Edwin Clamp: LLMs to Break Thought Landscapes, The Worldview War in Iran

In this episode of the Coherent Business Podcast, host Aram DiGennaro sits down with Edwin Clamp for a second time to discuss his groundbreaking paper on mapping meaning. They explore the "crisis of the map," arguing that our traditional Cartesian-Newtonian worldview—which treats the world as a predictable, mechanistic machine—is failing to navigate today’s complex geopolitical and economic realities.

Clamp introduces a topographical metaphor for human thought, where concepts form a landscape of "basins" and "attractors". Using Large Language Models (LLMs) as a simulation of collective consciousness, they discuss how we can visualize the "shape" of meaning to build bridges between clashing worldviews, such as the current tensions between Western and Iranian cultures. From shifting the business focus from efficiency to resilience to embracing the paradoxes of a multipolar world, this conversation offers a new framework for leadership in an indeterminate age.

Resources:

Coherent Business Project Website 

https://coherentbusinessproject.com/ 

For leaders, thinkers, and builders who believe business can be more than just efficient — it can be whole, human, and meaningful. Post-reductionist answers to real-world problems.

Protentional 

https://protentional.com

Protentional guides leaders to integrate compelling priorities into coherent strategy. 



Edwin's LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/edwinclamp/

Aram’s LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/aram-digennaro/

Key Topics:

conceptual frameworks, mapping meaning, AI and LLMs, topography of thought, worldviews, geopolitics, uncertainty and indeterminacy, business resilience, collective consciousness, paradox, leadership 

Key Takeaways:

• Concepts are not isolated points but exist in a complex network of relations that form a landscape of meaning. 
• Our current "Cartesian-Newtonian" worldview is failing because it tries to apply deterministic, mechanical models to a highly complex and indeterminate world. 
• Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as simulations of collective consciousness, allowing us to visualize and "map" the shapes of different cultural worldviews. 
• Most societal "crises" are actually breakdowns in the information and meaning layer rather than just the physical environment. 
• Effective business leadership requires trading off pure efficiency for resilience to handle "Black Swan" events outside of standard predictive models. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome to the Coherent Business Podcast, which is part of the Coherent Business Project. I'm Aram DeJaniro. And what we're working on here is a huge project. That is to create a new mythology of business. Every week, in my day job, I sit down with leaders and I talk to them about how their businesses are functioning and about how all the different parts of their lives fit together into a coherence. And I've noticed that that conversation really needs a lot of support. Our metaphors, our analogies, our methodologies, our organizing frameworks for how we think about enterprise are really flat and thick and productionistic. And they don't do for us what we need them to do for us. So if that project is of interest to you, then I encourage you to stick around. Every week I will be talking with people who are leaders, who are both thinkers and doers, and who are wrestling not only with the deepest, thorniest business questions, but also with the deepest, thorniest life questions. I hope you enjoy this episode.

SPEAKER_05 1:12

Hi Edmund, good to see you again.

SPEAKER_04 1:14

Good to be here again, Aaron.

SPEAKER_05 1:16

So today's guest is Edmund Clant, his second appearance on this show. And Edwin just read a paper about mapping meeting. And honestly, Edwin, you kind of played right into the hands of the Coherent Business Podcast because it's basically in this paper describing how meaning works, how coherence is created, how it falls apart, and some different conceptual frameworks for getting a handle on that. But I think before we get started, we should you know open up here. Let's do that. You have to open it quick to make sure your uh widget. Oh, your widget broke open.

SPEAKER_04 1:48

All right. And I obviously suck at point beer, but that's okay.

SPEAKER_05 1:51

Well you you so with the widget, you're supposed to let it uh sit for 30 seconds so it bubbles through and starts to calm down.

SPEAKER_04 2:00

Okay.

SPEAKER_05 2:01

And then you pour it.

SPEAKER_04 2:02

That's why you're the beer expert. I'm just the consumer in this equation.

SPEAKER_05 2:07

Well, Guinness is a good beer for a podcast because it's 4.2%.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

There you go, and it's sippable. Cheers, Aaron. Cheers. So we've got a good conversation.

SPEAKER_05 2:16

So I wanted to start with a quote from your paper. I thought it'd be a good jumping-off point. And that is a concept is not just a point. It sits in a network of relations. It has neighbors, opposites, extensions, emotional tones, metaphorical bridges, and practical consequences. Where many such relations are taken together, they form something more than a cluster of facts, they form a landscape. So what is a landscape of concepts?

SPEAKER_04 2:42

Well, I think primarily it's a metaphor that allows us to grasp some feature of how our mind works. So we're tapping into a metaphor of a landscape. But the the way I got to that metaphor was through looking at how human beings think. And just as you would, for example, if we were designing an airplane, we would test that airplane in a wind tunnel. So we're we're looking at a simulation basically to figure out how something works. We've we've come to the point in society where we're at this really interesting place that AI and large language models are essentially brain simulations. Now, we're not talking exactly, but roughly they simulate how the human brain works. That's why they were built the way they've they've been built. And when you look at that, it's taking place in what we would call like a high-dimensional space. We we don't need to go into that because it gets very abstract.

SPEAKER_05 3:38

Although I do want to go to the one image you had in the paper, we'll describe that at some point.

SPEAKER_04 3:43

But I mean, this if we take those high dimensions and we just collapse them down to a three-dimensional space that we are familiar with, when you map meaning into these large language models, what you would see is they would start to form shapes. In my paper, we talk about manifolds, which is the scientific term for like a shape in a space.

SPEAKER_05 4:06

And specifically a transition between different basins or different topographies.

