What is Coherence?

In this episode of The Bottom Turtle Podcast, Dr. Ray has a discussion with audio engineer Mike Belanger on the concept of coherence.  Like other guests on the podcast, Mike is a person with interests across science, philosophy, and religion/spirituality.  With his years of experience in audio engineering and his many spiritual experiences, Mike has developed his own cognitive schema that connects what seems to be disparate topics.  In this episode, we get to peer into Mike's worldview in the context of a discussion that is largely centered around the concept of coherence. 

Follow at Bottom Turtle YouTube page:
https://www.youtube.com/@bottomturtlepodcast

If you enjoy the podcast, please support us by leaving a review, rating the podcast, and/or telling a friend.  

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast, and leave a review on our FaceBook page at: https://www.facebook.com/thebottomturtle/

If you have any questions or ideas you want discussed on the show, leave us an email at thebottomturtlepodcast@gmail.com 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

In this episode, I have a discussion about the concept of coherence with audio engineer Mike Bellinger. Welcome to the Bottom Turtle Podcast. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Bottom Turtle Podcast. I'm theoretical physics, Dr. Shannon Ray, and in this episode, I'll be releasing a conversation between me and Mike Bellinger. So Mike is someone who I met in the comment section of my video on YouTube on information and broken symmetry. And he has a background in audio engineering, so he's an experienced audio engineer. But he's also someone uh like me and a lot of other people that I talk to on this podcast that is very interested in philosophical and spiritual ideas and concepts and making connections across different subjects and fields. And so it's clear when I was interacting with him and first started talking with him that he has a good mind for connecting things that I always say in the podcast, building the symmetry. And so throughout the podcast, I always talk about the idea of people's cognitive schemas, the size of them, and the idea of interacting with people and stitching together conceptual frameworks through shared interactions. And so, just like I mentioned with people like um uh Ryan and Dario and Reasonable for Deus and all these people, Mike also has developed a rather large cognitive schema uh where he connects ideas from his own perspective, so from his own uh local reference frame, if you will. And so when we first kind of initiated this conversation for recording, it was just a matter of you know starting that process of understanding each other's different worldviews and and and the relationship between them. So the conversation itself kind of evolves, it didn't start off with uh with a clear understanding, other than you know, just kind of hearing some of uh Mike's ideas, but a theme developed pretty quickly and then sharpened throughout the podcast on the idea of coherence. And so I like this conversation because it brings a different perspective on a lot of a lot of ideas and concepts that we've discussed throughout the podcast, and I think that Mike's contribution is um is definitely welcome. And it's one of those things where you know, unlike Dario and Reasonable for Deus and Ryan and other people that uh that I've done this with, I typically it typically takes like months, maybe even years, to like interact with someone long enough to get a good idea of what their world is and how these things connect and um and to stitch together to you know to stitch together the symmetries between these two worlds. And so this is something like the beginning of that process. But I do find that Mike has uh a lot of interesting ideas. So join me as I explore Mike's cognitive world as we continue this process of building the language of the podcast through shared mutuals and searched interactions with other people. So, with that, please enjoy the conversation. And if you like the conversation, don't forget to share it with someone that you know that might be interested. And don't forget to follow me on YouTube. I'll leave a link to my YouTube channel in the description of this episode. So I hope you guys enjoy. Peace. You want to start from where, like, where where your entry point is, like some sort of sort of experience or some sort of uh um epiphany moment where you're just like, ah, I'm gonna I gotta follow this lead, and it kind of took you down this this idea. First off, what's the idea that you're that you're talking about and then like what what kind of led you in the direction you went?

SPEAKER_01 3:36

So it's sort of like a collection of ideas that are sort of like the way that I'm collecting and synthesizing disparate topics and sort of fields together is novel. It's sort of like a way to connect quantum information theory, thermodynamic entropy, scaling of cognitive hierarchies of conscious beings. What those first two things are like my literal research. Yeah, exactly. So I think that there's gonna be some grounds for some discussion here. But um, I'm gonna like say that I am not reinventing anything. I'm not I'm like not discovering anything. I'm really good at seeing how two things connect, maybe where other people can't. But otherwise, I am a pretty normal guy. So no, no, no school or anything.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

But where I'm you do you do do like you do do like engineering stuff with um sound sound engineering, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Yeah, so I think that's a good entry point, actually. So I do uh audio engineering, live PA and front of house engineering, speaker setups for concerts, uh, and um acoustical engineering in general has been in my family for a long time. My dad was an audio engineer, so I was always around audio systems, talking about, you know, boxes, field propagation, stereo field dispersion, you know, the inverse square. So all this stuff is very physics, right? You know, so music is very music is very subjective, it's an art form, but acoustic physics is is a thing that's physics and it's actually explainable and perfectible within a certain volume of space. Um and so when you're combining loudspeaker systems, you know, you have a speaker that's dedicated to the top end, like the really high sounds that's, you know, the the stuff that's really intense and piercing. You have speakers that are dedicated to the vocal range, stuff that's more like percussive, and then you have stuff that's dedicated to the sub-range. So generally, when you see a bunch of different speakers together, they are configured in such a way to where the frequencies that they play, they cross over with each other in a certain way at a certain frequency. And when we're talking about the propagation of frequencies in physical space, you can essentially use something called the quarter wave rule, lambda over four in RF engineering is the same principle, where essentially you you use the virtue of distance to create a uh phase relationship between two different point sources to act as one coherent point source.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

And so that's a basic interferometer. That's basically like interferometry, that's a big basic interferometry right there.

SPEAKER_01 6:05

Sure. And if you have the sources and they're not coherent from a certain distance apart based upon the frequencies they're crossing over, then you're going to have phase destruction. You're going to have comb filtering and destructive interference in the stereo field. But if you do it cor if you do it correctly within the distance of lambda over four or uh the quarter wavelength rule, lambda over four is more used in RF engineering uh for amplification, whereas uh quarter wave is acoustic dispersion. So essentially you're going to have the phase relationship between each box be 90 degrees to each other. So the waves coming out of those boxes, for lack of a better term, are going to jive with each other and roll with each other rather than crash into each other. And that's the best way I can put that. So really, if I'm looking at things at the micro scale and we have RF engineering, you can create a circuit where you have four loops, right? Four different loops to amplify the signal going back in.

SPEAKER_00 7:01

Hold on, Mike. I got I got Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:04

But the number four kind of like, I think it's really important with construction, with group construction, and with coherence. Now, when we're talking about coherence, I'm talking now we're talking about me looking at the universe not as a physical thing, but as a field of information and information dense information density and relationships based upon sort of like coherence and various other things. So I guess audio was a good way into that.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

But so how do you how do you think about coherence? Like if you had to just explain what coherence was, what would you say?

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Yeah, coherence. So you have uh different sources of a signal and coherence is uh sympathy, a resonant sympathy between them. Um coherence is a tuning fork resonating when another tuning fork is near it that is at the same pitch. Uh coheren coherence is when a signal runs into a system and is not impeded. So we could also look at we could also look at a coherent signal as a um resistant, like an infinite non-resistant signal. Most coherent thing. The most coherent thing is the least resistant thing, I guess, right?

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Okay, yeah. Yeah, so you're thinking of like in terms of harmony.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Harmony, yeah. So I mean, I mean to be told, I think that harmonics relationships is really the fundamental root of all sciences and all mathematics. And just because we're dealing with, you know, supposedly an infinite space, and you know, where where the center is is based upon the observation point or the measurement point. I'm looking at it like if everything is the center and nothing is the center, if everything is the source of it all from the center and everything is the source of it all from the center.

SPEAKER_00 8:54

I So can I can interject? Like I think it it has to do with consistency. Coherence. Where the idea of a maximally non-coherent would be total random noise. Um there's no consistency anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 9:09

Yeah, so I guess now we can talk about entropy, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:15

Yeah, well, I am I am kind of I like you said, I I'm kind of interrupting your your train of thought. If you want to continue what you're saying before, then you you can do that.

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Yeah, mainly mainly, so I have a hard time thinking about that question without actually like really, really diving into it. Because the harmonic nature of reality is the wave nature of reality. And the wave nature of reality may or may not be real, it may just be how we digitize what's there. And, you know, based up, you know, the you know, entire wavelength, you know, look at the wave function. That may just be like how our mind digital signal processes the thing that is we are actually experiencing and what we're seeing is is the wave function. So I don't know if I don't know if that's real or not, but I do know at the fundamental most base level of everything we can measure, we have the ability to represent that on various graphs, plots, domains, fields. We can we can essentially represent things with wave functions or supersymmetries pretty much everywhere. And I think that those are the base fundamental points of how we process data, regardless of what the data may or may not be outside of that. So that's why I say harmonics is the kind of fundamental science to me, because it's gonna connect the dots at the fundamental levels of processing. Because when you can represent everything via time-based signatures.

