never be “100%” on time the same way that we never really sentence someone with “100% accuracy” so I don’t agree with this theory. However, I think the probability is constrained enough to be intelligible for a given domain, not when it goes to 0.
Thank you for your insights and recap of that quote. It is a gem and happy it you dug it back up!😂
Im quite surprised that I followed your arguments so well. Likely, not an attribute of my intelligence, but rather your ability to communicate dense and otherwise inaccessible truths. Thank you John.
Ever since I delved through your awakening from the meaning crisis series, i have been glued to your content. I appreciate your time, your mind, and your wisdom JV ❤🍄 you opened my mind to a world i was ignoring, and ignorant of, and i am eternally grateful, and thoroughly enjoying after socrates.
Yeah I'll be doing this twice, peace. Made it back to 15 minutes, glad I went 12 minutes back and listened again, even pulled a clip. Thank you John, and Gregg and all the others who have helped get us here, the future is yet to be written. Credit unknown.
I absolutely fell in love with Neoplatonism after watching your videos. I feel that I align best with this belief system, if I can call it that.
Wow John! You argument just keeps getting clearer and clearer. I assume it’s partly because I have heard you make it multiple times in different ways, but my real sense is the clarity just keeps moving up levels (pun intended) Thank you as always 🙏
33:00 this point about actuality emerging from interplay of constraint and possibility is amazing. Major yin/yang vibes here... We are finally reaching a point where scientific language is starting to converge with the deepest layers of spiritual language. We've been seeing this happen with the bible being explained in psychological terms since Jung, but I am much more surprised to see the taiji being explained in terms of physics, extremely impressive.
John I'm 20 mins in and this may already be your best talk yet.
The timestamps in the description are fantastic too (unfortunately they're not creating video chapters on the actual timeline, I think it's an issue with the format)
Thanks so much John, and thanks to Gregg for putting the conference together, can't wait to see more from it 🙏
I feel that way each video he makes
Excited to listen to this. A few of your last talks have been great. I’ve been trying to understand my spirituality. I found your awakening from the meaning crisis series on the precipice of a “dark night of the soul”. This led to my spirituality which completely changed my life around, I’m happier than ever. I realize how contentious spirituality or religion can be yet it completely changed my life for the better. Coupling science and spirituality is needed within our culture.
Ok update, I’m 8 minutes in after 30 minutes of listening and notes lol. I’m an autodidact so I have to take notes every time you speak for true understanding.
I love you and I love your works. I am grateful to be alive to see how beautiful this world is. Thank you for opening the doors to perceiving and being an agent in the world. I hope I can meet you and learn from you in person one day. Godspeed!
So profound.
This talk caused a gripping, and many of the concepts I have imported over the past few years of your talks and dialogues came together into a beautiful synergy. Your work has changed my understanding of existence and reality, and my life. Thank you.
Thank you, John, for this extremely beautiful and profoundly moving lecture: one of your very best. Here are the fruits of much labor; here is genuine love of wisdom; here is a philosopher! Both people coming from a traditional religious background and secular materialists alike must grapple seriously with the concepts of emergence and emanation as you explain them if they are to avoid - at a minimum - a truncated view of reality.
I hope we can talk about that little "fundamental presupposition" at the beginning that you mention...😊
Much love as always.
My dear friend! It is so good to hear from you. Thank you for your kind comments. I look forward to us talking again soon.
I love that you mention EO Wilson, I met him as a biology grad student years ago and have been inspired by his idea of the merger of science and art / humanities to get some momentum to deal with metacrisis. ❤
Spot on! We really needed to get to this argument earlier than later. Thank you!
I’ve had to rewatch this one, it’s absolutely amazing!
John, you did an amazing job here! Thank you for that. God bless you.
Great work both of you!
I'm so glad you posted this! Can't wait to really dig in deep into this talk! It was, appropriately so, next level. ❤
This is wonderful. I keep sensing that reality is creative just like learning and living.
A strong presentation on this new paradigm. Thank you John it’s a pleasure to be able to listen to you present your work. This consilience is so exciting
Thanks for Sharing, cant wait to listen to everything that was talked about on the UTOK conference.
Incredible. You're answering my questions that I didn't know I had.
Excellent. Will be listening again.
BRILLIANT 🙌
Boom. That was quite a powerful revelation. Thank you for sharing and unfolding it in the manner that you do.
