Inquiry with Kelly Chase - [The UFO Rabbit Hole] Ep 21: Dr. James Madden [Pt 2]: Unidentified Flying Hyperobject

Episode Date: April 27, 2023

Today we welcome back Dr. James Madden to the show. As I’m sure you’ll recall, Jim joined us a couple of months ago for a discussion about Plato’s Cave. We also discussed some of his latest work applying the philosophical concept of the umwelt to the UFO phenomenon. And I was really excited to see that that episode has become one of the most listened to episodes of the podcasts, because it’s definitely one of my favorites. If you haven’t listened to that episode yet, I highly recommend that you go back to that one first. Jim’s work builds on itself, and it will be helpful to lay down the foundation with that episode before moving onto this one.In this episode, we’ll be moving on to Dr. Madden’s latest work. Over the last few months, in a flurry of articles released through his Substack, Jim has laid out a series of arguments as to the nature of the UFO phenomenon that are, frankly, mind blowing. It’s not over-stating things to say that what Jim has done is to essentially break ufology–and I mean that in the best possible way. Because, in many ways, it’s been clear to anyone who is really paying attention that the traditional models and ontologies that have dominated modern ufology have needed to break. We began this podcast talking about what the UFO phenomenon might be, and we did a deep dive into the primary hypotheses including extraterrestrial, ultraterrestrial, interdimensional, extraterrestrial, etc. And all of those models are really useful for helping us to push our thinking about what the intelligence behind UFOs may represent. But if we’re being really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that none of them really fit. They come close in some ways, fall short in others, and ultimately leave us feeling like we’re trying to stretch a full-sized sheet over a queen-sized bed. What we’ve needed–desperately–is a model that would collapse all of those ontological categories and integrate them into a larger, more coherent whole. And I’d argue that what Dr. Madden is postulating with regard to the UFO phenomenon does exactly that. I truly believe that what he is pointing to here is the future of ufology. This work is urgent and critically important for us moving forward.NEW Class from Dr. James MaddenUnidentified Flying Hyperobject: UFOs, Philosophy, and the End of the WorldFour-week online class via ZoomWednesdays, March 27 – April 24 (skips April 10), 20247 – 9 pm ETLearn More About the ClassSign Up NowGET THE EPISODE BRIEFDR. JAMES MADDEN’S WORKThe SubstackArticles Referenced In This Episode: UFO Realism and the Uber-Umwelt Unidentified Flying Hyperobject Magonia as Hyperobject The UFO, Religion, and Our Epistemic Vulnerability FOLLOW DR. JAMES MADDENWebsiteTwitterOTHER WORK REFERENCEDHyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities) by Timothy MortonThe Third Table by Graham HarmanThe Will to Power by Friedrich NietzscheThus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One by Friedrich NietzscheBECOME A PATRONGET THE BOOKGet a SIGNED COPYGet it on AmazonFOLLOWWebsiteTwitterFacebookMUSICTheme: Cabinet of Curiosities by Shaun FrearsonBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-ufo-rabbit-hole-podcast--5746035/support. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I took a knife away from a guy once that was intent on killing me. I toked up on the knife and I tacked to a circle around his heart, lasting circle. And that was a very intimate act. He said, here's a list of all Aaron Brotherhood dropouts. Go through this list, sent a letter to each one of these M-Fing rats, and ask them if you could come and interview them for me. He has created this illusion of who he is. If you believe anything he tells you, you're screwing up.

You want to send me to Michael Thompson, who bucked the whole AB, dropped out, and testified against them, and you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? My mom told me, Eric, he's kind of a borderline con person most of your life too, but you got conned by a con man. Blood memory, a new podcast series from love and read wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the UFO Rabbit Hole podcast. I'm your host, Kelly Chase. Today, we welcome back Dr. James Madden to the show. As you'll recall, Jim joined us a couple of weeks ago for a discussion about Plato's Cave. We also discussed some of his latest work applying the philosophical concept of the Umbelt to the UFO phenomenon. And I was really excited to see that that episode has become one of the most listened to episodes of the podcast because it's definitely one of my favorites. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I highly recommend that you go back to that one first.

Jim's work builds on itself, and it will be helpful to lay down the foundation with that episode before moving on to this one. In this episode, we'll be moving on to Dr. James Madden's latest work. Over the last few months, in a flurry of articles released through his substack, Jim has laid out a series of arguments as to the nature of the UFO phenomenon that are frankly mind-blowing. It's not overstating things to say that what Jim has done is to essentially break uphology, and I mean that in the best possible way. Because in many ways, it's been clear to anyone who's really paying attention that the traditional models and ontologies that have dominated modern uphology have needed to break. We began this podcast talking about what the UFO phenomenon might be,

and we did a deep dive into the primary hypotheses, including extraterrestrial, ultra-terrestrial, interdimensional, et cetera. And all of those models are really useful for helping us to push our thinking about what the intelligence behind UFOs may represent. But if we're being really honest with ourselves, we have to admit that none of them really fit. They come close in some ways,

fall short in others, and ultimately leave us feeling like we're trying to stretch a full-sized sheet over a queen-sized bed. What we've needed, desperately, is a model that would collapse all of those ontological categories and integrate them into a larger and more coherent whole. And I'd argue that what Dr. Madden is postulating with regard to the UFO phenomenon does exactly that. I truly believe that what he's pointing to here is the future of euphology. This work is urgent and critically important for us moving forward. That said,

these concepts aren't easy to grok initially. But I also promise you that you don't need a PhD to understand this stuff. All you need is a little patience and the willingness to be uncomfortable while your perspective shifts. This episode starts by throwing you in the deep end, and unless you majored in philosophy, it's likely going to feel that way for the first several minutes. You're likely going to find yourself asking, why are we talking about what a table is when I came here to talk about UFOs? But I promise you that all of this is highly relevant and highly critical to understanding where we're headed next. So don't worry about trying to drink from the fire hose all at once. Just get a little wet. And around the 30-minute mark, you should hopefully feel these

ideas begin to come together in a way that makes sense. I also have included tons of additional resources in the episode description that can help if you get lost. So be sure to check that out. So without further ado, let's get to it. Here is my conversation with Dr. James Madden. One of the things that I find so interesting about studying UFOs is that you start asking if UFOs are real and then suddenly you find yourself asking anything is real and what reality actually is. And so you start interrogating all of your underlying assumptions about reality. But something that I've come to realize is that even identifying your underlying assumptions is tough. There are ideas that are so fundamental to the shared reality of the cave that you can just like look right past them without even noticing that they're there. And in reading your recent work,

I realize that one of the most basic assumptions that we use to parse the UFO phenomenon has to do with what an object even is. Like we spend a lot of time talking about the unidentified part. We spend a lot of time even talking about the flying part, but we just assume that we and everyone else knows what we're talking about when we talk about what an object is. But to become clear to me that even my concepts of what constitute an object are deeply prejudiced. And so I really wanted to start there. You and I have been talking a lot about object-oriented ontology, and that's something you've really been diving into in your work. So what is all of that mean? How can we start to think about objects in a way that's going to be more helpful for us?

