The Jim Rutt Show

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques in part two of a series on his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss limitations of the standard natural science perspective, the enlightenment gap, BM3, mental behaviorism, justification systems theory, discovering the tree of knowledge system, the evolution of complexification, the emergence of mindedness, resolving a contradiction between Freud & Skinner, the periodic table of behavior, 3 branches of psychology, the history of information processing, the unworkability of Cartesian dualism, top-down causation, Lawrence Cahoone's systematic metaphysics, distinguishing physicalism & naturalism, behavior as the central concept of the natural sciences, complicated vs complex, Chalmers's hard problem, cybernetics & the cognitive science revolution, 4E cognitive science, internal talk & individual variation, and much more. Listeners may be interested to know that Gregg is organizing a conference. Consistent with his book, it is called Consilience: Unifying Knowledge and Orienting Toward a Wisdom Commons. It will be held online March 17 and 18th. It is a Zoom event, and free to the public. Jim will be talking about Game B, and will be joined by Jordan Hall. John Vervaeke will give the keynote. And there will be over 40 presentations by many folks who have been featured on the Jim Rutt Show. Links below: Register for the conference. UTOK Conference 2023 - Clip Conference Flyer Episode Links: Episode Transcript JRS EP 176 - Gregg Henriques Part 1: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz The Orders of Nature, by Lawrence E. Cahoone Dr. Gregg Henriques is Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University in the Combined Doctoral Program in Clinical and School Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Vermont and did his post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a theoretical psychologist and has developed the “Unified Theory of Knowledge,” which is a consilient scientific humanistic worldview to unify psychology. He is the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology (Springer, 2011), and A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (Palgrave McMillian, November 2022). His scholarly work has been published in the field’s best journals, and he has developed a popular blog on Psychology Today, Theory of Knowledge, which has received over eight million views. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the 2022 President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and founded the Theory of Knowledge academic society.

Jim talks with Gregg Henriques about his book A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap. They discuss the book's audacious attempt to explain the universe, definitions of metaphysics & whether it's needed, 4 bins for the history of the universe, the tree of knowledge system, psychology's ontological confusion, the Enlightenment gap, one-world naturalism & the mind-body problem, scientific knowledge's relationship with subjective knowledge, the metamodernist synthesis, psychology's disagreement about its own building blocks, the absence of a meta-paradigm, John Vervaeke's recursive relevance realization, definitions of mind, empiricism, mapping the internal/external relationship, the unified theory of knowledge, the meaning of biopsychosocial, 3 meanings of mind, Global Workspace Theory, justification systems theory, question-answer dynamics, positive & negative space in communication, justification dynamics, motivated reasoning, and much more. Listeners may be interested to know that Gregg is organizing a conference. Consistent with his book, it is called Consilience: Unifying Knowledge and Orienting Toward a Wisdom Commons. It will be held online March 17 and 18th. It is a Zoom event, and free to the public. Jim will be talking about Game B, and will be joined by Jordan Hall. John Vervaeke will give the keynote. And there will be over 40 presentations by many folks who have been featured on the Jim Rutt Show. Links below: Register for the conference. UTOK Conference 2023 - Clip Conference Flyer Episode Links: Episode Transcript A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap, by Gregg Henriques JRS EP59 - Gregg Henriques on Unifying Psychology JRS Currents 009: Gregg Henriques on Theory Of Meta-Cultural Transition JRS EP116 - Doug Erwin on the Cambrian Explosion JRS EP 172 - Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis JRS EP108 - Bernard Baars on Consciousness JRS EP 159 - Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain, by Terrence W. Deacon Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts, by Carol Tavris & Elliot Aronson The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, by Jonathan Haidt Ego Defenses And The Legitimation Of Behavior, by Guy E. Swanson Dr. Gregg Henriques is Professor of Graduate Psychology at James Madison University in the Combined Doctoral Program in Clinical and School Psychology. He received his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Vermont and did his post-doctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a theoretical psychologist and has developed the “Unified Theory of Knowledge,” which is a consilient scientific humanistic worldview to unify psychology. He is the author of A New Unified Theory of Psychology (Springer, 2011), and A New Synthesis for Solving the Problem of Psychology: Addressing the Enlightenment Gap (Palgrave McMillian, November 2022). His scholarly work has been published in the field’s best journals, and he has developed a popular blog on Psychology Today, Theory of Knowledge, which has received over eight million views. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the 2022 President of the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration, and founded the Theory of Knowledge academic society.