SPEAKER_04 4:11

Yes. So what you start to see is imagine a topographical map. Sure. That's essentially an abstraction of how information is organized in these high-dimensional spaces. We're simplifying it. But it creates a landscape. And I think the poignant part about that is think about a raindrop. Let's say we got a raindrop. I mean, we can uh we could we can go fairly close to here when we get to the eastern continental divide. That raindrop falls on a mountain ridge. Where does it go? It's either gonna go down into the Potomac basin where we live. This whole region is drained by that main river, or it'll go into the new river, or it could go, I guess there are other places, depending on where the raindrop falls. But what that really is saying is that there is a probability that that little drop of water is gonna follow this very specific path. It's a probabilistic model. Landscapes are probabilistic. The paths that are the most probable tend to be the most deeply worn. So think of the Grand Canyon. That's where probabilistically the water's gonna flow.

SPEAKER_05 5:21

So would it would it be an example of this would be, say, my political beliefs? In theory, the thoughts that go through my head are indeterminate, but in actual fact, they tend to get attracted down into one of these basins, into some river, and that river ends up, first of all, far away from where the initial impulse would have been, but also probabilistically, it's determined that I don't just end up with a random collection of ideas, I end up with something that is in my landscape attractive to me.

SPEAKER_04 5:49

Yes. So I mean, look at what we've got going on in the world. I was just having beer with a friend of mine from Europe, and we were talking about, you know, geopolitics. I was kind of surprised on his take on geopolitics, but it and it makes sense in this model. He is, you know, his thinking, his worldview, which we can say the worldview is the map of the landscape that we inhabit, right? It's how we make sense of our surroundings.

SPEAKER_05 6:16

He could describe a worldview as a meaning topography.

SPEAKER_04 6:19

Yes, exactly. So here he is, he's basically rooted in a European worldview, which is informed by European media and European educational institutions and traditions. And as he had the same facts, quote unquote, his interpretation of those were very, very different than my interpretation. Because whatever, whatever little drops of facts are falling from the sky, his worldview will funnel those probabilistically into the most likely interpretation. All right. Now we can see it as domestically. We have a very vibrant domestic situation, politics. But we have people who are essentially inhabiting different landscapes of meaning because the same facts are interpreted in completely different ways.

SPEAKER_05 7:04

So you talk, you talk some about sort of the crisis that we're going through or the crises that we're going through, and you describe it as sort of a failure of the maps. Can you elaborate on that?

SPEAKER_04 7:17

Well, I think we're at this point, and I kind of bring this up in the paper here. Our current worldview is described as the Cartesian-Utonian worldview. Rene Descartes, I think therefore I am, but he also gave us a philosophical position, but he also gave us the Cartesian coordinate system, which maps space, X, Y, Z axis, right?

SPEAKER_05 7:36

And creates certainty in things that are uncertain and indeterminate.

SPEAKER_04 7:41

Yes. So I mean, just mapping. It it was a profound innovation in thought.

SPEAKER_05 7:47

And 500 years later we have nuclear war.

SPEAKER_04 7:49

Yes. But along with that is Cartesian-Newtonian, we got Newtonian physics, which allows us to basically simulate how things move in those 3D spaces. Missiles, whatever, planes. Those two ideas have literally given birth to our civilization. Those are mapping ideas.

SPEAKER_05 8:08

Definitely like first and second industrial revolution phases.

SPEAKER_04 8:12

Yes.

SPEAKER_05 8:12

They're based in this worldview, and those worldviews work very, very well within this narrowly prescribed set of geometry or scaling that they deal with.

SPEAKER_04 8:22

So our current worldview really is in those dimensions. We we have a a certain degree of mastery of that kind of mechanistic universe. Like we have planes, we have space rockets, we have, you know, geoengineering, we have all of this stuff that comes out of that body of thought. Okay. What we don't have very well is an idea of the landscape of thought. Currently, I mean, we look at our current situation, where our culture is interfacing with the Iranian culture in this war, and they're clearly like deeply ideologically driven positions, but really we we don't have much of an understanding of that. And to the extent that we have an understanding, it tends to be framed in an adversarial way. What I'm suggesting with this kind of metaphor is thought creates landscapes. And once we have the mechanism by which we can math the landscape, then we can basically have a similar trajectory of enlightenment where we're now navigating those landscapes instead of running roughshod over them. You know?

SPEAKER_05 9:36

Where does the crisis come in? Is it because we are trying to apply Cartesian-Newtonian tools to a much more complex landscape of thought and meaning? Or are you talking about something that's happening within the landscape of thought and meaning that is kind of leading to this sense of rupture or impending doom, depending on who you're talking to?

SPEAKER_04 9:57

Well, I think the the crisis comes in in that we've built this. So we used to talk about like international order and norms-based geopolitics and the rule of law. And we can see in the last couple of years, a lot of that kind of logically grounded thinking has gone out the window.

SPEAKER_05 10:21

Can you say a little bit about logical versus rational? I mean, there's a lot of definitions there, but when you say that this is logical, the international rules-based order or capitalism or you know, whatever it is, is this logical? Is it rational? And how would you structure those definitions?

SPEAKER_04 10:37

This is where we kind of run into some of the constraints of words, but rational and logic, I'm gonna like kind of put those in the same bag. It's generally we're we're we're looking at the world and we're saying, well, this is how the world works.

SPEAKER_05 10:51

We have a map, we have a topography.

SPEAKER_04 10:53

Yes. We're the world, like for example, we're talking about economics. We have economic theories that are very mechanistic. You inject liquidity in the economy, and then this happens. It's very much if you take the Newtonian physics, like we fire the missile and we can calculate exactly where it lands, we have a similar mindset with economics. Like, well, we do this and this happens, right? So we have this kind of this logical model, and that works really well while the environment stays the same.