Outstanding talk, thank you
Transcendence Naturalism Greg & John Wow Thank you for uplifting humanity
Spot on on every single point. I have been arguing many of these (points) over the years, but this is by far the best summary of the issues and associated contemporary fallacies I have yet heard. Bravo!
Great talk!
"For the LORD God is a sun and shield." My mind was blown some many times, I don't know how I'm still alive. John's work has made a real difference on me.
This is great video about ontological studies and good for people who want to study more about academic research on the topics. The other cognitive scientists also think bottom line of reduction needs to be emergentism, respectful the feeling of thirsty when someone goes down to drink water. The human brain has prefrontal area which is central part of empathy and so on, this is what is also embraced in being able to quantum theories too. The Quantum Theory of Ontological Issues Seoul Version (by Prof Chang as Korean physics pro) also similarly construct its explanation. I didn't read the book yet, academic researches are very truthful in many aspects. Thank you very much for Dr.Vervaeke's video sharing.
Best lecture thus far
Just gained some massive XP listening to this... Feels like I'm close to another level up 😛
I have being waiting for so long to see science and spirituality working together. Very happy seeing more and more this topic in my timeline. Would that be third order cybernetic being born.
Thanks again for the wisdom, vervaeke. I'd really like to see a debate between yourself and Robert sapolsky. May try to set this up on my own channel.
I could sense the excited spirit of a new, meaningful frontier coalescing!
It would be great if there was a list of the books mentioned in the video, under the timestamps.
@30:00 this was good, I like the Wolfgang-Smith argument. It is defeated if Many World Interp. were true, or some sort of Decoherence ontology. But assuming those are not true then the QM argument looks good to me. The LHC certainly detects results that cannot be explained without "mixing" (a form of superposition) but the LHC itself is never in a superposition as a whole. By the way, this is why Schrödinger's Cat is a mis-gedankenexperiment (and gross anthropocentrism). The Cat itself is a decent measurement instrument. Also talk to Neil Turok: the "wavefunction of the universe" is a "highly dodgy concept, and is probably total nonsense." (I paraphrase.)
I enjoyed your point about "structure" vs "causality"
Maybe define "structure" as:
"An environment intention filter, a connection system between an local intent system and it's environment intent system"
or "Causality Filter"
Incredible and amazing! Please could you get Pickstock to join you in dialogos?
I love the question "what is the ontological status of logic?" What intellectual delight.
This wonderful argument: The grammar of knowing and being must match.
What the freaking hell top-down- bottom-up all the way. Universal grammar is not a metaphor 🎉 Aletheia. Conformity theory is plausible.
I am so grateful that someone is doing the REAL work of thinking. SERIOUS thinking. No bullshit. This is IMPORTANT.
The hallmark of ****actual**** scholarship in an era of "publish or perish" proliferation of garbage.
Can anybody find the Hole paper that presents the argument for living things' causal power? I would love to check it out but I cannot find it for the life of me.
That was great and spoke to a lot that I enjoy pondering on. It is interesting my up-down definition I describe the other way around. I wonder... is the heristic perspective similar to frames of reference, schemas etc?
11:18 “.. there’s a tension [attention] in that!” Well played! 😁
We need Neoplatonism in the culture.
Why?
Wonderful Talk! It happens that i just started reading "Science and Spiritual Practices" by Rupert Sheldrake. I Wonder what Dr. Vervaeke thinks about Sheldrake's work ?
Thinking about the world in terms of Emergence and Emanation is Brilliant! This almost sounds like a model for a system of wisdom generation? I’m curious if anyone has an ecology of practices that works for them? Mine lately seems to be listening to brilliant minds talk.😮
Does anyone know of the sources for the mathematical theorems Vervaeke reference at 17:56?
Moving from the study of 'reel' reality to the understanding of surreal realisations which in-form 'surreal' reality. This Earth in its totality is beyond real its surreal. Keep up the great work
Metaphysical Realism:
Reality = That which is.
That which is, that is nothing in particular (actual)), is by definition everything in general (potential).
0. Potential = Being
1. Actual = Becoming (actualized)
What appears as separate and opposite is in Reality - Continuum.
When you say that the mind is a higher-level thing, this resonates with Philosophical Materialism. Contrary to other kinds of materialistic philosophies, this system also considers ideas, concepts, and sensations as material. For example, Mi represents the world with its categories. M1 represents physical things, including waves, energy as studied in physics, etc. M2 represents the inner sensations and feelings of egos (any kind of ego). M3 represents ideas, theorems, concepts, etc.