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Okay, so when you say wave function, are you talking about like in the quantum mechanical tense, like this uh solution to Schrodinger equation, or do you mean something, or do you just mean like the equation for a wave, like the wave equation in general?

SPEAKER_01 10:49

Not the wave equation. Anything that we can measure over time, we can create wave period, we can create periodicity from because we uh exist in a cyclical orbit, we exist in a cyclical world, we exist in cyclical systems, and we tend to work cyclically and habitually. Most of these things can be quantified on a grand scale. Now, I'm not saying there isn't, you know, like exceptions to prove the rule, and and there isn't things that can interject at grand scales or miniature scales that change things, but fundamentally, most things that we do we can measure and represent over time because that's what we are experiencing is time, right? We are we are beings that live in time and we experience it through space.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

And so Yeah, I was I was just asking to clarify because uh, you know, like wave function and physics had a very particular, like especially in quantum physics and like a supersymmetry. Like I don't I don't even know the uh physics behind supersymmetry like that. I'm not the guy to explain that, but I don't know if when you use those words, I wasn't sure if you were using it in that context or if you're using it in some other context that you're more familiar with. And I think you clarified that.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

Yeah, so I'm a layman coming at this using terms that make sense to me. So I'm I'm yeah I would love to let this discussion like evolve my ability to you know to speak about it. Because when I say when I say symmetry and supersymmetry, what I'm referring to is the quantum state that allows energy or potential to become matter. But whether that's happening in our minds or whether that's happening in the field sort of external to us, I'm not sure about. And um, yeah, so I I don't have the the right nomenclature potentially. So let me let me let me go sort of like I wrote down a few things about what I perceive here, and rather than you know, answer questions back and forth where I may misrepresent my thoughts, let me say that um this is taking like don't worry, man, it's a safe space here. You just you speak I speak your feelings. So no, I'm synthesizing ideas from multiple domains, right? So language is inherently not good here because a physicist and you know an archaeologist are gonna name two versions of the same thing, two different things, because of who they are and the lens that they're seeing it through, right? So we have so many different words for the same thing, and we sometimes don't have words for something that we all know. And so this is a synthesis hypothesis. I'm connecting dots across disciplines, and so some of it's gonna sound very physical because it is based upon a tangible like field propagation reality of like, say, acoustic physics or light moving through a medium, and some of that we can reverse engineer into like an opinion, and some of it is very, very theoretical, like information theory moving into how mind constructs itself through basal medium, moving through cognitive hierarchies and into what we are, like a being and then a mind and then a body and then a society.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

And so the idea I would I would say that what you're doing is like uh uh from my understanding of coherence by trying to connect these things between like you're trying to take all these disparate fields and then and then find some sort of underlining structure that's consistent between them. So what's your so it's that's how I conceptualize coherence. You're trying to find the coherence that's consistent uh throughout all different mediums. Where I go from one field to the other, there's something that doesn't change, there's something that's consistent.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

And so this is a social idea of symmetry. You could say coherence is sort of like a universal truth.

SPEAKER_00 14:12

Yeah, I I would say one one of the best ways to think of it uh think of it is in terms of symmetry. Yeah, it's the thing well, it's the thing that persists. It's the thing that persists. So it's like uh one of the examples I kind of think of is maybe a signal in a crowd where well, so in in quantum physics, when we talk about like something being coherent, we talk about it in terms of these unitary transformations. So like a pure state, a pure quantum state is completely coherent. So when I take the object and I rotate it, I'm not actually changing. There's something that is invariant that doesn't change. This that's associated with the symmetry. And so it's that invariance that doesn't change that's associated with the coherence of the state. When you're thinking about the different, like the spectrum between coherence and incoherence, that's a pure state to a maximally mixed state, where a maximally mixed state is like pure noise. And so you can imagine being inside of a crowd and imagine that everyone in the crowd is as a stadium, like a UFC event, the stadium. And everyone in the crowd is yelling something different. Each individual person at a given moment is yelling something different. And so from within the crowd, that just sounds like random noise, right? Because there's no consistency across what anyone's saying. It's like a bunch of vectors all point in different directions, uh conflicting with each other. Right. But then imagine that um like 2% of the people in the crowd start saying the same thing at the same time. Then what you get is a signal where you hear something that sounds correct, but there's like all this noise. So you don't really so you so you don't hear anything that's coherent, something that I can comprehend. And then and then as that, as the number of people who are switching from random speech speech to saying something consistent, it's it's slowly going from something a completely random nonsense, completely incoherent, to something coherent to where everyone's saying the exact same thing, then it's appear where it's perfectly coherent.

SPEAKER_01 16:00

Okay, so in my language, I I would call that crystallization. We have a seed. We have a we have a seed. Yeah, so I'm looking at things in like a very like I took acid when I was 18 lens, you know.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

So as far as I won't say interesting because I've I've been interacting with my AI, and um crystallization is something that is very consistent. So it it's actually really interesting that you said that because that's exactly how I've been communicating with my AI in terms of the language I've created in the podcast and what type of structure that it creates uh that the AI recognizes and the crystalline structure is one of the things. So very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 16:36

When when I heard that, the entire thing that I was thinking was a superstructure that is created by not so much each individual component, but by the shared component between them, which in the form in the form of a molecule that would be the valence electron between the atoms, but in the in the form of people, now we're getting into what I call trust gradients. Okay. And so a trust gradient between people is sort of like a weight, uh like a multi-dimensional weighed metric on like how much can I trust that this person is representing the same information that I'm representing, right? How much can I can I trust that what's important to them is what's important to me and that we have the same idea about it? And now, so like so now this is a good segue into like cognitive hierarchies, right? And and moving from something that is an individual unit. Like for us, it's we are people as individual units. But if you think about it deeper, we have cells in our body, and each of our cells has individual jobs and functions. They work, they work with each other, they're designed to do certain things for self-preservation, but somehow they all come together and work together to become the whole, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:41

Yeah, so shared identity, I think, is the best way to like what the you're trying to understand this trust gradient to what degree do I have a shared identity with another.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

Yeah. And how much can I trust that this thing is part of me? Well, that it agrees on something larger than itself, like me, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Yes, just like you and I being human, for example. We both know that we are among the human species, that we have a shared identity and in being human.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Absolutely. And so now we're moving into like, okay, I actually have a hierarchy that I developed, like like cognitive one, cognitive two, cognitive three, cognitive four. And it's a very basic thing, but I think it's a good place to start understanding this because we all kind of start at the same place as children, you know, coming from our mothers, and we all start at the same place as cells before we decide to create some serotonin feedback system to become something bigger. We have, you know, a framework where we have the first level being a predictive agent, and that predictive agent is essentially experiencing the environment and predicting what comes next, because everything runs at the sake of their environment. And the only thing that you can really do about it is first start thinking about it to know what's hitting you. What is that wave? Ow. Like you might feel pain first. Let's call C0 pain, right? So C C2, the engineering agent. So we have a predictive agent first, and before you can have an engineering agent, you need to be able to predict.

SPEAKER_00 19:09

So wait, so C C0 is pain, C1 is predictive agent, and C2 is engineering agent.

SPEAKER_01 19:14

C2 is engineering agent, which is goal-directed environmental manipulation and modeling. And so you can C1 is prediction. So you can't model your environment without predicting what comes next, right? So you need prediction for engineering. Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. Maybe and maybe engineering should have a different term. Let's call it environmental manipulation or the manipulating agent or the one that actually models its environment, modeling agent. So we have a predictive agent, C2 is engineering or modeling agent. Now C3 is the social agent where we have intersubjective modeling of other minds. So we have a mind, we have an environment, but now there's other minds, and now we can't predict necessarily what that other mind's gonna do. Introduce game theory, right? So C3 is game theory, but I I think game theory is like a chunk of it and not the full thing. Because what we have as individuals, even as an individual, sometimes we lack the capacity for C3, and that's why we seek it out in others, whether it's a relationship partner or a priest or a deacon, a president. You know, a lot of us actually fail to reach full social agency. And so we we offload and offshore to other beings. And then past C3, I believe, is C4, which is now we're getting to the coherence. Lambda over four, we have four stages, discrete stages of consciousness, where the fourth stage is collective consciousness, hive mind working together, institutions, corporations.