SPEAKER_05 11:26

So basically, if I have a map and it says walk three miles northeast and you're gonna come to a cliff, you climb the cliff, and you're at the top, right? Like that works until the landscape starts to move. And so if I say something like, if your fiscal policy has deficit spending, then over time interest rates are going to rise, then you know that's has some meaning within a certain system, within a certain topography. And if the topography changes, then well, your model is no matter how rational, no matter how great it is, it's right.

SPEAKER_04 11:55

So what we have is this kind of everything is predicated on this idea that our environment is relatively predictable and therefore our map, as it were, is essentially going to get us to where we wanted to go. You know, I think we have, I mean, we just say with the economics, you know, we had pretty functional economic theory for for quite a while. But now we've gotten to this place where our economic theories are starting to break down. Okay, what what happens if, you know, we we go into another financial crisis? We've kind of maxed out where we can go with quantitative easing. We don't have good new mechanisms. So it's almost like if we take this certainty that we get with classical physics, like we've designed this plane and it's gonna fly, that plane does great until it starts to get to the edge of space where the rules change.

SPEAKER_05 12:45

And then all of a sudden, or if you build a subatomic, an atomic level plane, it doesn't fly.

SPEAKER_04 12:50

Right. And so we've gotten to this place in our society where we I think we we had a pretty good shared understanding of things. Everybody's got a little bit of a different take. But it's like if I steal a car, I I understand I'm gonna go to prison. Okay. We had a good shared map and everybody was able to navigate functionally, but all of a sudden we're at this place in our society where things are not following the same rules. You know, we've got people in the Department of Justice and the FBI acting in ways that break the rules, okay? Our map doesn't help us address that. There's no like get off on this exit when you see this happening. We're like, what in the world's happening? So we're at this place where our map, you know, you can call it our, you know, our kind of social agreement, isn't really functioning very well. And it's like if you look at the pictures of Gaza, there's a point where the the breakdown in the environment gets so extreme, the map becomes more confusing. Because you're like, well, there's it's supposed to be like a school over here, and I can't tell if there was a school there anymore.

SPEAKER_05 13:52

To extend the analogy, there can be a breakdown in physical structures and physical environments that is a direct result of a breakdown in a meaning structure or an information environment. Yes. And we usually think of those as being backwards, like the the physical structures are more real, but I think we're starting to see as some of these things break down that the information map is maybe the real map, or at least it's just as real.

SPEAKER_04 14:16

Look at the crisis that we're having right now. We've got this this this war with Iran and public discourse is like, what are the objectives? Why are we why are we even having this war? It it doesn't make any sense. People are looking for a map that we're explaining it. Right. And so what we have is really a failure in this meaning layer in our in our culture. If we look at that transaction as this war, it lacks clear meaning. It's nonsensical. It's like, why are we doing this? It doesn't even make sense to a lot to a lot of people. Now, some people are gonna be like, makes sense to them, but broadly, and we're just starting to see this around the world, people are like, this doesn't make any sense. You know, we're not on board with this. This is crazy. But here here's the problem that we're running into. We don't actually have a replacement map. That's fundamentally the problem. And kind of what I'm postulating in this paper is hey, now that we have AI, now that we have these LLMs that have essentially mapped the body of human knowledge, they can elucidate some of the structures of meaning. Like we can use that as a reference tool to say, hey, okay, we want to reconcile with the Iranians. Let's try to understand where they're really coming from. They they have a different worldview, and they're living, we go back to the landscape, we're living in our little valley of meaning. Okay, we got the moral high ground over here, you know, we got wells of wisdom. We we use landscape works to def define meaning. Define the path where we're yes. So we're literally living in this landscape of meaning, and we we all, like you and I, will look around and like, okay, we see the same things and we interpret it the same ways. But over the ridge, there's another valley. Let's say the Iranians, they live in a very different world of meaning. Okay, we know that, but we don't know what that really is.

SPEAKER_05 16:10

Maybe a few people do, but so okay, so we need to get to like how we're gonna bridge this, and I'm gonna come back to AI, but I do want to really highlight something you said about this sense that the map of meaning is collapsing because I think that's a subjective experience that a lot of people identify with, isn't it?

SPEAKER_04 16:27

Yes, I mean, I think at this point, everybody has their own internal map, right? There's probably half a dozen issues that you and I, we know each other fairly well. We're gonna see those differently. So, like my map is slightly different than your map, but it's still mostly the same, right? But I think what's happened now is, you know, as people live in little corners of their landscape, they're actually like becoming separated from like our valley is turning into valleys. We can we have separate basins of meaning. Like you might have like a uh one that's kind of urban educated, you might have a rural, you know, Christian one, you might have different like Minneapolis, which has been in the news lately. The immigrant population, you know, has a different set of meanings.

SPEAKER_05 17:21

People predicted this like at the start of the internet era that this would accelerate the balkanization of meaning maps. But I think there's another thing at play here. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, and that is that I I think we've kind of lost the ability to see maps of meaning and understand their role, or maybe we've downplayed their role, or you can even say that a large part of the social progress of the last century is getting rid of maps of meaning. Is that does that resonate? Like that puts us in in a difficult or a different place when they are collapsing. If we've lost our ability to see them, share them, talk about them, value them, reinforce them. So you're kind of trying to bring back maybe some ways of talking about it. But I but first, like, do you do you agree with that?

SPEAKER_04 18:06

That we're essentially like have gotten rid of some of these tools. I think it's progression. We talked about this last time. I think society is a movement and it's a cycle. So so every society is going to go through this. But I think recently we've gotten to the place, and maybe it's capitalism is to blame, that marketing has figured out that in order to get the maximum value out of the consumers, they will affirm that person's beliefs and create an affinity, you know, whatever they're could be a religious brand, it could be like a consumer brand. But it's basically like, hey, the more that we can cause these people to identify with us, and part of that is differentiating themselves from other people, then the stronger hold that we have over that consumer.