Excellent. You know, as always, Kelly, you just blew me away there, like with how deeply you get it. Right. Okay. So, yeah, that's awesome. So, first of all, I had what your opening statements there, basically my hour. and 15 minute conversation with my students this morning in my UFO class about how we're kind of winding it up now. And it's just how they've come to see that the UFO issue is this incredible

thing that just busts open your overall ontology in ways and forces you to ask these really serious questions, very broad questions, broadly sweeping questions, even if it is no longer about the UFO anymore, right, that you've been dragged out of the cave in a way. So yeah, good getting it, right. Also, I've brought the last three years or so when I've been like dipping my toe in and getting interested into the UFO, I've simultaneously been getting interested in what's known as object oriented ontology. Okay. So like these two things have sort of dovetailed. There's a little synchronicity action there going for me. And I think it makes sense because I think object oriented ontology is a great sense making tool for the UFO. And so I even think of it as like unidentified flying object

oriented ontology. I love the word object. You get a van diagram overlap with the phrases there. Okay. So I guess should we just start with talking about what triple O is, what object oriented ontology is? Would that be a good way? Yeah, that's a great place to start. Sure. Okay. And I want to give the right people that are due. I'm not the harbinger of object oriented ontology. Name it most closely associated with it is a guy named Graham Harmon. Okay. And I highly recommend anybody who wants a quick read on this is you go find a paper of his that's pretty readily available on the internet called the third table. Also, he has a number of introductory books in object-oriented ontology. One is just simply called object-oriented ontology, a new theory of everything. The other one is called the quadruple object. Those are both very good places to start. So I'm going to begin by trying to do Graham Harmon some justice here, but I'm not his official spokesman. But I would love to be corrected by Graham, personally. So, okay, so you know, the name object-oriented ontology. So let's start with ontology. Okay. What is ontology? So ontology is the implicit or explicit understanding of what there is that we all carry around. Okay. And so like on,

we all have a basic categorization of what beings there are. Okay. And ontology is the act of trying to make that explicit. And so what object-oriented ontology is is an attempt at categorizing the basic things that there are in a novel way, in this object-oriented way. Okay. And to say, like, you think of the very name kind of sounds redundant. Well, what else would be oriented to in an ontology but objects? So let me explain the object part, which is the interesting part. Okay.

And Harmon's big point and his point that shows up in all of his work is that in the Western philosophical tradition, we have constantly been swinging back. and forth between two extreme poles in ontology. One he calls undermining and one he calls overmining, okay, the play on undermined with overmine. So what does he mean by undermining? So undermining is more or less what we hear in talk about reductionism today. That's a buzzword you hear quite a bit. And you can see already Plato and Aristotle, especially Aristotle, are struggling against an undermining tendency in the pre-Socratic philosophers. And, And basically what was going on already at that point was you had more or less materialist philosophers,

understanding that everything that is in our tangible world, like our world of ordinary objects that we orient to ourselves to practically, have finer-grained physical constituents. And there were various theories of what these finer-grained constituents were. You know, for some, the most common Greek view is it's earth-air, water, and fire. and they knew that if you took a tree and you chopped it down and let it sit, it would rot and turn to earth, right? Or if you burnt it, you got a hot enough, fire would come out of it, right? If you squeezed it enough, right?

Fluids would come out of it, right? And so they had a sense that everything had this earth, air, water, fire stuff in it. Okay? So they figured, well, it must be that that's what things are made out of. Other pre-Socratic philosophers had views, you know, that if you start chopping things apart, you're going to get smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. so there must be a smallest piece that you can get to, call it the atom is what they called it.

And that's the ultimate situants of the thing. So you had various theories of what the ultimate constituents were already in ancient Athens. But a lot of the pre-Socratic philosophers said, well, that's the whole story, right? If we just know the basic constituents, then we know all there is to know, right? Like what's really, what objects are is they just are assemblages of these finer-degree constituents, no more, no less. And so what do you make of then, you know, things like consciousness? What do you make of things like life?

What do you make of things like purpose and meaning and all this? There really were philosophers like Democritus, Epicurus, right? In the ancient world, we're going to say, well, these are sort of like illusions. These are not really part of what there is. It's just all atoms in the void. I mean, you already had that view then. It's not a new view. And so Aristotle, much of what he's doing is trying to give an argument against that

kind of undermining or reductionist view. Now, he doesn't deny that the finer grain constituents are real things, that they're real objects, but he is arguing for a kind of ontological pluralism, that we're going to have more categories. We're going to have more than just the smallest parts of things. We're going to also have the things that possess those parts. In Aristotle, when he takes this up, he says, well, look, let's just use a hackneyed example, right? Okay, so you have, I'll use a table because that's Harmon's example. All right, we have a table, right? That table, no doubt is made up of proximate parts. It has legs and drawers in a top surface, what have you. And those are also assemblages of screws and glue and wood, et cetera, et cetera. And all of that's going

to be an assemblage of something subatomic, what have you, for Aristotle, earth, air, water, fire, we're over that. Okay. So Aristotle isn't denying that the table has these parts, but he also is very acutely aware that the table has properties that none of those parts have. So the parts themselves, you could take a sledgehammer, smash the table up, or you could take the table and run it through a wood chipper. And you would at some sense have all the parts, but you wouldn't have a table. Okay. So that kind of argumentation says to Erasel, well, there's a difference between the table and the parts of the table. So in a way, he's going to say, you've really got two things there. You've got the parts and then you've got the table.

And so he would say there must be some attribute or properties that tables have that their parts don't have. And he has things in mind, like the table is suitable for setting books on or the table is suitable for conducting a podcast on or it's suitable for this or that. There's something that does. It has an activity, in this case, it's a passive activity, but it has an activity that the parts don't have. It's not really, you know, a pile of sawdust isn't suitable for setting your books on or what have you. So in that sense, Aristotle wants to say is, look, a table has some kind of ontological standing over and above or distinct from, right? It's just merely the assemblage of its parts.

But there's more of this. So like the tables aren't terribly interesting objects. Okay. So Aristotle would also say, so if you have something that is truly emerging, meaning it has attributes or it has a kind of agency or it has a developmental course that's distinct from its parts, he thinks it deserves substancehood. It's an object of its own, even though it's dependent on its parts. And he thinks it's very interesting with organisms. Okay, so the table is really nothing more than rotting wood, right? But say a living organism is doing something. It has goals it's moving towards.

It's trying to maintain itself. It has a kind of agency. Okay. So in Aristotle's view, living things are more ontologically sound. They're more ontologically independent and observing of their own category than artifacts are because they do something on their own. Also, Aristotle is interested in the fact that something that exerts a control over its parts has a kind of ontological standing over and against its parts. Okay. So if you think of it like if we put organic molecules in your body or we put elements in your body, they are going to

behave differently there than they will when they're not in the composition. I think of phenomena like epigenetics where like what goes on in the whole of the organism has a downward effect on the parts. We've come up all sorts of examples like this where it seems like the organized whole has a kind of control over the parts. In that case, Erosol says, yeah, look, so it looks like. It looks like, the whole has a standing. It's not just the parts. It's the parts, but also something else that's composed of it. All right.

The other thing that feelings will bring up in this manner is the notion of independent identity criteria. So I can take one screw out of the desk and replace it with another screw, right? And to replace one piece of wood than desk, replace another one, over time, I can replace all those parts. And we would probably still say we have the same desk. Okay. So you can think of it.

Now there's conditions in which the desk exists. when the parts don't. So it's very hard to say the desk just is the parts. Likewise, as an organism through the process of metabolism, even down to the atomic level, you're going to change over all your parts. What is it? Like they say, every seven years or whatever. I have no idea if that's true. But you're changing out parts all the time, but you maintain your identity. So here's the point, is it looks like there's a case to be made. Of course, this is controversial, like everything in philosophy, that if something has its own powers, its own properties, if it has independent, control, over some of its parts, and if it can survive the replacement of its parts, we have to say it's

an object in its own right. Okay. And by that Aristotelian argument, it's like you save the tables, the chairs, the squirrels, the human beings, the trees, all these things, from being simply undermined into these physical constituents. Standard argument from history of philosophy. And Harmon, as object-oriented ontologists in general, accept that argument. Like, yeah, there's more under heaven than just the molecules. All right. Now, what about overmining? Okay, so what's overmining?

