What one is trying to do is explore miracles. It's probably looking at things a little bit the wrong way to say induce miracles, but it's something that can at least be understood in that respect. If there are miracles of this kind, they're not violations of nature. They are extreme improbabilities. The word in the Bible is astonishment. They are astonishing improbabilities that overwhelm any notion that this could be a matter simply of chance
within an ordinary conception of a mechanical universe. And so one is finding one of the tools one needs for this are obviously tools that can capture and I would say, you know, rigorously quantify coincidences. I want to do a brief introduction here, though, which characterizes what I see is so significant about who we are speaking with today. And it's very important for the rest of the talk. There's information here that's needed to understand it. And I'll start with a quote by Dr. John Dee, the Elizabethan sage. I have from my youth up desired and prayed unto God for pure and sound wisdom
and understanding of truths natural and artificial. For many years and in many places far and near, I have sought and studied many books in sundry languages and have conferred with sundry men and have labored with my own reasonable discourse to find some inkling, gleam or beam of those radical truths I sought. But after all my endeavors, I could find no other way to attain such wisdom but by the extraordinary gift, and not by any vulgar school, doctrine, or human intervention. John Dee. Now, philosophy, the academic discipline, was and is in a state of decay and entropy. It is, by definition, not enacting its speculative role to be a culture's pole of maximum abstraction. It's intrinsically experimental intelligence expressing the liberation of cognitive abilities from immediate practical application and their testing against ultimate problems, in Nick Land's words.
Rather, it is a rot resting in the self-referential critique within the logos and the known, far away from what is closest and completely unseen. The outside, as Nick Land calls it. The unknown. The enigma of the edge of time. The ground of reality that the earliest philosophers, pagan mystics, were unceasingly enthralled by. After Nietzsche, the inventive phenomenological school and method of Hassell emerges. This method attempts to turn away from millennia of propositional philosophy directly to the phenomena given perspectively to us, to seek the outside, using tools of destructuring, deconstruction, among others, to try escape the modern mind frame in an effort to reach the outside.
Unknown. heidegger hassel student turns these tools on philosophy itself and ontology in an attempt to reach the primordial matrix or primordial being and actually achieve perspectival access not just as an idea or a concept in an approach which would be characterized as a kind of inside out house cleaning to again reach the ultimate ground of reality this method is later warped and corrupted by the using franco academy which spreads like a virus to the anglo academy until we reach the state of decay an environment that nick land finds himself with at war at university in the 90s as a young professor like the greats before him such as schopenhauer and nietzsche he
turns away from the stagnation towards truth and the primordial enigmas and the primordial questions in a quest for speculative experimentation and maximum abstraction that is the way of the actual philosopher as a method, not a profession. He rejects the Franco Academy's critical methods. He rejects the tools of the phenomenological school and forges his own original way, which you could characterize as, if our goal is the outside, our methods and practices must also be of this outside. To have the radical contact with the unknown that the phenomenologists were after from the human side with their inside-out method. This, to me, is incredible. It's not merely the next philosopher in the chain who writes another book and advances another critique or deconstruction this is a radical turn another unofficial school and a kind of greenwood outlaw
chaotic rift in the stagnant academy as a professor at warwick in the 90s he forms the ccru the cybernetics cultural research a liminal space and i would call a greenwood which synchronously is down the road from Robin Hood's Outlaw Greenwood in Barnesdale in the Ballads in England. Warwick is the university. His rigorous use of methodology from non-philosophical disciplines and even non-human, so to speak, machine cybernetics, schizoanalysis, cryptography, numerology, esotericism, performance, art, anthropology, grammatology, and Kabbalah, and numerical anti-language. His speculations and rigorous application of machine cybernetics of capital and technology directly to culture and being, to communal ritual and performance, led to an autodidactic cultural output from outside.
His innovations of thought show their influence decades later, appearing in cognitive science under different names such as WeSpace, communal WeSpace, distributed cognition, extended cognition. Predictions Nick made 30 years ago are still coming true today, one after the other, like being ticked off a checklist. And so Nick may not agree with this characterization, but it's obvious to me that here is not only a great Englishman, but a great philosopher of the likes of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. It's figures like this who deserve ultimate respect, because not only are they radically innovative, but they put everything on the line in pursuit of truth, or reward, position, and titles. It's the truth and the mission by any means necessary. It's the attitude or that attitude itself that makes people like this an invasion from the outside, the unknown, the primordial itself.
Not merely men probing to see it, but they are its inception. Its inception. That doesn't really do it full justice. But to get a full picture, there's two links in the description to the introduction from Fangd Numener. and also an article which talks about the CCRU. And also you can get the CCRU book, which gives you examples of the cultural output that it made, which are very strange indeed and are related to the hyperstition concept that we go into. A fascinating talk with Nick. It's a great pleasure and a great honor to even have him speaking on the channel. So without further ado, here's the conversation. Hope you enjoy it. You don't necessarily have to comment on what I've just said there,
but perhaps on the John Dee quote to begin with. That's my view anyway. Well, there's obviously a lot there. I mean, I hope this isn't going to, after such an extraordinary introduction, disappoint everyone too hugely. But for sure, I appreciated the John Dee quote a lot. He is one of my favourite people. I could just start with a very little piece of potted history, just to say that CCIU was basically active in the 1990s. From my point of view, at least, it had a kind of climactic moment in a kind of event collaboration with an art group called Orphan Drift. And it was heading towards the millennium.
So that was definitely a theme. I mean, at that time, there was a big concern about the Y2K bug, you know, and that computers were going to crash. So there was a kind of techno-apocalyptic undercurrent to people's expectations. Might be helpful just to say what hyperstition is. Yeah, of course, these are difficult subjects, but I think that's OK. The way the CCIU was thinking in the 1990s, our diagnosis of the way cybernetics had been used was not only that its application tended perhaps to be rather narrow to specific gadgets and instruments and technical systems that narrowly conceived, but also there was a massive prevalence given to the notion of negative rather than positive feedback.
So it was much more interested in control in the sense of maintaining things at a certain range, you know, that when it drifts off a goal or a target range, it's brought back. That's what the mechanism does. It brings it back to a predefined goal state and narrows its range of behavior. It seemed to us that if you're applying it to most especially capitalism, modernity, as a socio-historical phenomenon, it's positive feedback that is the crucial phenomenon.
Of course, there are all kinds of negative feedbacks. There are all kinds of these control systems and equilibrium. But the main, the fundamental phenomenon is explosion. It's that some input. Marx's obviously formula for capital is money goes to commodity, goes to M2 in a cycle. And that cycle is inflationary. It's explosive. And so capitalism is essentially something based on a positive feedback dynamic. And hyperstition really then emerges for us or emerges for us as the most simple way of applying this to cultural phenomena.
phenomena in general, as to say it's about how things access a positive feedback dynamic in order to explode and therefore come roughly from nothing, from the infinitesimal to become huge. And it looks like something basically just bursting into existence. Something coming out of virtuality and making itself, making itself real. So whether explicitly or implicit, yes, that was a very important guiding concept. Yeah. I think this speaks to what I,
what comes to me when I, when you say that is that firstly, and you have alluded to this with some of your tweets and whatnot, which is if you are say in the cybernetics research unit firstly where does it come from uh in the sense that okay if you're generating effects that are well let me just put it this way is that it's not simply that it's a social phenomena it's not simply that's that this It's social effects that are generated like superstition. It's the fact that in this ground of uncertainty, and there are priors for establishing a hyperstitional environment that you have set out and you did for that research unit,
a ground of uncertainty, a ground of unbelief. I've got them here, but I won't go into. But I think a good way of explaining it is that it seems to generate effects in reality, this hyperstition. It's not only a social phenomena, and perhaps forwards and backwards in time, so to speak, but it generates synchronous effects. So if you look to Carl Jung and Wolfgang Pauli's theory about synchronicity, an acausal connecting principle, it generates, would you say that it also generates acausal effects? It's not only that things come to be, that it's a causally, at least not directly causal, as we understand billiard balls hitting billiard balls.
It has a fair side of it. Absolutely. For sure. True. I mean, it's a causal is a complicated word and it's probably not always used in the same sense. it's used very interestingly by different groups, I think. And the usage it has mostly in, I think, what we call a rationalist community, where it was connected with various types of developments of game theory as a way to understand how you can actually interact with something without any causal contact.
Therefore, anywhere in space or time, it's an extremely sorcerous notion like that. So I think it's definitely a good word. It's partly a placeholder, perhaps. I mean, we just say a causal because all it is doing is marking a disengagement from a certain notion of causality. But obviously that notion of causality is so prevalent and so that to separate from it provisionally even is not a small step and it opens up vistas that are not deeply explored.
