Malcolm Ocean's LLM Context Archive

The Learning Mindset & Exaptation (Jordan Hall & Malcolm Ocean)

The Learning Mindset & Exaptation (Jordan Hall & Malcolm Ocean) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub4_krqEW4U April 2022

Malcolm Ocean 0:01
Fascinating. I mean, it all connects to me with a sensation that I’ve had a perception it’s hard to describe. Like, it’s like, you can perceive Moloch, right? But like, what, what are you perceiving when you perceive Moloch, right? Yeah, but there’s a, there’s a, there’s a perception that I’ve had when I really get into what you could call the learning mindset, or something like that.

Malcolm Ocean 0:28
I mean, the mindset that generates game B would be like another way to put it, when, when, when really getting into that mindset, even not fully integrated, which is a thing that I hadn’t appreciated before that one can be inhabiting that mode and still have, I mean, I obviously sort of knew this, because I kept oscillating between them, but I didn’t really appreciate that I wasn’t bringing all of myself into wholeness with me, into this mode, which at the time I would have thought of was a contradiction, but it, having done it, and having noticed that I’ve done It, it’s definitely not a contradiction. It definitely happens. But I would have this experience of being in this, this list, like learner mindset mode, and just watching the upward spiral of everything being fodder for learning, watching, watching its, its sort of utter power, like this feeling of like, like nothing is lost, like it’s an, it’s almost like an information theoretical version of the, you know, sort of indigenous practice of using all the parts of the animal. It’s like, it’s like, every, every moment, every every salient element of all of our conversations, all of our mistakes, you know, all of our you know, apparently wasted youths, turns out to somehow fold itself into relevance when, when the attention is oriented towards doing that, rather than towards regret or blame.

Jordan Hall 1:57
That’s a very powerful statement.

Malcolm Ocean 1:59
It’s it’s one of the things that makes it seem so obvious to me, that game B is the thing to work on, like, and that the thinking that generates it is is the thing to work on. And also one of the things that makes it obvious to me on some level, like, how little of it else there is out there. I’m sort of like, if there were a group of 100 people out there who are experiencing this with each other consistently, we’d already be in a different world.

Jordan Hall 2:25
Yes, for sure, it’s interesting. So that’s interesting, like, how do I say my heart aches when you say that?

Jordan Hall 2:37
Because this is true, and I would say I drew this up on a whiteboard something like 10 years ago, and the number was somewhere between 30 and 150

Malcolm Ocean 2:48
Mmm.

Jordan Hall 2:49
And some somewhere in there, we will discover that we’re actually in a different world. Oh, okay, well, that’s easy. Okay, great, let’s then do that. Turns out, crazy hard, weird,

Malcolm Ocean 3:02
yeah, harder than it sort of feels like it should be, or that used to be the case for me. I mean, I’m now, I’m now, like, well, it’s going to be exactly as hard as it is. Like, I

Jordan Hall 3:12
Ah, very pointed, yes, it’s going to be exactly as hard as it is. You’re like, Huh? That actually comes it’s imported, like, it’s actually an implicit, intrinsic and,

Malcolm Ocean 3:24
and one of those, those obvious things, the trajectory that my life has been on has been one of trying to create a prototype pocket of people aiming To get into this mode, together, and scale, here in Victoria and um,

Malcolm Ocean 3:47
that seems like, broadly, what I want to be doing with my life, wherever and whoever I’m with, and largely, I’ve been organizing my life around where ever feels like the best bet for that. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been wondering about is, like, how many groups out there are there who are doing this and keeping a low profile? It’s like, I’ve been kind of hinting enough on the internet that you can kind of get a sense that I’m doing something like this, but still not really. And then, you know, the group I was with in Waterloo, you know, had very little online presence, and right? And so it’s like, are there, like dozens, even hundreds, of proto groups like this?

