Transcript from Layman Pascal AMA: Your Neighbor Is Selling T-Shirts About Your Revolution Tomorrow

A live recorded conversation on UpTrust between Jordan Myska Allen and Layman Pascal, the opening session of UpTrust’s launch day.

Watch the recording or see the original AMA post, where the live questions came from.

That’s Definitely the New Aesthetic

[00:01:00]

Jordan Myska Allen: So happy to have you here.

Layman Pascal: Yeah, it’s exciting — also just a pleasure to see you again.

Jordan: Yeah, likewise. I hope people heard our pre-show banter, because that’s the gems right there.

Layman: Yeah, that’s definitely the new aesthetic. I do so many podcasts, and I really resist the tendency to over-professionalize it and make it look more like television. You want to catch a conversation midway through, and you want somebody’s cat walking in front of the screen. That’s the emerging style, as far as I can tell.

Paleolithic Emotions, Feudal Institutions, and the Technology of Gods

[00:02:00]

Jordan: There are a bunch of places we could go, but I love that you’re here at the start as a kind of framing for the whole site. You’re our official launch event, and it’s like: okay, wait, there’s something here. We could call it a metacrisis, a meta-chrysalis, a sense-making evolution, a revolution, a breakdown. All of those things matter, and none of them quite capture it. I think you’re the perfect shaman to initiate us into whatever this is. So let’s start there — if you want to type something I’ll paste it in, and if you want to talk, let’s talk.

Layman: The first thing that comes up for me is the terminology — what’s a metacrisis? It’s important to give ourselves a moment to hate prefixes in general, and the prefix meta in particular. We only use the term because it’s already in use. It’s a better term than polycrisis, in some ways, because it points to the scale, and to the internal and external transformation in the common set of drivers that underlie the collective set of crises we face. So maybe metacrisis is better than polycrisis. Maybe crisis is a good term. Maybe crisis is an opportunity. Maybe crisis is a term that scares our brains and misleads us about the situation. It doesn’t really matter what we call it — we’re looking at something that has a whole bunch of emergent, accumulating problems across different domains that seem to have some common roots. Each one seems radical in terms of human stability and thriving, and in terms of the potential transformation of life in the species. It seems to be anchored in — I love that quote where people say we’ve got paleolithic emotions and feudal institutions and the technology of gods, or some variant of that. A lot of this problem goes back to just how we are as beings.

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: And a lot of it goes to the way we’ve set society up for the last little while. And a lot of it goes to the new shit we’ve built that could change everything. Put those together and you’ve got a situation that makes everything seem weird and unpredictable and chaotic and radical — crisis-like in all directions. That’s where we live now, and that’s what we have to become good inhabitants of.

Your Neighbor Is Selling T-Shirts About Your Revolution Tomorrow

[00:04:00]

Jordan: You were referencing feudal institutions and lizard brains — somebody already commented that this feels more apparent for low- and middle-income countries. I think that’s a cool way to ground this. You and I can riff on developmental theory and non-dual epistemics and all sorts of crazy shit, but there’s a ton of people coming into global awareness at really different places of economic development, in all these different countries. How do you feel like that fits in? Can you riff on that?

Layman: Yeah, that’s a really interesting thing, because on the one hand, people who enter a system first sometimes see things about it that people who enter later don’t see. But people entering later in the process see how it’s begun to unfold. If your country is just coming online as an industrial power, or just getting hooked up as a digital networking society, it may be very obvious to you what the first few levels of response need to be — because you see everyone figuring it out in real time. You see the actual human needs, the actual ecological costs of the way we’re setting things up. There’s a lot of humanizing power in that.

I think there’s a lot of moral clarity that comes from people who are not just entering the globalized system, but entering it in a way that’s precarious for them — precisely because of the drivers that have been dominating for some time now. The real economic issues, the real ecological issues, the real life-and-death stakes present in those situations often give people moral clarity.

However, it’s not exclusively the case that people on the front lines know what the solution sets are. They may be aware of the first few things we absolutely need to do just to stabilize under these conditions, and we — from more privileged social circumstances, or from more bloated countries — need to take that seriously, especially in our politics and our day-to-day sensibilities. But there are things you only see from the thousand-foot view. There are extremely abstract things, things that pertain to how we’re laying out our leading-edge technologies, and things we’ve gone through as the more potent societies that we don’t want other societies to have to go through.

This is a classic problem in general: we often feel like there’s something really trustworthy in our bodies, our intuitions, our nature, our inheritance, and in being the on-the-ground nations and populations of the world — and that’s absolutely true, but it’s not an infallible source of information. We also need to supplement that with our largest, most abstract, most peculiar, greatest high-wire acts of the mind. You need to do interesting triage when you’re a first responder, but it’s also important to have people who are like medical coaches for athletes — you’ve got to push health forward and bring up the back at the same time. If we just do one of those, I don’t think we’re going to be able to grapple with this.