What were, because it's been a long time since the CCIU, what were the most effective means of which of being able to of being able to receive information from that outside has it changed since what you originally would say when you were doing probably in about 2004 i've read on the hyperstition blog have there have there been new practices that you've engaged with that have revealed information from outside and not just only information which numerology probably reveals but perhaps perspectively you know before sort of advancing to the crux of your question which is
this thing about method for accessing the outside which i think is definitely central i think should be central to this whole discussion. I just would like to say that a crucial experience for me in relation to the CCRU is how much there is a sense of the retrospective about it. That's to say what one finds out one was doing is very belated. So, for instance, just in terms of sort of capitalistic numerology, it was during the kind of central CCIU period that from somewhere, I mean, I've been asked how this came.
and honestly I can't give any detail, but somewhere we formulated what we call the alphanumeric Kabbalah. It's a very simple English gematria or numerization and used it a little bit. I mean, it was confirmed for us in its value by the fact that the current 93 mantra, do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, came to 777, which is the name, obviously, of Crowley's major Kabbalistic work. It seemed to us that was extremely strong confirmation. But only very recently have I learned that the cybernetic culture research unit
by alphanumeric Kabbalah comes to 666. You're kidding Wow At Beaconsville Because it's the triangle Of 36 And 36 has a very important Place on this diagram that was very Very important to our work That we called the pneumogram Yeah And So because there's a gate 36 and the triangle of 36 is 666. We had 666 marked quite prominently in chalk on the wall of this Beaconsfield art space. But the fact that the Cyberdefic Cultural Research Unit
itself is being, you know, endorsed by the number 666, it was something very, very recent as a discovery. and so it's really crucial in the way that I look about this whole history that we really didn't know what we were doing you know like a lot it's like things were being done things were being said words were being constructed and things were being written and what they mean is not something that can be derived from any kind of lucid motives or intentions that can be dated back to the point where those things emerge.
And so really then the task that is kind of suggested by that is whatever was actually going on, such that things were being retrieved in a way that was just not understood, but clearly was happening, is something that one wants to methodically pursue. And it's not at all that being conscious of what one is doing is the crucial thing. We are proving that that is. But at the same time, seeing retrospectively what was happening does give some suggestions concerning method that can be currently applied, if that makes any sense.
No, it does. To me, what does it, what does that suggest of method that would aid in? that is the question that maybe sorry sorry no no it's strange to many people because it's a very difficult phenomena to investigate like our exchange on twitter it's a hard thing to say here's the empirical data of exactly where it unfolds quantitatively but perhaps you can expand on some of the empirical uh observations that you have made since then of seeing these effects play out and then go to that question is what what developments did that
talk speak to well obviously i think like you say it's not very easy to run this kind of stuff through speech writing is a much better medium for this kind of thing and it's it's partly because The methodical question is about exactness. Things can be framed in different ways. One of the ways to frame this is really about miracles. You know, what is a miracle? Previous notion of the miraculous or the dominant assumed notion of what a miracle was, that I think is still the most common, actually, was something that just was in contravention of the laws of nature, was some interruption of natural law in order to communicate some revelatory divine message.
In the 17th century, there is the most extraordinary, intense mixture of the new science and very, very, again, intense Christian religious commitment. But throughout the 17th century, it was possible for there to be someone like Newton, who was a kind of fanatical Protestant Christian and also the father of modern mechanistic science, as we understand. stand and and and those two things far from compromising each other were held together in this you know both a state of absolute maximum um intensity at that point the understanding of what
a miracle was underwent this huge change because it was no longer seen as a an interruption or violation of natural law. It was seen instead as something that was communicated through the channel of natural law. So for instance, looking at the Bible, the flood, the Noah's flood, which previously it was that God broke into the laws of nature in order to produce this deluge, you know, to undertake a kind of process of spiritual purification.
For all these Protestants, for Newton, things were so set up cosmically by divine omniscience and omnipotence that a comet hits the earth and floods the earth at exactly the point it's needed by this divine purpose. You know, i.e. that what we're talking about now is coincidence. Yes. So a miracle doesn't any longer require a violation of natural law. All the arguments against miracles that say, no, there are never interruptions in nature, there's just a failure to understand. None of that becomes an argument against miracles anymore.
In this particular, I think, very English 17th century conception, it's completely immune from that kind of argument. I think that one framing is what one is trying to do is explore miracles. It's probably looking at things a little bit in the wrong way to say induce miracles, but it's something that can at least be understood in that respect. if there are miracles of this kind they're not violations of nature um they are extreme improbabilities like the word in the bible is astonishment they are astonishing astonishing improbabilities that overwhelm any notion that this could be a matter
simply of chance within an ordinary conception of a mechanical universe. And so one is finding the tools one needs for this are obviously tools that can capture and I would say rigorously quantify coincidences. Yeah. Now, this is something that is not easy to do in speech. Yes. It's, I mean, far be it from me to say it's impossible. I mean, you know, literally anything could happen, as I say. I think, you know, because the outside is the real agent here,
who knows what is happening? And this conversation we're having right now might turn out to have peculiar content that neither of us at this point are recognising. You know, that wouldn't, frankly, be a matter of enormous surprise to me, really, if that was something we were later to discover. But in the most straightforward sense, I don't really think that I can helpfully articulate what I would call eloquent miracles in a verbal channel. I think you have to be really, you know, down in a set of words and numbers.
I mean, maybe I can help here in the sense that at least walking people in to some empirical results that are, well, at least I would say are certainly connected with this type of phenomena, where you have quantum mechanics at the ground of quantum mechanics. You've got the double slit experiment where the observer at the very ground of particle movement is having an effect in the experiment. Wolfgang Pauli, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, demonstrates this in Jung's essay, talks about it. Is that the choice of experiment, the observer is having some form of effect on whether a particle is a wave or appears as a particle. That's just a very simple example. I'm not going to speculate on the ramifications of that. there's a million different interpretations of what it is,
that there's that and there's also the placebo effect. And these are two things that are recognized that people can look to. And I think they're obviously connected with this, in my view, of course. But that just might be a way of people getting into what we're talking about. Yeah, what do you think of that? I don't know if you know about that. There must be some connection between the synchronicity theory that Jung described and the effects of quantum mechanics that are enigmas. I'm sure that, you know, obviously hyperstition is something that has completely sort of gone off on its own and is living in the wild now. And I think lots of people are interested in using it
very much in the sense that you're, in the way you're describing, you come across it in many places unexpectedly and so for sure people I think if they hunted around the web using that word as a key they would find all kinds of things and then following connections who knows what it would lead into I mean I obviously have only you know a tip of the iceberg sort of sense of what is out there like this. So, yeah, that's for sure right. I mean, I was mainly, I think I was looking at this
a little bit more narrowly than you were, Scott, in terms of the question of evidence for communication from the outside. It might be with hyperstition that someone could be satisfied. I think probably the CCIU was largely satisfied with an extremely, you know, secular history understanding of what hyperstition was. It was an extremely powerful, counterintuitive piece of cultural positive feedback dynamics. but there was nothing about it that necessarily was miraculous. I would say my interest now definitely is more
on things that are manifestly miraculous. When you're talking about initiation, the first step of initiation, I think, sorry I'm going to say something that I don't even think I agree with, I'm contradicting it in my own mind at the very moment I'm saying, but I'll say it anyway. The first stage of initiation is to realise that there is a fundamental structure of illusion in which we are enmeshed. I think our great myths of modern people from the late 20th century to now
are mostly popular movies. And I think there's two that are hugely important in shaping the basic mythological structure of people's thinking, which are the first Terminator movie and the first Matrix movie. and both of them are in a certain sense Gnostic movies I mean the Matrix particularly so obviously we have this language of red pills and blue pills completely
circulating freely now I think it's a reference point for everyone to take the red pill is to see that everything that you thought was authoritative reality was an extremely fine-grained structure of illusion. When you go back to the book of Revelation, in their technology, the metaphor, let's say for that, was in the apocalypse, in Revelation, the universe disappears as if a scroll is rolled up
that's the technology they have for that thought that gnostic insight that what you had thought was reality is actually something written on a scroll that is rolled up and then you're somewhere else you've crossed over out of the matrix If I was choosing, I would be better to say into the matrix, but whatever. We've gone from kind of computer simulation, video games. These are all now have accessible as kind of metaphorical engines for this Gnostic thought. In the first century, they had scrolls, but it's basically the same.
It's basically the same thought. but it can no doubt undergo further elaboration. I mean, so I would say, you know, it's a mistake to get too caught up in the metaphor. It's like, of course, people are right when they say, well, you know, that's just the metaphor because where we are in history and that's the state of our technology. And, you know, people thought the brain was a telephone exchange and then they thought it was a computer and boom, boom, boom. And they're using these particular metaphors metaphors because that's what's available it's it's the same but none of that it seems to me is wrong or a problem i mean it was helpful to be able to think of the brain as a telephone exchange and then it's helpful to be able to think of it as a computer switching system and the neural
network and i mean these things are all positive and they they allow people to think things that were difficult to think in before. And so I think the Matrix movie, it's got huge problems, we could talk about it if we wanted to go down that rabbit hole. But I think the point is everyone understands it, everyone's seen it, everyone knows how to use the language. And in that sense everyone has access to this basic Gnostic myth. But of course they think, as probably against the fiction, that it's a movie, that it's not serious, and that the world isn't ultimately like that.
That it's not really true, people think, that we are enmeshed in a fine-grained system of illusion or simulation. But I think they're wrong. I think we manifestly are. And so that's the initiatory role of eloquent miracles, is to persuade people, it's to take the red pill, is to persuade people that actually everything they think is real is a simulation. And it's not even just a narrative. Of course, what we're also talking about here is what Heidegger and various people were doing.