Jordan Hall 4:26
I would say yes, likely, likely, somewhere in that in that range. But there’s something that happens when the the whole of that particular space begins to develop a capacity to communicate with itself and to become something that is a hui that represents the whole niche. So this is like the

Jordan Hall 4:48
What’s it look like? It’s a little bit like, probably how visual sensor, sense organs, self assembled. Like. One aspect is like, Hey, I’m sensitive to photons. Another aspect was like, hey, I can connect sensors together in a really good way. The third like, Hey, cool. I can actually connect actuation functions to to, you know, anything kind of, what do you How about we work together? How about we loop, like, photonic sensitivity to actuation functions. Cool, what’s that look like? You know that emergent potential, right? Yeah, it requires a series of functions that independently have no capacity to achieve the emergent potential, but it is actually latent in the in the collaborative possibility. And so it’s actually the progressive perception of how to collaborate, and therefore to embody the actual that has the capacity to express the emergent possibility getting your fingers on the foothill of the invisible global optimum. Yeah,

Malcolm Ocean 5:50
I just, I just made an interesting connection with this, and something that Stuart Kaufman talks about in reinventing the sacred um, which I forget that uh, exaptation is the term for exactly, um, yeah, and, and that feels related, actually, to what I was saying about the kind of the upward spiral just eating everything. It’s like, oh, we can accept that for this, like, right, right. Like, all of this latent potential. It’s all just like, chill in there. And sometimes things are destroyed, you know, but like, even, of course, yeah,

Jordan Hall 6:23
there’s no problem with that. Yeah, it’s like taking the peeling, the orange, right? The peel exists for that purpose in some very deep sense, as you say, if you’re really in that kind of game, the mindset, the ability to integrate the developmental arc, the peel fulfills its destiny. In a very deep sense, by being peeling, I meant something

Malcolm Ocean 6:41
more like, sometimes, you know, your computer crashes and you lose the file you were working on, and like, the information is just lost. But it also isn’t because you had the whole experience of writing it, and you now get to rewrite it having written it already, which is itself sometimes a benefit, and it comes out turning out better. So it’s like, oh,

Jordan Hall 6:57
man, you can have this, this. That’s that meta learning, right? You get to learn your own emotional response to things that don’t work out. Oh, yeah, like, simple, basic categories of like, save every frequently, like, a whole bunch of stuff explodes in the sphere. Yeah,

Malcolm Ocean 7:08
it’s not the learning you wanted, but it’s, you know, it’s learning you needed, yeah? Well, it always is,

Jordan Hall 7:16
but it always is so, so this is happening, right? This is actually exactly what’s happening is that all these nodes that are meaningful and have developed around particulars are beginning to become connected in a very subtle way with each other, which is producing an exaptation sort right filtering the aspect that was meaningful to the larger story, and from the aspect that was meaningful to the particular story, which doesn’t necessarily be destroying it just means putting in his proper relationship in context piece, and then building this capacity. This is the inverse of Peter Lindberg culture war 2.0 which is exactly the thing that he’s being attracted to, which is, hey, there’s a generativity that emerges in the consequence of the Tower of Babel. The whole point of the Tower of Babel story is that we actually had to become no longer connected so that we could develop this enormous degree of singularity. But now from that point of distinction, the possibility space of what would happen if we were able to reintegrate into a whole is the point, right? It actually grabs that whole volume, or some large fraction of the volume. So this, this creates a very a lot of confusion. So Michelle balance, for example, the work that he’s doing is a part of the story. His primary language and frame comes from the point of view of something like European style, economic thinking in a, you know, the hell is his name, prudhon sensibility. So it’s, what does he call it, Cosmo localism. I

Malcolm Ocean 8:55
was, I was just thinking about the thing that you said to Ari dellashma on the podcast that you and he did last year, which I really enjoyed, talking about paragliding and collective intelligence. Yeah, you said something about, I forget what you called it, but it was something about, like, we’re all indigenous to Earth, like indigenous being, like coming, coming from a place, yeah, having placidness to you and and it sort of feels like the the Tower of Babel thing you describe has this quality of like, exploding out until it wraps around, and then it’s like, oh, well, I guess we’re all here now, yeah, something like that, yeah.

