Society Is Breaking — And It’s Already Started w/ John Vervaeke

SUMMARY

John Vervaeke, cognitive scientist, and Robert Breedlove, Bitcoin philosopher, discuss neoplatonism, the One as first principle, action as primordial presupposition, markets as distributed cognition, and reconciling dichotomies for wise living.

STATEMENTS

The One in neoplatonism is not a numerical entity but the ontological priority enabling all relations and patterns.
Primordial presuppositions underpin knowing and being, differing from foundations as they resist error-detection without self-contradiction.
Voluntary necessity describes participation in primordial processes, akin to love's binding yet enlivening force.
Intelligibility is an affordance, a real relation of fittedness between intelligence and reality's self-realization.
Action requires caring and prioritization, distinguishing it from mere activity like a rock rolling downhill.
Relevance realization lacks systematicity, mirroring Darwinian fittedness without an essence.
Transjectivity captures the betweenness prior to subject-object splits, explaining adaptivity and problem-solving.
Performative contradictions arise when statements undermine their own conditions, like claiming unconsciousness while speaking.
The market as a dynamical system involves bottom-up emergence and top-down emanation, self-organizing through feedback.
Pricing serves as distributed knowing, reducing uncertainty via collective interactions in scarce environments.
Flow states demand free-flowing information, tight feedback, and meaningful failure, paralleling free market conditions.
Beauty discloses reality through appearances, holding primacy as the starting point against suspicion's hermeneutics.
Goodness centers on things being for themselves and others, binding emergence and emanation in dynamical systems.
Truth's ultimacy lies in reality's self-correction, calling us beyond frames toward inexhaustible realness.
Active open-mindedness shifts attraction from instinctive types to deeper soul connections, fostering wise love.
The axiom of action fuses is and ought, theory and data, in purposeful behavior meeting constraints.
Cultural cognitive grammar interpenetrates inner and outer worlds, enabling shared meaning through mutual correction.
Distributed cognition's agency solves hypercomplex problems beyond individual capacity, like navigating ocean liners.
Ethics ontologically grounds in right relation to reality, where performative contradictions reveal deeper norms.
Neoplatonism resolves Kantian projection by affirming reality's intelligible structure beyond senses.
Promises and agreements interdefine through normative mutual recognition, extending agency into narrative possibilities.
Speech acts presuppose cooperation via relevance realization, conveying more than literal words.
The One possibilizes all difference-making, as place rather than thing, enabling causal relations.
Evolution and cognition share predictive processing's top-down and bottom-up interpenetration.
Perennial processes like relevance realization converge traditions without identical products.
Finite transcendence balances humility against despair or hubris, avoiding slavery or tyranny.
Pricing remembers past interactions as cardinal evaluations from ordinal preferences.
Markets seek optimal performance through consumer sovereignty and producer adaptation.
Cooperation and competition grip optimally within private property's limiting principle.
Incarnating philosophy, as in Socrates and Jesus, embodies wise love beyond propositional wisdom.