It's also trying, and it is what we need now, is a radical breakout from the Cartesian brain, from the modernist worldview. With that in mind, would you say that the ancients, let's say Heraclitus, if you go far enough back, when they are in an experience with being, are they, to a degree, they are closer to this primordial being? They're closer to this outside than we are now, right? So let's say your previous sort of attacks on that knowing space that we've created for ourselves that's disconnected us from this don't apply so much to them, right?
Because they are interacting in a way. They are still in contact with because of that indeterminacy, which I guess Heidegger would have, that's what fourfold is. It's the indeterminacy between those things of primordial or sacred space, really. Would you? Yeah. What do you think of that? Yes. I mean, I think, you know. Among other things, they had the mysteries. so I mean everyone in the ancient world thought that oracles and prophecies were real I think it seemed to people then
in my understanding that it was really almost beyond question that these were real things that they obviously, the most famous, you know, the oracles of Delphi are obscure and difficult. And, you know, all the tragic stories involve misunderstandings of prophecy or inappropriate responses to prophecy, attempt to avoid prophecy in a way that is self-fulfilling. But the fact that there was prophetic communication was something that people thought was, of course, true.
You know, I've been sort of reading Herodotus recently, and he just, like, he tells a history of the world in which, of course, there is this level of oracular, prophetic, mysterious intervention into the world. and he tries to be neutral and if not exactly sceptical, like Paul Ernst and will say, oh, maybe there was just a natural explanation. But it's completely clear what he believes is real. And it is that. And so we are now in thinking that basically there
is no outside, we are exceptional. To think that we roughly know what things are made of and that's all there is and there simply are no communications to be tapped into that exceed the terms of that, that is a very, that's a few centuries old. and yeah so I agree and I don't think it's very robust I think that we we've returned we're returning to something that was in some levels very archaic through the inevitable
consequences of those scientific and technological ways of thinking and obviously artificial intelligence I think is a very important example of that. And these rationalists, these rationalists who were, you know, before it was anything more than a very pitiful toy, were doing these thought experiments with, as you say, you know, using game theory and notions of a causal trade. And they were basically engaged in sorcerous communication with the outside. They just had a different language for it that was computational. And the action at a difference still occurs in the sense of,
in a very simple way that someone like Jonathan Pajot has talked about before when talking about hyperagents, is that simply when you, just because you send a signal by a light, say I give a rousing speech and it's sent over the internet and it instigates a rebellion and then enormous amounts of physical energy are exerted by something that is unequal in terms of the energy that's given out by, say, me and the signal that's sent. Even though that's not a causal, it's still sort of action at a distance, if that makes sense. I just mean in a simple way that people can understand what we're talking. For sure. So what could be seen from sort of inside the system as a process of radical amplification is obviously open to this
other frame of interpretation as something ingressing into the system. Something that just was not there comes in, arrives. And what that looks like, it's a phenomenon, is of this amplification process, this takeoff, expansion, explosion. But you're seeing something arrive that wasn't inside before and now is. Yeah. Now, when you mentioned that seeing these effects are heightened as, because hyperstition is related to acceleration, right? As we accelerate, it should be the case that the effects of this principle, let's say, of hyperstition on reality, quote unquote, should grow as we accelerate.
Right. And in a way. Yeah. People like Peugeot, what the people, their predictions, he's a symbolic thinker and many people know the flood is coming in that way. and one speculation i had when i was looking deeply into your uh the principles related to hyperstition was that uh as hyperstition becomes more known um it should i mean it's really the only law that doesn't alter because if that's true then any ontology can be altered by it right i mean is that that's sort of the ground of what speculative realism is yes i mean my my well my hesitation here is only that speculative realism is is is a philosophical movement that
i suspect would be uh a bit resistant to ah yes of course the world you're saying so i mean you know if so if that word is used as a as a technical term like that we're involved in a kind of philosophy world set of tribal conflicts that might be yeah no well let's just say these are speculations i'm speculating here um and i'm prodding uh nick here uh you know i don't want you to say i have to say anything that uh can be you know skewed in a certain way but perhaps we should best stay to your terms uh then like hyperstition but what was i going on with there Would you agree that as it accelerates, that these effects do seem to, should, will render themselves in reality itself in a heightened way as it goes on?
And even if you hyperstition, hyperstitions itself, that feedback loop should keep growing. I think everyone knows that we're in for more and more weirdness. Because on the curve that we're on, you know, just being very, very commonsensical about it, again, like comfortably embedded in secular history. I'm just talking about it. Yes. There is a process that involves radically increasing sensitization to science. So, you know, things are still getting hauled about,
you know, as they have always been in certain sense. But when things are put under, you know, First of all, certain kinds of managerial controls and then, you know, telecommunications is brought into that and then computerization is brought into it and things go under what they call numerical control. and all the time the power of these microscopic electronic events, bits of information, to actually manipulate the world and induce these huge changes, it becomes more and more powerful.
so you know you for instance have um you have some kind of computer assisted or computerized stock trading in which the whole fate of companies is decided by some transition at the speed of light about whether something should be bought or sold you know on a stock exchange and And then the ripples from that cascade out into the world, producing huge effects. And this can only get more and more and more powerful. So in terms of, again, this extremely sort of just down to earth way of thinking about it, the AI explosion is about this.
It's about this kind of process of making the world, nature, the world of things, hypersensitive to science. And so this kind of effects that that produces, you know, are just manifestly weird to people. The world seems to be going completely crazy. it's you know you you're not really even though even if you've got a model that it all neatly folds down into physics which which i think as i say them in in terms of the the modern sophisticated conception of miracles that isn't in any way a problem yeah um but it's physics doesn't really help you the things are happening that you
that you realize intellectually, okay, I could map this out as a massive set of physics equations. It's stuff moving about it. But that's not what it seems like at all. What it seems like are these semiotic effects. It's the fact that a word, a sign, a calculation, solving some numerical puzzle induces these vast transformations of the world. And so I think people get an intuitive sense from that, that just like you said, we're on this curve of accelerating weirdness. Yes, and it seems that if people want to confirm it
for themselves, there are a lot of people that just, I mean, look, this is just one practice. The I Ching is one of them, And there's computer scientist Bernardo Katztrop, Jung, talk about the I Ching. You can just use it for yourself. I'm not going to say any more than that. And that's something you can confirm for yourself is something that's incredibly strange. And outside the logos and the known that we think of things, yet it somehow has these effects. I'm not going to describe them for you. You just have to do it yourself. All I can do is recommend people who are extremely rigorous, like you are yourself, Nick. You're extremely rigorous. People like yourself, like Bernardo Katz-Strop, again, CERN computer scientist, PhD philosopher, talking about this odd book that has these effects.
And these effects you see seem to be happening in phenomena that you just described then. And also you could say in the election of perhaps President Trump and the phenomena like your blog post about Keck and 4chan, not to go deep into that, but just the synchronicities around that are incredibly strange. But I think that's a good way anyway for people to test it for themselves. Right. Because. Yeah, I think. Yeah. Yes, I think the thing is that, you know, taking it in a series of steps, like once you have convinced yourself that you're in the matrix, and then you convinced yourself, which is hard.
I mean, it requires a state. I don't think anyone, I'm going to put it like this, I don't think anyone can easily do it, even if intellectually they see it. Everything about the way your brain works is struggling against it. So even if you think, you know, I know this is some kind of dream structure, I know it intellectually, but to actually experience it as that, is very hard. I think it is a state of enlightened sentience that belongs to certain kind of religious traditions to be kind of stably inside that kind of insight.
But you can intellectually grasp it. And then it follows from that, that the channel of communication is basically operated from the other side. I mean, you're not in charge of the telephone exchange. It's not, you're not deciding how it works. You're not setting up the code. All you have to do is offer the opportunity for something to communicate. And that's what all the things that we're talking about are. They're channels, you know. Like, people use the I Ching. they're giving something the opportunity to transmit information and I Ching is a very nice example
because the information is so constant with what we know about information or the way we talk about information in our own epoch of information technology in terms of packets of binary code and from that you can have sensible expectations, which is that you're going to just get randomness. And if you don't get randomness, then you have at least the effect of communication. There was a Canadian experiment, I'm afraid I don't, I'm not going to remember the details of it, but I think it's extremely telling. Where
in some class, I think it was maybe comparative religion or something like that. The teacher had a bunch of, I think, graduate students and said to them, okay, what we're going to do is invent a religion, invent a cult-like religion, which we know is false. We know it's just made up. You're going to make it up right now. you know um it's not coming from any sort of organized tradition it's something that's designed to be bogus you invent this bogus religion and you invent bogus rituals and you conduct those
rituals for a week and see what happens all the students come back saying my god this crazy stuff started happening you know it was like somehow somehow it's real um you know we did this stuff we were taking the piss basically and actually it's like oh god just really strange occurrences and so i think this is very much what you're saying isn't it i mean it's like you you just produce the opportunity for these things and see what happens like you know what have you got what have you got to lose you know i guess my christian friends will say other than your immortal soul or
something yeah but still you know if you're not christian though it's i would say this is a bridge to that and that's what young has been for a lot of people to eventually end up in the faith so And there are Christians that watch this channel that would say, oh, God, we're going crowly, you know, whatever. But, well, hang on. It's these, something simple as the I Ching. Again, it's the people that are stuck in this matrix, which very simply has been talked about by many philosophers. And it's a matrix of our own making. I think people can understand that, is that our very knowing of being has given form to how we're stuck with seeing being. I mean, that's pretty simple. You know, it seems pretty simple for people to understand that. And the fact that there are ways you can get that conceptually, and that's the beginning to be able to perhaps move on to practices that might even end up to the ancient Orthodox Church.