And in some ways that’s a lot of what the problem is — we often want to do this one side or the other, which, to my way of thinking, is part of how the modern system, the capital system, whatever we want to call it, is incredibly flexible. It’s able to enfold almost anything. You can become a revolutionary today, and your neighbor is selling t-shirts about your revolution tomorrow. It works itself into the system. One of the ways it does that is that modernity is so good at making a dialectic engine — a positive and a negative terminal, two main political parties, a prosecutor and a defender. It’s a system that runs on these dualities. So unless we can also grab both sides at the same time, our solutions aren’t going to be up to the scale and tempo of the system we’re trying to transform.

A Common, Sacred Feeling-Cause That Trumps Our Differences

[00:10:00]

Jordan: Right, awesome — I love that. So some of these dualities you named, just in my language: the body and the mind. On a social level, you have this pre-industrial wisdom, for lack of a better term, and then you have modernity — you see this with eastern or alternative medicine versus western medicine, and they both do certain things really well and other things really poorly. You have that sense of crisis-first-responder versus deep cause — sometimes you need to stop the bleeding, sometimes you need to find and treat the original thing. What are some of the ways we’ve screwed this up as a developing society? At least — here’s a few things we could do better, that we could help other people coming into this with.

Layman: We’re looking at a couple of big problems in the way we’re running our system right now — and by we I mean mostly North America, but it’s a more general problem too. We’re certainly allowing multinational corporations to play countries off against each other. We’re allowing our democratic collective decision-making institutions to fundamentally fail to reflect the intelligence baked into the population and the circumstances we’re in. We’re not allowing our currencies and economic structures to reflect the actual amount of work going into our systems.

We can look at how certain approaches to running a system work or don’t work at this level of complexity. One of the things America is demonstrating is that you need a much more resilient system to protect yourself against people who hijack the collective decision-making mechanism from within — politically, economically, and in the media. We’re going to need much more powerful media sense-making tools as we go rushing into an era of technology that makes the data you encounter less and less reliable.

We’re seeing the outcomes of relying on the types of currencies in play and the reinforcement and distribution mechanisms that currently dominate our economic model — prioritizing the movement of capital away from the areas where we’d need to solve these problems. And, from the more shamanic point of view, there’s a tremendous fragmentation, polarization, and shredding of the shared, sacred, civic fabric. There has to be a restoration of a common, sacred feeling-cause across the population — one that feels meaningful enough that it trumps our existing differences in temperament, worldview, and situation.

Jordan: Right. I love the way you said that. As an American, I’m like: yeah, we need to be proud to be American again. That doesn’t put any other country or way of being down, but it needs to mean something we can stand by. A surprising outcome of that, for a lot of hippies that I love to hang out with and consider myself one of, is that there’s a place for — not quite shame, but — there’s a place to use social pressure to actually enforce a kind of standard. What do you think about that?

Layman: Yeah, absolutely. We hang out in a bunch of developmental communities, and one of the premises there is that these different adaptive layers of sense-making that exist within human beings, and within social systems — though not in exactly the same way as in our psychology — all have function and validity. When you get a new one, the old ones don’t go away. We need to be able to draw on and energize healthy versions of all of our systems, even the ones we think of as lower or more primitive. You’re not going to wish away the cognitive biases of human beings, or the need for a large chunk of the population to feel embedded in a consistent mythic framework that makes sense to them. Part of that whole system, which we’ve had on this planet for a long time, is hierarchy, is shame, is conformity, is self-sacrificial rituals of various kinds. We’ve got to try to do that in a smarter, healthier way than it’s sometimes gone — but we can’t just throw it away, because it undergirds a lot of our social systems and a lot of our own psychology.

Mind at the End of Its Tether

[00:14:00]

Jordan: That reminds me — speaking of developmental models, this is maybe a little in the weeds, but I think you’ve thought about this a lot. Most people can’t actually access the meaning-making structures needed to evaluate whether these models are even accurate. How do you think about that, and how does AI change the picture, if at all?

Layman: AI is a tremendous new tool. Computation in general is a tremendous new tool — it allows us to potentially process patterns that fall outside our cognitive ability to make sense of. There are some arguments that the majority of the algorithms that constitute reality are actually complex enough that we wouldn’t recognize them as being patterned in the first place.

Jordan: Right?

Layman: So that puts us in an interesting situation. There’s a book I love — H.G. Wells, the science fiction author, from the turn of the last century. His last book was called Mind at the End of Its Tether, a short pamphlet saying, basically, we’ve gone as far as we can go with the rational, conscious, waking intellect. He’s probably a bit too pessimistic, but there’s something to that — we may be seeing the results of going as far as we can with the assumptions and the particular cognitive toolkit we’ve been using. So what are the other ones we can avail ourselves of, or ally ourselves with? We need to draw more on ecological intelligence, subconscious intelligence, collective intelligence, and computational intelligence — because one of the things these new computational systems can do is move much faster than us and take much larger chunks of data into account.