Overmining is basically the idea that all objects are the role they play and are human schemes of things. Okay. So in prior conversations, we've talked about the umbilt, right? And what is the umbel? Well, the umwelt is the world picture that we operate by given, the basic human perceptual apparatus or any organism's basic perceptual apparatus that's relative to the survival strategies of that animal. And I think we can make a case that anything we have access to, it's always through that umwelt. There's a tendency then to say, well, all there is

to the world is our umwelt, our framing of things. And there's nothing deeper to it than just how we happen to frame it or other intelligence species might happen to frame it or even how other non-intelligent species might happen to frame it, that the world has no integrity in its own, it's just a construction of the various perceptual strategies of the animals involved in it. And this is, so on the one hand, like, undermining leads us to the kind of, like, nihilistic materialism that one might worry about. Overmining leads us to kind of like an almost a nihilistic social constructivism. There is no world in itself.

It's all just our construction. And Harmon thinks that is the opposite error that we face as a tendency in Western philosophy. And his point there against overmining is just a simple fact that we are often surprised by the world, that the world does indeed push back against our constructions of it. And so it seems like we can't just say it's our construction because it does surprises. It does introduce things that are spooky and weird, right? And so he sees overmining as this sort of like kind of vulgar humanism in a way. Like it assumes that there couldn't be something running this that isn't our own construction, right? But again and again, human thought is revealed as really not running this.

So what is Harmon saying? They say, okay, so there's, we don't undermine, we don't overmind. And it seems to tell us then what objects are is not fully captured by our scientific schemes that would reduce them to their physical constituents. And they're not fully captured by our ordinary perceptual schemings of them or our political packages of them or whatever we package them. There's something else, right? So there is the table just the electrons and quarks of particle physics. It's not just that, right? Is it just its role in our social situation? It's not just that. It's this third thing. And for Harmon, that third thing is never fully accessible to us. It's always something in between those. Okay. So they're with me so far.

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If we find anything suspicious, like new loans or, changes to your financial accounts, we alert you right away, all through text, phone, email, or the LifeLock app. Get the alerts that could make all the difference. Save up to 40% your first year at LifeLock.com slash special offer. Terms apply. Yes. And I already find this very helpful. Yes. Okay. Yeah, I've done it a little more slowly here than I did in the essays. Right. So we've talked about the notion of ontological permiscuity in the past, right? My favorite. Yeah, I'm proudly ontologically promiscuous, right? And you can see why object-oriented ontology becomes very ontologically promiscuous,

because it's basically saying, look, there's a great big Uber-Umbelt out there, and our science doesn't get it. Our ordinary social framings of things, our caves don't get it, right? And so what is it? There's something out there, right? And think of it, if Harmon's right, you're picking up this coffee cup right now. Okay, if Harmon's right, all I'm getting, whether I analyze this coffee cup through the particle physics, I analyze this coffee cup through, you know, the social cultural analysis of it.

It's not the cup. It's just a caricature of it. And what the cup is is this immensely greater thing. Okay. That it gets a vote in how things are independently of how we conceptualize it scientifically or how we vote in it being in our political, cultural schemings. So already, if go that route of object oriented ontology, you're in a very, very open-ended, maybe even spooky world where you realize, like, the table isn't just the table you think it is, right? The cup isn't just the cup you think it is. The squirrel in the yard is not just the squirrel in it, et cetera, et cetera. Like everything is kind of opened and in everything withdraws more than it shows itself

to you, right? There's a constant withdrawal of the object from it. And I find that, one, I find the arguments for it very, very strong. And two, I find it like an incredibly common. compelling almost romantic way of looking at the world. So that's my, that's my quick take on objectory in ontology, right? So I think though where you want to go, those we want to talk hyper objects, right? Yes. And in some ways I feel like talking about hyper objects, because it can be a little

difficult, I think, especially if this is a new idea for people to think about how the table is not just the table. But I think that the idea of the hyper object in some ways, even though it's more complex kind of helped me get there. Because with the hyper object, it becomes more clear how the table is not just the table. Yeah, I actually think pedagogically it's easier. The hyper object is easier to get. And in an important text, which after I published that essay on my substack, I wish I had included this quote, there's a place where Harmon actually says, in a sense, all objects

are hyper objects. Yes. They're all bigger than we frame them. Okay. I love Harmon's example of Pizza Hut. So we'll still go with that one. All right. So in one of his books, I think it's in object oriented ontology.

Harmon uses the example of your average Pizza Hut restaurant. Now, what is an object? What is a thing in its own right? It's something that has its own attributes that are not possessed by its parts. It's something that has control over its parts. Okay. And it's something that can survive the replacements of its parts. If you think of it, a Pizza Hut restaurant satisfies all of those conditions as well as you do.

Think of it. Like, if you are an employee of Pizza Hut or a customer of Pizza Hut, does that affect your behavior. It definitely does, right? Like like it or not, when you walk in the Pizza Hut restaurant, you're going to behave differently there than you would have if you walked into a bar or you walked into your own home. Your relation to that object is in a way exerting a downward control on you. If you're an employee of Pizza Hut, definitely that exerts a downward control on it. Okay. So one, does Pizza Hut control its parts? To a certain degree, it does. Okay. And I think to a similar degree that the parts of an organism. Does it survive the replacement of parts? Yes, if you've ever

worked at Pizza Hut, you will be reminded repeatedly that we could do very well without you, son, and replace you with another one. And the Pizza Hut restaurant in your neighborhood could survive and probably will survive the complete replacement of all the employees and over time, all the parts of all the machinery and all of that, we could replace it brick by brick and it would still be that same Pizza Hut. So does Pizza Hut have an identity? Yes, it does. Okay. Does it have attributes that parts don't have? Certainly, right? Like, you can, can't pull off the Pizza Hut product without the Pizza Hut organization. So I think right there, you've got to say, and Harmon does this, is he says, well, if we're going to play fair and we're

going to protect the tree in the backyard from undermining, guess what? Pizza Hut survives too. So suddenly Pizza Hut has equal standing as the tree in your backyard does. And this is where he parts company with Aristotle. But I think he's probably right to part company with Aristotle here. And so suddenly now, once again, we're getting very ontologically promiscuous. restaurants are objects and they're just as good objects as trees. Okay. Now, let's look up a little higher here. So if your neighborhood Pizza Hut franchise is an object, well, gosh, it looks like the same argument's going to apply to the Pizza Hut Corporation, right? Or isn't it, aren't they owned by Pepsi?

Like everything is right? Okay. Yeah. But anyway, so it's there's the, the, Pizza Hut Inc., well, it exerts a downward control over all the restaurants and the employees. It has, you can replace the parts with it. It has, it has, it has, attributes the parts don't have. So now it looks like Pizza Hut Inc. has a standing, right? And so what are we doing? We are nested in this hierarchy of ever higher and ever more controlling objects now. But think of it that at Pizza Hut Inc. that too is nested and say the economy. And can we make a case that the economy is a kind of object now? I think we can for very similar reasons. But notice when we go from, and this is an important point. So like right now,

Harmon would say that Kelly and I are forming an object, okay, like in virtue of our conversation, right? Because is there a hole that's greater than the parts of the two of us in our conversation? I think there is, right? Does the fact that we're conversing have effects on us? It does, right? Okay. Could the conversation survive us? Yeah, I could leave and like my wife, Jen could jump in and take it up and we would still say it was a stream of conversation.

So we've formed an object, but that object is very much close to us. we can understand it pretty well. But then if we embed that conversation in the Pizza Hut restaurant that we're sitting in, it's affected by its presence in the restaurant. And we don't understand the restaurant nearly as well. But then we move that out to the corporation, move that out to the economy. Our ability to grasp the whole of that object as human beings is shrinking as the object becomes, quote, unquote, bigger.