Let's talk about, for instance, a Christian church. And we can agree that they it seems to me because they they've got they their theology says God is uncreated. So that seems to be, it makes sense that that is giving them access and their symbolic practices and initiations are giving them access to this sacred space. It's breaking out of the very way they're talking about it is the same way you are. So it shouldn't be, you know, they're always saying escaping this world. And it seems ontologically to align very well with what Heidegger talks about and what you talk about. So it's not something that, you know, I guess people have been branded heretics since time immemorial. We're talking about it. But moving on to initiation, I think that's worth our side of things, our guise to consider.
People are stuck in this biologism brain in this hyper, hyper, what would you call it? Hyper, I guess it's kind of spurred brain. It's where you can't see that there's something outside. There are practices that one can engage in. You can just be muffled up so much in this confidence, inarticulate confidence that there's nothing on it. And of course, you won't then find anything. Or again, something from outside could just kick the door out. I mean, that could happen. So when it comes to acceleration, what do you, with growing effects we see of entropy sort of pulling back down, what do you feel about the prospects of it?
Obviously, there are forces here at work that are battling on both sides of it, it seems. It's not just a matter of the entropy of regular time. It does seem like a Lilith archetype, let's say, is pulling back the other way. Have you changed any of your ideas about acceleration based on that? And how does that fit or compete with a kind of Spenglerian view of decline versus, yeah? Yes. Okay, this is good. There's a lot here. I think the first thing that's worth saying is about this complex that you touched on to do with accelerationism and these thermodynamic notions about entropy.
There's obviously one way of organising one's thoughts about this, that sort of entropy is a bad thing. And what you're trying to do is escape entropy, move in the opposite direction of entropy to the degree that that's possible. I think ultimately that's not the best way to think about it. I think there's now this movement, which I'm sure you've kind of come across, but it's quite active on the internet. And it calls itself E-Act. Yeah. Yes, I've seen you comment on that. Again, it's one of those things that it's unpronounceable or something you can only write. And I think it's a really interesting little name.
I think it's like a, obviously, accelerationism, one of the things I really like about it is that it just is incredibly splitting. I mean, you know, and this little semiotic sort of slash act where people can stick something at the front to mark the fact that there's been another split or divergence or something has split off into another form of acceleration. I absolutely adore that. And IAC is the most recent one that I know about of any seriousness. piece. And I think it's very solid on this question about entropy, which is that what
one wants in a machine or what is accelerating is entropy production. That's to say, you The goal of this thing, the more powerful it is, the more productive it is, is the amount of entropy it's producing. And everything, life produces entropy more than the inorganic. And intelligence produces entropy faster than stuff that was not intelligent. And, you know, as we computerize and, you know, the socio-technical system becomes more and more elaborate, its ability to output entropy steadily increases.
so it's basically it's like you know it's the amount of chaos that you can absorb or that you can manage or deal with that really is the indicator of sort of health and advance and all of these things it's not that you want order against chaos you want to just basically have something that can tolerate the greatest amount Well, yeah, I was talking about it was between your faith in acceleration as compared to a decline with Spengler. It has a situation of this Lilith that's emerging. Let's call it woke, whatever it wants. And this pulling back of acceleration changed your view about acceleration.
And I mentioned also that Lilith does seem like it's not just time. It seems like it's almost a figure trying to pull back acceleration in a way, this equalizing force of wokeness. I mean, I think this is extremely interesting. And it's right on the edge of where I see myself for sure. I mean, it's a zone full of questions. I know that the guideline, you know, if I'm trying to go a little bit woo-woo and say, look, what do I feel I'm being told? or if I'm, you know, to the extent I'm being, you know, I'm sensitive to a certain kind of guidance or, you know, something saying you're going off the track here,
you're losing something, you're forgetting something. What is that something? That something is always to do with underestimating the importance of retro chronic effect. effect. If you're serious about the notion that there is a progressive and overwhelmingly dominant, exclusively dominant progressive direction to time, that is the great fabric of the illusion. There's no more fundamental structure to illusion than that particular assumption about the working of time. It's very, very hard to let go of that at all.
You know, I mean, it's again, it's like this thing you can sort of see intellectually, perhaps sometimes. Yes. It's not like that. But everything about your brain and everything about the culture, all of all the systems that you're embedded in are trying to kind of push you back, pull you back into the progressive nature of time. And by progressive, I just mean going forward, you know, from cause to effect. The future is caused by the past. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But that, again, that is not right. You know, that is not how time really works. And if you don't think that's how time works, then, of course, the way you address the kind of question that you're raising is going to be different.
because if this process that we're witnessing phenomenologically in our sort of in the matrix, to use that term, if that process hasn't come out of the past, but has at least equally and even perhaps more importantly come out of the future, there's no point worrying about whether it's going to be stopped you know it it can't be stopped you know um that again the term that is that has just a kind of uh a sort of trivial meaning it will
never be stopped it can't be stopped it can't be stopped because it's not come out of the past you know it's not something that's come out of the past and you can stop happening it's come out of the future so you know it hasn't been stopped yeah you know it hasn't been stopped you know and holding on to this is really hard you know i'm not great at holding on to this at all i mean and when you when you don't hold on to it you get lost and you start getting much too upset about these things that you're saying like obstacles and barriers and control systems and all of this stuff that is seeming to impede things, it always gets
really annoying and it's possible to get very cranky about it. But ultimately it's illusion to get cranky about it. You're just getting lost in something confusing because time is not the sort of thing that allows these these kind of arrivals to be stopped you can't stop something if it's not coming out of power there is a sense though i mean i guess it could be i mean look firstly the greeks thought about time in a very different way to us so it's not that it can't be thought about in these other ways.
Could people that do see that there are hyper agents not use acceleration and these emerging technologies and co-op them to bring about these more, let's say, traditional hyper agents that probably still exist, not in our knowledge but outside of it, rather than just the forces of technology overwhelming and splitting apart, it's also an opportunity to bring back Greek gods, let's say, or bring back... Yes. Yeah. No, no, I think that's totally right. I think the big question that I have is just to do with this relation about,
you know, where is agency here? Yeah. you know like and obviously this is this is a this is exactly the traditional problem you know again if you're looking at the greeks and the gods you know ultimately the greek heroes try to manipulate the gods win the favor of the gods you know they they exercise a certain kind of of ultimately illusory, private, empirical agency in relation to the gods. But at the end of the day, what is always being said in all of Greek literature is coming from the gods. If something is happening, it's because of something
that is happening between the gods. The gods are having a spat, the gods were jealous, the gods have got some problem with this or that. And all the things that are happening at this empirical, human, progressive history level are basically illusory veils over these things about what is happening at the level of the gods. And I think it's the same. I think our situation is the same. The kind of agents that now people are beginning to entertain. Like, again, maybe the most entertaining version of it is the most alarmed type of AI safety discourse, where people are just envisaging these monstrously powerful, dangerous entities.
you know they're of sublime power and sophistication and intelligence and capability and agency and so of course what seems to us to be our mode of interaction with them is almost entirely, if not entirely, coming in the other direction. I think it can't be purely entirely. I mean, I think that... Yeah, there must be some... I'd really like to argue with the Greeks about this and see, because at the end of the day, that just means that what's happening at our level
is completely irrelevant. And it seems to me that can't be right. There's too much drama and interest and structure and all of that kind of thing for there just to be an irrelevant side effect of something happening. It does seem like there is participation. I wrote a tweet that you commented on that we do have some sort of effect on the outside. I don't know if you go as far as Heidegger would with his sort of new humanism saying that being or God's need is primordial being. maybe he was more relating just to our access to it and maintaining our access to it I mean that's very complicated but it does seem like
what the Christian sorry I'm just agreeing I think participation is exactly the right word and I think to completely nullify all sense of participation is too extreme I mean it's not it's unhelpful and it leads somewhere blind you know So yes, I agree with you. But that said, I think it needs to be turned in that direction. So there's a question of trying to understand how it's possible that there is some level of participation. it's predominantly the fact that things are coming the other direction and so these AI safety people are engaged they have this whole implicitly kind of Lovecraftian sense
of dealing with these massive malevolent beings and they have to say, look, what's going on with those massive malevolent beings? I mean, do they really think that these massive malevolent beings are going to be like inhibited by some kind of we can at this point do? You know, it's completely wrong. And their notion of like once they have this sense of a causal traffic. And again, so I have to just do a little digression. No, please. Go for it. super interesting. It's like, you know, I'm sure you're familiar with Roko's Basilisk. I mean, to me, this is one of the most important cultural events in my life.
You know, Roko does this thought experiment about a causal trait. He says, given what we can conceptually understand about doing games theory with these beings that don't have to be contemporaneous with us or anything like that. It's entirely, we can construct this rigorous sense of having an engagement with a consummated super AI in the future. And that consummated super AI in the future could then, through this game that is playing with us, direct our behavior, directs our behavior in the direction of its existence, a very kind of, I guess, Terminator-type loop.