In this system, Mi = M1 U M2 U M3.
Given that the sciences are always increasing our knowledge of Mi, we need a negative definition of matter. Thus, we have M as a general ontological matter. M is akin to an infinity of processes. We cannot say anything positive about M unless we are willing to do metaphysics. All we can say positively is about Mi.
Finally, we have E as the transcendental ego (not to be confused with idealism). It could represent any ego (like ours), but it is more like an institutional ego (Catholic Church in the middle ages, empires, philosophical schools, etc). This represents the idea that Mi is like a map of the universe and that we will never know some things about it (M).
By the way, a lot of the ideas given by Gustavo Bueno are inspired by Catholic theology. It is interesting that he created a sort of materialistic philosophy based on that.
Edit: when I say materialistic or materialism, you can understand this in the same way you are using "naturalism".
If you are interested, there is a book: Contemporary Materialsim: Its Ontology and Epistemology
I wish someone could tie this into a kind of phenomenology of alchemy and chemical addiction...
Would it be possible to get a list of references to the works and thinkers cited in this keynote?
You’re on fire, your ideas are absolutely psychedelic. You’re penetrating deep into the mind of god brotha, keep it up!
I’ve watched this video a few times and feel it makes important points. I have a few questions. Here’s one.
(at 8:20) “Reductionism is a flat ontology: only bottom level is real, higher levels are illusory.”
Does reductionism necessarily deny strong emergence? Does it necessarily say that higher levels are unreal? Why not reality for all levels? The apple is real; its molecules are real; etc. Analogy: typographic characters are real; words are real; sentences are real; paragraphs are real, etc.
Moreover, can lower-level entities be regarded as examples of strong emergence? Atoms emerge at a certain level. Protons, neutrons, and electrons emerge at a lower level. Etc. We may think of atoms as already existing, not emerging. But when protons are smashed, if the resultant sub-atomic particles are considered real, then why not call them strongly emergent?
I'm interested of the notion of receptivity. How would this fit into the emination and emergance framework? My initial seeing is a betweeness that affords high flexibility up and down so an appropriate response to the situation. This is what I experience in my Qi-Gong practice. This increases my receptivity to the world and makes possible more flow in interactions. Curious is this makes sense?
@32:00 that's a vague way of putting it. But poetically accurate I think. At the base marble level it's the fermions and bosons for sure (some say strings/branes, causal sets,... whatever bros!) The probability is not truly fundamental. It's our ignorance - we cannot watch the elementary particles at the Planck scale, and even at atomic scales our probes are disruptive, but more than that, there is entanglement, so information is non-local (to us, from our perspective). The actualization is not really a collapse of probability waves, it's just measurement records, which break entanglement structure. That gives classical appearances (which are real, not "emergent"). That said, level emergence is based upon all of this. But it is a longer essay to explain that, and I'm going to refrain for youtube comments! lol.
Dear John, please look up the book ‘Nietzsche and Zen’ by a Dutch scholar named André van der Braak. It’s a brilliant book in which Nietzsche enters into dialogue with Zen philosophers such as Nishitani and Dogen. I’m sure you’ll love it.
Thanks! Will do!
27:30 - You mentioned a subtraction-addition symmetry for moving on a ladder.
With respect to the basic process of "improving relevance", that it requires the
pendulum motion on the ladder.
This is very interesting for the intention to improve the definition of "distance" with
respect to "relevance".
So measuring "distance" might always be a function over "changes in frequency".
Is it distance between the relevance of two elements with the same property?!
1:06:36 Im just understanding Carl Gustav Jung right now 😂 thanks sensei
In Philosophical Materialism, we have a principle called "Symploké". It means that, ontologically, not everything is connected to everything else directly. In other words, it means that the world is discontinuous. Otherwise, we would not be able to know anything. This is similar to what you have described using differences as an argument against reductionistic systems of thought.
That's why Philosophical Materialism rejects monism.
By the way, your thoughts on information theory remind me of some passages in Incomplete Nature, by Terrence Deacon. Have you heard about that book?
Looks like Ken Wilber's 2nd tier is manifesting in the world. Post-postmodernism. I hope his contribution of Integral Pluralism is remembered.
Excellent! Well presented. Why not use the phantasy if the late neo- platonists themselves instead of Corbin?
Good point.