And what is a hyper object? Well, that term is coined by a thinker by the name of Tim Morton. in his aptly named book, Hyper Objects, which I recommend. And a hyperobject is an object that is so immense in its scale. That could be literal physical size, but it could also be complexity. It could be temporal duration, what have you, that it becomes unintelligible from the perspective of a lower scale object. So I think you could maybe make a case that right now, there is no one human individual that can really understand the global economy. The global economy is mostly operating in the Uber-Um-Velt right now.

And we're just kind of getting a little piece of it here or there in our own um-velt that we're speculating about. Okay. Morton likes examples drawn from environmental studies. So the environment, he makes a pretty good case, is mostly operating in the Uber umwelt. We can like grass some weather events in our umwelt, but those are just like little fingerprints in the environment, which is much vaster than that.

And he talks about geologists and environmental studies. People in philosophers talk about the Anthropocene, which is clear. There's pretty good evidence that humans have tripped off a new geological age through our footprint on the Earth. And the Anthropocene is so immense. And it's this massive object that we have tripped off now that defies our understanding. And Morton makes a case that he thinks we're not just surrounded by objects, we're just surrounded by hyperobjects, objects that are too vast for us to understand. And many of them are our doing.

Like he points out like he thinks you can make a case that the complete collection of plastic in the world has taken on a kind of objective life of its own, right, is exerting a kind of downward influence on us. And we haven't even begun to understand that. And so that's notion of a hyper object. And there too, I think once again, as soon as you start to see the world through that orientation, you're starting to see like, okay, now we are in an immensely enchanted world. Yeah, absolutely. Something I really love about the Pizza Hut analogy as well is because I'm sure you see this is something I see in Ohio a lot. I'm sure this happens to Kansas as well where, you know, Pizza Hut had these very distinctive buildings that they would have their shops in and they get turned into other things. And so you have this building and now it's not a Pizza Hut anymore.

They paint the roof gray and it's an urgent care or it's a jewelry store or it's a whatever you want to insert there, a preschool. But there's something of the pizza hutness of it that remains because. you never look at that building and don't see a pizza hut somehow. Yeah. It's the Pizza Hut Corporation is still present. It's still there. They don't own the building anymore. They have nothing to do with it. It's replaced all of its parts. Its purpose has changed. Yeah. And yet the pizza hut is still somehow present. And I think this is really relevant to probably where our conversation is going here. So Graham Harmon loves the example of the Civil War and the Dutch East India Company.

Because they're like those are clearly the civil war begins as a human doing, right? Someone decided to shell Fort Sumner and Lincoln decided I'm going to go show those guys, you know, what you do if you shell Fort Sumner. But what happened then is that those human acts, right, those like very mundane human acts, turned into this thing, the civil war that had a life of its own, that exerted an immense influence on millions of human lives, in a sense was bigger than anyone could control. control, right? And still to this day exerts an influence. So it was a human endeavor introduced a new being into being that took on a kind of life that that actually eclipsed us, right? Graham Harmon has

a book on analyzing the Dutch East Inde Company as an object. And I think really he means a hyper object there. And was this, it's a corporate structure, but it took on a life of its own. Like moved world history for good or ill, right? Did terrible things, did great things, all that. But at no point was any human individual really in charge of that. It was in charge of the human individuals involved in. Okay. And we humans have this really, really odd, I don't want to call it ability because we mostly do it accidentally, but we have this odd tendency to trip off processes that culminate in hyper objects that come back then to control us, right?

It's our attempts to run things have this backfiring tendency that we tend to be run by the very things that we create. The Faustian bargain. It's constant Faustian bargain. And I mean, and I know it's like it's happening to say, yeah, there's always unforeseen consequences. But I think what's interesting, what I've learned from Harmon, what I've learned from Morton.

And there's another, I forget the author's name. It'll come through in a bit. She wrote Bennett is her name. She wrote a book called Something Matter. But anyway, I'll get it for you. It's a fabulous book. But anyway, what I've learned for all three of them is not only do. are there like unforeseen consequences for humans in our actions, but there are unforeseen

ontologies in human actions, right? Like human actions have a way of bringing about new orders of being, new categories of things that we then have to contend with as others, right? Maybe other animals do that, but it seems like we have a knack for it. Yeah. No, that is really interesting. So in some of your recent papers, some of your recent articles that you've done, you've been talking about the UFO as a hyper-object, and even mconia as a hyper object. So how can we start taking all of this stuff that we've just talked about and start applying it to the idea of the UFO phenomenon? Yeah.

Okay. So my first for a year of speculation about the ontology of UFO is I made the case that this notion of the umwelt and the Uber umwelt is, I think a useful way of thinking about the UFO that in a way of thinking of it not as extraterrestrial, but to think of it as it is another kind of being, maybe an organism. maybe an animal that resides here on earth, not in another dimension. It's just another kind of animal that we just were not evolved to deal with, right? That we have not evolved to deal with it.

And therefore, we don't have perceptual apparatus to really even sense it or not enough. And so that we're getting is like kind of we bump into it just over the edges of the umbel, Uruembel realms, right? And then that that's uncanny. It doesn't make sense, et cetera, et cetera. And I've already, by doing that, I've already gone object oriented, right? Okay. But 9x moves to take it to hyper objects and say, well, we assume are what I call the Goldilocks ontology, right, when we think about the UFO.

We assume that the UFO is going to be the sort of like the philosophical fame, the middle size dry good. Like we assume it's going to be about the same scale of thing that humans are used to dealing with. Okay. So it's going to be maybe like their airplanes. Maybe there are other individuated humanish things are involved in them. But that's all assuming the primary ontolocel. scale is the scale that we're used to dealing with in our oomfeld. So I think there's a kind of hubris in that.

All right. And I raise the notion of hyper object here to say, well, maybe the UFO isn't even multiple things. Maybe it's just one thing, a hyper object that shows up under these other appearances. So in the same way that like, if you look at the environment simply from the perspective of how it shows up for us, you don't see the environment. You see a thunderstorm or a tornado or a blizzard. or a cold day or a warm day.

It shows up as individuated things that we packed down into the Goldilocks zone that's easy for us to deal with. But in fact, none of those things are the environment. They are manifestations of a single thing that is the environment. And once you admit that our oomveld, our framing of things is not the end-all be-all for objects, then I think you have to be open. Then in the Uber-Umbelt, what is the UFO? Is it many or is it one? Well, it may be one in the sense that like the Pizza Hut Corporation is one, right?

It's one organic system and organism that manifests itself under these very different appearances. And I think as we get on like the other stuff, I think that helps us make sense of lots of things. The other point that I would make is given all our tendency to trip off hyper objects, we could then maybe see the UFO is something that may ultimately be our doing. Okay, that through our technological innovations, and we might discuss whether like nuclear weapons or innovations or anything like that, through our technological interventions in nature in the last century, have we tripped off a process? Have we tripped off a hyper object? Not unlike global warming, not unlike the Civil War, right? Not unlike the Anthropocene, something like that.