SPEAKER_00 20:44

Yes, yes, yes. And so this is this is actually interesting because this actually is a model that's consistent for individuals and also for groups and societies. So within your own self, you're trying to create harmony within so so like within the podcast, I don't know how much of it you've listened to, but I've I've constructed this um this made like this is it's basically it's like communities all the way down. So just as you were saying, like you are this being made up of a bunch of different cells and things, and and there's some degree to which if all it's like if so this comes to coherence, right? So if everything that you take together as a clump of biological material, a clump of physical material, if that if there's no structure to it, it's all random, then there's no sense of identity, there's no sense of anything, it's just a clump of randomness. So and then you start, so then you start having um you start trying to create structure. So you take the randomness and you start having the things have relationships with each other. And and there's and there's a degree to which those relationships have to be persistent over time. So, like whatever your digestive system is doing, whatever your reproductive system is doing, all these things, there's there's some degree to which you know your digestive system should be able to digest food over time. Like it's not gonna do something different. There's something consistent about its nature. And so this idea of going from random noise to structure is the idea of Of finding something that is consistent or coherent. And to your point, if we are these things that's made up of a bunch of collection of living things, then there has to be some way to collection of living things all doing their own thing randomly. There has to be some sort of consistent function between them, some consistent relationship between them that then can emerge the idea of an individual. And so, and so this goes into what this goes deeply to what you're saying, is something like even within your own being, you can have a bunch of discord. You know, and this is why we need things like psychology, why we need things like uh religion, like we need spiritual leaders, like we need a comfort from other than stuff, because there's a degree to which it's like to what extent can you stabilize your own identity? And and the degree to which you don't have a stable stable identity is the degree to which you're like suffering and like so you're trying to create harmony. And I think this is kind of the hierarchy of what you're trying to do as a uh, yeah, yeah. So this is the hierarchy of what you're trying to do as a being. And then when you start getting to a level where you really create some sort of harmonization, you've gotten to some high level of consistency, then I think you start being able to recognize that consistency in others, and then that's when you stop thinking of yourself as an individual and you start seeing yourself as outside as opposed to being totally inside, external as opposed to totally internal.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

A few points on that, and I totally agree with pretty much everything you said. One thing that I I think I've come to the conclusion of is that scaling certain problems, like becoming a person, is a problem that's beyond the comprehension of each individual self, right? And um, it's just a matter of scale. It's certain it kind of indicates that certain problems become tractable, not with more units, but with a different architecture of units, right? So we have certain units that can do four things, certain units that can do three things, certain units that can do 50 things in our body in our body. So like the difference and and like the the breadth of it all is necessary for it all to cohere, even though it's all very complicated. Um and then the other thing that you said, I think that when it comes to like sociology, like have you ever followed the work of Michael Levin? No. So he's a biologist, he's the world-leading biologist studying things from a purely biological perspective. But he's come to the conclusion that minds exist everywhere and that, you know, very, very basal cells show the capacity of an individual mind as well as them all working together. He's doing very, very interesting work. But one thing that he said that I really, really like, and it changed my perspective on everything, was that he believes that all beings are equally as selfish. It just depends on their concept of self. And so we're talking about growing, I'm sorry? So we're talking about you know, communities all the way down, right? What is my concept of self? How far does that extend? Well, I can conceptualize my cells all working together, but that's about as far as I can get. I can get down to the atomic, you know, connections of it all. But even that's kind of fuzzy because like everybody has a way of like visualizing that. That's not necessarily what it looks like or feels like at the microscopic scale. So let's just call, let's just say cells, right? That's as far as my sense of self goes down. But how far does it go out? That's the real question, right? Because so much of us, what we're doing right now in like Western science is going down to the individual, isolating, getting down to that one little thing and understanding its power. What next, right? Well, we've been actually doing it for millennia. We just don't have a word for it except for institutions and kingdoms and things where we create these groups and these social structures, right? These are the next stage of human evolution, is what kind of groups can we cohere and form together that creates something even though we're all different little pieces working on our own little part of it.

SPEAKER_00 25:50

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, you're you're getting at the center of yeah, this is this is an explosion of um of ideas. Because now you're getting directly into the heart of ethics. And I mean, within my framework like that I've constructed within the language of the podcast, um, one of the example things I like to use, like and I explained it at the beginning of the episode, Spirits and Waveforms, is this idea of the self. And and it's going back, I think it's called theseist ship. I forget what the name is. I think it's these ship, where it's this idea that you have this ship and then it's made up of a bunch of material, and you take one piece of material and replace it with another piece, and you do that, you know, slowly over time to where eventually you get to the point where all of the uh material, the original ship is gone and it's all made of the new material. Then you ask yourself, is this the same ship? Um, and so when I think about it, it's the fact that as physical beings, the physical energy and matter that makes up our system is replaced over time. Like we eat food, you know, the same cells, the same material cells that made up your body when you were an infant are not the same as they are now. It's like 99% of that stuff is completely replaced. But there's something that is coherent across time, something that is persistent that says I am Shannon. And so the question then becomes if it is the case that the physical matter is replaced over time, but there's something that it persists that is not made of physical matter that says I am Shannon, then you can see how you can split apart the physical structure from something that's not physical that you can say yourself. And I'm saying that that is like the blueprint. That's the architecture, that's the information that tells you the interaction between materials. So, like if I take a small piece of my material and then replace it with another piece, because all the other material is still interacting in in something like a field, like a field, right? So when you put the new material into the field, it collects into place what it's supposed to be doing because of the all of the other interactions are persistent. So in other words, you can think of it as this field as being part of yourself. So the real important part about that then is that it's the blueprint on how you put the configuration of matter together. So now you have to ask yourself when I use this nomination of representation, is that when you do something like study to be a physicist, like you learn how to do calculus, right? So because of nominational representation, you know for a fact that you, your physical system went to it from a state before you know how to do calculus to a state after you knew how to do calculus. And so that has to be associated with the blueprint or the of how to store the memory of calculus. So even if you take the physical matter that that makes up my body, because the blueprint to store uh calculus is inside my system, when I put new in there, new matter in there, and that stays persistent. So and then so then you see how, and this is how it goes, how it extends outward instead of being internal. Because now you see how if I learn how to do calculus and you know how to do calculus, then you have the same blueprint, the same architecture in you as I do in me. And so then that's when you start saying, ah, I see myself over there because you start associating the identity of self with the blueprint. And so, um, and so why so so, and then this is how you start constructing shared identity. So whenever you look at who you're responsible to, like if I'm if you're being selfish, like you said, you're being selfish to the self, then it comes down to what uh what else is the self, and that's why you can say, like, I'm an American, we are all one self, I'm a whatever, and then this becomes and so yeah, so if you've listened to this podcast enough, you know that I construct identity in this way for this reason.

SPEAKER_01 29:10

So I do highly suggest checking out the work of Michael Levin because he has actually coined a term for this morphogenic bio bioelectric field where uh where you know this limb of the salamander can be expressed on an electric field before it's ever grown, because the salamander knows how many exactly how many limbs and digits to regrow and then stop. And otherwise it's called cancer. We call that growth cancer when it's unchecked and it doesn't have coherence. So, interestingly enough, Michael Levin is coming at coherence from the lens of biology and cells talking to each other and working together. And it's it's really brilliant, but interestingly, it goes so far beyond biology, and he's the first one to say that. And he says that cognitive sciences, psychology, game theory, talking about how individual units interact with each other in a system. He's talking about that's really the next step in understanding how the body's gonna function. Because if we could, you know, uh a skin cell to reprogram itself into a little cell that goes around and you know cures neuronal damage, why do we need medicine? So there's uh all sorts of interesting things there. So, Michael Levin, I would definitely recommend checking out his work.