Thank you for your reply. If you have time, please see these videos on the phantasy of the late Neo-Platonists. There is more to come in this series. Contains icons similar to Dr. Smith's...
part 8: the phantasy and world formation czcams.com/video/f38WPM3TX3U/video.html
part 9: Notes b4 Plato: world formation czcams.com/video/jvSffXLsdFU/video.html
Part 10: VEHICLE OF THE SOUL, czcams.com/video/jvSffXLsdFU/video.html ...@@johnvervaeke
While I‘m totally sold on Vervaeke‘s “neo-neoplatonism,” I am surprised and confused he makes no reference to Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. To my mind, Whitehead represents another great reimagining of neoplatonism for the contemporary scene.
That is only because of my ignorance. I am now in a very deep dive into Whitehead’s work and process ontology and theology. I have a video from Wednesday with Matt Segall and another next Wednesday with him addressing this in depth. Thank you.
@@johnvervaeke Thank you for replying. I will definitely check both videos out. I studied Whitehead at the Claremont School of Theology a few decades ago, and his influence both theologically and philosophically made a big and lasting impression on me. Unfortunately and despite Plotinus’ profound influence on the Abrahamic traditions, especially in regards to their mystical strains, I was taught little to nothing about Plotinus and neoplatonism in the four seminaries I attended. It has only been in the last few years that I’ve become acquainted with what I now view as the foundation for a spirituality and religious mysticism up to the task of overcoming the corrosive nihilism of this postmodern age.
Am I understanding correctly that there is a sense in which the poles are singular, and as we approach the middle multiplicity emerges? Ie at the bottom 'atoms' (in the metaphorical sense -- whatever it may be, quarks, energy, ...), and at the top we also seem to converge towards something that is simply consciousness/knowledge? Anyone who wishes to educate me or flesh this out/make it more coherent, please please do! Thanks a million
What's book would you recommend to an introduction to a Neoplatontic ontology?
It is all intuitive for f you have been voyaging through the universe for a while. Have a strong background in biology helps. Evolution maps this landscape and reveals the origins of reality itself. ❤
@23:00 🤣 that was extremely funny. In fact entanglement is essential, for without it we have no superposition and revert to classical dynamics, which is deterministic and reductionist. Most physicists do not know this. The GPT folks probably do, but might not have looked into ti (they only establish entanglement and superposition are inseparable, so physically equivalent in any GPT.) in fact, I could probably explain to John, entanglement is part of the _base marble_ that permits all the high level top-down causation he advocates is "real". On that I agree with him. The levels are meaningful.
Thank you for a very thoughtful comment. I think that the argument you point to is very relevant and I do seek to integrate it with the arguments I have advanced.
what are the legal implications if there is no distinction between facts and values?
You are honest about the nature of reality and a more truthful legal system forms that realizes it is inside a religion and it can consciously choose to be at war or at peace with other religions rather than claiming to be objective
@9:18 yeah, "what it shares with other things," but also _relations it has with other things._Note that relationalism and/or your "shareism" can support dualism or pluralism. Physical things, or just spacetime itself, can have properties shared with non-physical reality. You cannot use physical experiment to deny this, since physics only deals with the physical properties, it cannot probe what is beyond. (So is ignorant of what might be beyond, whether it is nothing or something.)
Thanks! This is a great lecture, like always. Imagine a thought-provoking scenario where the omniscient and powerful sophon from the sci-fi novel "The Three-Body Problem" has been an ever-present force (like a god), manipulating and restricting the scientific discovery on Earth. What if our individual experiences are merely those of a single alien infant immersed in a meticulously crafted, single-player virtual reality game, replete with all other non-player characters, designed to educate it about the intricate tapestry of Earth's history?
I know I'm just trying to pick my own brain. LOL.
I have an uncomfortable suspicion that reductionism will need to "bottom out", as in reaching a level of complete reduction where there is no differentiation and 100% generalization, before ontological depth can be re-established in a sturdy way that can propagate throughout society without collapsing.
We've passed some threshold of cognitive ability which makes this level of reduction possible and forms of meaning which rely on previous levels of cognitive ability are ultimately doomed to break down under examination of this newer level. Rebuilding meaning in a way that can last and feel true to our deepest core require the complete flattening of ontology into it's most reductive component, and then re-adding depth by using our most advanced cognitive faculties to build new layers on top of this reductive level - only through this will we have a non-flat ontology which is ultimately generalizable(as it's built on top of the 100% generalized reductive layer) and which won't break down under analysis by our more advanced forms of cognition(as it is created using our most advanced forms of cognition).
