Man's Role in Co-Creation | Jamie Wheal

Is it that our science will finally catch up to our philosophy and theology, or is it that we write convenient Just So Stories to explain what is actually being dictated at a more primal-based level, beyond our ken and beyond our will and motivation? I don't have a point of view on that, but I'm curious about it.

Well, I don't think they're convenient Just So Stories, because I think they're as correct as anything can be correct. I mean, let me give you an example of that. The hero myth that's laid out in the passion story has as part of its structure the insistence that there's nothing that’s more transformative than the willingness to embrace the full horror of life, right? Because that's what the passion story is. It's an archetypal tragedy taken to a metaphysical level, and it’s an arch tragedy because Christ technically undergoes virtually all the varieties of suffering that are possible.

Yeah, right. Okay, but accepts that, right? Or even welcomes it, which is a very strange thing. But that's not where it ends, because there's a mythological surround of image and story that accompanies the passion that also insists that after Christ is crucified and died, he harrows hell, and that's something like a forthright confrontation with the domain of malevolence itself.

But the story is very straightforward if you think about it from a developmental perspective or a biological perspective. The story is that there's no way that you can adapt to life without embracing all of its horrors, including the proclivity for human evil. And then there's an additional addendum to that, which is that the degree to which you'll be redeemed is proportionate to the courage that you embody in that confrontation.

I think that looks to me just to be correct, so it's not a Just So story unless life itself is a Just So story, because the alternative hypothesis is that you could adapt properly to life by shrinking from its most aversive elements. And that's preposterous; I can't see any circumstances at all under which you could make a credible case that that could possibly be true.

Because even when children are trying to expand their competence, let's say in a relatively incremental manner, what they're always doing when they do that is putting themselves on the edge of their ability and flirting with catastrophe. You know, you can do that foolishly and dangerously, and sometimes that’s useful, but you can do it in a manner that’s incremental and sensible, and it works just as well—or even better, right?

I mean, it’s arguably just the ability to make mistakes without fear, right? That’s what all animals do; all mammals do. Wolves do it, kids do it. And that might be also the highest form of engagement, well, and volitional novelty generation. So, rather than just faceless, formless, pointless evolution, creation, destruction, right? When volition, when free will comes into the mix, we get to create new; we get to create.

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Well, and that seems to be no different than the biblical notion, for example, that human beings are constructed so that the role they play is one of co-creation. I mean, that’s what’s implied in stewardship—that’s what’s implied in the initial Genesis narrative when there's an insistence that we first see God characterized as the creator of all things, and then we see human beings characterized as made in the image of God, which obviously implies some lower resolution embodiment of that creative capacity.

That seems to me to be perfectly accurate, and I do think that that's as good a definition of what consciousness constitutes as anything that’s ever been described. I mean, we are playing constantly. We play with the possibility that’s in front of us exactly the same way that God, in the initial phases of the Genesis story, plays with the tohu vavohu, which is the chaotic possibility out of which reality itself emerges. And there’s a perfect isomorphism there.

As far as I'm concerned, you can map that; we have mapped that neuropsychologically. I mean, the further reaches of that exploration haven’t been integrated completely into the culture yet, but it’s there. So then you get sort of Stewart Brand’s whole earth catalog bit about, like, we are as gods; we may as well get good at it.

So how do you say isomorphically, right? We are the same; we are made in the image of, and we are sort of doing another version of that. And how does that not end up in narcissistic inflationism? That’s a great question, but that’s also the first question that’s dealt with in one of the first questions that’s dealt with in the opening chapters of Genesis, because God lays down an injunction to Adam and Eve, which is a very specific injunction.

He says, he basically tells the first two human beings that they have full freedom in the garden to interact with everything that’s there—to name it, to steward it, to utilize it—but they’re not to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And what that means is that they’re to abide by the implicit moral order and not pridefully replace it.

And that’s exactly, see, this is the mistake that man made, because man's medicament for the death of God was that human beings would have to create their own values. And that’s the one thing that God tells Adam and Eve they’re not to do in the garden. And the notion is fairly straightforward, and this is something Sam Harris has some appreciation for, although not religiously, is that there is an implicit moral order, and that has to be followed.

It can’t be replaced by the presumptions of human beings. That’s partly what Eve does when she sins—attempt to do that. But you know Elaine Pagels' work and her translations of the Nag Hammadi Scrolls and then the Gnostic Gospels won the National Book Award, right? I mean, that book blew my mind when I read it in grad school because at that very moment in the Genesis story, right in one of the apocryphal gospels, at the moment that Yahweh is bowing up on Adam and Eve and saying, “And who allowed you to eat from the fruit of the tree of good and evil?” Right?