There may be all kinds of alternative practical models — for economy, for physics, even for spirituality — that are out there in the sea of possible patterns. But brains like ours are never going to be able to find them and compress them to the point we can use them. So we have to rely on, train, and aim these systems to try to mine the world of pattern-space, to see if there are alternative solutions to the ones we’re implementing right now.

The Integration Surplus Model of Religion and Spirituality

[00:16:00]

Jordan: This is super cool. When I try to empathize with the way you’re seeing things, or step into your point of view — we have human cognition, the normal thing we think of, the brain. And there’s some other things people often think of, like the body — my body is holding itself up in this chair without me thinking about it, it’s cognizing in a certain sense. But instead of seeing it as humans and AIs, before and after, you’re like: there’s this plane, this field of different ways of making sense, of interpreting data — intuitive, collective, computational, human, animal — and they’re all kind of available to us in a way we haven’t really leaned into that hard. Some are ancient, some are modern. Is that kind of how you’re seeing it, or feeling into it?

Layman: Yeah, that’s a great summary. One of the things that comes up for me is how important it is to have that experience of yourself in order to understand that as the way the world operates. We’re getting a lot of new information out of neuropsychology and cognitive science in the last couple of decades about the inherent plurality of the human psyche. We’re not God-given or market-given preset individuals who just reason in selfish interest — it’s an ecology in there. That puts us in a situation much more akin to the ancient animistic view — although there are naive elements to that view, and we’re not trying to regress — but we do have to take embodied, embedded, plural psychology into account, whether we think in spiritual, abstract, metaphorical terms, or just in terms of how a nervous system is embedded in a body.

Multiple informational processing systems make us up. We have parts. We have emotional, mental, and physiological intelligences. We have conscious and subconscious. We have front and back of the brain, left and right of the nervous system. We have a whole suite of different developmental intelligences, if we want to look through that lens. So there’s a whole panoply of systems in us. First, recognizing experientially and theoretically that that’s the case for yourself — and then taking up practices in life, or deliberate internal work, or both, that try to generate more coherence among your fragmented or quasi-autonomous information systems. That puts you in the right internal position, I think, to look out at the world and go: right, this is a complicated plurality. There’s an interesting set of complementary intelligences that are needed — we need to be able to explore and amplify each of them, and work together to bring coherence, alignment, or agreement between them. That, in my view, generates a surplus coherence — an extra quality of meaningfulness, which looks like spirit for the individual, and religious qualities for the collective. We need more than enough coherence to mobilize outside the patterns we’re embedded in, and we get that by increasing our ability to integrate the information-processing options available to us.

Jordan: I love it. You bring this kind of information-theory orientation, and you’ve — I think you described spirituality like you just said, but you have a name for this. I wrote it down so I could remember it — it’s kind of a theory you’re known for. This surplus sense-making capacity is kind of a bottom-up way of describing what awakening or enlightenment — not that those are good terms — is, for anything anyone experiences.

Layman: Yeah — actually, in one of my first conversations with John Vervaeke years ago, he referred to what I was talking about as the Integration Surplus model of religion and spirituality. I took it from him and started to use it, because it’s a good summary of one big block of what I’ve been working on that feeds into the rest of these ideas. It’s also something that came out of my own spiritual practice — in particular my work in the Gurdjieff lineages, combined with the time I spent working on theory and social development in integral communities. If you take some of the ideas out of particular esoteric lineages that involve bringing your mental, emotional, and physiological intelligences together to create a generalized beingness — that’s pretty good, phenomenologically. What does that actually mean? And what happens if we have more than three intelligence systems we need to bring together? That’s a very fertile way to begin thinking about this.

Just Because You’re Good at That Doesn’t Mean You’re Good at Everything

[00:22:00]

Jordan: Yeah, the Integration Surplus theory — when I think about my own experience, that seems true. I don’t know how much that’s true in general, or true because I came into integral theory when I was very young. I can’t step outside my own view. One question about that: how do you understand or explain the shadow abuses — teachers who have a wild amount of integration surplus in some areas, and then fail to act in somewhat obvious ethical ways? Sometimes it’s confusing, because you’re like, well, they justify it as in service of spirit, or spiritual teaching — and sometimes maybe it actually is. I don’t know — this is one of the areas that I feel met Aris about.

Layman: Yeah, it’s really good to think about that internally and externally, because you can get a lot of integration between some systems, but that doesn’t mean you’ve integrated all of them — the ones you didn’t integrate, or didn’t even think to check on, are going to come back to bite you in the assets at some point. That’s where our shadow material, our unintegrated stuff, still exists. When you look at an individual through the lens of an integration surplus model, you can see how somebody might get a whole spiritual tradition around combining the physiological and the mental — practices where people are trying to lead their body with intention, or constantly mentally follow what their body is doing. A lot of dance, a lot of martial arts, a lot of yoga has this. You get particular results, and those results are valid. But just because you’re good at that doesn’t mean you know much about your own emotional possibilities and sophistication. You might get somebody else combining their mental understanding with their heart, or their body with their heart, and that person doesn’t necessarily know much about something else. It doesn’t make them good at music. It doesn’t necessarily make them good at ethics either.