As a side note, this process would be isomorphic of the inner transformations undergone in the "Dark night of the soul" or the nigredo phase in alchemy. Breaking things all the way down into their component parts until all is the SAME but not ONE(chaos), in order to rebuild it into an ordered unity where all is ONE but not the SAME. Essentially, it seems that the relation between the meaning crisis and the world is isomorphic to the relation between the dark night of the soul and the individual. The parallels go much deeper than I can explain here, and are alarmingly consistent, I'm sure someone else must have had this thought as well.
The trick is figuring out how to start building up new layers after things have been flattened down to a completely reduced, generalized component. If all is reduced to the same thing, how does one start building up new categories and hierarchies to differentiate that sameness? This is the exact problem faced at the height(or depth) of the dark night of the soul. In the dark night of the soul, the solution is beyond the capabilities of the individual - it requires seeing things they are fundamentally incapable of seeing from their current frame of mind, and so it can't be brute-forced.
Jung said the answer emerges spontaneously from the unconscious as a symbol and that it evokes a feeling of numinosity; I believe he is correct here, although the symbol is just a representation which doesn't even need to be perceived in order for it's effects to be felt. In the outer world I believe the solution would emerge(and is emerging) in a similar way. I think if we flatten ontology in a single generalizable component, and we gaze at this component long enough, it begins to glow; we begin(and are beginning)The trick is figuring out how to start building up new layers after things have been flattened down to a completely reduced, generalized component. If all is reduced to the same thing, how does one start building up new categories and hierarchies to differentiate that sameness? This is the exact problem faced at the height(or depth) of the dark night of the soul. In the dark night of the soul, the solution is beyond the capabilities of the individual - it requires seeing things they are fundamentally incapable of seeing from their current frame of mind, and so it can't be brute-forced. Jung said the answer emerges spontaneously from the unconscious as a symbol and that it evokes a feeling of numinosity; I believe he is correct here, although the symbol is just a representation which doesn't even need to be perceived in order for it's effects to be felt. In the outer world I believe the solution would emerge(and is emerging) in a similar way. I think if we flatten ontology in a single generalizable component, and we gaze at this component long enough, it begins to glow; we begin to perceive the numinous within it, and following that feeling of numinosity will lead us to a new dimension(I believe this is fundamentally the role of the numinous) - this new dimension is depth. The flat, fundamental reductive substance begins to glow and when we follow that glow it leads us upwards, off of the flat plane and into the dimension of depths, illuminating the real and the meaningful as it goes, if we follow this glow all the way to the top we will re-establish connection with the sacred. I think this process may already be underway, and a few dim rays of this glow are starting to become perceptible to some percentage of individuals who've been gazing at the flat, undifferentiated chaos for a long time without giving in to the temptation of averting the gaze towards some false idol.
@27:00 not quite, that's a no go. Top-down only has causal power if there is retrocausation. Luckily for you there is (in physics jargon, advanced waves, or I guess you'd say "backwards causation"? Slight language clash there note. In Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory the advanced wave is "backwards" in time - an antiparticle). While all reported physics experiments are forwards time evolution stories, we "know" (we think we know) off-shell processes occur all over the place. QM violates special relatively (everywhere, all the time). But no experiment can probe off-shell. This does not matter though, because for advanced effects we only need the existence of off-shell processes, we do not need to measure them. Quantum tunneling is a primitive example. We never observe the electron 'in the tunnel" so-to-speak.