Jim talks with Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater about their new book The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World. They discuss the game of charades & its relevance to the evolution of language, the false myth of a pure language, language as self-organizing system, Captain Cook's encounter with indigenous South Americans, pidgins & creoles, gesture & vocalization, language & tool construction, the communication iceberg metaphor, misunderstandings in relationships, the now-or-never bottleneck, language understanding vs language production, genetic capacity for sequence-action-sequence tasks, chaotic improvisation as the core, the complaint that the young are ruining the language, the unbearable lightness of meaning, the miracle of sloppiness, order & disorder, word order & frozen accidents, language evolution without biological evolution, ChatGPT as a demonstration of how far learning from experience can get you, a poetry Turing test, and much more. The Language Game has been featured on Behavioral Scientist's Notable Books of 2022. Morten and Nick’s previous co-authored book Creating Language: Integrating Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing (MIT Press 2016) was named the Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2017. Episode Transcript JRS EP75 - Nick Chater: “The Mind Is Flat” The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World, by Morten Christiansen & Nick Chater Simpler Syntax, by Peter Culicover & Ray Jackendoff Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition, by Peter W. Culicover Morten H. Christiansen is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, Professor in Cognitive Science of Language at the School of Communication and Culture and the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, as well as a Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and environmental constraints in the evolution, acquisition and processing of language. He was awarded the Cognitive Psychology Section Award from the British Psychological Society in 2013 and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies in 2006. Christiansen was elected as a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, as well as elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Cognitive Science Society. Christiansen is the author of over 250 scientific papers and has edited four books and authored two monographs. Nick Chater is a Professor of Behavioral Science at Warwick Business School. His research focuses on the cognitive and social foundations of rationality, with applications to business and public policy. He has (co-)written more than two hundred research papers and six books. His research has won awards including the British Psychological Society's Spearman Medal (1996); the Experimental Psychology Society Prize (1997); and the Cognitive Science Society's life-time achievement award, the David E Rumelhart Prize (to be awarded in 2023). His book, The Mind is Flat, won the American Association of Publishers PROSE Award in 2019, for Best book in Clinical Psychology. Nick is a fellow of the British Academy, the Cognitive Science Society and the Association for Psychological Science. He is a co-founder of the research consultancy Decision Technology; has served on the advisory board of the Behavioural Insight Team (popularly known as the 'Nudge Unit'); and been a member of the UK government's Climate Change Committee. He co-created, and was resident scientist on, eight series of the BBC Radio 4 show The Human Zoo.

Jim talks with Fred Beuttler and Mark Stahlman about their new online graduate program, Trivium University. They discuss the trivium & the quadrivium, instilling a better sense of grammar, the current digital paradigm, five paradigms in communication technology, the outsourcing of memory, retrieving scribal ways of thinking, why we need another university, re-centering professor-student interaction, cost disease in higher education, three spheres in geopolitics (East, West, and digital), the replacement of globalism, shaping a new generation of leaders, alphabetic vs logographic thinking, the Ukraine War as conflict between 3 spheres, what it means to be human, averting the geopolitical dangers of the Davos attitude, Net Assessment, setting Great Conversation over Great Books, averting World War III, and much more. Episode Transcript Trivium University Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, by Marshall McLuhan Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism, by Shadi Bartsch The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics For an Age of Commerce, by Deirdre McCloskey Mark Stahlman is a biologist, computer architect and ex-Wall Street technology strategist.  He is the President of the not-for-profit Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL, 501(c)3,  digitallife.center) and its educational project Trivium University (Triv U, trivium.university).  He is also CEO of Exogenous, Inc. (EXO, exogenousinc.com), a strategic risk analysis group and on the editorial staff of its publication, the Three Spheres Newsletter (TSN).  He studied for but did not complete advanced degrees in Theology (UofChicago) and Molecular Biology (UW-Mad).  He has been widely interviewed and published, including teaching online courses (available on YouTube via 52 Living Ideas). Fred W. Beuttler, Ph.D. is a fellow at the Center for the Study of Digital Life (CSDL), as well as one of the founding administrators of CSDL’s new Trivium University.   He also teaches history at the University of Chicago’s Graham School for Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies. From 2015 to 2019 he was the Associate Dean of Liberal Arts Programs at the Graham School, overseeing a masters in liberal arts, the “great books” certificate program for adults, and the Fortnight in Oxford. From 2010 to 2015 he was Director of General Education at Carroll University, in Wisconsin. In 2012 and 2013 he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Germany, where he taught American political history. Prior to his return to academia, he was Deputy Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, in Washington, DC, from 2005 to 2010, where he coauthored and edited a number of histories of House committees. He received a BA at the University of Illinois, an MA from Trinity International University, and his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago, with a dissertation entitled, “Organizing an American Conscience: The Conference on Science, Philosophy, and Religion, in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, 1940-1968.”