There are all these ranges of understanding we have to develop on their own terms. We need some good map, and some shared cultural ethos that says: include at least these basic modules of intelligence in the integration you’re setting up. We also have to leave room for people to be doing it experimentally, in whatever ways are attractive to them, and contextualize that in a way that’s relatively safe for people who are intrigued by it. You have these famous characters throughout history who’ve done something interesting to their nervous system, energy field, consciousness, whatever we call it — some of them are great, and some of them are dangerous predators in certain areas, or just have huge blind spots. That doesn’t mean they aren’t interesting, or that you can’t learn something from them. It would be nice if they had a slightly more contemporary ethical attitude. It would also be nice if the people going to them understood that just because they’re really good at one thing doesn’t mean they’re perfectly good at all things — you have to be responsible for yourself, your safety, and set up sensible protocols around them.

Jordan: Yeah, it’s exciting, and I’m nerding out a little, because in a lot of ways, two of the big pieces of UpTrust that are unique are things we’ve touched on here. One is separating out these systems — being able to say, hey, I trust you, or the upvote or downvote, whatever you want to call it — it’s training epistemically for this difference. You can be really good at martial arts, or really good at yoga and meditation, and maybe you’re a really bad cook, or car mechanic, or something. These aren’t quite the deep systems we’re talking about, but they gesture in that direction — being able to see the plurality of each individual, so-called individual human being. And then this dialectical synthesis of holding opposites is a big part of what we do here too. So I’m just excited — I love it.

Layman: Yeah, I love that you point that out, because one of the interesting features of UpTrust — not to get too salesy about this — is that being able to value different aspects of somebody’s posts initially seems like a bunch of hassle and extra work, and you’re not totally sure what the subcategories mean, so you can get a little too mental about it. But the basic principle — an invitation to check yourself and say, which aspect of you, which sense-making system, are you using to value this, where are you finding value in this — contributes to the possibility of a more complex social networking and collective sense-making system, which is part of the technical response to something like the metacrisis that we need.

Trust is interesting — in integral terms, it has an intersubjective and an interobjective, or systemic, aspect. We need to get better as people at trusting each other and being trustworthy, showing up in integrity, figuring out how to be together in ways that generate a sense of shared we that exceeds us and feels valuable, that we voluntarily want to submit ourselves to because it’s such a wonderful, satisfying, necessary feeling. That’s super useful, but it doesn’t necessarily solve the systemic problem of creating trust — meaning our information protocols, our cultural artifacts, our institutions, our collective decision-making protocols all have to take us to a higher level of trust too. If we can’t get that higher level of trust across the board, we aren’t really going to be able to solve the metacrisis, because we’ll always have a significant weak spot that can undermine the whole system, or be vulnerable to predators and parasites that currently hold back a lot of our civilization’s transformational potential.

We Need to Rely on Each Other

[00:28:00]

Jordan: There’s so many ideas I want to double-click on there, but I don’t want to just go for the most recent one. One thing that lights up for me: one of the natures of development, I think, is this increasing embrace of these poles you described — more autonomy, and more communal or collectivist. And one of the ways that’s required to face this crisis is — UpTrust is stupidly ambitious. We’re like, let’s change the whole incentive landscape of conversation on the internet, of attention-getting on the internet, the whole media. And as we talk about it, it’s obvious that takes an incredible amount of ambition, or drive, or individuality — but it’s a tiny piece of the solution. That’s even just one quadrant, or a quadrant or two, and there’s ten or twenty or fifty or a hundred or a thousand other incredibly ambitious projects. I’m feeling the ecosystem nature of it — a ton of people individually choosing to do this and needing to rely on each other. I need to rely on someone building a distributed-ledger type thing I can run UpTrust on, on the systems level, but also on innovations in governance, in sense-making, in spirituality, and all that kind of stuff.

Layman: Yeah, this goes partly to that comment about what people know when they’re just entering the global economy — whether that’s us, historically, or other countries right now. There’s a sensibility they might still have around the obviousness of needing to rely on each other, needing to be trustworthy, needing maturation rites as a community, needing to be able to stand and take heroic sacrifices sometimes on behalf of your community, your family, your ecosystem, against the seductions of the machinery around you — while also understanding that machinery is a legitimate form of empowerment, and that you don’t want to just continue existing the same old way and suffering the same old disadvantages. I think they’re very often imbued with a stronger sense of the values necessary from the prior system, which we might have lost track of from spending so much time in the new industrial and electronic form of reality.