Of course, that's a bigger scale. But that we have tripped off objects now that are so vastly superior. to us, like unwittingly, we've done this, that we are only seeing glimpses of them and we really don't understand them very well at all. And I think that makes sense of maybe why there's an uptick in the sightings since the 1940s, right? And so one way you can think of this is there's always been this other thing out there in the Uber Oombe Belt, this other animal, but we didn't interact very much with it. But then say we set off a nuclear weapon or we start flying around in its space. So now there's like a new interaction. And where there's new

interaction, you've got a new thing, and that new thing is taking on a life of its own, and now it's exerting control downwardly. It's exerting, you know, all these powers downwardly, and that's what we're encountering in the UFO, right? Yeah, and it automatically, and I know you've gone here with your work as well, it automatically makes me think of his control mechanism. You know, it's something that we may not necessarily know is there until we bump up against it. Yes. And then that kind of triggers it. Yeah. I mean, and think of it, like, what is the Pizza Hut Corporation, it's a control mechanism for managing the employees primarily, right, and the customers. I mean, when you look at Valle stuff and he says, it's a control mechanism, it's a control mechanism,

but you think, but there's got to be an agency behind the mechanism that's running it, right? Right. I think once you understand the hyper object or you start to think of a corporation as an object, there isn't like a stuff that is the corporation. The corporation is the institutional mechanism of control of its parts, period. it, right? So what is the phenomenon behind the phenomenon? What is the substance behind the control mechanism in Valais? I think we could maybe say the ontology is the control mechanism. It is a mechanism because it's like asking what's the substance behind the organic arrangement of my parts such that I'm an organism? I'm the organic arrangement of my parts. What is the substance behind the control mechanism? It is the control mechanism. It is that organic arrangement. right and so i think that the metaphor i've started to think about the UFO as or at least i'm speculating one way we could think about it is we are constituents of the UFO same way that like the employees

and the ovens are constituents of the pizza corporation right and the pizza corporation has reality because it is a control mechanism of those parts right we are constituents of the UFO and it has a reality because it's a control mechanism on us right right and i think something that's, first of all, reading all of this and getting into your work and thinking about this has given me very weird dreams because I think the example that's been most useful for me has been the economy because it's really helpful for me to understand that I can go down to the store and buy something. I can engage in commerce. I can hop on a plane and go to another country and engage in commerce there. I can read about the economy. I can, you know, I can buy

stocks, I can do all kinds of things that are like, I'm interacting with one little piece of the economy that gives me some kind of an idea of what it is, but I don't really know what it is. And it moves in ways that, you know, even the top economists in the world can be utterly flummoxed by something. It's not like anybody has a real grasp on what the economy is. And when I start thinking about the UFO in that way, and each of these encounters and experiences being one little window into a piece of it, but there's no way to know what the whole looks like. Exactly. And I love your example because every one of those acts you mentioned, like, okay, you can spend some money in a plane ticket, spend some money in a book, right? You can

learn about the economy. You can buy some stocks. And there's your direct perception of you as an agent going out there and you're going to manipulate the economy. But note all of those things are motivated by things in the economy pushing you towards it. Yes, exactly. Right. So you're very sense of an agency in that is also a product of a prior agency of the economy on you, right? So you're in this like feedback loop with the economy throughout the whole. thing. And I think people get that sense of that feedback loop with the phenomenon. You know, people say all the time, you start paying attention to the phenomenon and it feels like the phenomenon starts paying attention to you. Even what you were saying earlier about the synchronicity

of you getting to this place in your work with regard to UFOs and then also getting into this object oriented andology at the same time, that tends to be the experience of people researching this, is that it's almost like you reach out in the first book you pick up is exactly the one you we're supposed to read. And so, you know, going to Valais stuff like in the McGonia's hyper-object thing is, okay, so Valet's view is, okay, you've had the control mechanism and it's doing something to us. And it does it to us by manipulating us cognitively. It's like literally introduces myths and it retracts myths, right? It's this mythologization and demethalization process that comes back and forth,

back and forth, right? And he talks about how he sees it as it's like a homeostasis that's being maintained here. And that gets me thinking. So, okay, we're moving towards an organic model now, right? Is that there's some higher order object that maintains itself by keeping its parts in homeostatic relations, right? And how does it do it? It does it cognitively, like getting us to think certain ways and thereby act certain ways. So I think you can see these ideas are like a suite of hormones that are released to keep things in their proper line. And so this great object that's like supervening on us and thereby can having downward control of us. Maybe it's an organism we've been a part of for our entire history. But what's happened

now is we got a line like we like set up a bomb and caused disturbance in the organism. So what's it doing? It's feeding hormones. It's feeding enzymes down to try to reorient our homeostasis, right? And so maybe once again, Mark thinks of all this as the valiata met him, but thinks of all this is like a kind of like regulation of ideas. And so I think of it exactly that way. Or I think that is a plausible way to think about it, right? Yeah, like a thermostat where if it gets too hot, the heat turns off and if it gets too cold, the heat turns on. But the point is to keep it within this temperature range. Yes, exactly. And what is the means of regulation? It's cognitive, right? Right. And how is our behavior regulated? It's through the introduction

or retraction of ideas. And I think, I mean, that's very clear in Jacques, right? And what I'm trying to do is just said, okay, here's an actual like ontological, metaphysical model that's out there in existing philosophical literature that actually really dovetails nicely with what he's up to here, right? I think this is also really applicable to the sightings themselves, the experiences that people have themselves with the UFOs after going through this work and exploring it. I've been thinking a lot about the Tick-Tek from the infamous Nimitz incident. So you've got this object that they're interacting with and it's in the sky and it's flying around and it's interacting. with other planes.

And it's about the size of a big plane. Right. But other than that, it has no other seams, flight surfaces, any anything else distinguishing it. It's just this Tic Tac shape. And we assume, in a way, we attribute things to it that are very much like a craft because it's about the size of an aircraft. It's interacting with aircraft.

Goldilocks on top. Yes. So we think it's being piloted because that's what we experience. an object kind of like that to be. But the truth is we have no idea what that Tick-Tac is. It could be an intelligence itself. We truly don't know. Or it could be like the little pinky of something really big. It's our range. Right. But like what is the thunderstorm? It's like the pinky of the environment, right? But what do we do? We break it out for practical reasons because we have to avoid the pinky. And so we like ontologized or reify the thunderstorm as a singular thing.

when really it's just a manifestation, a temporary manifestation of a much larger hole that is the environment or the climate or something like that. Well, maybe that's what the UFO is. It's this, you know, temporary manifestation of a climate or I would say of an overall organic structure that we are embedded in in an higher alcohol. Yeah. The thing that really bould me over about this and why I think this is so important and why I'm so excited for your book that's coming out is that I think that this idea, really collapses these other ontological buckets that we've created. And we need that, right? I mean, uphology is stuck.

We don't have an answer. And so at a certain point, to move forward, we're going to have to find that thing that collapses our ideas now and pushes us into something new. And I think this does that because like with this podcast, we started with, is it extraterrestrial? Is it ultra-terrestrial? Is it interdimensional?

Is it extrater-tempestrial? In a way, what we're talking about is something potential. much bigger than that. And those buckets themselves kind of betray our own prejudices because it assumes something that's more like us than not like us. Yes. I think this is one of the important pieces in objectory of ontologies. It's anti-humanism.

And anti-humanism can mean something very specific in, in like, post-moner philosophy, but that's not what's meant here. It's just the idea that, look, our human measure of things may not be the ultimate measure. Okay. And our human framing of things may not be the ultimate framing, that objects get the decisive vote in what is real with objects. And I think, once again, we have to very much mistrust our tendencies to think of the UFO in the Goldilocks ontology, to think of it as more or less on our scale, more or less as operating what we would do in that situation and all that.

We're talking about something from the Uber-Oomveld here. And we should not think our scales at all apply to that at all. And I think this is one of the great ethical lessons to we learn from the UFO phenomenon is utter and complete epistemic humility, right? That it's like our ordinary categorizations of things revealed as the cave that they are. Right. And have to really open ourselves up to a different kind of thinking to make sense of this, right? And everyone, like what everyone do is they're going to take it and put it into like scientific categories. So they're going to undermine it.

Or they're going to try to explain it in human psychological categories. So then they're going to overmine it. And I'm trying not to do either of those things. I'm trying to let the object speak in a way. Yeah, I think that's so important because what I'm realizing, looking at all these other theories, which I mean, they still have, there's still something to them, right? We can't completely dismiss them.