SPEAKER_05 18:52

So black, red gold coffee, and if I am with gun culture, sight wing, pro veteran of Dove's campaigns a few years ago, you know, going in on body image and some of the and just basically weighing in with their product on how you should feel about being a woman and about beauty and about your body. And so, like by aligning, we can sell stuff. By aligning with the map that somebody has or that we think that they have, we can sell stuff better. Is that good or bad?

SPEAKER_04 19:17

It just is. I don't I I think it's just a natural progression of of how society has evolved. And what it has led to is exactly what you said. It's a it's a balkanization of meaning that, you know, now I don't know how you experience it, but like when I was young, it was pretty common for people to be able to sit around a dinner table. I remember this as a child, and have conversations about social issues that were cordial and polite and and constructive. Now those lines of differences have been so accentuated, and this goes into politics and religion and all of these different areas of the society, that it a lot of these positions become difficult for us to navigate from one basin of meaning to the other.

SPEAKER_05 20:04

So we talk about it being social trust being eroded. Again, we're using a landscape to kind of exactly yes. Instead of being a gentle valley and saddles into other basins, we're kind of in canyons and chasms, and it's really hard to get over.

SPEAKER_04 20:19

I mean, it's like you know, if you take your your traditional like southern Christian basin or valley of meaning over here, and there used to be roads and bridges that would go to other places, but like you're saying, those are increasingly eroded, and some of those, I mean, a lot of that is in a sense, I I'm comfortable here. I want to protect my little Garden of Eden where I feel very happy, you know, metaphysically, and I'm not challenged, and this is a nice, happy place for me. I want to protect it. I don't want people coming through here. I don't want challenging ideas to disrupt anything. So we probably are responsible for that erosion. One of the points that I'm making in my paper, we are changing those landscapes. Right. I mean, just look at the landscape of gender, like one of the most fundamental human constructs that has changed massively. And what used to be something that was largely kind of a similar concept, now you have some very, very strong and different opinions on that.

SPEAKER_05 21:25

So they people are not just at different places in the same map, they're actually inhabiting different maps.

SPEAKER_04 21:30

Right. And you see that some of the the contention in society around these issues.

SPEAKER_05 21:37

So it seems like a lot of loom and doom, but you do talk very constructively about how how bridges happen between different basins, how landscapes are constructed, sort of better practices for making things happen.

SPEAKER_04 21:52

What I was proposing in my paper, and again, we we've got to be careful because when you're talking about using an LLM as a as a Simulation to map meaning as it were.

SPEAKER_05 22:02

Yeah, very I'm very suspicious of that.

SPEAKER_04 22:04

Yeah, well, there's obviously a conversation to be had around that. But we're talking on some levels of abstraction there.

SPEAKER_05 22:11

You're using it as a metaphor, right? Because we maybe some people, not everybody, but some people sort of understand how LLMs work. And this is an inference machine that creates a web of connections. So it's a way of jolting us out of this idea that everything is mechanically connected in a Cartesian-year way. And yeah, so if you like, well, think like an LLM is a suggestion that I think is fruitful.

SPEAKER_04 22:36

Well, I think what it allows us to do, Aram, is once we can, in a sense, map it or define and define a thought, we can compare that with let's just say let's talk about the idea of peace. We can talk about peace. Let's if we had an American LLM, we say, okay, we're gonna put this in, we're gonna see what peace looks like in the American mind. Right. And we're gonna put it in an Iranian LLM and we're gonna see what it means to them. And we're probably gonna find we've got very different meanings around that. I mean, frankly, our definition is like, you know, we need to retain our forgive me, but our sense of ego. We need to win. You know, the US doesn't lose, so we we need to get this. And the Iranians are gonna have a very like, we just want to be left alone. Like, we don't anyway, it there's subtle differences that are in those those fields of meaning or those shapes of meaning that are not apparent when we talk. And I think so. Part of it is LLMs open up a technique that we could leverage to essentially measure the difference in meaning.

SPEAKER_05 23:42

Or are you just describing what we would have normally expected of a mediator or what we would have traditionally called wisdom? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 23:50

But it also, you know, when you when you think about meaning as a landscape, it's a really profound shift in how we're defining it. Because if we look at the progression of Western society, we came out of, you know, the the religious worldview, which is where our universities and our our kind of knowledge institutions came out of biblical truths, and then that kind of morphed into scientific truth, which is, you know, the idea that there's one truth about things that science is gonna elucidate. And so we we're still stuck in this way of thinking of basically right and wrong, you know, like this whole situation in Iran. Why are we fighting a war? If it's a war to determine who's right and who's wrong, somebody's gonna take the blame for this in our current mindset. When we when we talk about landscapes, that whole kind of paradigm shifts. We're talking about ecosystems. That's what we're talking about.