That exact moment in booms Sophia, right, the mother of all, says, “And who made you, Yaldabaoth, false maker, and why are you flexing on your children?” Yeah, well, that’s the Gnostic interpretation, you know? And I would say that that’s actually, as far as I’m concerned, that’s part of the flaw in Pagels’ work is that proclivity towards Gnosticism, because there’s a reason that that original Demiurge, let’s say, lays down the law.

And the reason for that is that there is an implicit moral order, and you know you touch on that in your book in one part in particular when you talk about the infinite game. Yes, this is another way—yeah, well, this is another way of conceptualizing the implicit moral order, let’s say.

So, for example, if you and I only interact once and I have the chance to take advantage of you, for me there’s—you could argue in a sense that there’s every reason for me to do that. But in any one-off interaction, you could say that the appropriate default position, if you’re cold and calculating about it, is to take advantage of my advantage, to utilize power and compulsion—Game Theory 101.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, but you know perfectly well that that rule doesn’t apply to iterated games. So, we’re going to interact with each other repeatedly, especially when that’s open-ended. What you get in that situation is the emergence of a whole different set of guiding principles that allow the interactions to continue.

So, the notion would be, yeah, to keep playing the game for as long as possible and include as many players as possible, right? Right, and to have all the players actually playing, which means that they can’t be subject to compulsion or force. Because one of the things Yak Panksepp, for example, has documented—he’s done the best work by a large margin on the neurobiology of play.

Panksepp has showed quite clearly that that state of play, which is a highly desirable state and an expansive state, is also relatively fragile in that it can be disrupted by the emergence of any other motivational state. And so, the outcome has to be uncertain for it to be fun; for it to actually be a game and not just a beat down. Yeah, it has to be uncertain, and there has to—it's more than just uncertainty—there has to be uncertainty, and the consequence of playing the game has to be the expansion of skill—not only at that game, but in associated games.

Right? Which is why if you’re picking someone to play with, you don’t pick someone that you can just easily defeat, which, you know, if victory or power was the name of the game, you’d pick someone—or, you know, kids playing basketball or touch football, right? When the big brothers, you know, have enrolled the younger brothers and they get their butts kicked, and they’re like, “All right, it’s three on five,” or, “Okay, we’ll spot you one point,” or whatever it will be to make the outcome uncertain, right?

Well, uncertain and challenging, yeah, right? Right? So we can all play full out and not know how it’s going to turn out. Yes, you—that, yes. Because you want that to be a consequence of the game. And it’s very interesting to see, and it’s very interesting to think through the fact that if children have a choice, if they’re even remotely well socialized, they pick a fair and challenging game over certain victory.

Yes, well, as far as I’m concerned, that mere fact alone does irreparable damage to the hypothesis that the fundamental motivating force in human endeavor is power, because if it was power, you’d pick the easy victory every time. Like, why wouldn’t you? Because anybody that you can crush is in your control. That isn’t how—that’s not a game.

No one wants to play that game, not even the victor, unless they’re narcissistically psychopathic and immature. And so, it’s so interesting because in a free-choice situation, children and adults as well will pick a game of optimized challenge over a game of certain victory. And I think that you can expand on that; you can make that a general principle of motivation.

This is exactly the choice that Abraham makes—how two golden retrievers do that. We have a young puppy who’s giant—90 lbs—and his big sister who’s only 60 lbs. And he started being a bully, and she stopped playing. And now all he ever does is flop over and play the submissive to her so they get to play, right? So they’ve evened it out, right? Right? Right? Exactly.

And you can see that, as Panksepp showed, mammals in general seem to have a specialized play circuit, and it is regulated by precisely that. So one of the things he demonstrated, which was Nobel Prize-worthy as far as I’m concerned because it was a remarkable discovery, was that if you pair juvenile male rats together in repeated bouts, the dominant rat—the one with a 10% weight advantage, because that’s enough to allow a rat to reliably pin its opponent, which is what they like to do in their wrestling bouts—if the larger rat doesn’t let the smaller rat win at least one-third of the time, the smaller rat stops inviting play.

And so, I mean, people didn’t understand the significance of that. The significance of that is that there’s an implicit morality that emerges in consequence of repeated voluntary play. Like, that’s a major league discovery, and that’s part of that implicit moral order.

Say that sentence again, please. That there’s a morality that emerges in consequence of iterated voluntary play, and it’s patterned. Yeah, so this also makes completely short shrift of any arguments about something approximating moral relativism. It’s like, no, wrong! Why? Because the constraints that exist in the domain of desirable repeated iterated play are—it’s a very narrow, it’s a straight and narrow path, it’s a very difficult path to traverse.