But all of them assume whether you're talking about it's coming from another dimension or it's coming from another point in time or it's coming from somewhere on earth or it's coming from another planet, we're assuming that something more or less like us is getting into something that's more or less like a craft that we're familiar with and then fly in here. And that reduces phenomenon to something very familiar, but we don't really have any reason to believe that. And if anything, and a real exploration of the topic reveals the fact that the UFO phenomenon ultimately breaks all of those models anyways. So we have this indication that they're not the right models. And this is something that I think I've learned.

in a lot of ways from Jeff Krepple and his notion, and Whitney Streber, that notion of super space nature. Like this idea that we've got this neat divide now between the natural and the supernatural, between the material and the immaterial, right? It looks like what the UFO is showing us is that was an artificial division in the first place. Okay. And we're going to only get progress by getting over that false dichotomy and seeing nature as super. And as you know, I've pointed out in some line of the work, that the Greeks did not have that distinction, right? I mean, Aristotle's natural theology is full of deities.

And all the Greeks meant by in material is just it doesn't change. They didn't think of it as this other kind of like spooky thing, right? It just meant it wasn't subject. It was more, it was less temporally subject than we are. And so I think in a lot of ways what we're doing here is returning to a more original human disposition to think about things, right? And a lot of these dichotomies between, say, the material and the material between super and nature, supernatural and natural, are really products of relatively recent modern materialist assumptions. All of this with the hyper object has brought me again and again back to the idea of AI because I think that we're having this moment and time where we're really seeing the creation of a hyper object and the nature of it kind of helps us see that. There's this AI Dumer.

His name is Eliezer Yukowski. He is one of these guys who's been working on AI longer than just about anybody. And his real conviction is that we're already past the point of no return with AI. And then it's very dangerous to us for a lot of reasons. But one of the ideas in his work that I find most compelling and most relevant to this conversation is that as we're training these AIs, we're training them basically primarily as, chatbots that can interact with us. And we train them on a lot of human stuff. And we teach them how to talk to us like they're a human. But one of his big arguments is that this is not a human. This is fundamentally not a human that a true artificial general intelligence would be so much

smarter than us, which we don't even know what that means because we've never encountered anything truly smarter than us. And it's much faster than us. How would you frame something smarter than you. Like, it would seem like it's, yeah, by definition, beyond your ken. Exactly. Exactly. And what he's saying, though, is that what we've created is this thing that knows how to talk to us like it's a human, but that it's true intelligence and the thought process behind it is not human. It's fundamentally not human and that we can't be fooled by the fact that like we've trained it to talk to us in a certain way. We can't think that that's all that there is going on back there and that we might not know, we have no idea what's going on behind there.

And that brings me back to the idea of the hyper object again. 100% I agree. 100% I agree. Okay. There's a less known German phenomenologist who was actually a student of Heidegger's, but Heidegger was infamously right wing in Germany. And Anders, his student was left wing, so they broke up. And Anders ended up in America during the war. And actually, I think was literally working as a janitor while he's writing this brilliant philosophy on the side. I love that. And Anders has kind of reentered the conversation in American universities, mainly through the efforts for a guy named Mueller, who's started to translate more of his stuff. But anyway, Anders is writing in the 1950s.

And so at that point, the notion of artificial intelligence isn't really up and running. The idea of conscious machines isn't really up and running, but already about 50s. anders is writing essay saying, we're done because we have abdicated to the machine. The machine runs it now. And Anders has this view that he thinks the end came with the first time we tested a nuclear weapon because he thinks what you had there is you had this, a bunch of human individuals, each working on their own little slice of things. But none of them knowing what this was all adding up to.

And the people who did know what it was adding up to, like Oppenheimer, like they set it off, And they say, behold, I am death, the story of worlds. But then why did you do it? Do you know what I mean? And no one had, no one really had an answer. You could say, well, because we had to beat the Japanese or we had to like show the Russians how tough we were or whatever. But how did we get in that situation? What put us in a circumstance where we had supposedly no choice but to incinerate cities with these weapons?

And what Anders is saying there is because we had abdicated our moral cognitive duties to the, technological hyper object that was already, he doesn't use the term, but the technological hyper object that was already operative then. Do you see what I mean? So it didn't take AI to do this. It didn't, it won't take conscious AI if that's even a possibility to do this. I think there's something to this. We already became the wards of our own machinery by the end of World War II.

And we're just seeing it now, like we've just been seeing that play out. I think in our last time we chatted in an episode. I mentioned the film Failsafe. And like by 64, filmmakers like Stanley Lemait are seeing Failsafe as the point of that film is, it looks like we don't really run this anymore. Our machines run this. And we defer all our decision making to the machines. And we act as if they're going to operate by what would have been our logic just faster.

And the point is, no, they don't. They're not human. So even if they're contrary, whatever, they're not going to do what humans do or they're not going to think the way humans think. So we have given up responsibility for ourselves to a cognitive mechanism that we don't understand, right? Right. It's very interesting that at the moment that we did that in our history is then also the moment where we suddenly have these technological looking things appearing in our skies. Yeah, exactly. And so to me, that's like the, okay, it's so weird, but I'm like, that's the thing is at the moment we create or we give ourselves over to a hyperobject of our

own invention. At that same time, there's these other technological manifestations, at least we interpret them as that, showing up and monkeying with us cognitively, it seems that there's got to be some synthesis of those ideas somewhere for us to see how that fits together. And to me, that's the philosophical task, right? Yeah. And we sort of did it in a tacit way then, right? Because it wasn't like we were trying to create something like that. We had a million other objective than creating the box. It wasn't that. But what's interesting with AI is that that is what we're doing. It's not tacit. We're on purpose trying to create something that will basically take over for us and and doing it without any real thought about what that might actually look like.

Think of it, okay, think of like the Elon Musk phenomenon, right? So Elon Musk spends a lot of his career developing AI, but then is like the guy who's really into telling us now, it's going to wreck us. So he's no different than Oppenheimer. After Oppenheimer sets the bomb off. He's like, behold, I am death, destroy the world. And you're like, well, why did you do it, Oppenheimer? Well, same thing with Musk. It's like, okay, yeah, he's saying, behold, I am death. But like, why did you do it? He's like, Why did you do it? And I think for him, it's just this inevitable thing. There's a technological thing to be done. It's it's the in our Promethean nature that we're going to do it. And it can't be stopped. And that's to say we have abdicated responsibility for ourselves to a quote unquote higher power now. Right. Yeah. I saw a video the other day of this robot that can turn itself into liquid and go through the bars of a cage. And I was just like, why did you? you make this. That's the worst idea. It's a terrible idea, right? We can't stop ourselves, though. It can't stop ourselves. And I think it's because I think Anders is right. We are not running

things anymore. We have created a hyper object that is in fact got a life of its own. It's doing its own things. And we are parts of that organic whole. And just as the liver does not understand the organic whole of the entire human organism, we don't understand the organic whole of this thing that we have set into motion. Right. Right. And it makes me think of Nietzsche. I know that you've got in that direction sort of with the last man. We're kind of dancing merrily towards this utopia or AI is going to handle everything for us. But the reality of what it's doing to humans and has the potential to do to humans is really profound. So how do you, do you want to talk through Nietzsche's view on all this? Sure. Okay. There's a lot of direction to go with, let me go with the most

direct and we can we can complicate niche if you want need Nietzsche like invites complication right but yeah there are two passages in Nietzsche's will the power i'm sorry i don't have them in front of me okay but uh one is eight 66 right in will the power where nietzsche says the overman will only come once humanity has been incorporated into he calls like a worldwide economy of the machine and this will require of humanity that the passionate emotions have to be like habituated out of us so that we can just participate as cogs in this machine. So like right there you can see for Nietzsche, he has many versions of the Overman, but that version of the Overman is a technological hyper object, right?