IDEAS

Neoplatonism's One acts as verb-like wanting, unifying knowing, being, and self-organization dynamisms.
Primordial presuppositions enable faith as participatory binding, not blind belief, grounding voluntary necessity.
Intelligibility affordances couple relevance realization to reality's self-realization, transcending subject-object divides.
Action equates to problem-solving, bridging goal unease with adaptive fitting in autopoietic systems.
Transjective spaces like problems or affordances evade pure subjectivity or objectivity, embodying betweenness.
Performative contradictions prioritize over propositional ones, revealing non-propositional knowing's primacy.
Markets as hyperprocesses track economic hyperpatterns via pricing's collective ledger of interactions.
Flow states' conditions mirror scientific causation detection, sifting causal from correlational signals.
Distributed cognition remembers and determines via emergent agency, solving irreducible complexities.
Beauty's primacy counters modernity's suspicion, where appearances reliably disclose rather than deceive.
Goodness's centrality loops for-itself and for-others, sustaining dynamical reality's feedback.
Truth's ultimacy drives endless correction, mirroring reality's inexhaustible self-realization.
Active open-mindedness reprograms attraction radars toward soul-depth over instinctive typology.
Cultural cognitive grammars interweave personal and social meanings, preventing solipsistic isolation.
Pricing as fifth knowing P: corrigible, sharable, reality-tracking via scarcity-disciplined exchanges.
Free markets flow culturally, discovering economic realities through uninhibited signal feedback.
Transcendentals as affordances: beauty for discovery, goodness for interaction, truth for correction.
Map-territory paradox resolves in participatory mapping, where representations embody real principles.
Opposites like actuality-potentiality reflect reality's nonhomogeneous dynamism, not mere concepts.
Wise love incarnates philosophy, reliably eliciting mutual bests beyond desire satisfaction.
Bitcoin resists fiat noise, preserving price signals for truthful supply-demand revelation.
Neoplatonic emanation-emergence grammar parallels cognition's predictive processing loops.
Perennial convergence on processes, not products, avoids relativism's performative traps.
Ethical ontology prioritizes performative alignment over abstract moral derivation.
Incarnational figures like Jesus embody logos-agape, fusing wisdom with compassionate action.
Horizon metaphors capture unending self-correction, disclosing deeper grounds without full grasp.
Distributed intelligences like markets autopoietically preserve via collective problem-solving.
Private property assigns responsibility, enabling failure's meaningful stakes in interactions.
Post-enlightenment gaps dissolve in action's synthetic a priori, fusing fact-value in practice.
Mystical humility admits epistemic boundaries, gesturing beyond frames to inexhaustible unity.

INSIGHTS

The One as primordial wanting unifies epistemology and ontology, enabling all relational difference-making without reduction to arithmetic unity.
Action's axiomatic irrefutability via performative contradiction establishes it as transjective ground, prior to and bridging subject-object fractures.
Markets embody distributed cognition's agency, harvesting hypercomplex causal patterns through pricing's corrigible, intersubjective memory.
Flow's optimal grip parallels market discovery, where free signals, tight feedback, and property-staked failure sift actionable realities.
Transcendentals interpenetrate: beauty discloses primordially, goodness binds centrally in for-itself/for-others loops, truth corrects ultimately toward inexhaustibility.
Cultural cognitive grammars reveal inner-outer inseparability, where self-reflection emerges from social mutual correction, dissolving private language illusions.
Wise love reprograms salience from decadent instincts to soul-revealing depths, incarnating ethical ontology in reliable mutual elevation.
Performative over propositional contradictions expose non-propositional knowing's foundational role, grounding all frames in participatory enactment.
Finite transcendence demands balancing humility with aspiration, averting despair's enslavement or hubris's tyranny in dynamical becoming.
Pricing as knowing's fifth dimension compresses subjective ordinals into objective cardinals, tracking scarcity via collective, reality-disciplined interactions.
Neoplatonic process perennialism converges traditions on universal dynamisms like relevance realization, yielding culturally fitted yet non-identical products.
Map-territory participatory fusion resolves representation paradoxes, where maps embody territorial principles through embodied, corrigible orientation.
Ethical primacy emerges ontologically from right-relational affordances, where performative misalignments reveal deeper normative presuppositions.
Distributed autopoiesis in markets seeks self-preservation through emergent seeking, channeling individual agencies into systemic optimal performance.
Horizon-bound correction embodies truth's ultimacy, perpetually disclosing larger worlds while presupposing inexhaustible, frame-transcending unity.