Jordan: Yeah, I feel like we’re in a puberty — assuming we make it to adulthood, civilizationally, as a species, as a globe. We’ll see. It reminds me of those graphs you see, like happiness correlated with GDP — at first, low GDP, medium happiness, and there are two or three stages where happiness goes down as GDP goes up, and then it goes way up. There’s this sense that someone will want to immigrate to a new country, or bring modernism into their tribal land, and you’re like, well, they kind of screwed themselves for two generations — but their grandkids are way better off in all the things their culture previously valued. There’s an interesting kind of lineage sacrifice in that.

Layman: Yeah, it’s an interesting thing. First, there’s a problem of local maxima in general — you might have to lose something to get to a higher, better something. Then there’s a long-range problem: that might actually be better down the road, but what are the accumulating externalities it produces? That’s largely what we’re looking at as the metacrisis — the accumulating externalities of the modern system, which the modern system itself can’t solve, because they’re produced by its own tactical strategies, its technical efficiencies. When those efficiencies are aimed at the problems, they solve them a little and then regenerate the problem — and you end up in what some people call hyper-modernity, as opposed to a true postmodernism.

There’s a Much Bigger Alignment Problem

[00:32:00]

Layman: Sorry — what was the question? I got distracted by the word hyper-modernity.

Jordan: Let’s go with your distraction — that’s part of it. Because you have this hyper-modernity, you have — the housing crisis, I think, is my epochal version of this. You have bundles of bundles of bundles of financial instruments, eventually junk bonds or something — this weird, hyper-modern, abstracted, U.S.-financial-market thing that ends up impacting the whole world in a weird way. And at the same time, you have this rise of pluralism, people recognizing multiple perspectives — and with that, it’s harder to lean into saying, hey, that’s not okay, we’re not going to do that. From that mindset, there are certain things that aren’t okay, and one of them is to hold people accountable.

Layman: If you take something like basic Darwinian mechanics and apply it to a lot of this: there’s a constructive interplay between a proliferating set of experimental mutations and constraint that brings it back into alignment with needs and environments. We can apply that to our technology, to the whole noosphere and its relationship to the biosphere, which I think is an important contemporary shamanic consideration. We have to look at the way we set up a society, and the way we honor layers of increasing abstraction in our thinking, our systems, our economics, as potentially the first wave of a really good process. But it’s only going to be useful if it’s constrained again — to be adaptive to actual resources, actual human needs, and so on. There’s a classic alignment-problem discussion from the last ten years, mostly about how we align AI tools with human safety, basically.

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: But there’s a much bigger alignment problem — how do you align the mind and the body, the individual and the community? How do you align the anthroposocial-technological domain with the ecological domain? How do we align our ability to innovate new tools with the constraints that tend to make those tools operate in service of human and ecosystem thriving? And that’s what you’re talking about with the housing crisis — housing is a real thing, on the ground, actual lives, actual buildings. And then it gets packaged, packaged, packaged, fractional iterations of that, turned into a gambling mechanism that’s obviously abstracted too far from reality. The economy operates relatively independently of the actual situation — some people can make a ton of money off it, but it doesn’t incentivize an actual increase in the situation’s wealth.

Jordan: So there’s something interesting here about another polarity — between horizontal or pluralistic thinking, which is like, even from the beginning, you said the polycrisis has this quality to it. And then the meta introduces hierarchies, and both are true, both are part of the thing. There’s something here with the confusion about how those relate — even how to define this, what’s the difference between one whole and another, when does it do this versus that?

Layman: There’s an even bigger confusion, which is — you have evolution: a set of horizontal adaptations, how well your mutations allow you and your descendants to fit a particular niche. There’s no real advancement in that — it just fluctuates, without a clear trend. But once in a while there’s an adaptation we might think of as an adaptation to the broader-reality niche, which allows that whole system to get enfolded in the production of a new regime — a new set of capacities and sense-making options — and that becomes the stable platform from which you undertake your new experiments in horizontal adaptation. So we get this cosmological stack after a while. It’s not apparent in every adaptation, every interaction, but there is some kind of metaphorical verticality and horizontality. But all of that doesn’t tell us what’s healthy and useful or not.

Jordan: Right?

Layman: Right — because you can set up a system, we can do this with AI right now: alright, we’re just going to make it go meta on meta on meta on meta, and be endlessly self-reflective. Is that the system we want? That’s one of the functions we want to prioritize, but it doesn’t tell us what healthy is. So we need to be able to clarify, in addition to stable adaptation and in addition to growth —

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: — what a health-pathology axis looks like. So we can say, and tell our machines, this is a more likely outcome for generalized thriving than that is, according to whatever the logic of naturalness and thriving is that we’re utilizing. And we haven’t put a lot of time into that.

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: Some of our ancestors did. The famous Greek notion of the golden ratio is one way of thinking about sages who weren’t just interested in self-development and community meaning, but also wanted to produce a technical description of what beauty and naturalness and utility looks like.

Jordan: Right.