SPEAKER_05 24:46

I think this is a very traditional way of looking at things. Like this whole Aquinas-Descartes-Newton trajectory is the modern way of thinking about things. But in an ancient worldview, it's exactly like you're saying like concept isn't a single thing, it's part of this complex web with complements and opposites and attractors, and everything in life exists within this web. I would say that's that really is a traditional way of looking at the world. And so I think it can also be a very modern or fit for the future, but in some ways, it doesn't need to stand in opposition to people who feel like they need to have a home with ancient ways of thinking.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

Right. And so it kind of sets us up for shifting thinking. Like, you know, we we saw Rachel Carlson's work, Silent Spring, was a critique of the idea of monoculture. And, you know, like we know that we both have been in Africa for a while for a while. The West was going in there and saying, we're going to teach you how to arm, and you know, you do it our way and you'll get the best results. And that didn't work out because ecosystems matter. In a sense, our thought life is shaped by our ecosystem that we live in. And each ecosystem has its merits. You know, this is why we don't want habitat loss in the natural world, because when we lose diversity, we're losing resources. But we haven't translated that thinking into worldviews. Like there's still this kind of tacit assumption that, you know, one worldview is better. What we're getting to when we're mapping meaning is like this this worldview, this is these are its strengths, these are its weaknesses, you know, these are its taboos, and then it sits next to this one. And we can start looking at instead of which one of these two competing things is going to win, it's like what can each bring to the table. You know, how can we negotiate some of the sticking points between these two worldviews? How can we negotiate that?

SPEAKER_05 26:49

So Samuel Huntington kind of took this zero-sum approach. And you know, there's some truth to that, right? There are clashes between civilizations, but then there's also relationships between different topographies and between different bases. In your paper, you talked a fair bit about attractors, and I think that's a really interesting concept. Can you explain what that is or what that would be in this context?

SPEAKER_04 27:10

I think there are these fundamental ideas that different cultures, which you would liken to different valleys and in the landscape of thought, they have different attractors. So, for example, the Western culture has a strong rights attractor. Like any topic that we want to talk about, we're going to interpret it through the lens of rights. Go to, you know, and of autonomy and related ideas like this. You you go to another culture, and they may see that same narrative interpreted through the lens of responsibility. If you go to the Indian subcontinent, strong family responsibilities there, versus our kids get to be 18 and they're like, I'm I'm out of here, right? So the attractors are those fundamental concepts in the culture that tend to pull all the other topics towards it. Democracy, freedom, you know, what whatever they are. Other cultures have different ones. And those are the strong attractors that tend to define the culture.

SPEAKER_05 28:18

And there are a lot of them, and they operate simultaneously. So as you're choosing one or the other, it's more that you're in a high-dimensional space with a whole bunch of different attractors. And it's hard to think about three-dimensional topography, it's in many dimensions and those dimensions, but you you can do it, and you can do math with that kind of layout. That's that's basically what we're saying. And so you can point at a tractor over there and say, hey, you know, see how this is influencing. It has a gravitational pull that pulls words toward it, it pulls family behaviors toward it, it pushes away something that's a complement or something like that. Right, right. So can you sort of high-level describe some of the things that you feel like are important in the phase that we're moving into? How are we wanting to describe it? Post-liberal or post-postmodern or after the breakdown of the topographies. What are some of the attractors that you're seeing playing a big role in the next phase? Like you're not defining the future, but what are the attractors?

SPEAKER_04 29:14

I would say the first part of that is recognizing that our map is broken. That's the first part. Yeah. I don't think a lot of people are there and they will continue to try to go to the old ideas, even though they're not working. I mean, we can just look broadly across our society and say there's a lot of things that aren't working. But once we start to shift into talking about what is emergent, obviously we've gone to a multipolar world. That's what this big geopolitical struggle is essentially playing out right now. We went from basically pre-World War II, there was a global order. Post-World War II, there was the two superpowers into a binary system to a singular system where the US was the only superpower and it became a hegemon. And that has caused an awakening around the idea of a multipolar world order. So we're seeing that as a shift. Yeah, that's true. And we see that we see that same line of thought like playing out in other areas of society. For example, in psychology, we've gone a lot of psychology started to go to spectrum disorders. Like things aren't things aren't clearly defined. You know, things could be much more spread out, as it were. So there's shifts in thinking. So I'd say a multipolar world is one thing. That starts to bring into question the singularity of truth. That basically says there might be multiple ways to see this, which is a shift in thinking. For a long time, it's just been the West telling the rest of the world, this is how you need to run your country, it needs to be a democracy.

SPEAKER_05 30:48

Well, it's part of the card thing, right? Either it is or isn't, it's not everywhere, it's at a place versus everything exists in a web. And if everything exists in this web, then you can have a singular, singular point or singular points that that pull it together or unify it or where it vanishes. I I I agree. I think that's becoming a little more clear. Some people see that at positive terms versus negative terms.

SPEAKER_04 31:10

And then I I would say another, and this kind of goes back to some of my work on the quantum worldview, but once you start to get to that that situation in your mind where like there may be multiple truths here or multiple perspectives that these people feel are true, that then becomes acceptance of paradox in society. And I I think that's a major shift in how how the world can be viewed. So for example, we would view law enforcement as the good, and we use the criminals as evil, but they in fact they have a symbiotic relationship, right? You you need the law to define who's criminal, but you need the criminals to justify the existence of the law. So here we we move from this like there's only there's only one correct way in society to do this.

SPEAKER_05 31:58

You need to have rules, you need to know who's in, who's out. Actually, they're both manifestations of the same thing, which is there's a variation in human behavior, and there's an ideal that a society selects, and then it pushes it down to the layers of abstraction until it becomes a rule. And even the rule is never quite absolute, it has to be sort of reified on the street by the criminal, by the criminals and the police officers that are playing different roles in order to sort of pull this abstraction down from where it lives as an ideal of truth or justice or honesty or whatever it is.

SPEAKER_04 32:31

And I I I think this is where we could shift some things in our culture because again, who's driving, for example, the drug trade? It's everyday people in this country. Now, these are the same people that are saying, you know, it's wrong for a lot of our lifetime we've had the war on drugs. So there's literally been a war around this topic while those those people that we're at war with are serving our society, their wants and needs, right? So there's a paradox there. We don't have the structural elements in our worldview to process that paradox. So we just continue to you know proceed with this war while we're driving the consumer market for the goods.