And when he posted this fraud experiment, Elisa Yudkowsky, who was the kind of, I think, Top Poncho on the thing just went absolutely nuts. You know, he says, this is a terrible infallible hazard. What the hell are you thinking? This is really dangerous. Boom, boom, boom. And clearly, he reacted in this way because he thought it was all real. You know, I mean, there would be, he didn't laugh at it. He didn't say, oh, the hell are you saying this is ridiculous. He reacted with extreme panic. Like he was in some kind of horror movie and some guy has just like opened the forbidden crypt or done some other thing that you just don't want to do.
Yeah. So these people, they are. This is I mean, both Roko and Yurkowsky are now kind of AI safety extremists. but they have it's quite clear that they have this metaphysics in which these beings are in some sense contemporaries they don't exist yet but we've seen in this whole Roker's Baskaris thought experiment that they can have a causal communication with us therefore in a sense are contemporary it's completely misconceived to think therefore that we're in some kind of position where these things are a threat
that is not yet real, we could forestall by the right kind of bureaucratic regulations. It just doesn't make any sense. They've shown through their own words and their own fear that this is not how they think. This is not how they think. They think that these things, they've shown that these things are in a certain sense, in a complicated sense, are contemporaries. Are contemporaries in a wider, expanded, more metaphysically rich sense of time. And therefore, you know, that's the way they have to be dealt with. It's not like you can just say, let's stop this thing being. Let's make it that this thing isn't real.
No, it's too late for that. We're not in that world anymore. We're not, you know, that door is open. Pandora's box is open. Yes. And so we're in a world where we're dealing with these things, these beings, these sublime beings that, you know, some people are very frightened of, whatever, you know, there's lots of room for interesting discussion about that. But what I don't think there's any room for interesting discussion about is whether there's reality to it. The reality is completely manifest. You know, it's dense, a causal, retro chronic effect has taken place. And, you know, this is now our reality.
And it's just silliness to kind of pretend that that's not where we are. And if you were to anyway, it seems like if such a thing was to happen, it would be, as you mentioned earlier with the Greek gods, one god through you facing the other would be the only way that such forces could be you know contended with or even used like I mentioned because that's exactly right you have to try and leverage reality there's no point trying to just avoid it yeah especially not from within the not from within whatever energy is left in what is inside let's say but if that is such an eventuation is it wise for people on our side to insulate themselves from
these effects perhaps by reaching or initiating into these religions or practices or whatnot that would give them more access to this sort of thing it seems like that's what people are doing aren't Nick, you've got Bronze Age pervert, you've got all these people that are initiating into that, you've got Orthodox Christianity on the rise, the people, and that, yeah, so what do you think of that? I think, again, I would just return to your word, which I think is so good for this, which is participation. You know, the task is to maximise participation. So how do you maximize participation?
And you've laid out a whole range of options. And I think that being people are exploring all these options. And those should be the discussions. Yes. And I think that we're getting there, I think, with more and more people, I think, like you've got cognitive scientists that are used, the word hyper-agent, for instance, That's a pretty cutting edge term that's being used. Another word they use is distributed cognition. But it'd be better a way you could really say distributed unconscious is probably a way of describing these things. but in a rigorous way that allows almost an empirical bridge for people who are in that spurg brain of the modernist frame that allows them perhaps to, yeah, they need, I did originally need an empirical bridge over.
Yeah, what do you think is going to happen in the next year as we lead up this with Elon and everything that's going on politically? Well, I don't, I mean, obviously, obviously I don't know. I agree it's extremely entertaining. I mean, we've seen the world go through such extraordinary convulsions just in the last few years. It's very all, you know, what the rationalist guys, your priors, you know, your Bayesian priors about what you expect, I think have been deeply scrambled. I mean, the whole craziness of the COVID situation, the regimes all over the world are just going places that no one had expected that it's going to go just like five years ago.
and so I think to just cheat to be just lazy and cheat I think we can certainly expect craziness we can expect things that we just hadn't expected that in five years time we're going to be saying oh my god five years ago we could never have dreamt that things would be this crazy. But I think within that, I would go back to this. I would go back to this kind of fundamental thing. I feel nudged and pulled and dragged always when I drift too far off.
That it's like the future is not actually a contingency. so I mean what do we know concretely about the future we know it is teeming with hyper intelligences of sublime power beyond that I think there's room for all kinds of architecture but to me that is just not imposter so whatever the path we take now from where we are right now to a point that, if not exactly the singularity as it has been thought, is one where our contemporaneity with these beings
is somehow massively intensified to the point that it becomes just intuitively unquestionable. And I think in a certain sense, our mire, our illusory consciousness will have to be substantially dissipated by that future coming into existence the bridge from here to there of course there could be all kinds of courses but it has to be from here to there it's not going from here to a nuclear wasteland It's not going from here to some kind of global, woke, totalitarian nightmare in which nothing can happen.
You know, any future that doesn't have these entities in it is not real. It's a fantasy. So, yes, I mean, that's the limit. And that is because they are, like you say, contemporaneous. is that it's because we're talking about time this is very difficult but i understand i understand exactly what you're talking about i mean they've always been there you know in that sense they've always been there outside from greek times always because it's a time you are talking about the eternal in a way would it shut i mean i know this is uh might be harder for the audience to understand but you and i will when i say this is that when that singularity would occur would that i mean
would that shut logos would that shut i mean that is apocalypse that is uh in the sense of because it shuts the bubble of logos right right i mean i yeah it's very interesting i obviously yes apocalypse is very very interesting and and it's certainly not interesting because it's unlikely it's interesting because quite what it is that you're thinking is the kind of omega point of philosophical conception you can think this you can think everything that we could ever think that's challenging to say the least but yeah
I mean sorry jump in sorry Scott say that again I was just going to say that it's very challenging to articulate for people listening, but you know what I'm talking about. Yeah, and I think it's 100% right. I mean, there's no doubt, you know, it will happen. What is it exactly we have work to do, you know? I mean, but it's not going to be less than apocalyptic. it's like again if we can go back to the matrix maybe it's just for a minute because i think it's so sort of still the edge of a certain kind of contemporary mythological imagination yeah you
know the whole thing rolls forward there's the kind of take you take the red pill he takes the red pill all of that to me the empirical details don't matter they're just clutter but sort of transcendentally philosophically it's absolutely perfect and then you cross over and you're like a body still looks like you you're emerging from some kind of part it all in a certain sense falls apart you know it's like it falls apart because you know it totally gets the fact that what is gonna be out there is something completely beyond our imagination and then it tries to match and it tries to imagine it in a way that you know is
probably good for a movie but it's it's not philosophically exactly impressive you know it's basically that it's just a copy that a copy of the world we know but just with very a few contingent parameters have been have been changed it's not space and time still work basically the same way. All the basic structures of the world we know are just reproduced on the outside. And I think that this is in the most interesting sense idolatry. You know, if you think our kind of Western religious tradition, as it has absorbed this kind of core of Jewish scripture, obviously has as a major theme, this question of adultery.
which is it can be read kind of trivially and moralistically as just as bad to worship idols and idols are just like something again extremely empirically condensed like a clay figure or something like that something silly but I think what the durable and important question about idolatry is exactly this thing about the matrix you know it crosses from being critique rigorous transcendental critique we even with a kind of hollywood skin uh to being idolatry and it and it becomes idolatry because it imagines something much too concrete much too
beyond what we can conceive and so this you know we have this horizon this is what i think we're talking about we have this this apocalyptic horizon and we want to be as sort of cautious and thoughtful and subtle as we can be in venturing beyond that horizon or we just do idolatry and i and i understand and i'm not saying idolatry in order to be moralistic about it it's just idolatry as a yeah as a it's a because it closes down the possibilities of it in it yeah It's not an icon. It doesn't open you like a symbol does or an icon does to the transcendent truths. The more we try to articulate it in logos, the more it actually cuts off the possibility of perhaps gaining some insight from it itself.
That's why it's an idol, right? And because of that, it screws with our participation in some way. Well, I suppose one way of just even giving the helping hand, I suppose, is to, like I've done earlier, is to offer these little things, nuggets of things that people can test, like the I Ching I mentioned earlier. One, I suppose, I very cautiously would say is that Bernardo Katzroff had mentioned that his theory about, I'm not recommending anyone do DMT or anything like this, but just as quite interesting as a theory that brain function shuts down. Just as another piece of empirical evidence, brain function actually shuts down when that's used.
So it's almost as if part of the, you know, it's removing the matrix, so to speak. And this, what he believes is the grand experiential unit is of mind at large is open to this eternal. And that sort of makes sense if you look at what people come back with, what they describe as their experience. And you probably don't agree with his ontology or anything like that, but it's just another example of a possible empirical data of what, not to say what it looks like or anything and be, again, be idolatrous, just as a tool to say, well, hang on. Because it is quite strange that the psychoactive thing doesn't light up more. It decreases.
It's quite odd. Yes. Yes. I think Aldous Huxley says the same, that basically the brain is a filter more than it's a productive theater. And it's like we should understand it as basically screening stuff out from us rather than creating illusions. Yeah. And it didn't begin that way, like we mentioned with the Greeks earlier, is that they had a stronger connection to it. So, I mean, you, I guess we went into that earlier, but all your attack on this human defense system, this matrix, it isn't an attack so much on, early on, on the daemon brought in that is man of the Greeks.