SPEAKER_00 30:23

Did you get a chance to listen to the uh um the episode of the podcast, uh the configuration stability principle? I did. Okay, yeah, yeah. Because I think toward the end of that episode, I I start, I like the I try to construct the idea of seeing the self in others. And and and I and this really does go to the core of like religious ideas of God, with with especially like you look at Buddhism, it's this idea of um that which is not beholden to the laws of impermanence. Any religious conceptualization of God is that God is like the eternal, the thing that doesn't change. And it's essential, and God would be essentially the uh underlining invariant structure from which everything else emerges. That's why within uh within Christianity and like Judaism, you have this idea of being made in the image of God. And and and and this goes to the idea of everybody is a reflection of God's character. Everything is a reflection of God's character, but you have this notion of sin which is associated with distortion. So, in other words, when you when you when you're when you're in a state of sin, you're in a state where you distort, manipulate, lie not only to yourself but to others. And so what's reflected back is no longer like a uh a reflection with fidelity that's coherent. And so there's something like trying to purify yourself and go to higher states of being where you're more in line with God, where you're trying to remove the layers of distortion that you have. And then once those layers of distortion are removed, then you can start reflecting back true coherent data to yourself and others, and that's how you start becoming a true reflection of God. And everybody, because of our different individual selves, we all reflect from a different point of view, but from a different perspective. And then this goes into my idea of like local neighborhoods and lead groups and the algebra and all that stuff. But yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Yeah, that's a good segue because also I have a lot of Eastern philosophy in my mind. And recently I've been doing more um religious studies into Western philosophy and Christian philosophy just to understand that how it ties into everything. I'm not religious, however, I am extremely spiritual because I do see a reality of a fundamental sort of consciousness or a fundamental sort of creator of all of all things. But I see it at all scales. You know, saying that I'm separate from God right now is is false, but also it is true. Both states can be true, and that's what we call a tetravalent logic. When we have both states can be true or false, you know, now we're entering collective consciousness territory where you and I need to come together to create the truth. Because I believe fundamentally that humans as individuals are limited to cognitive level three, meaning trivalent logic. And and now we're gonna go a little bit deep into how I got to this conclusion of trivalent logic. Yeah, what is trivalent logic? I was gonna ask you that. What do you mean by the logic? Trivalent logic is yes, no, or maybe, right? We have we we have the ability as beings to basically understand things. Yes, this is true. Yes, this is what I see as true. Yes, this is what I understand. No, that is not true. No, that's not what you say it is, or maybe I don't know yet, but I'm gonna I'm gonna figure it out, right? Or we'll or maybe we'll never know. So trivalent logic as beings, we're kind of faced with paradoxes. And when we are faced with paradoxes, because there is much more than trivalent logic in this universe, when we're faced with those paradoxes, that's why we form structures bigger than ourselves to process that information because all of reality is an information processing system at scale, and that information is you could say it's God's voice or signal, but it's different for everyone at every scale that it's happening, right? So, how I came to this conclusion of trivalent logic actually has its roots in our evolution as primates and where we come from, like over 100,000 years ago out of Africa, where we have proof that, you know, between 75,000 and years ago, the early humans were using red pigment from a stone called red ochre. And it's one of the most early pigments we were using. We used it for sunscreen, we used it for uh bug repellent, we used it for paint, we used it for regalia, we painted our dead with it, we painted our houses with it, we sought it out. Whenever we traveled across the world, we found new sources of it to keep using it over 70,000 years. Only in the last five or six thousand years of human history did we really stop using it. So this red stone is very, very important to early humanity. And why is that? And the only reason I can really think of if we're going into anthropology, which I really am not, I never went to college except for music history. So I'm a layman and I'm I'm gonna be the first to say that I'm wrong if someone comes at me with some real evidence. But I think this is actually testable. And that's the difference here between other claims. So I believe that when we have the evolution of the trichromatic vision, so we have a new cone in our eyes that has evolved to see the color red, it enables us to see blood, it enables us to see ripe fruit, it enables us to see things in the shadows that we couldn't perceive before. It created new biological structures at the same time as it created new logical structures, right?

SPEAKER_00 35:34

Uh so are you saying that there's a point? Are you saying is it within the evolutionary literature that there is this evolution of trichromatic um vision or and where we start seeing red? Is that some is that is that a um a conjecture or an idea, or is that like established science that you've come across?

SPEAKER_01 35:54

It is established that uh primates evolved the red cone in their eyes around 150 to 250,000 years ago. And then so we line that up with ice ages and then out of Africa and we and where w red ochre was popular, uh where it seems to have come from over 75,000 years ago.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

We have to be able to do that. What was the vision capacity prior to the evolution of that being able to see red with it just like shades of gray or what do you know?

SPEAKER_01 36:26

Green, yeah, greens, greens, grays, browns. It really was a lot of different shades of green.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 36:33

And so we evolved the red cone, the most recent to our perception of being what we think. Like where we are right now, the most recent color that we evolved to see was red.

SPEAKER_00 36:45

Okay, okay. So you're saying the most recent color that we've gotten within our evolution is is red?

SPEAKER_01 36:50

Red, and then the gradients between red and everything else. And that's where I say this latent space that is maybe, right? So before we honestly, I believe we were limited to yes, food, no, not food, yes, mate, no, not mate, yes, predator, no, not predator. There was no I don't think that animals have a maybe. And that's what's and I believe that's what separates a cognitive level two from the cognitive level three.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

Okay, okay, this is interesting. So this is a very interesting point. So this is consistent, and like whether or not the um like the science, hard science on this is is like whatever. Um so okay, so this is consistent with an episode of the podcast I have called The Ultimate Abstraction, where essentially when you have black and white thinking, they're in it's like yes or no. And I always there's a really good example I I use of this. It's like imagine you go online and you're watching YouTube or you're watching, you know, whatever, and there's someone on YouTube and they're telling you some fact about something that occurred. You know, it's like um they're telling you some sort of factoid, or they're telling you some sort of some sort of fact. And you have to ask yourself, can I trust this person? So if it is the case that you trust this person, then when they tell you something, this goes into the true bin, right? You don't have to go into the is this true or is this not true bin? And so the idea of black and white thinking is you can go, all right, I place this over here or I place this over here, and it's and it's easy. Like you don't have to keep memory, but if there's a maybe, then you have to store the memory of that maybe. And so this is associated with abstraction because now you don't have the freedom to just go, all right, I put that in the true and I don't think about it anymore. Now you have to go, I'm putting this to true, but I'm not sure. So I have to hold this up. There's entropy there, there's uncertainty there, and I have to keep track of that uncertainty. And then once you actually can verify it's true, it's like, okay, good, I can release that in theory and I can just place it in the true bin. Um, and so this idea of being able to uphold the idea that the thing could be a maybe is the idea that you're not allowing it to be A or B. You are actually abiding in the pair in the contradiction of A and B. You have to hold those both up simultaneously, which causes which cause which requires memory. And this is the idea of going at huh.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Memory requires time. That's the forward feed mechanism of evolution. Yeah, yeah. Memory requires time. So now we're getting into trust as a computational substrate, right? How much so if I have to hold on to maybe and process it later until it's processed to yes or no, I have to collapse that into a yes or no. It's a binary, right? That's why, that's why that's C that's why C C2. It's a binary system. You you have to collapse things down. There is a maybe, there is a yes, there is a no. C three is we can hold a maybe and be fine with it. But now something you might hold as absolutely true, I might not, right? And so now there's a maybe that exists between both of our fundamental yeses. Yeah. Right? And so now we're moving into cognitive scaling, right? So things that we cannot solve as individual beings, we move into collectives. Things that we cannot solve as collectives is the then we move into the next step. That might be LLMs. But this is all when it happens at the same scale.

SPEAKER_00 40:07

I want to say, too, that the idea of you having a different yes than me, that's a that has also associated with a different configuration. So if I have a if with the same question, I have a yes and you have a no, then that's associated with this binary of a different configuration. And so conceptually, there is a difference in what we believe to be true, but that also is stored as memory in our system. So there's a physical system that's just there's no mentation of representation. There's a physical configuration that's associated with that difference in in memory. And I'm saying that that's also contains a different spirit, which then says that there's a different, there's a difference between you and me. We don't have the same spirit. I'm me and you're you, but if our yeses are consistent, then there's a then there's a there's a shared spirit there. Now we have a shared spirit, it's a shared cognitive uh uh understanding of reality.

SPEAKER_01 40:53

Yeah, and I think that the definition of what that shared, like how important what that shared information is, is what dictates what we call society. Like how important is what's important, and then what do we share within that, right? So I think we can all agree that like women and children and you know, any anyone shouldn't be hurt, but like we should all probably agree that like women and children first on the lifeboat, you know what I mean? Like we all share certain things about our minds. Yes, certain maybe exactly. Now we're getting into really empirical ethics discussions, and ethics might be the next step in understanding biology. Who knows? Michael Levin is probably the closest one I found that actually knows. Trust as a computational substrate is, I think, a topic that we really need to start talking about. Because as we move into autonomous systems and drone-based systems, where there's lots of different swarms or units in a swarm of things that does things out in a factory or delivery things or driving out in new flying cars, you know, the next hundred years are gonna be really interesting. And I believe using trust as a computational substrate, like weighed metrics between different individual units, I think that's gonna be an interesting field of research because we don't currently look at it like we don't try to quantify trust thermodynamically as memory over time.