QUOTES

"The One is not a numerical one, but the first in line in terms of ontological priority."
"Voluntary necessity is the way we participate in this primordial process."
"Intelligibility means there is a real relationship of fittedness between your intelligence and the way reality is realizing itself."
"If it doesn't have attention, it's not engaging in action."
"Relevance lacks systematicity because you know is this what try and find what is it that all the things I find relevant share other than them being relevant."
"Adaptivity is a real fit. Or another example that people don't pay enough attention to, a problem."
"Performative contradiction is when your statement contradicts the state from which you're making the statement."
"The market is a multi-levelled complex dynamic system which means it has all kinds of feedback cycles."
"Pricing is a compressed socially generated information that reduces uncertainty about relative scarcity and demand."
"Beauty is when appearances don't deceive but appearances disclose reality."
"Everything is simultaneously to be real. Everything is for itself and for other things."
"Truth stands for reality realizing itself such that we can be corrected in our attempts to solve our problems."
"I decided to do active open-mindedness. I got very very clearly what's the type I keep getting attracted to physically."
"Action is problem solving."
"The axiom of action reconciles the post-enlightenment gap by showing that the modern dichotomies like subject object fact value is ought theory data analytic synthetic are not ultimate fractures in reality but analytic cuts within one living event."
"We reliably bring out the best in each other and that's a better understanding of love than just the satisfaction of desire."
"The conditions for the flow state are the same kinds of conditions that set up a scientific experiment that allow you to distinguish causation from correlation."
"Optimal performance is some optimal grip between cooperation and competition."
"The map has to not only represent reality, it has to participate in reality."
"Pure relationality is not any kind of relation."
"Incarnating philosophy, as in Socrates and Jesus, embodies wise love beyond propositional wisdom."
"The economy is cultural in a deep way and I think culture is better than bureaucracy."

HABITS

Practice active open-mindedness to override instinctive attractions, focusing on deeper personal qualities.
Engage in daily self-reflection to identify and correct biases in relational patterns.
Cultivate participatory knowing through skilled behaviors like meditation or dialogue.
Maintain tight feedback loops in personal projects, embracing failure as corrective signal.
Read challenging non-fiction weekly to build cognitive resilience and insight depth.
Prioritize soul-level connections in relationships, beyond superficial typology.
Internalize social perspectives for self-awareness, imitating others' viewpoints developmentally.
Use journaling to track relevance realization, noting foreground-background shifts.
Participate in communal practices like group discussions for mutual meaning correction.
Exercise predictive processing by anticipating outcomes in daily decisions.
Foster voluntary necessity in commitments, embracing binding yet enlivening faith.
Renegotiate agreements explicitly in conversations to ensure mutual recognition.
Seek flow states through free-flowing information environments, minimizing distractions.
Balance competition and cooperation in professional pursuits via property-respecting rivalry.
Engage in pilgrimage-like activities for horizon-expanding self-correction.
Distill books into key frameworks for rapid wisdom integration.
Protect personal sovereignty with tools like encryption and secure communications.
Nurture ethical incarnation by aligning actions with ontological principles daily.

FACTS

Neoplatonism posits the One as ineffable ground of all emanation and emergence.
Performative contradictions underpin axiomatic truths like human action's irrefutability.
Distributed cognition enables hyperobject navigation, as in ocean liner systems.
Flow states biologically cascade insights via causal pattern detection akin to experiments.
Private property assigns responsibility, preventing tragedy of commons in resource use.
Bitcoin mining accumulates more BTC over 2-4 years than dollar-cost averaging.
Organ meats provide 100 times more nutrients than muscle meats for human vitality.
SIM swap attacks clone accounts in minutes, draining lives without encryption.
Markets self-organize via variation-selection loops, mirroring biological evolution.
Pricing turns ordinal preferences into cardinal records through voluntary exchanges.
Transcendentals bind normativity: realness compares like tallness, not redness.
Cultural grammars interpenetrate psyche and society, enabling sharable meaning.
Darwinian fittedness lacks essence, constantly redesigning without eternal models.
Predictive processing interweaves top-down expectations with bottom-up sensations.
Promises extend agency into normative possibilities via mutual recognition.
Fiat printing introduces noise, obscuring supply-demand signals in prices.
Neoplatonic faith participates in presuppositions, affording voluntary action.
Horizon metaphors illustrate unending disclosure without full territorial grasp.
Absolute nothingness in Nishida paradoxically grounds all affirmative being.
Incarnational ethics fuses wisdom with agape, as in Socrates' taught erotica.