SPEAKER_05 33:12

I mean, you you can use paradox or you could use mystery, but but but really it's what you're saying that we've come to see the world as a mechanical thing or hope or assume that it can be pushed into something mechanical. And that's a really odd way to look at the world. The world is really complicated. To try to put things in categories and create mechanical connections between them is not normal. It's not how perceptions work, it's not how families work, it's not how neighborhoods work, it's not how your garden works, right? And so these new attractors of paradox, history, spirituality, quantum relationships, psychologies, those, I think, in many ways, they feel strange to us modern people, but they're not strange at all.

SPEAKER_04 33:57

We, because we've become an advanced society, we have looked at you could say advanced aspects of nature, science, basically, physics, and we were like, oh, this is really cool. You know, physics is a determinant system. So, you know, let's think about humanity, you know, and in the dark ages.

SPEAKER_05 34:18

Which it turns out it isn't.

SPEAKER_04 34:19

Right. Well, yes, we'll get to that.

SPEAKER_05 34:22

Okay, yeah. But in physics is determinant. Yeah. And so then we import that metaphor into things where that is not how things work at all.

SPEAKER_04 34:30

And so, like, as a world, we've like we went from this place where the world is is mysterious and we we not understandable, and we don't want to go into the forest because there are demons there. And like we were very constrained by mystery. And then as we started to practice this new way of thinking, we're like, oh, you know, now we can do all of these new things. And but what a lot of people don't realize is that way of thinking, it it's not been confined to science. If you go to the university here, the management department's called the department of management science. And you and I, because we're businessmen, we know a lot of what we do is how like science stuff. We're gonna measure the metric, we're gonna track the data. And so even parts of our society that are scientific have been reshaped into a scientific mindset, and it's super effective. We know that's from business, right?

SPEAKER_05 35:24

Like it's effective at a certain level, which is like physics, is effective, you know, between here and here, these levels of scale, yes, it's effective at certain levels of scale and under certain circumstances. That's part of what's breaking down, is that our businesses, first of all, it's not true. That's not how everything operates, right? Just like you can't build a chip and store your data your phone drive and store your data on it unless you know how quantum fields work.

SPEAKER_04 35:48

That's right.

SPEAKER_05 35:49

You can't actually run a business unless you know things other than the mechanicals of running a business.

SPEAKER_04 35:55

So we we've we discovered this very productive domain of thought.

SPEAKER_05 36:00

It's very productive, yes.

SPEAKER_04 36:02

And this is, you know, that look at our look at our society. Look at where we're sitting, look at our surrounded by this amazing technology that even as a kid I could never have imagined this. So we found this very productive things, but it's only productive in that certain domain. And what ends up happening as we started to have more and more mastery of the things that are within that domain, the things outside of that domain have become more and more the drivers of the things that we don't understand.

SPEAKER_05 36:33

Okay, that's really important. I would say it's not just the drivers of things that we don't understand, but they become the determinants, not in a sense of determinacy. But okay, if everything inside your system is controlled by a certain paradigm, it's taken for granted or it's a premise. And so then everything outside of your system is what produces actual change, actual result, actual surprise, right? There's no information left in a determinate system. But increasingly we're finding that all of the things that are interesting that are happening are coming from outside the system. We're like, what the fuck? Why is this here? It's not supposed to exist at all. It would should tell you that your your topology, your meeting that you live in isn't working for you.

SPEAKER_04 37:13

And then there are numerous things that happen when you have that mindset, like people engage in this activity to get the maximum margin out of their investments, as it were. And so they're often trading off resilience for efficiency, because resilience is there to deal with indeterminate events, right? So when we have our whole mindset that we've got this all covered out, we don't need to spend the money and the time dealing with things that are not going to happen. We can just engineer that out of our purview. Then obviously, when those things happen, they're much more damaging to us. So it's not apparent, you know, when you when you start thinking about it, but the shift in thinking is profound. And a lot of what we're dealing with now, COVID, you know, this whole war which is being very irrationally driven, it's not those deterministic things, it's the indeterminacy. How is AI playing out on the battlefield? We don't know. It's an indeterminate question, right? You know, so there's indeterminacy now is the problem of our age, and we're trying to solve that problem with deterministic thinking. And that doesn't work. Where can you find the inspiration for a new worldview to deal with those indeterminate problems? You can look to quantum physics because that is a system that deals with chaos and indeterminacy. Okay, so we can draw inspiration from that, or you know, we can look at this like this idea of mapping meaning, that is a probabilistic model. And when you say that, that is inclusive of all outcomes. So a probabilistic model is kind of taking up the space between determinacy and indeterminacy. You have the deterministic element. The most probable is in that model, but also the least probable is in that model. So I think when we shift our, you know, in a sense, our core paradigms to some of these models of thinking that are more culminating of indeterminacy, that starts to unlock different perspectives, new techniques and approaches that we can use to solve real problems that we're having.

unknown 39:26

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 39:26

Yeah. Yeah, it just is not first nature for us because we want things to behave like a machine, and that's how we build our world. Yes. So then to say, well, you need to be working on meaning or you need to look at the things that are unlikely, what whatever that sort of beyond the edge of our epistemology, that's really difficult for people like that.

SPEAKER_04 39:50

Well, and I think too, the the the challenge that we have as human beings, I mean, we can be very smart, obviously, we we do amazing things, but like on average, the average human being is not great at dealing with tremendous complexity.

unknown 40:06

True.

SPEAKER_04 40:06

Right. True. So, yes, you might have a specialty in like microprocessor design or something, but in general, in terms of all the complexity in the world, individually, we don't have the faculties to navigate all the complexity that now we are running into. And so we tend to favor these simplistic models.

SPEAKER_02 40:24

Sure.