SPEAKER_00 42:09

Here's a question I have for you. So talking to you, like it's interesting because during this conversation, you mentioned several times, you know, I'm a lay person, I don't have like technical understanding. But it's that talking to you, it's very clear that within your internal language, internal structure, there's a high-dimensional coherent structure that you're functioning with. It's you're not just talking out of your ass, it's not just nonsense. I understand where you're coming from, even if the word technical terms you use maybe something specific to you, but might be something different to uh to someone in a specific field. So my question is to what degree, like how confident do you feel do you are you that the internal structure that you have for the meaning of your words um are consistent, like logically consistent? In other words, that if it were the case that someone were to sit down with you and basically, to what degree are you certain that there would be a symmetry transformation between another person's structure and your structure, such that you can say, okay, my structure is internally consistent. My structure, my structure is internally coherent. Like how, to what degree have you pressure tested your language so that you, when you use a word, you know, all right, I know how to map this word to this word consistently in a way that's coherent.

SPEAKER_01 43:25

Well, I try to constantly check myself on that, but also having conversations with people like you wherever I can. Um, I can only hope that we can come to a new understanding or a shared understanding from this conversation. And um when I say certain things, it is the way that I see it because of how I visualize reality. I've come to terms some people see the world when you say red apple, they can immediately see the red apple in their mind, right? And it's visual, it's cartoony even. Yeah, I don't. I have I have a Very non-visual mind. And the way that my mind constructs reality is it's actually an engine for reality rather than a display for it. And so my mind looks and tries to actually understand like, okay, we have two atoms. What makes them stick together into a molecule? It's something called a valence electron. Well, what's the valence electron? Well, it's something, it's an electron in the cloud that's furthest out that actually shares polarity consistency with the other electron, and that's why they can form. Okay. So, like, okay, so how do I visualize that? Well, the easy way to visualize that for me is the same wave propagation theory we're talking about, waves coming out of speakers, where we have two signals that are either conflicting, missing each other, or jiving with each other. And so the way that I see that is just a single line coming out of a single speaker moving in a spiral and expanding into space. And then I keep I keep looking at things like that. Lines and dots, lines and dots. Um, you can construct a really good, coherent model of how reality works with really basic visual tools. And as far as the words that I'm using, I can be corrected on them, but that doesn't mean that my model is incorrect, right? It just means that I don't have the right necessarily scientifically agreed upon nomenclature or jargon. And a lot of the stuff that I think about is actually on the fringe level of quantum information theory. So talking about entropic gravity, now we have something that not even like the most established physicists agree about and have nothing and have language for. So how are we going to talk about that in context to everything else that I'm talking about? So I have to sort of come up with my own, my own language that I'm sure some of it is totally incorrect from um falsifiable standpoint or like a text textbook definition standpoint. But I'm sure that there's enough coherence to what I've constructed here to where someone like you or someone like even Michael Levin or someone like um Josh Abach could actually look at this and actually say, oh yeah, there's some stuff here that actually lines up. And I might not have used those words or those words are wrong, but what he means is this, and what he means is that.

SPEAKER_00 46:07

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, the the the point to my question was um I had I had the the it in my head, I lost it. Um let me see if I can reconstruct it real quick. The point to my question, if you listen to my podcast, I say specifically that I'm constructing a language and that the purpose of the podcast itself is to um is to show how every word that I use. So I take colloquial words and then I change their definition slightly, you know, like spirit, how something programs the universe and how it's programmed by the universe. And and I take these words and I and I change their definition slightly. But then the purpose is to show like the logic, like logically, how these things stick together, like how two words stick together, and then give someone an observation to confirm it. So the example I always use is something like um you have the idea of minds and computer algorithms, where in the both case of a computer and a physical system, like a like a person, in both cases, you have their physical subsystems of the universe that can be placed in many different configurations based off of what data they take in and how they process uh information and how they process data. And this can be verified because if I tell you a secret, then you can get up and walk into another room, tell someone that secret, and um that's no different than if I handed you that secret on a memory card and you carried the memory card into the room and handed someone that secret. And so you know that when I'm talking to you, that I am programming you and that you're going from a config you're that you're going through a trajectory in the space of configurations from the space of configurations that your physical system can be placed in from one prior to having the secret to one to one after uh I've told you the secret. And this can be verified through observation through this example of me, of you carrying the secret into another room. And so for me, this this entire thing that I've constructed is like this symmetry, this coherence between mind to computer algorithms, and it's verifiable. Like, in other words, everything I said is just as basic as the idea that if I take a wine glass and throw it on the ground, it'll be smashed. And so the idea of my podcast is the entirety of it, especially in the earlier stuff, is constructing it's like it's like I'm trying to communicate my model of reality, the language that I've constructed. And when I speak to someone like you, it's very clear that you have a language, like you've done the same thing. And the thing is, is that I've interacted with enough people over the years to where I've actually spent, and this typically takes years of interaction, that I've actually constructed the symmetry or the algebraic transformation between the language I constructed in my podcast and whatever language they have. And every language that they have is going to start from a different uh local neighborhood. Um, and so for instance, I've recently been having these conversations with this guy named Dario, Dario Velis, that's an Italian grad student, who is writing a thesis on Lacan. And he contacted me uh on YouTube based off my video on information and broken symmetry. And for the last, I don't know, six months or something like that, we've been talking back and forth where I can where we've been constructing the symmetry between my world and his world and the language of uh Lacan so that we can see, we can see ourselves. And so, but the but the thing is is that when people like when we function as beings, we don't always take everything that we understand and then put it into a structure, a structure that's something that could be programmed into a computer, for example, where everything is logically consistent. A lot of times we function out of intuition. And so just because someone is functioning out of intuition, like they have an intuition for what a word means, then that intuition can itself construct the coherent structure of what they're trying to say. So even though they might say some term or some word that's not consistent with some technical version of it, that doesn't mean what they're saying is nonsensical or incoherent. But it may be the case that although what they're saying is coherent, they might not have formalized it yet in a in like a coherent structure such that you can hand it to someone else and they would know how to use it without you being there. That's the difference. So some of that point to the question I was asking was like, to what degree are you certain that this thing that this language you constructed, your the way you construct reality, um, has been formalized such that I could you could hand it to someone else and then leave, and then they would know how to use it without you being there. Um, and and and just and and if you haven't done that, that doesn't mean what you're saying isn't it, it doesn't mean that you haven't constructed a large coherent world.

SPEAKER_02 50:18

Can I ask you a question?

SPEAKER_01 50:20

Yeah. So you said you used the example of giving me a secret, either telling me a secret and me walking in the room and sharing it, or putting it on a memory card. And both of those are the things. What or who defined what a secret was, and what is a secret outside of something that is a fundamental level of a trust gradient, like a straight line on a trust gradient between two people. And so what I'm what I'm getting at is that the whatever you hold is true, whatever I hold is true, what I'm saying is that the layer above us, the layer that contains us, and the layer that we operate in is having truths in it that we can't individually process that we can only share space on. So this secret, right? The secret that you can entrust in me, and I can choose to share it or not, you define you defined that secret as a secret. There is no secrets in an informational reality, right? Everything is known if we go out and look for it. There is no real wall there, except for social structures that pose the wall.

SPEAKER_00 51:23

Well, I mean, we gotta be careful with what we're with what we're because it'd be like something like a a password, like I can't log into your bank account. So, so and then it could be like like there's there's a certain certain degree to which the secret might be the password to your bank account. And unless you're saying there's something like you can meditate or astral project or something like that and find the no without without me communicating to you my bank account password. So whether I'm saying you could see that information without me telling you.

SPEAKER_01 51:53

Given enough time, all encryption protocols can be broken, and all systems that humans have devised to hide information can be broken. I don't believe in encryption once we get to a certain level of processing power, because that is a is a scale of processing power. The more you have to brute force, the better you are at it. There is, I believe fundamentally believe, like no information security. And that is why we can one of the reasons why we construct systems to find truth, because we want there to be information security. Turn the question, we want to find trust, even though there is none. So we create it.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