Layman Pascal interviews Jim about the principles and strategies that could transform Twitter into infrastructure for collective intelligence. They discuss Jim's motivation in engaging the topic, Musk's current lack of strategic intent, the least bad unfairness, avoiding point of view moderation, distinguishing between style and content, decorum, user-controlled filters, GameB's erroneous ban from Facebook, principles of fair enforcement, setting thresholds between private & public domains, whether Twitter is a public utility, advantages & risks of open-sourcing Twitter's code, two kinds of censorship, culpability around links, replacing the ad model with a subscription service, a connection with liquid democracy, issues with de-platforming, modulating viscosity, social media choices as socially consequential, adding groups, risks of the downvote, gradient rating systems, emergent engineering & why no one's using it, identity authentication, likely near-future problems, automating sophisticated moderation, experimenting with character limits, wild-card content, a community disinformation immune system, optimizing for time well spent, and much more. Episode Transcript "Musk and Moderation," by Jim Rutt (Quillette) "Saving Twitter—A Roundtable," featuring Jim Rutt (Quillette) JRS Currents 080: Joe Edelman and Hellie Hain on Rebuilding Meaning weco.io Hylo Coordinape MetaGame Layman Pascal is a public speaker, nondual theologian and yoga & meditation teacher based in Victoria, British Columbia. His family has lived in the coastal islands for five generations. He is a writer on themes of cultural philosophy, shamanism and organic spiritual development.

Jim talks with Joe Edelman and Ellie Hain about their new movement, Rebuilding Meaning, and two recent talks introducing ideas towards a better world. They discuss tools for building toward more meaningful lives, the meaning of meaning, looking behind the void, the litany of shit, exercises in eliciting meaning, coherent pluralism, containers vs meanings, how religions lost their grounding, values articulacy, the importance of aesthetics, using language learning models to extract meaning profiles, values vs virtues, sobering up from internet optimism, the decay of spaces, when focus shifts from meaning to incentives, funnels, tubes, & spaces, piling up strangers vs creating spaces, metrics of meaning, meaning cards, space trains, the example of science, Carl Rogers's concept of congruence, designing good ideal selves, spreading the message, and much more. Episode Transcript Rebuilding Meaning (website) JRS EP34 - Joe Edelman on the Power of Values "Exit the Void: A Movement for Meaning," by Ellie Hain "Rebuilding Society on Meaning," by Joe Edelman A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life, by Heather E. Heying and Bret Weinstein JRS EP 173 - Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodern Self-Help Joe Edelman developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI and programming language design. Ellie Hain is an artist, researcher, and cultural strategist working on new imaginaries and ideologies for the post-industrial age.

Jim talks with Hanzi Freinacht about his book 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life. They discuss the book as a response to Jordan Peterson & his "12 rules" books, metamodernism, fostering sober crazy people, magical thinking in highly developed personalities, integrations of science & spirituality, stabilizing higher phenomenological states, lower average states as a phenomenon of late-stage Game A, living in a mess moderately, fucking like a beast, sincere irony, quitting, doing the walk of shame, reverse death therapy, Carl Roger's idea of congruence, healing with justice, burning your maps, the pernicious belief that our maps are complete, killing your guru & finding the others, Jung's golden shadow, playing for forgiveness, and much more. Episode Transcript 12 Commandments: For Extraordinary People to Master Ordinary Life, by Hanzi Freinacht JRS EP36 - Hanzi Freinacht on Metamodernism JRS EP53 - Hanzi Freinacht on the Nordic Ideology JRS EP82 - Hanzi Freinacht on Building a Metamodern Future JRS EP 172 - Brendan Graham Dempsey on Emergentism JRS EP 170 - John Vervaeke and Jordan Hall on The Religion That Is Not a Religion JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Hanzi Freinacht is a political philosopher, historian and sociologist, author of The Listening Society, Nordic Ideology, and the upcoming books The 6 Hidden Patterns of History and Outcompeting Capitalism. Much of his time is spent alone in the Swiss Alps.