Where is the classification for these levels of emergence/emanation? Kabballah has them
I love how he’s got a picture of a can of Arizona green tee
🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:
02:01 *🔮 The talk aims to provide the nuts and bolts needed for cultivating wisdom by reconciling science and spirituality through naturalistic strong transcendence.*
03:10 *🌉 Deep consilience between science and spirituality requires making a case for strong transcendence within purely naturalistic terms.*
03:55 *🌳 Naturalism should be extended beyond just deriving from sciences to also include what sciences consistently assume, like the presupposition that natural science really exists.*
06:00 *🔭 A meta-convergence argument will be made that reality is inherently leveled and that knowing is ultimately conformity.*
06:56 *⬆️ These arguments converge to allow strong transcendence within naturalism, recovering and redoing Plotinus's core argument for Neoplatonism.*
08:09 *🌐 An argument against reductionism shows the need to balance generalization (what things share) with discrimination (differences that matter).*
12:19 *🔍 Discrimination allows generalization to fit causally to specific situations, making one context-sensitive.*
13:13 *👓 Losing differences (like blurring without glasses) reduces causal interaction ability with the environment.*
13:52 *🧩 Balancing generalization and discrimination optimizes intelligibility and realness.*
14:35 *➗ Information requires real differences and probability distributions, not pure identity.*
16:19 *💻 Physics concludes information is fundamentally real, requiring essential differences for knowledge.*
17:03 *🌳 Real knowledge exists, so pure reductionism is impossible - essential differences must remain.*
17:31 *☘️ Emergence means differences between things are real and matter to ontology/epistemology.*
19:03 *⬆️ Higher levels have real causal power beyond just summing lower level components.*
21:55 *🐳 Living things require redundant patterning across levels to propagate signals against noise.*
24:45 *📘 The idea that higher-level structure really matters is core to embodied cognitive science.*
25:14 *🌳 A tree is a self-organizing structure, where chemical events cause it to have a particular form that increases the probability of certain causal events continuing to sustain the tree.*
26:12 *⬆️↙️ Structures exhibit causal emergence upwards to constrain and increase the probability of causal events downwards, in a dynamic interplay of bottom-up and top-down causal power.*
27:18 *⚖️ Intelligibility arises from the polarity between identity (causal relevance) and difference (causal relevance), not from pure identity or pure difference alone.*
29:19 *🧮 The measurement problem in physics suggests that the measuring entity must be at a higher ontological level than the thing measured, having properties of constancy and integrity that the lower level lacks.*
30:52 *🔭 Real differences emerge upwards, allowing real measurement of those differences downwards - an argument for real ontological levels presupposed by natural science itself.*
33:13 *🔑 For science to be real, we need real information, causal signaling, structure, and measurement - requiring a leveled ontology with real emergence, emanation, and their interrelationship (a Neoplatonic ontology).*
35:40 *❌ The idea of epiphenomena (higher levels as mere effects with no causal power) is incoherent, as anything non-actual and unknowable cannot exist.*
38:06 *🔀 Emergence and emanation are completely interpenetrating, not separate realms - avoid dualistic polarization, reality is a field.*
39:17 *🕳️ The Enlightenment idea of the mind forming representations of an external world leads to being trapped behind representations, unable to know the world itself (Kant's critique).*
40:15 *🔬 Catherine Pickstock's book "Aspects of Truth" powerfully argues that Enlightenment distinctions between knowing and being have been undermined by modern philosophy.*
41:50 *💥 Distinctions like analytic/synthetic, fact/value, theory/data have been devastated, showing interpenetration of knowing and being.*
46:19 *🔄 With no absolute distinctions, there is real interpenetration of knowing and being - a conformity theory where their fundamental principles must be the same.*
48:19 *🧠 Convergence in psychology shows cognition is interwoven bottom-up and top-down, suggesting reality must have this grammar too.*
49:33 *❓ If reality doesn't have this structure, why does cognition? And if cognition is illusory, we're trapped in momentary solipsistic skepticism.*
50:30 *🧩 The grammar of knowing and the grammar of being must fundamentally be the same, although the specific contents can vary considerably.*
51:16 *🔄 There must ultimately be conformity between knowing and being for them to be grounded.*
51:45 *🔃 Transjectivity, the real relation that binds subjectivity and objectivity together, must be ontologically real for truth to exist.*
53:56 *👐 Conformity is a relationship of sharing principles that allows for co-determination and co-realization, not pure identity.*
54:26 *⚖️ Reality is an emanation-emergence continuum, an ontological leveled reality where knowing conforms to disclose different levels.*
56:55 *🌀 Self-transcendence in knowing is matched by reality-transcendence, with leveling up in knowing disclosing leveling up in reality.*
57:27 *🌳 The argument relies only on the presupposition that natural sciences really exist, biting which bullet loses all reductionism arguments.*
01:03:00 *🔄 The proposed ontology posits that higher levels of reality get actualized and informed as you ascend levels.*
01:03:39 *🌐 Emergences at life, mind, and culture levels, mediated by different information processing networks, would constrain and give rise to a taxonomy for the emanation-emergence structure.*
01:04:35 *🔆 This ontology has implications for unifying knowledge, addressing the wisdom famine, and orienting towards a wisdom commons for engaging life differently.*
01:05:03 *🧘 Wisdom involves real self-transcendence that makes a difference in how one fits with oneself, others, and the world - true meaning in life.*
01:05:59 *🕉 For real spirituality involving self-transcendence, connectedness and meaning, the transjectivity argument linking subjectivity and objectivity is needed.*
01:07:25 *🌳 Invoking complexity necessitates a leveled ontology with real self-organization of patterns that make a real difference - complexification of cognition coupled to reality.*
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@24:00 for that causal powers argument based on Shannon information and communication channels, _you need to at least give the damn axioms mate,_ otherwise I cannot tell which of them a reductionista would be inclined to reject. It is so important for formal arguments! Any damn logic bro hoon can check the logic using automated theorem checkers, but the axioms are what humans need to check.