So yeah, so so based off the example you I like the response you gave because you're saying something like with enough computational time, with enough computational power and time, then I can get I can find that out. Um, you know, because there is there is like something, there, there's a computer that has a configuration, a structure. And to go from the configuration in which I'm logged in, where I'm not logged in to where I'm logged in, those are two different configurations, I need the password. And you're saying something like, given this existence of this structure that has the capacity to be in the state of logged in or not logged in, we can get to logged in with enough time and computing power. But but this is an important question because now think of a secret as something that's like inside me, you know, some maybe something that happened when I was really young or something I don't want to tell anyone. Or maybe it's it's even the case that within my own self, and this starts going into the idea of symmetry and quantum states. Um, because for me, quantum mechanics, I understand it as being the symmetries of the universe, the entropy of the universe, the degree to which the universe is not defined. And so there are actually states where it's not in one state or the other. It's the cats alive and dead. It's not either, it's it's not in either one state. That's the potential of what it could be. But it's in it's in this entropic state to where that has not been defined. It has not been rendered yet, has not been brought into existence. It's in a state of potential. And so, with that being said, this idea of computational capacity having the ability to always reveal something. I don't know if it's the case that you could, for example, take all of my physical measurements of my of like of my uh physical system. Like you could, like you knew everything about my physical system, whether or not you could reconstruct my subjective state of being or my subjective experience. So I'm in other words, I'm trying to pose that there might be a limit to this computational um of this ability to understand everything through computation. And this is fundamentally, I think, of the word religion and spirituality comes in. Is that I don't like for me, especially in my recent years, I reject the idea that everything is material, like everything can be understood in terms of computation. Like even the idea of logic and computation and information, all of that to me is is within the realm of the material. Um, but but the the nature of reality is made up of the symbolic order, as Lacan would say, and the real. And the real is that element of reality that cannot be totalized by the symbolic order. And so the the idea of this like the real in this space of structure, symbolic order, where we have the idea of coherence. This space is the space of the temporal, the things that can be molded, things that change over time. And then this up, huh? Even you could call it platonic space. No, no, platonic space is the space up here where there is no, so that that's that's precisely the separation between heaven and earth. Earth itself associated with the temporal. So even in Buddhism, you have this idea of the law of impermanence, where you have a separation between the eternal and those things which can can arise and then die, can be born. And so things that can be born and die are separated from the eternal. And I think this is true in like the Tao Tejing from the little bit I know from talking to other people. I know it's true in Christianity, I know it's true in Buddhism that you always have this separation between heaven and earth, the temporal versus the eternal. And so for me, this idea that everything, like, and so that to me, the materialistic, the material is is associated with the temporal. But I think that the eternal, that which is outside of the symbolic order, the real, it's not like reality. In other words, I'm disagreeing with the idea that with enough computational capacity, you can learn everything.

SPEAKER_01 56:04

I think there's a limit to I think that we're seeing it maybe from two different lenses. And this is why I say that we don't consider trust a computational substrate right now, but we should. Because if we look at our society as an information processing system and not as a society, then we can come to the understanding of how that information might be weighed and moved around the system. And when we talk about, you know, the perfect space, I don't see a separation between heaven and hell. I just see one samsara. And that's that samsara is here, and it is our either prerogative or our dismay to work with that. Now, how I look at this is that we can build, we can crystallize pockets of order within entropy by using that entropy as a moving force, as a driving force. So this is even gravitational. We talk about the sun exporting, um exporting entropy, and then we harness light, you know, it's exporting it as light and heat. We we harness that and use it to create food and infrastructure and energy. And that's not forever. It's a temporary system of order created by an export of entropy from a field, a massive body, which we are in the field of influence of. Yeah. The entire thing is an information processing system and gives rise to information processing systems and destroys them. And I look at the entire thing like an effervescent field. If you want to use God as the term, then it's an effervescent field of God's ideas popping up and that we are here to manifest them. Now, if you want to say God's mind is the platonic space and is the perfect space where nothing can exist, well, that's that's fine. But if you also want to look at Eastern philosophy, they also say that there's a difference between the Atman and the Brahman. And, you know, the the difference being that one is non-conceivable, non-reachable, and shouldn't even be worth your time because you can't even start thinking about that stuff. And the other one is like, oh yeah, that's the creator. That, you know, was what that invisible, non-manifest thing turned into, and that's the one thing that we can start thinking about, and that's how most people see God. Right.

SPEAKER_00 58:17

Which one's wish, by the way? Which one's wish, by the way?

SPEAKER_01 58:26

I actually really like this story, and keep in mind this is an interpretation of it uh that I really like. It's not necessarily the one everyone agrees on, but um essentially the uh the idea is that Atman in his infinite emptiness was lonely. And the first actually didn't create Brahman, but first created Maya, and Maya would be the field of illusions, yeah, and basically then shattered himself into an infinite amount of Brahmins, and then interesting. That's so interesting. The different scales of Brahman being they say that one Brahman at the ultimate level of Brahman, one Brahman's breath is like one thousand Brahmin lifetimes, and then those thousand Brahmins, one breath from them is like a thousand other Brahman. So we were all like manifestations of Brahman and the godhead at some hierarchical scale down the cosmos.

SPEAKER_00 59:13

Yeah. That actually makes a lot of sense to me.

SPEAKER_01 59:16

But the the the idea that you know we're all like the way that I see heaven is a field in front of us, which is potential for us to actually do something with. Like we could turn this into something good by working together. That I literally think that breaking out of C3 into C4 is realizing that the kingdom of heaven can be built here by all of us together if we work together.

SPEAKER_00 59:40

Yeah. Um, I I think it was what's what's interesting to me is that um, yeah, so this makes sense because you have the Atman, as you said, is like this eternal emptiness. You know, there's sunyata in Buddhism, it's associated with emptiness, and that's what Buddhism focuses on, is emptiness. And so to me, that's the realm of pure symmetry. That's that's the realm of pure symmetry. There's no self or other. So this goes into the idea of information, like information is broken symmetry. So in my in my episode, I mean the video I think that actually made made us come into contact with each other with that that video on information being broken symmetry. And it's this idea that without a broken symmetry, then then there's no capacity for perception. And a broken symmetry creates a reference frame for you to have a self and an other. And so there's there's something like when I think of the platonic, even like the platonic ideal would be something like the realm of form in Buddhism. So I think that that's that's the difference. It's like emptiness is like pure emptiness. There's no perception, there's no anything. You know, this is like the real, unattainable. Like this is the thing that's outside the symbolic order in Lacan. Okay. This is this is the real outside the symbolic order in the Khan. And then you can have something like, okay, let's go from a state of pure, unbounded non-perception, no broken symmetry anywhere. And then let's break symmetry so that that space gets mapped out. That's my that that would be so that would so that would be something like the realm of form. So now you have the realm of form. So you have the emptiness and you have the realm of form. The realm of form is something like a perfect. It's like, it's like if you take the realm of symmetry and then map it with no delusion or sin, right? It's it's like it's like, and and and this is not associated with itself because the whole idea in Buddhism again is this idea that when you have a sense of self, then and the example I've always used is the idea of the pessimist versus the optimist, right? You look, you have a glass that's halfway full of water. For a pessimist, it's half empty. For optimists, it's half full. But the form is just a glass halfway full of water. It's it's both of these are valid. But when you're a pessimist, you take a form that is valid and then you and then you collapse the maybe state of them both being simultaneous and you collapse it into one world. That's an identity, that's an attachment, that's a that's a that's a world that you created. Now you have a world and identity associated with being an optimist. But the realm of form is the idea that instead of conditioning yourself to say that this thing is this versus that, you allow the thing that is true to just be. So you've so you've gone from an optimist to the superposition state, right? So now you've allowed that. And so this idea is that you are moving outward every time you break down one of these conditions, this forcing that you've done, you've gone to this higher state. And the idea of the realm of form would be everything is just merely what it is. You're not forcing yourself into one or the other. And so that to me would probably be the Brahmin part right there. So that would that would that be going from Atman the Brahmin, the realm of form. Then from there, it's like you have all these different shards. So this goes back to Christianity made in the image of God. So now you have this idea of local neighborhoods because you know, abide in the entirety of all of it is not possible. So instead you abide in your in your local neighborhood, and then it's a matter of whether or not you've purified your local neighborhood. It's your local neighborhood full of delusion, lies, and defeat, and such that the mapping of this Brahmin space is actually not coherent. So then that's where that's where since comes in. Sin creates incoherence, it creates noise.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:12

Does that does that make sense? It does, but I see it through a different lens. And the way that I'm seeing it is you know what cold welding is? Uh-uh. So I think I've heard of it before it, yeah. You know, elemental metals have a lot of electrons that they can do each other. So in the vacuum of space, if you take two elemental pieces of aluminum, say aluminium, and they have no oxide layer between them, they will cold weld. You can just press them together and they will weld into one piece of metal. And what I how now there's lots of different ways to view that. The material science will just say, oh, they're donating electrons readily to each other. The way that I see that is that all aluminum is the same aluminum.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:56

And and it's just waiting to come back together. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:59

Yes, yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:00

And I see that sort of like I see everything in that sort of context. So if we're talking about sin as, say, now an oxide layer, we're we're talking about oxide layers of things that wear us down, things that we fight against. So we're talking about being an individual cell. The environment hits us. Oh, what do we do? We we have to develop skin. We have to develop a neurological system, we have to do all this stuff. All that stuff builds us, but it also leads to what we call evolutionary sin. It's I guess what what I would what I would call sin is the need to fight against your environment and the need to eat at all costs to live, because to live is to experience the divine, but it's also to sin, to need to.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:40