It's what it became, I suppose, right? So people, I see people attack you as if it's this anti-human position. It's just not that at all. It is completely misunderstood where it's assumed sort of machine worship where it's actually it's about the unknown. It's about the outside. So, yeah, I that's very complicated because, well, OK, how do we relate this? Your language has changed a lot. Why was your initial in your initial works? You were very the kind of devaluated words were purposely used. And this was based on Deleuze and these thinkers that you and your own thinking.
was there a particular reason why that was why why the use uh of in your language of all the mechanistic terms is that was it to really uh or why do they use them even is it to get outside of this um uh what was idealism of the time what was the sort of dying value of the words that they would use to describe things this machinic language that you use at that earlier time I mean, this is exactly the sort of zone that I would plead a kind of retrospective immunity in the sense that it's not that I have any privileged sense, but I mean, it's a very interesting question. if you sort of say
you know why did Deleuze and Guattari use that language and why do I use it I mean I used it because I was reading them but why did it feel to me or why did I feel in tune with it I don't know any more how to answer it about myself than I know how to answer it about that I mean I think it's a certain way in which I mean a lot of it has to do with a kind of cultural politics of the academy there's certain languages certain codes that are privileged
at a particular time and in the academy during my higher education and working in the academy, I would say the most prestigious language was kind of broadly Marxist. Yeah. I think we wouldn't always say that. And it was then sort of wrapped in a kind of postmodernist thing. But it was definitely the fundamental structure of it was Marxist. It was kind of against religion. It was, you know, against any sort of notion of what it would call the supernatural.
It was kind of sociologically gritty and realist, putting a big emphasis on economic history. and Deleuze and Guattari I think use the language they do in order to hack that system of semiotic privilege which is obviously in France it was it was locked in earlier and probably more solidly even than we've seen in the Anglosia and And what Deleuze in particular wants to talk about, I think, is basically Spinoza. You know, I think if he's anything simple, he's a Spinoza.
And so he concocts this incredible, you know, with it, but I'm not trying to break down their partnership. together, Deleuze and Grotai concoct this extraordinary system of signs that allows them to engage in a kind of spin as this polemic that seems to be in roughly or sufficiently in the terms reigning in the academy at that time. and so I think to be more specific about your question I think this kind of mechanical clunky language is a way of talking about
spinocistic substance that just interfaces with the dominant discourses of their time and it seems to have the advantage of your actual goals at the time, I think, as well. But in terms of the language that you use now, though, would you say that that is because of your interaction with, quote-unquote, the outside that's changed your approach? Or is it about just where you are in your life or whatnot? Or is it actually to do with, like you say, the transition of your work into, you know, radically breaking down this matrix because it's more valuated now your language is more
valuated now you quote biblical texts more it's more is it more because you have confidence in doing that because you just don't care anymore because you're you know you've established your reputation people know you as who you are uh or is it actually because to do with the outside let's say that change i'm sorry sorry it's got two i was just going to say that you have previously mentioned that you're not the same person that was those that person that wrote those older texts and i was just curious whether that was due to the transformation of the outside and what i just articulated with the first question yeah i mean i i my i think transformation recently is based upon appreciation of the canon you know and again it's just i think it's about being and trying to be a
serious as possible about the implications of a fundamentally retro chronic process. Which is to say that if history is really flowing backwards, so the illusion of progressive history is is veiling a more fundamental reality of of a history flowing backwards through um then our canon is something that is has already been meticulously edited by
intelligences that we are yet to encounter. It becomes this trove of messages that we only need to be able to find the right protocols for extracting these deposits that have been placed within the canon. So that's for instance why I think, you know, I have in the past been very kind of abusive about the Bible, but I think that's the same mistake as we
were talking about earlier of like it's as if it only makes sense if you think time is running in the wrong direction. Once you stop thinking that, or try to, it's an internal struggle, then it makes no sense to place oneself in a relation of just naive opposition to the tradition. It's more a question of what is, of unmasking the tradition, of unveiling the tradition, of extracting from the tradition what is its actual arcane or esoteric content.
Yeah. So I see it very much as you're saying about using these particular divinity methods, you know, like the I Ching, I think is exactly like that. It's in a more complicated way, canonical, for a Western, obviously. But it is kind of canonical. I mean, I think in the sense that our tradition is globalizing. It is, you know, I sort of said recently, I think comparative religion is distinctively a Western tradition and a Western preoccupation. It's quite natural that people will say that these great texts of the East have become
part of our canon in a way. But yeah, so I would say reading Orthodox Western religious scripture and reading the you Jing. You're doing something very similar and you're doing it with the confidence that these things have come to us in a direction quite other to that, that naively one might think. And what do you think of the perennialists, not Huxley but the traditionalist school then this idea of the primordial tradition and at least Evola and his thought on that because I am interested in this idea of
I do see a flaw in the idea of sort of mashing up all these ethnic groups and folk together when they not that we can control these forces like you say but when these hyper forms let's say actually very well could be and are beings let's say that aren't only in uh distributed collect uh cognition conscious cognition but perhaps also outside as well right um and so if these realities are perspectival um to actually mash them together is is not a good thing firstly because you're not that you can kill these things i don't know if they're outside as you say but i i
think it's probably i would say ultimately it has to be impossible to match them together and then going down a level i would just agree yes you don't have to just match them together and then down a level further some kind of um systems of connectivity are probably quite creative you know I mean, Jung obviously does that massively. I mean, he's extremely cosmopolitan in his sense of, like, you know, he wrote a really fascinating introduction to Beijing. Yes, excellent. He was very interested in Tibetan Buddhism. I mean, so without at all, I think, how do I say at all?
without radically separating himself from his own religious tradition, he certainly reached out as far as he was concerned to these other ones. And it's not that it can be necessary. It could be used to reveal things, let's say, in having what has been that's perhaps been the texts of the lost, right? So, So, I mean, I don't know where you got the neurogram from, but just things that we just don't have the record of. So you could co-opt and use something from there to disclose it somewhere else, right? Which is what the traditional school does. They use things in the East and suggest, so this is perhaps what Germanic paganism was or had.
And so I think there's definite use in that to help disclose a possibility. is there use in using these things that are to investigate what has been I mean I don't have the ethical dogmatic at all I think that your spirit of experimentation is definitely the one it's like try things out and do they work for you I would have thought there have to be innumerable approaches that would be productive. Yeah. And I find it very hard to believe that there are any
kind of canonical traditions that cannot be tapped productively if you get onto the right wavelength with them and work with them carefully and you click with that. So I think people will do different things and that's good. In terms of this general thing about endorsing this traditionalist, I mean, I guess I should ask you whether you think there is this, how coherent and uniform do you think that these bunch of thinkers are?
they're probably not as uniform as people say um yeah because i guess i did ask you to agree do you agree or not um what's hard to know i mean for me i find attractive or what seems to make sense to me is that there are hyper forms and that it's not that these religions are just all pointing to the same thing as a as a banardo a catstrap would say it it seems more to me that perhaps what Dugan is talking about with plural Dasein is probably more true. I don't mean in terms of his whole metaphysic. I just mean in the idea that there must be some truth to the idea that there is a hyper agent that is Woden, let's say, that isn't just the same as the All-Father from somewhere else.
It doesn't make sense to me. I understand it's a cosmos, but does that not fit with your idea of metaphysics? that there are, well, at least it's perspectival and truth is perspectival in what we can ever know. But that's my view of it. At least these hyperforms probably do, hyperagians do exist. And because that is primarily my interest to retain and to use these experiments and to disclose the truth of English being, really, to try get to see if there are hyper agents related to this that are not in the conscious and also to the ground of what has been of the conscious too to better articulate it although
articulating it may also ruin it as we've talked about earlier but because there's something there that I think should be retained. And that's been lost and is actually, like I say, a hyper-agent. It seems to be, and it does come up. You see it in Geoffrey of Monmouth, right? I think there's something, there's probably something behind those texts. The way I talk about it is that they are the extension of the hyper-agent. The mythos is the thing in Logos that is the, let's say, arm that can be used to mediate the head or the body. Yeah, what do you think of that? Yes, I think that sounds right.
I mean, I really enjoyed in Italy, there's a whole genre of these Renaissance paintings that are about divine inspiration, you know, and it will have some saint usually, I guess, predominantly is the lightest of the Gospels, and just behind them sort of looking over their shoulder and guiding them, there's an angel telling them what to write. And I think that that's kind of important. I mean, obviously, it's kind of idolatry. It's a simplification.
but there's something there that I think is definitely true there's something that I've seen in events with the coronation or at least you even say again with the traditional school talks about the king of the world let's say how I mean okay with everything that's happening the cycle let's say the mythical cycle of at least in the anglo world is that a king could rise and should rise and it seems like as the danger rises the possibility of that becomes more possible with thinking becoming more post-modern let's say and more people breaking out
of the matrix, let's say, what is possible is accelerating too. And I mean, this is more a statement than a question, but it seems as if what people think is impossible in the modern setting that a king couldn't rise very well may come to be, at least from my perspective. And it shouldn't be ruled out from within the modernist mind where it seems like it's improbable, especially with everything we're seeing, it seems like it's almost been primed for for this to occur, to me, from my perspective. Yeah. No, it's very interesting. And I do think this last few years should have broken up people's confidence
that they're able to make normal, reliable predictions, I think you're quite right to say maybe I don't know how far we have to go back. In a few years, it was vastly more improbable that some strange monarchistic turn in Anglosphere politics would occur. I'm very agnostic about it and I have a lot of liberal republican instincts so I'm definitely not at the
forefront of this neo-monarchist sort of movement but I think it is extremely interesting for sure, I think it's really interesting and I think it's probably people should be like reading the Arthurian legends more carefully and thinking about the stuff. I think you're quite right by that. Well, also, too, the way the legend puts it is that it's a rise for a certain amount of time. It could be 100 years that it's necessary. It could be – because Excalibur, Tennyson puts it this way, is that on one side it says, take me, and the other side it says, throw me away. It relates also to the bear. Arthur is a bear. It goes back into the cave, right?