Layman: Right. And we can pick up that challenge, I think, and move forward — our new computational tools may be able to help us do that in a number of ways. And that also comes back to what we might call a shamanic task, because the symbol of the shaman is partly a person who’s trying to wisely negotiate between the human and the ecological realm. They both need to come together to produce something like naturalistic thriving in a distributed fashion. One of the tasks of the shamanic intelligence today, quote-unquote, is to try to figure out how we can computationally implement a clearer notion of what a desirable outcome state is for natural and human systems.

Training Machines to Recognize What’s Sacred

[00:39:00]

Jordan: Yeah — I love that. I’m just typing it in: Shamanic task is technically defining, slash computationally implementing, a more clear notion of what a desirable outcome state is for humans and the ecology. Is that right?

Layman: Yeah — that can be very abstract, which is great for whoever’s listening who’s very abstract. But we can think about it in super simple ways too. If we think about a CAPTCHA system, where you have to log in and they make you tell the computer what the traffic lights are, or which one’s a bus — it’s partly a login test for humans, but it’s also partly training the machines to know what a bus looks like from different angles, in a fragmented view. Why are we just training it to recognize traffic lights? We could be using human prompts to say: what do you think is most sacred-looking, or which one looks most natural to you? You can imagine a scenario where we had ten years and hundreds of millions of interactions to train the machine to improvise pattern configurations that match our sense of what sacred, or natural, or thriving looks like. That could be a really straightforward kind of tool we could work on.

Jordan: Yeah, this is great — I’m really with you here. This speaks to one of the questions: we set up this kind of silly premise, like, what’s the metacrisis and how do we solve it, as if it’s solvable, as if it’s a problem that needs solving, versus something more alchemical or processual. One of the answers, I think what you’re saying, is that there’s a willingness and ability, for the people working on these things, building CAPTCHAs for that matter, to think about the good — what are we aimed at, and why. And to design processes not just for pure efficiency, or cost, or profit optimization, but for flourishing optimization. This is one example — what’s beautiful, what’s good. You could even imagine using a CAPTCHA-style thing to ask what’s more ethical. I don’t think the trolley problem is the right abstraction here, but you could imagine introducing — CAPTCHAs with trolley problems — trying to get people to train the machines to recognize what human ethics look like.

Layman: Yeah — there’s a field of architecture called Parametricism now, and it draws on Gaudí and Buckminster Fuller, and also some more recent architects. The premise is that they use computers to try to spin up best-fit solutions between multiple interacting parameters, and they can give you a variety of different best-fit solutions. The interesting thing about those solutions — when you ask about cost, materials, human utility, how it fits into ecosystems, that kind of stuff — is that the results are very futuristic and very archaic and very organic-looking. They look much more like the results we get out of biomimicry, when we look at the close molecular structures of parts of the ecosystem for solutions to human technical problems. There’s a beautiful strangeness there. We’re already experimenting with ways we might be able to produce not only a new aesthetic that’s inspiring and interesting and changes the experience of the cultural landscape, but also pioneering ways to start generating something that solves a lot of problems at the same time, and gives us the kind of futuristic, archaic, organic aesthetic our hearts seem to be starving for — which the modern layout doesn’t really provide. Once in a while, when I was a kid, I remember seeing the space shuttle take off from Florida, and you’re like, oh my God, this is like being at the pyramids — there’s a tremendous monolithic awe, you’re beholding something vast and great. There are these beautiful aesthetic peak experiences possible from our participation in modernity. But by and large, when you look at highways and parking lots and a contemporary sewage station compared to a sewage station from the 1800s, it looks like an aesthetic disaster.

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: And part of that is that we’re not using the best version of our contemporary tools to spin up structures that meet our sensibility relative to both function and fitting into ecological, naturalistic anticipations about thriving that are built into our brains.

That’s Merit

[00:44:00]

Jordan: I could go on and on about this — I’ve looked a little at some contemporary moral realism that talks about this kind of thing. But I wanted to bring in a comment.

[Chat question:] Layman, please define your we. This conversation so far hasn’t presented an invitation, and it seems to focus more on the unknown. Who needs to develop, to cultivate — is it us, or they — to what we become? So what’s your we?

Layman: Great question, and it operates on multiple levels. I think probably in this discussion I’ve used we most commonly to mean the human species in general — as if it were a collective entity trying to face existential problems that exceed whatever the local, cultural, and personal situations are. But sometimes I’ll also use we to mean something like the overlapping transformational, developmental, and regenerative networks — there’s a cluster of communities that prioritize certain values, prioritize certain practices, and are trying to come together globally to look at these kinds of problems. I’m in service to that subculture a lot. So sometimes I’ll mean that, and the rest of the time I’ll mean an aspirational notion of the species.

Jordan: And how — that second definition can be seen as elitist. What do you think? Is it elitist? Are we elitist?