REFERENCES

Neoplatonism, Plotinus, Proclus, Dionysius the Areopagite.
Spinoza's conatus and oneing principles.
Nishida Kitaro's absolute nothingness and basho.
William James' pure experience and relations.
Robert Pirsig's dynamic quality in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
Lao Tzu's Dao in Taoism.
Hindu dharma and Brahman.
Aquinas' actus purus.
Mises' Human Action and praxeology.
Hoppe's argumentation ethics in Economic Science and the Austrian Method.
Gibson's affordances in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Pearl's Theophany on neoplatonism.
Vervaeke's Zombies in Western Culture and Awakening from the Meaning Crisis series.
Desmond's metaxu and betweenness.
James Filler's relational ontology.
Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida on deconstruction.
Merleau-Ponty's contact epistemology.
Hutchins' distributed cognition in ocean navigation.
Darwin's evolution by natural selection.
Savage's small vs. large world uncertainty.
Gödel's incompleteness theorems on formal systems.
Reichenbach's proof of multiple logical worlds.
Bach's conversational implicature maxims.
Austin and Searle's speech act theory.
Simon and Newell's general problem solver.
Rakur's hermeneutics of suspicion.
Schindler's primacy of beauty, centrality of goodness, ultimacy of truth.
Nicholas of Cusa's coincidence of opposites.
Vervaeke's book with Chris Masterjohn and Christian de Quincey.
The Lectern online platform for courses.
Peterson Academy courses on transcendentals.

HOW TO APPLY

Identify instinctive patterns in attractions; practice active open-mindedness to seek soul-depth.
Engage daily in perspectival shifts, questioning foreground-background relevance.
Build tight feedback loops in work by soliciting immediate critiques.
Participate in communal dialogues to mutually correct meanings and biases.
Map personal goals against scarce means, embracing uneasiness as action prompt.
Deconstruct dichotomies like subject-object through transjective exercises.
Simulate performative contradictions in debates to reveal presuppositions.
Track market signals daily, distinguishing causal from correlational via prices.
Foster flow in tasks by ensuring clear info, rapid response, and stakes.
Renegotiate agreements explicitly, recognizing mutual normative rights.
Internalize social viewpoints via role-playing for enhanced self-reflection.
Distill readings into ordinal preferences, aggregating into personal cardinal values.
Protect interactions with encryption tools against deceptive interferences.
Balance competition-cooperation in ventures, respecting property boundaries.
Pilgrimage physically or intellectually to expand horizons of disclosure.
Affirm transcendentals: seek beauty in appearances, goodness in relations, truth in corrections.
Incarnate ethics by aligning daily acts with ontological relationality.
Program radars toward wise love, prioritizing mutual best-elicitation.
Analyze pricing as collective memory, applying to personal scarcity decisions.
Cultivate voluntary necessity in commitments, binding without enslavement.
Use horizon awareness to self-correct frames toward inexhaustible realness.
Engage distributed cognition by contributing to open markets or collaboratives.
Differentiate nominal from real opposites, grounding in dynamical patterns.
Practice non-propositional knowing through skilled, participatory embodiment.
Evaluate relationships by reliability in bringing out mutual optima.
Simulate market autopoiesis by seeking self-preserving systemic feedbacks.
Apply cultural grammar by interweaving inner-outer meanings consciously.
Correct maps participatorily, embodying territorial principles in creation.
Embrace finite transcendence, balancing finitude with aspirational humility.
Harvest hyperpatterns via collective intelligences like science or economy.