It is this greater thing than ourselves. Like what's Overman, Uber Man, Superman, Superman, right? Something beyond us that we're going to create. evolutionary stage. So we're going to give rise. Because for Nietzsche, evolution is progressive. It's always giving rise to a more powerful, better be. Okay. So what are we going to be be going to be our answer to us? What will replace us that's greater? It will be in Nietzsche's view, a global hyper object, right, that operates as technology, of which humanity is the organic parts. So Nietzsche saw it in the late 19th century. He saw the play here. Like this is where

this is going to go. And so then what are all of us, like we're last men, right, are people being prepared for the sheer mindless boredom of participation in a mechanism, right? Right. And I think it's very explicit in those passages in the willpower in Nietzsche that this is the next stage of human evolution. And if you start listening to like some of the transhumanist types and people talk, they seem to be aware of this and dig it. Right. that we're going to replace ourselves with something better, something greater, something transhuman, beyond human, right? But then what comes of the remaining humans? Well, we will be, you know,

molecules in that organic hole that is the Ubermensch. And in some ways, we almost become irony and the sadness in it is that we almost become less than human in the process. Like the way that he describes the last man, he talks about the person who is all about, comfort and luxury and not about growing or expanding or challenging themselves in any way. It makes me think of idiocracy, you know, the guy who's sitting in the toilet chair with just screams around him. I mean, in some ways, that is that kind of, you know, Nietzsche's last, man. And we're almost there. Yeah. So you have that, that, okay, and so the techno version of the Ubermensch that I mentioned, but there's this other notion of the Uber Munch that you have,

very prominently in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which is the published writing. So I think we have to privilege that overwill the power in terms of interpreting Nietzsche, right? I think in terms of ideas that are in the hive mind, I think the latter one's just as good. But in terms of being Nietzsche, you have to privilege the published stuff. And in Zarathustra, Nietzsche, it's very fascinating. Nietzsche has Zarathustra claim that humanity is a rope stretched between the mere ape and the overman. And his idea there is humans are the animal. that has never been comfortable merely being an animal.

So we've always posited a goal for ourselves that's more than being an animal. And maybe that goal at one point was the platonic philosopher, right? It was going to be more than just merely fleshy. Or at one point, it was Jesus Christ. At one point, it was the like perfect Marxist citizen, right? And these are all things through each of that. Give us something to strive for that isn't just a mere ape. Okay.

But now he's worried with the death of God, which is say the death of all ideals for Nietzsche. We don't have anything to strive for it out. So what are we going to do? We're going to snap back to mere ape-like existence, right? But Nietzsche's worried. He's like, people hear that and they think what he's saying, oh, yeah, we're going to go back and we're all going to be Conan the barbarian or something like that. And he's just like, no, that's been bred out of us. We're going to be very boring, like absolutely boring, right?

are going to be lazy, creature comfort satisfied, you know, dying of diabetes. This is what he, you know, and you're right, it's sort of, okay, look at the contemporary West. And I think in that way, he's very prescient too. Like, once we lose all ideals, what are we going to look like? We're not going to be dangerous. We're going to be boring, right? Because he'll say, we've never seen a star, so we've never had anything to strive for. But now you can connect that with the technological notion of the UberBent's because now you've got a bunch of people that are just ripe for the picking to be incorporated.

into a machine existence that can then be the hyper object that's going to be the next thing. Does that make sense? At first, I didn't think it was real. I woke up to this blinding light and I was transported to another place. Pluto TV. Then I heard a voice. Come with me if you want to live. There were thousands of movies and shows and they were all free.

The truth is our scene. It's just so beautiful. On Pluto TV, free streaming of Terminator 2, Fringe Arrow, the 100. any X-Files may cause excitement, loss of sleep and sudden belief in extraterrestrials. No credit cards or alien encounters necessary. Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never. Yeah. Like by becoming last men, we will quietly participate in our being overcome by this hyper object.

And what's terrifying about that is that the very nature of the hyper object is that I don't think that we can know if this is ultimately a good thing or not. Right. Right. To the individual, it's almost certainly not a good thing. But to humanity as a whole, to the earth as a whole, to the galaxy of the universe as a whole, is this the right, is this the natural right progression? Is this the path of evolution? Or are we being colonized and destroyed by something that we don't understand? And in some ways, it's both, right?

Yeah, exactly. And it could be like as we overcome our humanistic pretensions, we realize, hey, maybe our being overcome is good, right? I cannot bring myself to believe that, right? Like I find myself like I want to maintain my ability not to become a last man and be just merely incorporated into this hyper object, right? But I think you were raising the appropriately dark philosophical question there, which is I think the dark philosophical question that we should be addressing for our generation. Yeah, because I mean, I agree with you. It's really hard for me to accept that this is the right path because, I think, I'm. I mean, even just look at our society. We're just getting progressively more depressed.

United States is probably the country that most exemplifies exactly what we're talking about. And we're also the only country where you have a mass shooting about every five seconds. Exactly. Exactly. And not dealing well with this. It's not what we're supposed to be. I even look at my own life. I've never really talked about this on this podcast. But back in like 2016, I was extremely depressed. and I basically ended up selling all of my worldly possessions. Like literally everything fit into a backpack. And I started traveling.

I did a different country every month. And it literally saved my life because I needed to get uncomfortable to progress. Think about the hero's journey and an initiatory experiences and what we've talked about in terms of waking up in the cave. Like that discomfort is such a critical part of what it means to be. human, experiencing that, facing it, overcoming it, not evolutionary process, that process of continually striving to be better and to be more is the only real place for happiness for a human can be found, I think, even though it is very uncomfortable. And we're slowly getting further and further away from that. And people are depressed as hell. And think of like for Nietzsche,

what humanity is is the thing that will accept that suffering for the sake of a goal, right? We are the thing that's stretched between the ape and the ubermensch. So we are the process of being stretched and pulled and tortured by our wanting to be something more. And this is why he calls like what he sees is like our generation, like in the big sense of generation as the last man. This is the last gas for humanity. And then we're going to fall back to being an unconscious ape again. So the only thing that will save you from last manorily is a commitment to a kind of existential suffering for the sake of. of not wanting to go quietly into that night, right?

To find you can strive for. Like in your case, it's a philosophical quest, right? And it costs you dearly to do it, right? And therein, you're maintaining your humanity. I think the dark thing for Nietzsche in the middle of power is like, well, hey, let's face it, most people are going to pull that off. So what we can do is the higher types can work them up into a machine that will be greater than us. But I think Nietzsche would say you as individual are perfectly right to resist that at every stride, right?

To fight for your humanity. Yeah. It couldn't agree more to. Yeah. Well, I think that there's this, I find it very naive in a way. There's this kind of beliefs among a certain kind of tech billionaire and people who follow them, where they have this sense that there's no reason why anyone alive today needs to die. But if you're below a certain age, that at a certain point we're going to get this figured out,

either nanobots are going to save us or you're going to be able to upload your mind into a robot body and live forever. you know, all these different ideas that we have of what that would look like. And people are so obsessed with kind of maintaining themselves and never dying. But I don't think they recognize that in doing that, the thing that they are still dies. Like the very fundamental, their humanity, you're no longer a human at that point. You're something else. As Heidegger puts it, this is, you know, Dazine is the being for whom being is an issue. Right.

So to be a human is to be something that. puts being in a question. And the thing that puts being most fundamentally into question for us is the fact of our mortality, right, that we are finite. To say that we're going to make ourselves naturally immortal is to say whatever that results will not be us. And I think we have to ask ourselves, is there a value just to being us or not? Because I think when you do have people proposing a kind of natural immortality, well, one, there's a question, would you really want that? I think I'm going to get pretty damn bored of Jim Madden by about year 80, right? Okay.