Layman: I don’t think there’s much of a problem with the concept of elitism. I think we should try to be elite. It’s different than being an asshole. You could be a good elitist in a lot of ways — we want people to specialize, and then we want them to come back and tell everybody, but we don’t want them to be beholden to the idea that they have to be immediately simple and generally comprehensible to everyone. So I think we do want elites. A big problem we face now is that our elites seemingly aren’t elite. I watched a documentary last year about the Australian Elite Special Forces — that’s their official name — and how they were hazing and indoctrinating new soldiers in Afghanistan by having them shoot Afghan civilians. You look at that and you’re like, that’s not elite — that’s actually really low. That’s a really crass, crude, dysfunctional way to go about things.

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: So I’d like there to be a system where we could count on elites more — both in terms of technical functions, like I want the most elite physicists and the most elite generals and all that, but also in terms of people pushing forward different kinds of philosophical and psychological capacities. The elites need to be affirmed, encouraged, supported — but that’s not the same as giving them an unnecessary or exaggerated status, power, and influence in society. They have to be appropriately elite. This is another problem we’ve come to as part of the drivers of the metacrisis, which is often a way of saying: what are the sub-functions of modernity producing these effects? One of those sub-functions is that we’re very often blind to the functional fit of the merit in our meritocracies.

Jordan: Yeah.

Layman: The example I always give: you could have crashed the American economy in 2008 because you’re a terrible banker, then got a bailout from tax money, and then went right back to work running another bank.

Jordan: Yes.

Layman: So is that merit, in a meritocracy? In some ways, yes — you have some skills, you didn’t get there for no reason. But what skills are they? You have the skill of avoiding the consequences of your own bad decisions. You have the skill of getting people to pay you. You have the skill of convincing people you have some kind of authority. Those are real skills — that’s merit. But it’s not the merit that’s appropriate to running the economy.

Jordan: Yes.

Layman: Right. So we have a meritocracy, but we don’t have a mechanism for making sure the particular forms of merit match the skills and the task-spaces where we want that merit applied. We need a kind of meta-elitism, that fits our elites to the areas where they’d actually be useful, and not just self-aggrandizing and increasing their hoard of the general resource share.

The Metaphysics of Adjacency

[00:48:00]

Jordan: And it goes back to that alignment question — which subprocesses do we want to select, and what does it actually mean to flourish, to have a good life, a good society that aims at good things? That reminds me — in some ways, you have this individual self-integration that leads to a surplus, which leads to a flow state, this incredible joy, this high functioning — imagining we could have that as a society. There’s some sense in which integration at its best is an embrace of pluralism — you have to see this plurality inside and outside, and work with these systems without trying to reduce them to each other. How much does ontological pluralism fuck up coordination?

Layman: Yeah, it’s got to be handled in a smart way. The first thing is that we can’t be naive about the plurality — we can’t have a flatland pluralism that says just because pluralities are being honored, all contributions are equal under all conditions, or that you have the luxury of spending an endless amount of time getting everyone’s view for consensus. There’s a constant negotiation between the combinatorial explosion that’s possible in looking at the sub-functions and their sub-functions in a system, and the possibility of an overly simplified, dogmatic response pattern — and we don’t know exactly where the sweet spot is between those. What we need are processes that allow us to sway back and forth, negotiating the space between them. There are systems that are pretty good at doing that already — some human systems, and some ecological systems too. But we have to make sure we allow for locally functional hierarchical levels in the way we set up our pluralities, and then also constrain those, to make sure those particular hierarchies don’t spill too far out of their appropriately applicable niche.

Jordan: Right. We’ve got only a few minutes left — you can do a wrap-up. And just to make it harder, since it came in: I think you’ve done a good job of looking not just at pluralism here, or in the future, but also in the past. One example is this idea of both-and, diunital cognition, with roots in African epistemology. Can you touch on that before we close?

Layman: Yeah, there’s a notion present in some philosophical and developmental systems — Ken Wilber summarized it as both-and thinking, but he’s not the only one who’s done that. There have been a number of Black thinkers in particular who’ve focused on diunital — which is a unity of two. It’s very much like saying both-and. How do you bring things together in a way that’s actually integrated? My friend Germane, who’s like the voice of Black metamodernism, likes to use diunital rather than integration. He’s very focused on how you move beyond just oscillating back and forth in a dialectic relationship — which sort of reifies the duality that’s holding the system in place — into an actual hybrid or synthetic solution. It’s a little bit like: how do you get beyond just pluralism, into an actual coherent, integrated pluralism?

I don’t think we want to undermine that duality either, because you do have to go back and forth in order to find the ability to coordinate two different ends. To some degree, that coordination is just a resonant coupling — like if you’re trying to make two neurons wire together by firing together, there’s a little bit of physiological change, but a lot of it is just signaling coordination. These two things can become better at signaling, and they can reveal, in their mutual tension and their parallax, a greater picture of reality that goes beyond just the sum of their parts. The danger would be that you create communities that think they’re integrative, think they’re metamodern, and they’re actually just people who constantly oscillate back and forth between two given perspectives that have been made available to them by their cultural background. We don’t want to be stuck in an endlessly fluid shifting back and forth of people who never really take any position. You have to somehow bring those positions into a collaborative alignment that’s functional, that you can act on, speak about, and make sense from as if it were one thing — but not so much one thing that you lose the value and the information contained in their difference.