Jim talks with Brendan Graham Dempsey about his book Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. They discuss the meaning crisis & its symptoms, reciprocal narrowing, the pre-modern & the modern, the emergence of reductionism, the meaning of complexity & emergence, sacralizing the scientific creation narrative, Prigogine's theory of dissipative systems, the universe as a process of endless complexification, marrying Bobby Azarian's Unifying Theory of Reality & Gregg Henriques's Unified Theory of Knowledge, consciousness vs sentience, Integrated Information Theory vs John Searle's biological functionalism, the odds that intelligent life evolved only once in our galaxy, tying complexification to the God concept, making the "religion that is not a religion" accessible through mythopoeia & storytelling, the Omega Point, whether approaching the Omega Point implies pushing for a techno-Singularity, Emergentist ethics & practices, and much more. Episode Transcript Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Modern World, by Brendan Graham Dempsey "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis," by John Vervaeke - YouTube series JRS EP143 - John Vervaeke Part 1: Awakening from the Meaning Crisis The Emergence of Everything: How the World Became Complex, by Harold Morowitz The Romance of Reality: How the Universe Organizes Itself to Create Life, Consciousness, and Cosmic Complexity, by Bobby Azarian JRS EP 159 - Bobby Azarian on the Romance of Reality JRS EP105 - Christof Koch on Consciousness JRS EP 167 - Bruce Damer on the Origins of Life JRS EP 171 - Bruce Damer Part 2: The Origins of Life – Implications JRS EP40 - Eric Smith on the Physics of Living Systems Brendan Graham Dempsey is a writer whose work focuses on the meaning crisis and the nature of spirituality in metamodernity. He is the host of the Metamodern Spirituality podcast and the writer behind the six-volume (and counting) Metamodern Spirituality Series. He earned his BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont and his MA in Religion and the Arts from Yale University. He lives in Greensboro Bend, Vermont, where he runs the holistic retreat center Sky Meadow.

Jim talks with Douglas Rushkoff about the ideas in his essay series, "What's a Meta For?" They discuss Facebook's renaming to Meta, the semantic web, ChatGPT, a Turing test recalibration period, Rocco's Basilisk, the conversion of the real world into a meta-world, Elon Musk as techno-monarch, the limitations of his understanding of free speech, returning Twitter to the people who use it, Zuckerberg's Caesar obsession, Rushkoff's criticisms of GameB, the dangers of an abstracted "omega point," understanding the complex binding energies of GameA, dominant political isms as a result of industrialism, GameB's schism over personal vs institutional change, the need to actually deliver, coherent pluralism, what being a member of GameB will mean, dangers of a totalizing narrative, not knowing what GameB is, cultivated insecurity, rejecting the metaverse, GameB's resilient response to critiques, and much more. Episode Transcript Douglas Rushkoff (website) "What's a Meta For?" by Douglas Rushkoff (part 1 and 2) Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, by Douglas Rushkoff Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, by Douglas Rushkoff JRS Currents 051: Douglas Rushkoff on the Once and Future Internet Character.AI "If I Were CEO of Twitter," by Douglas Rushkoff "The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets," by Joe Lightfoot Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, by Christopher Boehm The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, by David Graeber & David Wengrow Doomer Optimism JRS Currents 049: Ashley Colby & Jason Snyder on Doomer Optimism Named one of the “world’s ten most influential intellectuals” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is an author and documentarian who studies human autonomy in a digital age. His twenty books include the just-published Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, as well as the recent Team Human, based on his podcast, and the bestsellers Present Shock, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Program or Be Programmed, Life Inc, and Media Virus. He also made the PBS Frontline documentaries Generation Like, The Persuaders, and Merchants of Cool. His book Coercion won the Marshall McLuhan Award, and the Media Ecology Association honored him with the first Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. Rushkoff’s work explores how different technological environments change our relationship to narrative, money, power, and one another. He coined such concepts as “viral media,” “screenagers,” and “social currency,” and has been a leading voice for applying digital media toward social and economic justice. He is a research fellow of the Institute for the Future, and founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he is a Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics. He is a columnist for Medium, and his novels and comics, Ecstasy Club, A.D.D, and Aleister & Adolf, are all being developed for the screen.

Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society... Jim talks with John Ash about his use of AI art tools and their implications for society. They discuss the basics of how the latest models work, using AI to communicate complexity, removing noise from noise, style transfer, pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge, expressing complex ideas through images, iterative de-noising in human conversation, stochastic gradient descent, receptivity to meaning, latent spaces, a high-order taxon of creative iteration, songwriting, finding the ideal number of iterations, stylistic interpolation, Cognicism, attribution & sourcing, citations in ChatGPT, the coming debates about ownership & permission, why the first court ruling will probably be about porn, the world as a giant interconnected neocortex, propaganda bots, owning our cognition, stochastic terrorism, future shock, solving internal alignment before we solve AI alignment, and much more. Episode Transcript Al Actress Performs a Mesmerizing Tale of Duality ("Atheus and the Golden Braid"), by Speaker John Ash - YouTube Play.ht The Congress (IMDb) Deep Reckonings, by Stephanie Lepp JRS EP129 - Stephanie Lepp on Deep Reckonings John Ash is a thought leader in AI-assisted technologies, decentralized sensemaking, a writer, a visual and musical artist, and a steward for the ideas around Cognicism.