SPEAKER_04 40:25

Because in the end, they're more useful to us. Imagine, like, you know, you can have a very simple map with just the streets on it, or you could have like, you know, I'm very familiar with ArcGIS, which is the company that does all the mapping, the 800-pound gorilla of the mapping world. They have like a thousand layers of data in their map, right? You don't want to be driving down the interstate with ArcGIS on your, you know, your car navigation because it would be too much information. You want the simple information, you want the simple paradigm because it's easy to navigate. But when you're in a complex environment, it's not helping you. And I think that's where we are.

SPEAKER_05 41:03

It's constantly moving back and forth between specificity and generalizations, making things simpler and more detailed. That's part of how life works, how eyesight works, how perception and thought works, how computers work.

SPEAKER_04 41:18

Yeah, and even so I think one of the really great things about AI and LLMs is it's helped us progress our thinking on how the human brain works. Because what we have tended to do as a society is we we see the brain behaving in the same way that we do. So, like for a while, I think humanity thought like our brain records things like we'd write it down on a piece of paper. And then, you know, you see you've seen it in the legal system. Like, for a while, people thought our brain records information like VHS tapes, and then someone had to be on trial, and what did you see? The fact that they didn't see it proved that it didn't happen. And now we've progressed to the point where it's like that's not how the brain works. The brain is it's is doing a lot of managing of the complexity behind the scenes, it's filtering what you see, it doesn't record everything, what you see, it records what's poignant, or there's a lot of complexity around neuroscience. But here, now we have a tool that allows us to basically model that capacity.

SPEAKER_05 42:18

Well, it is sort of front and center, and so it's forcing people or encouraging people to think more critically about thinking and ask questions what is the human mind or the human being that's outside of calculation? Because now we have a machine that's doing something that's outside of calculation in a sense, right? So it's helping us ask some really interesting questions, I think it's right, that opens up then possibilities for people to start thinking about thinking in two ways.

SPEAKER_04 42:45

Yes, it's almost like now we have a microscope looking into our our uh conscious thought or simulating.

SPEAKER_05 42:53

We're attempting to make it simulated, and through that we're understanding better what it's simulating or not.

SPEAKER_04 42:58

Or we could say a telescope that's looking at the the collective, our collective consciousness. You know, these LLMs are trained on everything, basically. All information. So it's it's giving us a perspective that as an individual I would never be able to have. Right, right. You know, so it's almost now collectively we're able to to see things about ourselves that before was simply intuition. Now we can compute those things. And that leads to all kinds of I mean the the revolution in consciousness that that could lead to I'm not saying AI doing stuff for us, but just the fact that now we have a way to reflect on our own consciousness could be a really profound shift in how we behave socially.

SPEAKER_05 43:49

Well, well, look, it's accelerated what we've been talking about this whole time with our maps of meaning failing. And so we're looking beyond the edge to you know, what is the part of meaning that hasn't come? Collapsed yet. So the fact that we have this sort of mirror or lens in LLMs to see aspects of ourselves, I think it's accelerating people's consciousness about consciousness, for example. Just writing does that. Conversation does that. Writing something down and looking at it a year later, like that becomes a sort of mirror. And in some profound ways, I think artificial intelligence is encouraging people to say, wait, what is what is a human again? What does it do?

SPEAKER_02 44:24

Right.

SPEAKER_05 44:25

Because I thought I understood, but I clearly don't, because this thing is happening and it's happening in in here. Yes. And it's elucidates what's going on. Yeah. So I think that's an example maybe of what you talked about as bridge ideas or structurally critical ideas. Can you explain what those are?

SPEAKER_04 44:40

Well, if we if we again we go to the assumption that meaning creates landscapes and different different cultures inhabit different landscapes. Well, let's say uh you we have the US landscape, we have the Iranian landscape, there are these mountains, in a sense, that divide us. You know, we're on our moral high ground over here, looking down on them. But in a sense, the transition points, like a mountain pass between valleys, those can be engineered.

SPEAKER_05 45:10

We can do thought, we can build those connections and we can recognize them and shine lights on them.

SPEAKER_04 45:15

We could, we, you know, we can look for ways that in the ideal landscape, we can say, hey, this piece of our landscape over here makes a nice transition to that piece of their landscape. And we just have to do a little bit of kind of neutral work to bridge that. Okay. And so it could be, you know, that I I don't want to speculate about what those can be, but it's like once we start to map the landscape, we can see where those saddles in the ridges may occur. Like maybe there's this piece of our belief system where there is no way for somebody to traverse over those things and end up in their well-being. They're incompatible with connection.

SPEAKER_05 45:58

Well, let's speculate a little bit because that's essentially what Coherent Business Podcast is about. It's providing structurally critical ideas, like helping people find a saddle into another view of business or another view of the corporation, even. Are there any of those that you've been thinking about that you we would specifically apply to the business situation and helping us see how we get from here to there? Because in a sense, that where we are now is unsustainable in so many different ways.

SPEAKER_04 46:24

Well, this key on that word sustainable. I think ultimately I would say the sustainable business is part of this new mode of thinking. Okay. I think what what we've seen in business is a history of unsustainable businesses. Businesses that grow, explode, and then collapse. So many of them over my lifetime. But sustainable businesses are gonna have some different characteristics. I mentioned this just a minute ago. Like efficiency is not sustainable, it's maximally productive, but it's not gonna be around for the long haul because eventually something is gonna come along that's gonna be outside of the parameters that you run for the most efficient population. If you take uh efficiency, you know, we say we want to maximize this variable, maximum profit. Let's take that as a Ferrari that you want to drive fast. The goal is to get, let's go as fast as we can. Well, that's fine if you're on a racetrack. The variable of what you're driving on never change. But out in the real world, you know, you can get hung up on a on a speed bump, you know, you can hit a rock with your tire and it will pop because they're like an H tick or whatever. You know, a more a more resilient choice would be a more practical view, you know, a truck or something, and that's resilient and it can handle the changing landscapes that you have to traverse.