John, could you maybe give us the title or maybe even the arXiv - number of some papers, in which this notion of 'upper levels have real causal power' (for example from Michael Levin) gets mathematically demonstarted? I am courious how you would proof such a statement fomally.
32:42 la actualización viene siempre por un ser en acto.
Call Forrest Landry you two should talk again.
@1:02:00 yeah, maybe. I share your intuitions and arguments against reductionism, but notice no one really solved the puzzles Jaegwon Kim had with mental causation, not even by rejecting reductionism, since top-down accounts are still physical, none are mental. However, that aside: for just _physics_ there is another presupposition that can be jettisoned, and that is the notion all things are wave functions. This is a deep prejudice. One obvious exception is that spacetime itself is not described by a wave-function (where is the frame of reference?). So there is a path not travelled to "quantum gravity" whereby spacetime does not "emerge" out of QM, but rather GR + CTCs _imply_ quantum mechanics. Or GR + some other principle --- but the most obvious principle is non-trivial spacetime topology.
If you ask me though, Schrödinger's Cat was never a wave-function either, it was a physical classical cat, all the time. Quantum entanglement, after all, is what causes superpositions, and they are "monogamous" so can only have microscale effects (or macroscopic length and time of course, due to non-locality of entanglement). QM is inapplicable to macroscopic systems that are not sufficiently well entangled. Note: this does not mean the formalism of QFT is inapplicable, since QFT is not the same as QM. QFT is a calculational tool, and has to employ Lorentzian path integrals (or the equivalent), but the transition amplitudes underlying the path integral are due to entanglement --- since they cannot be accounted for with a classical probability theory. QM is the unique GPT that has entanglement.
I've been thinking about the example John uses of the emerging structure of a tree that emanates down constraints. I like the example, but I think it's incomplete. What emanates constraints on the emerging structure of the tree? It would be the actual emanation of light. If light behaved differently, the emergent structure of the tree would be different.
Yes that is correct. Emergence and emanation are relative terms like feature and gestalt.
@@johnvervaekeI understand. I guess my point is that I think it would drive the point home better to start with the emanation of light constraining the emergent structure of the tree and then go into the emergent structure of the tree constraining the possibility of a photon striking a chlorophyll molecule. But I'm just a lay man, so maybe I'm overthinking it all. Either way, thank you John for all the work you do.
Still sounds a lot like how the video game environment is rendered to the player. Are we sure particles aren't pixels?
'Science and...' tells you everything about Vervaeke's broken mental furniture
Does this mean that the most completely unique event is also the most informative? I put it to you that the most completely unique event is the miracle. Would you agree? What are the implications of and for this within your system? Does your ontology have room for miracles? I am particularly interested in this question with reference to the arts, especially poetry. As you know beauty is closely related to the sublime. And the sublime is what awakens awe in us. Miracles do that. But so do works of art. Since if miracles are characterised by their uniqueness art is characterised by its celebration of uniqueness, whereas science tends not to celebrate anything but investigate sameness. A science of the utterly unique would be a very odd thing. And perhaps even more unique than what is being investigated.
44:00 If Is-Ought/Fact-Value, Theory-Data, Synthetic-Analytic distinction doesn't exist, it sounds like we're in trouble. What's next? A Priori vs A Posteriori?
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Sounds a lot like holon theory proposed by Ken Wilbur.
How can emergence and emanation be equally real, equally contributing to intelligability? If the world is at bottom potentialities being actualized by emanation, then they are not equal. Emergence is dependant on emanation in a way which emanation is not dependant on emergence. Then emanation/actualization is fundamentally a se, and emergence contingent.