Jordan Hall 9:35
And especially if you think about it very nice, because you can do that not this was one of the very first insights that in my early game B days was the petri dish. Like, where did game a come from? That was the inquiry. Like, okay, this is a diagnosis. How did it happen? And, by the way, I’m still not quite clear on it, because obviously you get to a point where models of reality become very difficult to hold. Cool, but one, one frame that’s worthwhile is the petri dish, which is, you know, I’ve got a petri dish and the I’ve got bacteria that are duplicating, you know, reproducing to fill the potential available space. And as we know, right somewhere around the n minus one generation, it looks like there’s still plenty of room that somewhere. When you get to the to the, you know, n generation, there’s none all at once. Yeah, a ground rush effect. And there’s a real change in the cultural logic of evolutionary choice making as you’re moving into the n minus two to the n zero generation. And when you’re at n minus two, it’s still, grab grass, stay what you are, seize territory. That’s sort of the basic strategy. Reproduce as fast as you can, or grow as fast you can, depending on which version of that is you. But when you hit the limits to growth, to invoke a different but equivalent frame, the underlying cultural logic of evolutionary choice making completely shifts. And the point is, it actually shifts in precisely the direction we’re talking about. It shifts into the learning modality. So instead of applying a certain capacity that you have already learned, one must, in fact, innovate or develop a new capacity that is not yet present in the field at all. In the field of actuality, you’ve reached the limits to growth. The only place to go is into the field of potentiality, or the possibility, if you’d like. And so, you know, game a basically from from this in this narrative, what happened was, is game indigenous, expanded, much like the bacteria, essentially forking Dunbar scale groups as the population grew, is just moved. Go to a new place. It’s a big fucking world. Keep moving. I don’t want to go to the Arctic. Well, fuck you got to go the Arctic, right? I’ll figure out how to survive in the Arctic. Okay? The Arctic just opened. Now. People can flood into the Arctic. I don’t want to go to the, you know, the Pacific Islands. I don’t want to have to, like, sail out to the middle of the ocean. Fuck you go to the middle of the ocean. Okay, we figured it out, right,

Malcolm Ocean 12:06
just right. Not that it sounded like that, but, yeah, funk on a structural evolutionary level, it was, it was simply that those who did found a place, and those who didn’t, you know, maybe perished in some little local war or whatever, right, right,

Jordan Hall 12:21
right, until the limits to growth, until we have, actually, actually,

Malcolm Ocean 12:26
well, yeah, it was. It was, at one point, more fit to go find a Pacific Island, until it wasn’t. And actually, at that point, it became more fit to, like, make a guy, like, make a fort and start, you know,

Jordan Hall 12:39
we it’s like, Hey guys, we ran out of shit. Well, what are we gonna do? Go over there. There’s no over there. Oh, shit. What are we gonna do? Guess, we have to take his shit, yeah. Like, as simple as that, yeah, I want to try to take his shit. Well, he’s getting really good at not having his shit taken. Well, what do we do? Get better at taking his shit? Boom, right? Boom, yeah. And after a relatively short period of time in evolutionary time on the order of 10s of 1000s of years, maybe even single digit 1000s of years. There was a discovery, an exaptation, of a series of possibilities that have been discovered over and over again. This is the whole point Graber, ah, I wish he’d lived long enough to have this conversation completely right and completely wrong. Yes, all these characteristics have been discovered over and over and over again, just like photosensitive cells and nerve cells. But until there was the exact right pressure gradient, the exact pathway in a high intensity selection function, there wasn’t a exaptation, collaboration possibility. It didn’t create this verticality that suddenly all these things have been discovered over and over again. We’re like, hey, well, how about we do this thing. How about we domesticate females and and sort of create a surplus value of males and train them to be specialized in this particular domain called killing other men, like, Oh, that’s interesting when Oh, ping, and you have this series of discoveries of the field effect of game A, right? The emergence of game A was the the popping into that as a possibility, and of course, the playing out of history has been the searching of the available space of that. Yeah. And the point, the reason why this came into my mind was the story that you just told of the power, power babble, the circling of the whole possibility of game A in the whole world, right? Think 1988 and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War involution of kinetic warfare in the context of Mutually Assured Destruction. We didn’t get rid of worse warfare, just brought it to the infinite testimony finer and finer grain wars, until you reach the moment that we’re at now, right? And the moment that we’re at now is, oh, shit. We filled the world again. The whole vessel is full. The possibility of gaming is all the way to its edge. So we either go up or we go away, yeah, how it looks. So anyway, that was the that was one of the early insights, yeah. All right, we gotta go, yep. Um,

Malcolm Ocean 14:54
I have some appetite to actually put, put the last chunk of this recording. Up on YouTube, where we’ve been talking about exaptation. So.