Yeah, right?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:41

Yeah, yeah. And so that's the way that I'm seeing this. That's the lens that I'm seeing this through is that, you know, you and I, we just talked about underneath all of this, like trusting that we're both human, trusting that we both have energy moving the cells inside of us, and trusting that underneath all of us, I probably see like there's like a spark if there's a soul, if you believe in a soul. You know, I believe that we all share the same one, and it's all just expressing itself through different forms at the scale, at the scale that we can receive in the moment. There's a great, there's a great quote. It was recently popularized by Irving Finkel on the Lex Friedman interview, but it was actually a quote from a Sherlock Holmes book. It is possible to infer the Niagara Falls from feeling a single raindrop. And I'll add to that because the big thing is not different from the small thing. It's just experienced at a scale we can receive in that moment. Right? That is what we are experiencing right now as individual lives. But the truth of God is we all come together as something bigger. But right now, I do believe that there, if you want to go into like, you know, fringe stuff, there's constitute or not constant, there's operational hierarchies like of opposing C4 consciousnesses on earth, like it corporations, institutions, religious groups that are all fighting for base full control. Control over the C4 architecture. But that's a whole conspiracy theory and a half based upon a whole hypothetical framework that I developed that doesn't really jive with a lot of people yet. So we're not going to go into that.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:10

Well, I think that we're not looking at it from different views. Your explanation of sin uh was actually consistent with how I'd see how I'd see it. And in your cold welding example, and it's funny because someone told this to me recently. I can't remember who it was, but it's but the way they described it is that in the vacuum of space, they don't actually see themselves as separate anymore. Like that's not it's not two separate things. There's nothing, there's nothing that creates an inconsistency between them that makes them see they're separate, so they just kind of fuse together. And so when you were talking about the oxide layers, that creates separation. So that's that's the thing. There's a separation, and that separation creates a self and an other, an in and an out. And it's that separation that um and so and so one thing that I've noticed about Christianity and Buddhism is that the world of sin seems to be the same as samsara. And and so it's it, and so and so in that case, they're both this idea of the separation from God or the separation from the eternal, separation from the eternal. This is why you always have a separation between heaven and earth. And so you enter samsara, one one of the ways that you escape samsara is by letting go of self. And so the thing that puts you in samsara is the clinging to a self. This is this idea of self. But that's the same thing that brought us into the world of sin. Because in the story of Adam and Eve, the story of the fall, what you have is uh Adam and Eve doing things their way instead of God's way. And so there's this idea, and so within Christianity, there's always this idea of you're always trying to align your you're always trying to align yourself with God's will. And this is the idea of uh what it means to repent. Repent was translated from the Greek meta metanoia, which means to like change your mind frame. And so and I and I think sin, I think sin is associated with missing the mark. So sin is associated with this idea of missing the mark. So in other words, you have something like the eternal God, and you're trying to align yourself with God's will. And that's what Jesus is. Jesus is is the is the being with no sin. So he doesn't miss any mark. He's perfectly aligned with God, such that there it's almost like there's God, the eternal. I think of it as a funnel, this eternal, think of it as the Atman, the eternal. Uh well, maybe it's maybe it's maybe it's like Atman and Brahman. And I sometimes I think of the father might be more associated with the idea of Brahman. And so, and so, and so, and then you have um uh Jesus, because he has no sin, has a perfect connection. So it's like there's Brahman, and then there's a channel between uh between the temporal, so there's the eternal, the temporal, and then you have like the instantiation of God within the temporal, and that was with within the symbolic order, and that's what Jesus is. And so the idea is you're trying to get back to the state of a lack of separation uh between God. But to do that, you have to like submit to God's will, like this within the within a Christian sins. And so this idea of um sin, it is the idea that like going back to what I was saying before about our local neighborhood. So in the picture you gave with Atman and then Brahman, where I'm saying Brahman is like the realm of form, imagine it as a perfectly coherent structure that has no delusion, uh separation or or or like things that create separation in this sense. So, in other words, that if I purify my local neighborhood, I purify myself and you purify yourself, then when we come together, we actually see each other as the same in the same way as the cold welding. So the cold welding is that was really good because if you have impurities in you and you're full of sin, then when I come to interact with you, there's a degree to which I am not open to you. I am creating separation between you. I'm listening to your words, I'm distorting them before they get here because your words may challenge my sense of self, which is a structure, which is an identity. And so what I do is I distort what you say. And then oftentimes the reason why you live and abide in delusion is because you have an attachment to a self. And the truth, when it comes, might tell you that that self you have is false, and you have to let it go, but then that's a death. And so you want to avoid death. And so this is this is the nature of it. It's something like the degree to which we cannot become one being is a degree to which we abide in delusion and sin. And it's the degree to which what's it? We we can't see the coherence, we can't see how we are one. It's another word, you're trying, if we all get to the point where we're purified, then you get to the what's like the bottom turtle, like the the the invariant God, the eternal invariant thing from which we're all reflections of.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:48

I'm glad that you brought the bottom turtle into this conversation. Yeah. I agree with, you know, it's it's hard not to anthropomorphize all this through whatever lens makes the most sense to you because universal truths tend to come through whatever lens makes the most sense in the mind. But I fundamentally like, like, yeah, and that's in that local network could also be called Indra's net. And if we're going back into Eastern philosophy again. But you know, I think that it's great that we're getting to this point with information. So like because we're coming to this through the ability to talk to each other on silicone chips with electricity running through them. And this is why, like, I I'm not, you know, I love looking at spirituality, but also through this scientific lens and why I'm trying to deconstruct this thing that I seem to know to be truth in my own mind, trying to destruct it using language that is truth for others. And I think that's that's fundamentally why my language might seem disparate. But um, it's just a part of the network dynamics of collective intelligence. Like I'm a little integration middle point between a bunch of different people. And so I'm gonna have. No, I've never heard that. Okay, well, I mean, you could you could look at it like that with language as well. Like you're gonna take in uh influence from others, you're going to see things you like that people are doing, you know, you're gonna be influenced by the truth of the situation, even though you guys might not even share any words with each other just by by virtue of distance. And now we're going back into geometry and the platonic space and quarter wave theory, because by virtue of distance, things can sum together just by being the right distance apart from each other. They don't have to say the same thing, but whatever they are saying, they have to say it with respect to each other. That's the interesting part. Because quarter wave rule seems to be a way to respect the signal over distance. And this is why I think using language like this is important because it's multidisciplinary. And if the right person hears these words, they might say, Oh, in my field of work, that actually makes perfect sense if I apply it this way, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:13:04

Well, that's the that's the reason that's the reason why I made the podcast and why I went and made videos on YouTube. Like I literally get contacted people by people like you and Dario, and like Dario listened to my video on information that's broken symmetry, but like that's the Hegelian dialectic that's understood through the con by like uh Slava Slavo Zizek. And so like we start interacting, we start discussing over time, like, oh yeah, and this is the whole point. It's it's this is the whole point of the cold welding. This is why everything is algebra, everything is symmetry. Once you actually can construct the algebraic structure that maps the between languages, then you can see that what I'm saying, what you're saying, is the same thing. Oh, it's actually the same thing. We're just using different words to explain the same thing. And then that's when this this, because each perception that you use comes with a self. Because how you perceive the world affects how you behave in the world, which means it affects your spirit when your spirit is understood as how you program the universe and how you program are how programmed by the universe, but to say how do you respond during an interaction? How do you behave? How do you program reality? And so for every perception and how you see reality, there is a spirit associated with it. There is a self. And so when I come to you and you're using a bunch of words and I don't understand what they mean, but then over time we interact and go, oh, you're this maps to here, this maps to here, this maps to here, this map to here, then that creates a coherent structure and that's the cold welding process. But you can't do that if someone refuses to acknowledge basic reality. That that's a chair, like that's a dog. No, that's a balloon. And it's just like just we're not gonna be building any structure together because you're just Murphy. We're not gonna be building any structure together because you're lost in a delusion. I can't, I cannot meddle with you. It's not possible.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:45

Well, delusions are delusions are a problem of a scale of time. Yeah, I don't have enough time to spend really convincing this person that what they believe is a delusion, so they're they're hopeless.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:56

Well, no, that's the point is sin. Sin itself is something like sin in itself is something that you have to overcome yourself. Maybe the case that there is no time. That's it, that's the nature of sin. The nature of sin is such that there is no, it could be the case there is no time that could snap you out of it. You just have to eat, and this is the whole idea within Christianity. It's like, this is what it's like to blaspheme against the Holy Ghost. It's something like the more you lie to yourself and the more you sin. There's a certain point where you put yourself in a hole so deep, you're so separated from God, you're so separated from truth, you're so separated from reality that you can't come back from it. Once you see the nature of sin, especially how it's like biblically how it is, it is everywhere and people are functioning out of it all the time. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:38

Can I ask you a question?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:40

Yeah, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:41

I know you're Christian, but do you believe in reincarnation?