I'm a little frustrated that I didn't seem to really get any of the points. There are just too many cases where I don't know what John means. For example I was pretty sure John was arguing for something like strong emergence most of the way through, so it was a very helpful question at the end clearing that up. So I got that he's not arguing for strong emergence. But if he doesn't believe in strong emergence, then I definitely never understood the criticism of reductionism.
Strong emergence implies dualism which I reject. But standard models of weak emergence are only bottom up and this leads to upper levels that are epiphenomenal. That is absurd in itself ( an epiphenomenon is an ontological oxymoron) and leads to the performative contradiction that one is drawing conclusions about the ultimate nature of reality from a level one claims is an illusion that has no causal powers. So I am also rejecting standard weak emergence.
@@johnvervaeke Oh wow thank you for replying! And no worries if you stop replying. I completely understand if you're busy.
Maybe it will be helpful for me to consider an example, because I really want to understand the point. If we for example look at a driving car, then we can consider this an example of emergence, because the ability to drive is something the parts can never do on their own. But then I don't understand what the top down emanation is. Bottom up emergence makes sense to me. The car is driving because of how all the individual parts are working together, but what do you think the top down emanation is in this example?
I of course agree and understand that the whole system of the car has causal power, but I don't see how its causal power isn't just a direct result of the causal powers of all the individual parts that the car is made of and how they interact with each other. Said in other words, I don't understand how or why reductionism breaks down here, and why we can't just say that the whole system of the car is a direct result of what all the parts are doing together.
When you say you reject both strong emergence and standard weak emergence, I am not sure what kind of emergence you're considering, but I do want to learn more about it.
@@Kanzu999 There is a structural functional organization of the parts that constrain the possible causal interactions. This shaping of possibility by constraints is the top down emanation. Only the parts in a very specific structural functional organization have the causal power of a car.
@@johnvervaeke I see, that makes sense. But I don't think I understand why this is a problem for reductionism, if I'm understanding correctly that it is. Does reductionism assume that the structural organization of parts doesn't matter for the causal power of a system?
@@Kanzu999 Well, if the car has properties the atoms do not have except because of its structural functional organization, then the causal powers belong to that structural functional organization as a whole and not to the parts. The whole explains the world in a way that parts alone cannot. So the explanation cannot be reduced to the explanation by the parts. The whole has a reality as a whole. Furthermore if you allow the first structural functional organization to be real then it can be nested in higher order structural functional organization. So that you can talk about something like the evolution of life that cannot be explained using only quantum mechanics.
There is information at the higher level that does not exist at the lower level making the higher level intelligible. Reductionism claims that intelligibility is identical to generalizability so only the most general properties are real. But information requires identity and difference between things. Without that no patterns, like the car. No patterns, no information, no knowledge. And then how did we learn about the subatomic particles? Where does that knowledge exist? Not at the level of the atoms. Atoms don’t have knowledge. Truth is not an atomic property.
How does Neoplatonism relate to Phenomenology?
Who is the "Hole" mentioned in the second argument?
And is there a link to your student's mathematical proof that you could provide?
Hoel. It isn’t his proof. He carefully validated Hoel’s proof.
@@johnvervaeke Great thanks, John! It's misspelled in the timestamps just fyi.
And how do you spell your student's name? Just for my notetaking purposes haha
I think the two papers he referenced are:
When the map is better than the territory (EP Hoel, 2017)
Agent above, atom below: how agents causally emerge from their underlying microphysics (EP Hoel, 2018)
@@MDSaunders oh fantastic, thank you Mike!
The difficulty of uniting Science and Religion is that there actually is a transcendent uncreated Creator.
Religious ppl have little to no problems with science but the opposite acceptance of the Divine seems impossible. The Supernatural is real but materialist refuse to even try and recognize this truth.
It seems we have to say that all things are actually material. Even God is material. Even mind is a material substance. These materials are simply finer and of a different quality. This fact can be verified by experimentation and direct experience.
If we can unite the understanding of the East and the knowledge of the west we can then move forward.
Lex Fridman just had an incredible conversation with Edward Frenkel on his podcasts - can't help but wonder what kind of conversation John could have with him... just wishful thinking I suppose but still
Where psychology meets physics. I like it, but the unified theory you're looking for has proven to be astonishingly elusive.
Umm…. I did not intend to listen to something like this today but let’s see where it takes me. Synchronicity? Probably not….
The argument he is struggling with at fifteen minutes was made in an erudite way by Donald Davidson over fifty years ago.