My philosophical approach, I often call the metaphysics of adjacency, because it’s very much about how you get things just the right amount of far away from each other. Very often, when we talk about integration, or even when we talk about unity, we don’t really want unification. I don’t actually want to be one with my lover in the sense that our bodies are superimposed over each other and our pancreases have to occupy the same space. When I say I want to be one, I actually mean I want us to be close enough that an additional function that supersedes us is enacted. You can think of any two cultural or psychological sense-making systems that way — how do you bring them into coordination enough that they remain separate, but also operate as if they’re one thing? That whole paradox-like structure — that Zen koan machinery — also tells you something you couldn’t have known just by moving back and forth between them. So that’s diunitality.

Jordan: Boom. I love it — that’s a great place to end. We could go forever, and it’s time to wrap up. Thank you so much, Layman. Thank you everyone for commenting and listening and watching — the comments will stay open, and people can keep having this discussion. We need to keep having the discussion, and doing it in a diunital and adjacent way, where we disagree generatively. So, thank you.

Layman: Yeah, I’ll be able to jump in and respond to a bunch of these throughout the day.

Jordan: Anytime.

Layman: Okay, great.

Jordan: Awesome.

Layman: Fantastic. This is fun. Neat to go first — I appreciate what you’ve set up here, Jordan and I—

[The raw recording is truncated here, mid-sentence. See changelog.]

Show Notes & References

Books

• Mind at the End of Its Tether — H.G. Wells (1945). Wells’s last book, written near the end of his life: a short, pessimistic essay arguing that the rational, conscious, waking intellect had gone as far as it could go in a world that had become fundamentally unpredictable. Layman cites it as an early instance of hitting the edge of a single cognitive toolkit, while noting Wells was probably a bit too pessimistic.

People

• John Vervaeke — Cognitive scientist known for his work on the meaning crisis, a close cousin of the metacrisis language used throughout this conversation, and a guest on Layman’s podcast. Layman credits an early conversation with Vervaeke as the source of the name Integration Surplus model of religion and spirituality, though published sources attribute the framework itself to Layman’s own body of work.
• Germane Marvel — Writer and theorist associated with the term Black metamodernism and its diunital logic, and a guest on Layman’s podcast, The Integral Stage, in an episode specifically on Black metamodernism. The name is heard in the raw audio as Jermaine — no audio witness exists for this episode to confirm the spelling. We’ve rendered it as Germane based on the strong topical match (diunital cognition, the voice of Black metamodernism) with Marvel’s public work, but this is inferred, not confirmed. Flagged below.
• Vernon J. Dixon — Economist whose 1970s paper, The Diunital Approach to Black Economics, is the originating source for diunital as a term for both/and, unity-of-two cognition — the Black-epistemology tradition Layman gestures to as the root of the concept.
• Ken Wilber — Integral theorist; credited here with summarizing the same both/and logic as both-and thinking, alongside — not instead of — the diunital tradition.
• G.I. Gurdjieff — Early-20th-century spiritual teacher whose Fourth Way lineages taught the integration of intellectual, emotional, and moving (physical) centers — the tradition behind Layman’s reference to the Gurdjieff lineages feeding into his Integration Surplus model.
• Antoni Gaudí and Buckminster Fuller — Architects Layman cites as forerunners of Parametricism, the computationally-driven design approach he describes as producing structures that look simultaneously futuristic, archaic, and organic.
• Layman Pascal — Host of The Integral Stage podcast; known for the Integration Surplus Model, the Metaphysics of Adjacency, and Metashamanics, all referenced directly in this conversation.

Key Concepts

• Metacrisis — The term Layman opens by interrogating: a name for the interlocking, accumulating set of civilizational crises (ecological, economic, informational, institutional) that share common roots, distinguished from polycrisis by its attention to the internal drivers, not just the external count of problems.
• Diunital cognition — A unity of two logic — holding two things together as both/and rather than resolving them into one or picking a side — rooted in Black epistemology (Vernon Dixon) and taken up in contemporary Black metamodernism.
• Integration Surplus Model — Layman’s framework describing spiritual awakening or enlightenment as the surplus coherence generated when previously fragmented systems of intelligence (mental, emotional, physiological, and others) are brought into alignment with each other.
• Metaphysics of Adjacency — Layman’s own term for his broader philosophical approach: finding the right distance between two things so an emergent, third function is enacted between them, without collapsing them into one.
• Parametricism — An architectural movement (associated with theorist Patrik Schumacher) that uses computation to generate best-fit design solutions across many parameters at once; cited here as an example of technology producing outcomes that read as both futuristic and organic.
• The Australian Special Forces documentary Layman references isn’t named in the audio. It most likely refers to reporting connected to the Brereton Report inquiry into alleged Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan (for example, the ABC Four Corners investigation Killing Field), though this specific documentary isn’t confirmed.

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