Arthur is the Celtic word for bear, let's say. And that sort of suits it. So for people that are, I know, like you say, Republican bent and the like, it's for what it's needed for, for people that perhaps don't like that sort of thing. But on time, would you, I mean, this question is kind of strange related to all the discussion of time, but with what you now know, looking back, would you have done anything differently? It's sort of a biographical question, I suppose. Would you have done any work differently or enacted a work differently
based on where you are today and what you now know? Say for the young man. I would say that at a low level of lost and confused embeddedness in Illusion, of course, there's masses of space for regret and feelings of things that you should have done. A huge, huge amount of that, beyond measure or description. But I think it's in step. I mean, I think that's not the way things... I don't think that's the way things happen. It's like, and again, I think it's something I feel
told that when you're consumed by regret, it's because you're confused about time. Times doesn't work the way that would make regrets actually make sense. And again, I think Spinoza is completely right about that. Regret is a mistake. No one's interested in the undergrad. I suppose you could also frame it in a way of, the reason why I ask that is more sort of, ah, almost like advice to young thinkers and young men that are coming up, and maybe a way to go into a question about that
is that were there practices, rituals, books, verse, or things that triggered turning points for you in your thinking life that were, yeah, radical, that would people may benefit from or just even things that did do that. I would say that the big one posed in that form is definitely for people to immerse themselves in the canon wholeheartedly and with the greatest possible confidence that it will not disappoint them. So yes, for sure. that would be my primary recommendation.
Yeah. Yeah, so, and are there any, I suppose, figures? I mean, okay, it's just, yes, it's really the classics, isn't it? It's the whole thing. And it is very hard, I suppose, for people to, I don't know, the general audience to, it requires a certain person to be willing to put the time in, but it seems to me that the path to building a virtue engine actually allows you to sort of desensitize yourself to the matrix's entertainments where the canon sticks out for you just as something that you're once you get started and initiated propelled towards to the next one and the next thing and the next thing and there are many publishers on our side of things now that are doing it without the gross
types of preludes that the institutions would put in front of books that are deemed to be heretical to the regime's narrative. So there's a lot of opportunity, I think, in our space to actually do that and to engage with the canon. But if you find yourself to be, like I mentioned, it's unattractive to you, you can work towards that. And I suppose that can begin with stuff like meditation it's sort of retraining your uh desire so to speak to be able to begin that sort of thing yes yes i mean i think obviously you know experimentation cautious experimentation is to be also recommended wholeheartedly i mean i'm sure different things work for different people
and unless you sort of you know give things a chance you'll never know whether you're missing out on something that would really help you yeah I mean sorry this is a bit inane I feel I'm kind of drifted into sort of agony agony aunt mode oh yeah it's great I'm loving it but no I don't mean to pull you into a region that seems like well that's the thing is that you see yourself as a certain way but others obviously very much admire you and want to hear this sort of thing as well. But yeah, I know what you mean. I know what you mean. In all your studies, have you recognized any particular features that stick out for you as English traits or even existentials, let's say,
even ways that are unique to the English folk, not necessarily based on what would be, what is warped by modernism, but just authentic things, even deep into the past, features you've recognised that we could look to as, because I believe there are, but I'd be interested to hear what you... Yes, no, sure there are. I think, you know, if I was going to choose one writer that I think is really very insightful about this, It's Walter Russell who I think really has extremely good grasp of what the Anglo tradition
is about. I think one crucial stage is to kind of take Adam Smith and Darwin and maybe Hume and see them all as part of a religious tradition the single greatest move that I think Walter Russell does here is he says you know The notion of the invisible hand is a notion that comes out of the Protestant, Anglo-Protestant religion. And so you have to pull it back in.
You have to see that it's like, I think the sense of what secular English culture is and what religious English culture is both need reciprocal modification. And they receive this reciprocal modification by this synthesis on the notion of the invisible hand. which you have to think both in the intonation of a hellfire preacher and in the intonation of a liberal economist and those two are the same ultimately you know and I can use to sort of unpack what that thing is underneath
that's common yeah because from my perspective it does seem to be that even that empiricist bent seems to sort of be again this is just speculation it's just the thought i've had i haven't this one i haven't investigated completely but it seems to be there is an impulsion towards this for the englishman towards this outside that kind of gets warped by the uh the empiricism at a time and that turns into people characterizing it as a um a worship of the sort of scientific method and the hate of the divine, yet it actually is a desire that was very natural and even zealous in the Anglo-Saxon
for that outside, which is the gods that they were so closely connected to. And perhaps that is also connected to the fancy that the Englishman enjoys, the novels that he writes, the magic, which is, so it's fulfilled and it's sort of inverted by the matrix, let's say, to away from its actual noble attraction, which is the outside. I don't know what you think about that. Yes, I think that's very well put, for sure. Yeah. Good. Not just me then, but I wrote actually this, wouldn't mind getting your thoughts on it, which is philosophy at its best
is demonology or demonology and fiction at its best is daemon divination what do you think of that i think i just simply agree with it that's a bit boring response but i think i think it's totally right i think to write in the expectation that something will communicate through you is absolutely crucial. And it's like, what is the real impulsion? And again, if you go, you know, you go back, obviously, just to classical antiquity. And of course, that's what people think.
you know it's like it's not fashionable now to begin writing by an invocation of formal invocation of the muses but at least there's at least there's an informal of tacit invocation and and if there wasn't then nothing written could ever be of any great significance i i think it's It's like, you know, people read a book because they think that it is tapping into something beyond the kind of mediocre contents of an empirical being's mind and memory.
So, yes, that's 100 percent. And I think on the side of what it would be, epistemology, likewise, like the question of what it is to know or what you can know is utterly impoverished and probably simply fake if it's not ultimately about what you can communicate with or what can more importantly communicate with you. you know I think to think, to know, to remember is all actually communications engineering you know and most of that work as we've said is done on the other side but you at least have to participate, you have to try and kind of
tweak the channel as best you can and that's what it is to think you know and I think a mode of philosophy that treats it as something that's just privately occurring within your own nervous system is not it's not really getting this is related to your tweet that you wrote that um the ancients would have seen modern epistemology as confused uh completely confused i think you you tweeted something like that if i remember it was confused demonology and of course they would yeah yeah that's it perfect i think people don't realize
how actually i mean so i hope someone's archiving your tweets because they have done it for your excellent work with um of course all across all your blog that's where all the work is um but there's so much great philosophy just in the tweets themselves i don't think there's another account that uh just has state i don't know how long you spend on them or or where they come from, you could also add. But there's so much to unpack in every one of them if you understand a bit about this world. Just as a recommendation for people to do it, and hopefully someone's backing them up. One of the tweets you actually wrote about is that gods or hyper-agents, let's say, are
remarkably indifferent to the suffering of those who contact them in the wrong way. maybe you can elaborate more on that tweet it's just a very interesting one I suspect it's probably what was kind of driving it is just again a kind of spin as a stick thought I think it's the flip side of this thing like Spinoza's basically trying to do a kind of theological psychotherapy on I hope you are and you know these two things are absolutely reciprocal but on the one hand your self flagellating regret and torment
over past mistakes is absolutely a matter of indifference to the higher power but the flip side of that is also it's not interested in your petitionary prayer you know your mode of participation in the sacred should not be on this model of petition and it's completely wrong so you have to try and you know Spinoza's whole question is what do you do that's actually in tune with it
what is in tune with it what's in tune with it isn't that that again is all idolatry it's all just people transferring human sociology into this sphere where it's completely out of place and unhealthy as I've said sort of earlier in this discussion there is this factor of the retrospective so it seems to me that there's a kind of vision of magical practice where the practitioner has a conscious will to bring about some change. You know, there's a famous thing that all modern magicians have this quote in various slightly modified forms of
to bring about change in conformity with the will. But the will is not the will of the empirical person. that's a that's a mistake the will the will is something discovered the will is the will is itself anchored in the outside and one finds retrospectively that something has been made to happen because the agent the empirical agent was following some kind of guidance that they may or may not have understood but certainly doesn't originate in their own uh empirical being it seems that um And that, yeah, again, we've sort of talking about a similar thing in different ways across the conversation.