SPEAKER_00 1:15:45

So it's interesting because I I um, you know, my spiritual journey actually started with Buddhism. Well, it started with a bunch of stuff, but eventually I it was like an intertwining. I studied Buddhism and Christianity at the same time. Yeah. And so from my understanding, so the the nature of Buddhism and the nature of reincarnation in Buddhism is actually quite strange. And it's something that I've grappled with and thought about. It's actually something you can't just just accept because within Buddhism, there's the idea of no self. You know, like everything is dependently, every sense of self is dependently originated, so there's no actual like central self. And this is the same thing with Lacannian psychoanalysis, where the idea the he uses these topological structures like Mobius strips because he wants to communicate the idea of there is no orientability, which is to say there's no there's no clear in and out. So this is the idea in Buddhism, dependent origination. There is no clear self in other because you yourself are dependently originated. The self that is you is from the five aggregates. So the five aggregates are made of the temporal stuff that can come into a configuration. So you're made of the five aggregates. And so, with that being said, within Buddhism, there's this idea of being reincarnated or past selves. But if the central tenet is the idea of no-self, then what does what is that? And so there is this idea of karma and how the and how karma works. And so it's actually very technical and nuanced as to what the hell they mean by reincarnation in Buddhism, given the fight idea of no-self. And so, within my understanding of reality, within my language, within the what I've constructed, I think I can reconcile the nature of reincarnation as understood through Buddhism within how that might be true or manifested in reality. So it's something that I know at one point in time I thought about it in one detail, I could have given a better answer, but I have to go back and reconstruct my argument and my thought about that before I could uh give you to but I think I think there is a way in which it makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:34

So I think with most people, most people in the world have this thing that they do where they anthropomorphize things because familiarity breeds understanding. And so, and so I believe when people think about reincarnation, they think about oh, that there's like a soul inside me that creates Mike as a person, and the next life is gonna be this exact type of person, right? I look at it more like the information processing pattern that creates Mike is possible of continuing onward, even if that's in through other beings or an influence that I leave on this world. So I don't necessarily believe in reincarnation as in my soul is gonna pop up in another sh in another vessel.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:17

But I but I believe in the energy that is both moving through me, resonating in me, and moving out of me as tangibly receivable. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:28

This I think is consistent with the Buddhism understanding. From from what I can tell, I think that's the answer that they give. That's how that's how it's understood. Right. Yeah. So what there's some invariant soul that whips that hop from this body to that body. It's more of, like you said, these aggregates that have this karmic energy associated with it that didn't go, yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:46

And so actually, interestingly enough, you're talking about attachment and karma and the relinquishing of attachment as part of the Buddhist lifestyle in you know, releasing yourself from the bonds of samsara because it's all a door that's open and you get to walk out of it at any time. It's just it's just so interesting here. And so, and so I think that um that's that's the lens that I like looking at this all through, less so than like purifying myself or not. It's I'm in prison, but the door's open and I can leave whenever I want. But I just have no fucking idea. Oh, excuse me, language. I just have no idea that I just have no idea what's on the other side of that door. And this prison cell is just so comfortable. I get three square meals a day. I know what's coming for me, right? And so you've been a prisoner your whole life, but you can walk out anytime.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:38

Well, that's the thing, is it's it's embracing death. There's a degree to which you have to embrace death to be free, to get into a flow state. It's like, it's like uh Neo in the Matrix, essentially what it is. It's it's like whenever, even even within our own sense of identity, like I said, our self is associated with a structure, not just our physical matter and energy, but the blueprint, right? The spirit, that's what they were the idea with the spirit part, like the blueprint, the waveform that tells the matter how to interact to create a specific structure. And so if it is the case that spirit is understood by how you program the universe and how you're programmed by the universe, then your spirit is defined by interaction, like what happens during your interaction. So, for example, this is why reputation, this is what reputation is. If I are gonna start lying about who you are and what you've done, then the next time you interact with someone, then I interact differently based off that false information that I put out about you. And so if it is the case that I have an attachment to a way people perceive me, right? Then if I go out into the world and I proclaim something or I do something that harms that, that their perception of me, then my spirit changes. And so there's a death of a self. The self of me, prior to my spirit changing, is dead. And now that and then now I now have a new spirit such that I walk into a room and someone might try to stab me because of what they think about me. Um, and so this idea of like embracing, like escaping some sorrow and walking out the door, like you said, you're inside the prison cell and it's comfortable because it's because it's there's something familiar and predictable about the situation you're in. To actually leave it requires you to step outside into a space of uncertainty and unpredictability, which this is going to some dude stuff, but it's the openness. It's the openness, like the vagina of reality. It's the openness of reality. And and that's where the entropy is, that's where the uncertainty is, but that's where creation happens. And so, and so if you are in the in the cell, then things change a little bit, but it's predictable. To go out into the wilderness is to expose yourself to the wilderness. You can die on an adventure, but but if you don't, but if you don't gain, if you don't interact with entropy, then everything is predictable and consistent, and you're not so you're not alive. And so this idea to live is to is the degree to which you embrace the uncertainty of uh and go out and accept whatever happens. So so in other words, if you go out into the world wilderness, uh, he died, of course he would, he died. He would he tried to he tried to you know go surfing, shark infested waters. Of course he died. What do you expect? And and but that's what that's what you do when you embrace and accept whatever reality is. You don't try to go against it, you just throw with it.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:18

Uh lest you become lest you become again as a child, you should not enter the kingdom of heaven. Yes. Um so the the metaphors in religion are amazing. I love them. Um, and uh to talk about sin again, real quick. To talk about sin real quick, you know, this prison cell is a good analogy because it's something that we build ourselves to try to protect ourselves from sin, right? We we build this prison for ourselves and we stay in this room to try to pure ourselves, purify ourselves over time.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:47

I thought if we build this, like the sin is what we're actually, that's actually what this prison cell is made out of. Like we've attached our identity.

SPEAKER_01 1:22:53

I mean, yeah, the sculptor and the sculptist, you know, it's all it's all the same material, right? But at the same time, the only way out of this cell of sin that you both create yourself and are is to become something completely new and to basically with relinquish everything you were. And during, I am gonna actually say an acid trip when I was younger, I had uh I had a moment where you could say the beings or the the reality in front of me told me that I would be given in my own lifetime the opportunity, I would be presented with a false version of infinity, right? There is a looming digital reality coming where people are gonna talk about digitizing consciousness and living forever in the in the mind of robots and like getting rid of aging, right? Yes, yes. I see this as a spiritual fallacy, yes, and I think that life itself is is beautiful because the rose has thorns and because the rose wilts. And there is a certain nature of reality that is here to stay, and there's a certain reality that's going to outlive us. But the fact of the matter is we are temporary, and I believe that that's what makes it all worth it. My laptop is is about to die, and uh I need to run downstairs to get the laundry out before someone steals it. Okay. Yeah, Devano. I I could get that.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:16

Um yeah, my thing turned out really good. Um, I'll let you go. And it's unfortunate because we could probably continue talking for hours, but let's do another one. Yeah, we can do another one. It's like when we post this, I know what will happen is the conversation starts off incoherent because we're trying to establish like our shared language and structure. And then I think over time it starts become crystallizing into something real, uh something clear, which is good because I used that metaphor at the beginning of the episode, and I think that that's what happened. We went from a uh a crowd of random directions to where we coalesced onto a uh one direction, and something coherent came out of it. So this was great.

SPEAKER_01 1:24:50

I think um both of us are trying to describe the mind of God using different language, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

I think we're using largely the same language, actually. There's not it's not too hard to build a bridge between what we're saying, I think. So I think we're we have much closer neighborhoods, local neighborhoods, than I think a lot of people would typically.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:06

That's why I reached out initially on your video, man. I I I could sense that you had a lens on this that was like the right lens, even though we're using slightly different language. It's you see the truth very clearly. Um thank you for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:19

Thank you for your time today. Yeah, no problem. And I and I definitely one reason why I interacted with you immediately is because I could tell the same. You are not, I am certain that what you've constructed is not incoherent nonsense and that you have uh you have a very strong, good intuition and working structure that you're that you're seeing reality with.