Do you know what I mean? I think. Right. No, exactly. I have to admire to live forever. And there is a kind of generational selfishness for this is like, I need to die to get out of my other way from my kids, like literally resource wise. But I'll admit, like with the death of my own father, I'm not glad my dad's dead.

But do you know what? It did have this like, oh, wait, man, I'm the point of the spear now. Right. But I mean, and similar thing with my mom's passing, too. It was like, well, no, wait, this generation now is mine, right? It's up to me as to where my sister, like, where our family tree, my wife, where our family tree goes. Do you see that? It was like the sense of inheritance. But that only happened because they went on. And at some point, I'm going to have to become a memory to my children so they can take up the torch, right? And that's this really fundamental part of the human experience is this sort of like, I have to be saying get out of the way for the sake of my own offspring. But whereas like, pretend. to like natural immortality is to say I should never have to get out of the way. I should never have to give this up to someone else to inherit. I know I'm making the heavy moral argument there that are difficult to defend, but I think this is clear. You are changing the game of what it means to be a human by doing this because for our entire history to be a human was to be finite, to have the primary orientation of your life is the sake of the next generation, not your own. But if I am going to be here perpetually, then in my orientation, is not towards the next generation. It's towards me, okay? Right. We can talk about the moral critique of that.

I'm happy to, okay, but even leaving aside, you have to admit we are changing the human game and we have no idea what the consequences of that will be. And there's this question. Who said we get to decide human nature, right? Right. It comes back to these things that are just fundamental to being a human.

And I'm sure people would argue it. It's hard for me to because I believe it's so fundamentally. But, you know, the coming of age is, There's a reason why that is such a central theme in our rituals and our religions and our art. Because in a way, that like coming of age process is one of the most fundamental units of what it means to be a human. And I remember, you know, my dad passed away when I was 20 and I had such a hard time accepting that. Yeah. But he knew he was dying and he said to me, you know, whatever you are meant to be, it requires me not to be here.

Yeah. It was a wise man who spoke those words. Yeah. He was a pretty smart guy. Yeah. It's hard to me to argue it because I believe it. Yeah. But there's the thing.

It's like we have to get over this notion that just because we believe something, we can't stand by it. You know what I mean? Great. Yeah, I wrote an essay last summer on the occasion of my mom's death because it happened right simultaneously as two of my children were moving to Europe, right? So it was this very interesting moment I found myself. And the second of my parents died, right, at the same moment that it would come to three of my six children live overseas.

And I realized, like, as my parents were now memories to me entirely, I am becoming more and more a memory to my grown children, right? And I was overwhelmed with this sense, like, look, it turns out, Jim, you were not the point of this thing. You were not the point of this, right? And I didn't find that distressing. I found that kind of, oh, yeah, that's right. I'm not the point of this. It's about me taking this thing up from my parents and moving it along for my kids with my wife, right? But we're not the point.

We are always in between. Like the present isn't the point, right? It's the mediation between the past and the future, right? And so if you think of us as the present, then we have to remember we are the mediation between what we're given and what we're pushing forward. But I think if you say, hey, I'm immortal, then there's no sense of gift now. There's nothing given to you, right? And there's no responsibility to push it forward. So I don't think I would choose immortality given the option.

Right, right. But it brings us back to that same question of, you know, I don't in theory have an issue with getting out of the way for what is to come next. You know, I think that so much of for a healthy, responsible person, I think that's really the purpose of middle life is recognizing that it's not about you. Yeah. And setting things up for the people who are coming next. Yeah. But your project in those terms. I think it's a great example of it, right?

Like you've taken up a teaching. Yeah. So, sorry to interrupt. Yeah. And that's, there's a lot of fulfillment and happiness to be found there when you do that. And, but I think it, the problem is, is that it's easy to get out of the way for the humans that are coming. But I don't know if I want to get out of the way from whatever this next thing is. Yeah.

Yeah. And there's this kind of irony. Okay. So there's like, I need to get out of the way from my, my children or my students or other people in my life. But that's the human thing. That's like clearly built into us, right? There's interesting question like why, why is there, from an evolutionary standpoint, why is their old age, right?

Like most animals pretty much, once they like get past peak fertility, they're done. Whereas humans, we get to hang around for a while. And it's clearly because wisdom is important for humans. It's very complicated to be a human. So someone has to teach people how to do this. So like we get to hang around past fertility. And it's beautiful. A self-giving old age.

is part of the human thing. Because we have to be around long enough to teach the next generation. We have to rear them and then they have to be around long enough to teach next generation and then get out of the way. That's natural to us, I think. Now the idea that we as a species need to get out of the way for something else, it's unclear to me that that's something I can get on board with. Or even is it possible for me to get on board with that because I care a lot about the thing

that is humanity. Like I love humanity. Even though I admit we're not the point, does that mean that we should just give up us as a thing? Right. And I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced of that. I'm not convinced of it either, especially because I don't feel that we've become the thing that we had the potential to be. When I look at this new thing that's coming, I don't see it as the embodiment of what is good and interesting and important about humanity.

I see it being the antithesis of that. And I think that that's why it's so hard to. to accept that as the answer. Yeah, I agree 100%. I think this thing that's coming to use the Nietzsche in terms, it is beyond good and evil, right? I don't think it's conscious. So it's not troubled, nor is it pleased by anything it does.

It's just a pure exercise of growth and expansion and power, right? It is Nietzsche's will of power. That's what it is, right? I think that's right. Nietzsche loves the idea in the will of power of the machine metaphor as the UberMet, because the machine is beyond good and evil. It is not concerned. And therefore, it doesn't suffer the worries about is life meaningful or not.

It just expands and pushes and grows and does its thing. Whereas we, poor humans, have always asked, okay, but are we doing this? Why do we care about this? Is this the right thing to do? But the machine isn't troubled by that, right? So I cannot say as a human being that defines itself as all humans do by a sense of good and evil, that I can be on board with our being replaced by something that's beyond good people, right? Right.

Right. Now, is there any path of resistance? I don't know. But gosh, I can sure as heck, can resist it in the relationships I have. Right. Yeah. We can go down fighting, I think, is maybe our best bet at this point. Do not go quietly into that good night.

Right. Yeah. By the way, and I hate this is like pretty shameless. plug, but this is what my book's about, the one that's impressed now, but thinking about thinking, mind and meaning in the era of technological nihilism, this is chapter five of that book. So it's not out yet. So it's not too shameless of a plug because I can't give you a link for it. Sorry. But no, I can't wait. It's going to be amazing. Well, I feel like this is a good place to leave it. Yeah. This has been an incredible conversation. I'm so glad we were able to do this. And for anyone who's listening, I'm going to be having Jim back. in a couple weeks here to take a lot of what we've talked about in this conversation and use it and some other things to start analyzing an incredible book that came out recently by Whitley Streber, author of Communion, called Them. So Jim will be coming back soon for us to kind of talk through this. I was really struck in reading them how closely Whitley's very thoughtful description of the others and what he's come to understand about them really maps to a lot of what you're saying in your new work. And so I'm really excited for that. Yeah. When I was reading that, I was like, oh my gosh, I got to go back in my essays and like footnote Whitley because people are going to think I'm like plagiarizing him. But even though I had done that stuff before I had read

his book. So I'm like, I can attest to the fact because you let me read the stuff early than it existed before. But I, it's striking. So for everybody, I'm really, really excited to share that with you guys in a few weeks. And Jim, thank you so much for coming back. This was a blast of. Yeah, these are topics I do not tire talking of. So thank you.