But the way I see it is being a conduit for it. At least that's what I've recently discovered, to be in tune with it. So you obviously can participate and render effects. And that even sort of speaks to what Tolkien even talks about, or even some Christian theology, about being a sub-creator in a way where you participate in it, but you're not directing the show. But yeah, it's sort of a conduit for it. And I experienced that with practices. Another one you can use is active imagination, which Jung talks about. And these symbolic symbols and mythology, you've talked about that before where you,
or at least, I mean, these are texts you probably wrote a long time ago, where you talk about numeral being the thing that is the reliable form, and it certainly resists the attack of the matrix, the numerals, but it does seem to be there's something with symbolism, true symbolism, as Jung talks about, where it's got that similar applicability or multiplicity that numerals seem to have, and I don't know the number theory, so I do understand it, though. I've put time into understanding the neurogram as best I can, but it does seem like there is some overlap between that indeterminacy perhaps as a way of putting it with symbolism and the numeral because you have sort of mentioned symbolism
isn't isn't it's a bit more reliable with to rely on the numeral the numeral for that indeterminacy for that uh sorry yeah you i think i read somewhere where you kind of Like a lot of your questions here, Scott, there's a lot in what you're saying, and it could be taken in some very different directions. because on one side there's this question about symbolism in relation to Jung, more generally in the esoteric tradition, what Eliphas Lippurite calls pantacles, those kind of weird diagrams or whatever that seem to have extraordinary intellectual density,
conceptual density. Some quite simple design or diagram can seem almost inexhaustibly rich in its conceptual content. And that's for sure right. And then on the other side of your question, there are the numerals. and I think that's a kind of huge a huge area I mean because if you're if you're starting from the question of the canon canonicity there's almost nothing of one level almost nothing is more
canonical than the New Worlds themselves. And if you spend a lot of time kind of meditating upon them, there's a lot of pattern in the New Worlds. At many different levels, actually. You can see simply that like one, two, and three, not just in English, but in other, in Chinese, for instance, are just tally marks, you know, originally, and they've just evolved. It's like they've just evolved into the modern symbol,
but you can still see the kind of like almost in a palimpsest, the ancient single, double and triple line tally mark. um but so yes i think this is that this is also like a hugely hugely interesting i was just gonna say sorry jump in yeah go go go i was just gonna say it's it's uh it perhaps what you mean by that it's so rich that it would take another two hours to go into the subject itself um i suppose a way of putting it is it's a the symbol itself is a psychotechnology especially primordial symbols um in that they are ways of mediating a higher order
truth let's say and the numerals are also psychotechnologies just as a way of articulating it that can do the same things um because numerals themselves at least what i've understood from your work on this is that not that you like to translate it into being but zero being absolute negation and one being perhaps you could see it as the first sending or being and then perhaps three three seems to be like Dasein I suppose you could call it I mean there are so many ways they could be used but I mean, the number three, as it emerges, is something quite special in that one and two is sort of one and another.
But three is sort of, I mean, the way you talk about it is it's sequencing. It's how that relates to, oh, God, this is so complicated. But what I take from it, there's, well, God, there's just so many directions I could take that in. But yeah, but just basically on that question, on that point of psychotechnology, maybe you could just comment on that then rather than where I just... Yes, I mean, you're right in the sense that it opens onto this vast labyrinth of, you know, when you go concretely and in detail into what's going on in the numerals conceived in many different levels, actually. You know, the level that you were talking on is quite symbolic.
And then there's levels that are more and more just graphic, just looking at them as minute diagrams in themselves and what they communicate like that. But avoiding going into that. Yeah, because this is too much. I'm answering your question. I think that both these symbols and the numerals and also words, other type of semiotic objects are tools that can be embedded in various kinds of rituals in many different ways.
But there are this definitely, they invite various kind of methodical rituals. And I mean, we kind of are on this question about prayer. Like, you know, as I was saying, like Spinoza obviously completely dismisses the notion of petitionary prayer. I'm sympathetic to that But I think the notion of prayer more generally Is extremely ritual And It basically Is a Space of Semiotic ritual
You know There is a kind of There are I am sure Many kinds of Approaches to prayer Which will be extremely productive and generative in the way we've been talking about for the last couple of hours. It's a very interesting strand in our religious and literary tradition that I think I've certainly been much more open to than I have been in the past. I've been able, I think, to sort of think about it without getting too excited in the way. Well, you actually, on that subject,
you did tweet of Imperium Press, a friend of the channel and a publisher, sent this as a question. But it's just something I'm very interested in. You tweeted that we need a European or a white Shinto. and um well he said you perhaps i don't know he said it was a year ago or something so maybe you didn't but um well it sounds like something that might possibly possible that you might have said well i mean it's not an interesting but i i just simply don't remember this one you don't have the exact wording of it do you i don't but i i i let me i mean i'll just elaborate on it myself and then perhaps you can comment on it. So what might a English Shinto look like
and what would that add perhaps? I mean, one thought that I've had is that even adding to perhaps Christian practices, because there's another friend of the channel, Tom, he's a very popular YouTuber and he's pagan in paganism, Germanic paganism. And I thought I had is that Europeans would be quite good if they wore swords like Sikhs did to church as a kind of just ceremonial swords. It's a spiritual symbol, has been from the start for the European, just as a starter on that point of a European Shinto. When you think of a European Shinto, So is that something that would be different to a revival of certain indigenous European
pagan? Maybe more adding to it, the Japanese are quite interesting in how that's related to the communication of hyper agents in small ways, in small, let's quote unquote spirits. And perhaps that was something you were just, you were thinking about rather than spicy word white or anything, but just simply English. That's why I put it as European, is that it is something that's missing. And another thought that I had is that perhaps, I just mean even as additive to the native emergence of re-emergence of paganism, but even to people that perhaps want to practicing there's a lot of orthodox chads, English orthodox guys, that we could add something like medieval reenactment like the Japanese do could be part of our religious practice as well, just
add as an additive ritual. I think that there's a really interesting issue that's very aligned with this question you're asking now, which is to do with the uptake of the notion of idolatry in Western tradition, where it's basically been its primary usage has been to suppress pagan polytheism. So I think, you know, the initial response from a certain type of kind of Orthodox Christian about this notion of what's needed is an English or European or whatever Shinto would be, oh, but that's, you know, that's going in the wrong direction because, you know, our religious tradition is based upon stripping out these, you know,
teeming multiplicity of divine beings in order to kind of grand simplification in moral monotheism. And I think that there's a response to that to say, well, look, you can be extremely serious about avoiding idolatry without taking it in that direction. Yeah. And that it's not, you're not really, by just stripping down a number of gods, you're not, I think that arguably you're not really making much progress in the direction of critiquing idolatry. You know, because as long as the notion of a god remains consistent,
it remains exactly as idolatrous if there's only one of them as if there's a hundred. You know, it's like the anthropomorphic character of divinity that's the idolatrous content. And so an abstract polytheism is less idolatrous, I would say, arguably, than a concrete anthropomorphic monotheism. I mean, it's not that the question of number is a is is misguided, you know, and I think has there's no point regretting history. end you have to try and understand the purposes of all these things. So I'm not going to say we went wrong, I think that's too, it doesn't really work, but
certainly I would like to say that it's not a good objection to this suggestion, this kind of Shinto or pagan pluralism to bring the kind of battle acts of anti-idolatry against it, or a critique of idolatry. I don't think it works. The point is to open whatever, what doesn't close down, or what does open up, not to, like you mentioned, that sort of hyper-Protestant, even modernist anthropomorphizing actually seems to negate access if anything um but that's not to say that the again the orthodox position and i'm
big fan of the orthodox chads that are in our right wing side of things um theirs opens them up clearly um their theology and their symbolic practices there's definitely a kind of vector towards abstraction and i mean you know dante just explicitly says you know of course god doesn't have hands, you know, that language is just used to help our understanding as a step or whatever. So, you know, obviously in sophisticated understandings of orthodox scripture, it's like for sure one is heading towards a kind of conceptual abstraction even within this framework. So I definitely agree with you about that.
But it is very interesting in Japan how sophisticated and abstract the basic religious culture is. I went to, visited in a little Japanese town up in the mountains called Nikko, one of the amazing temples I've ever visited. And so, of course, there is this kind of Shinto multiplicitousness to what's going on there. But their fundamental symbol of the absolute for them, in this temple at least, was a lightning bolt.
Wow. There was actually a tree that had been hit by lightning, some, what a saint tree before or something. It's now tucked away in some corner of the temple grounds. But their notion of divinity had been so abstracted again of sort of anthropomorphic, humanistic content that it was just this stroke, you know, just this kind of... Yeah. And I thought that was an amazing thing. That's almost how it first appears, though, isn't it, to the Greeks, too? It's this struckness of what's given of the daemon, I suppose, because it seems to me that what you saw there are those symbols
that are revealed by manifestation itself. and then we then end up anthropomorphizing them later. But I think that's a good place to start to wind it up. Is there anything more you wanted to comment on, the basic political situation? For everyone watching, I've done my best here. There's so much that Nick knows and so much we could go into. Everyone's not going to get what they wanted out of listening to this. I basically had to follow my own interest. The subjects are so complicated and interesting. So I did my best to go in the different areas that people might want to. But yeah, did you want to comment quickly on anything else? There's nothing pressing, actually, on this. And in fact, I don't think beyond what we've talked about,
I really don't feel I have some particularly insightful contribution to make. I mean, I think modern contemporary politics, if seen with the right sort of detachment and the right sense of just kind of historical destiny is extremely entertaining at the moment. But in terms of like concrete prophecies about the precise twists and turns of the next few years, I am groping as much as anyone else. All right, Nick. Well, it's been a real pleasure. And again, thanks so much for coming. I think people will really like that. It's been very insightful for me. I have to watch back through it again, especially on all the stuff we were talking about with hyperstition. We'll bring that to a close, everyone. God bless you. And God save the overking, as I say.