ONE-SENTENCE TAKEAWAY

Action as primordial interaction bridges dichotomies, enabling wise relational living amid dynamical reality.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Embrace neoplatonic Oneing to unify personal knowing with being's dynamisms.
Practice active open-mindedness to realign attractions toward soulful depths.
Cultivate transjectivity in problem-solving, evading subject-object traps.
Seek performative contradictions to unearth non-propositional wisdom grounds.
Participate in distributed cognition via markets for hypercomplex pattern tracking.
Foster flow through free signals, tight feedbacks, and meaningful stakes daily.
Incarnate ethics ontologically, aligning acts with relational affordances.
Balance cooperation-competition within property's ethical limits for optimal grip.
Deconstruct modern dichotomies via interaction's betweenness and beyondness.
Affirm transcendentals: disclose via beauty, bind via goodness, correct via truth.
Internalize social grammars for sharable self-reflection and meaning.
Protect signals from fiat noise using sound money like Bitcoin.
Horizon-walk through pilgrimages for unending self-corrective disclosure.
Reprogram radars for wise love, eliciting mutual bests reliably.
Apply pricing as knowing: compress preferences into scarcity-disciplined actions.
Engage cultural cognitive loops to interpenetrate inner-outer realities.
Differentiate real opposites in dynamisms, avoiding nominal confusions.
Build voluntary necessities in commitments for enlivening faith.
Simulate market seeking to preserve personal autopoiesis amid uncertainties.
Map participatorily, embodying territories in representational creations.

MEMO

In a sweeping philosophical dialogue, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and Bitcoin advocate Robert Breedlove unravel the threads of modern disconnection, positing action as the primordial bridge across fractured realities. Drawing from neoplatonism, they describe the One not as a static entity but a dynamic wanting that underpins all relations—enabling knowing, being, and self-organization without collapsing into numerical simplicity. Vervaeke, a University of Toronto professor renowned for his "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" series, argues that this One manifests as voluntary necessity, a participatory faith binding us to reality's inexhaustible flow, much like love's enlivening compulsion. Breedlove, host of the What is Money? podcast, connects this to Ludwig von Mises' axiom of human action: goal-directed behavior fusing subject and object in transjective spaces, where problems and affordances emerge as real fits prior to dualistic splits.

The conversation delves into intelligibility as an affordance—a fittedness between mind and world—challenging Kantian projections by affirming reality's inherent structure. Vervaeke elucidates performative contradictions, where denying action (like claiming unconsciousness while speaking) undermines its own conditions, elevating non-propositional knowing above mere propositions. Relevance realization, Vervaeke's core concept, mirrors Darwinian fittedness: undefinable yet essential, lacking systematic essence but dynamically redesigning through predictive processing's top-down and bottom-up interweave. Breedlove extends this to economics, viewing markets as distributed cognition—hyperprocesses tracking economic hyperpatterns via pricing's collective ledger, turning subjective ordinals into objective cardinals disciplined by scarcity.

Central to their synthesis is the market's autopoietic agency, self-organizing like biological evolution through variation-selection loops, where consumers sovereignly vote with wallets and producers adapt via profit-loss feedback. Fiat money, they warn, injects noise akin to lies, obscuring causal signals and violating savers' property, while Bitcoin restores truthful price discovery. Flow states' conditions—free-flowing information, tight loops, meaningful failure—parallel free markets' accurate signals, minimal interference, and property-staked risks, both sifting actionable causations from correlations in high-dimensional complexities. This cultural-cognitive grammar interpenetrates psyche and society, dissolving inner-outer divides for sharable meaning.

Transcendentals—beauty, goodness, truth—emerge as affordances: beauty's primacy discloses through non-deceptive appearances, countering modernity's suspicion; goodness centrally binds for-itself/for-others in dynamical feedbacks; truth's ultimacy drives horizon-bound corrections toward inexhaustible realness. Vervaeke invokes Schindler: beauty from primordial emergence and emanation, goodness as interaction's loop, truth as reality's self-corrective call. Breedlove's map-territory metaphor illuminates: unmapped horizons (beauty), participatory mapping (goodness), corrigible alignments (truth), resolving paradoxes where representations embody territorial principles.

Their exchange culminates in wise love's incarnation, echoing Socrates and Jesus as exemplars of logos-agape—philosophy enfleshed. Vervaeke shares falling for wife Sara's soul first, reprogramming instinctive radars through active open-mindedness to elicit mutual bests, embodying ethical ontology. In rough economic times, they urge depth over reactivity: finite transcendence balances humility against hubris, channeling animal energies into productive enterprises via property-respecting rivalry. This relational ontology promises renewal, urging participation in the One's wanting for a flowing, optimally gripped world.