SPEAKER_05 47:49

Can corporations do that when they're in a competitive landscape with those running races with Ferraris?

SPEAKER_04 47:56

This is the crux of where the idea meets the person. Somebody has to say, you know, in the long run, this is the best choice. You know, and and you you will you will deal with the trade-off every day until that black swan event comes along. And all those people who were running their competitive businesses and they were making more profit, blah, blah, blah, they go out of business. Strategic thinking is long-term thinking. Yeah. If you're just you're running your engine at red line all the time trying to get the most out of your machine, you know, at some point something's gonna go wrong.

SPEAKER_05 48:32

Well, this efficiency resilience trade-off is sort of one kind of micro example, but it also has to do with just how complex of the landscape you're living in.

SPEAKER_04 48:41

Yes. I I think if we if we say the ecosystem resides in the landscape, we live in very complex ecosystems. Like in business, what we've seen is coming back to fight us in the butt as a nation, is we've been driven by efficiency for the last, you know, 20, 30 years, and everything, all our manufacturing was outsourced. And hey, you know, we can make it in China for a quarter of the price, blah, blah, blah. We've seen all of that. The movement towards maximized efficiency, and now we have no resiliency. And so now we're in this position like up a creek without a cattle, because I don't know. You know, we we made those choices, we made those trade-offs for the short-term gain. And now, now how do we how do we find resiliency in economy? I don't know that we do, or it'll be very painful.

SPEAKER_05 49:29

Yeah. Well, I mean, I think to make something like that happen, what you have to do is you have to tap into useful relationships with more parts of your ecosystem so that the world that you're living in, it's not just the world you're living in is more complex, the world you're aware of is more complex, but more points of that complexity are built into your business model. So the triple bottom line is like a really crass way of talking about this, but it's still a very simple mechanistic model which accepts all of the same constraints that we're living with.

SPEAKER_04 50:00

Right.

SPEAKER_05 50:01

And, you know, some of the really most advanced leaders then incorporate a million more data points into how they run the business. A lot of the really good ones do that. It's not, it's not uncommon at all. But you know, you can't just trade off efficiency against resilience on a single continuum. I guess what I'm trying to say is like you have to learn how to live within that multi-spex landscape so that you're a part of an ecology rather than a mining company or something.

SPEAKER_04 50:26

Yeah, and I think what ends up happening is you get a shift in the vision of what's possible. We still tend in our Western business mind, it's like we're gonna grow this company and we're gonna be the biggest in the world. It's still a very prominent way of people thinking. It's like we're just gonna maximize this, you know. And I I think when you start to look at domains, landscapes, etc., you have to start dealing with locality. In the end, ecosystems existed in a space. Yeah. And the way that we've currently constructed our world is we have pieces that are essential to our operations that are existing in different ecosystems that we don't agree with. It's like Iran has the oil, that's a whole different ecosystem of thought, and we're having a conflict around ideas with them, you know, because we see the world differently, but we're still dependent on them.

SPEAKER_05 51:19

It actually means that we depend on them being controlled by us insofar as certain economic interests go.

SPEAKER_04 51:25

Yeah, and that's been the mindset. Like we want to be a good thing.

SPEAKER_05 51:27

It's the domination versus stewardship thing that you talked about.

SPEAKER_04 51:31

Right, and obviously it's not working.

SPEAKER_05 51:33

Right, right.

SPEAKER_04 51:34

Yeah, I mean, it it it's a short-term game. I mean, we dominated them for for decades.

SPEAKER_05 51:41

So it's Persian. They've been around a long time. They'll be around powerly for another long time.

SPEAKER_04 51:48

But they have a different worldview that allows them to play the long game. I mean, any any season statement should know that. I mean, like, we're pursuing this whole like avenue of geopolitical relations with China, and China's as an ancient civilization. They're they're playing the long game and we're playing the short game because we have that kind of that Cartesian-Newtonian mindset. It's like we just want to reach our goal. Trump was saying that we won the war in Iran, right? It's like we want to, we want to accomplish it, and then we've got we're done and we're gonna move on for our next story.

SPEAKER_05 52:20

We want a simpler, we want simple stories. Like you're saying, that's how we think, but we're entering a time where finding maps of meaning is what is going to carry the day, or what are where the critical edge of growth is gonna be. So I think that's what what you're trying to get at in your paper is let's pay attention to how meaning, very complex meaning, actually emerges and see if we can get better at it.

SPEAKER_04 52:43

Yeah, it's basically like, look, we're gonna have a relationship with Iran one way or the other, because they're a major oil supplier. So why not shift our thinking towards an ecology that says, you know, yes, they're different than us, but we can find bridges between our culture and their culture where it's not a problem, you know, which is which is the traditional role of diplomacy, but we've seems to have lost that.

SPEAKER_03 53:07

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 53:07

Anything else you want to say in closing? I think the reason I wrote this paper, Aram, is we're at a kind of an inflection point in our in our culture, in our society, a crisis, if you want to call it that. And I mean, it was Einstein said we can't solve the problems with the same level of thinking that got us there.

SPEAKER_03 53:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 53:25

So, really what I was saying with this paper is now that we have some new tools to evaluate meaning, collective consciousness, and things like that, I think it would be very smart to put together a team that can start working on this. I mean, it's very experimental. I don't have the answers, but there is clearly a path there. There's there's an opportunity there. So it's almost, I think this is an opportunity for our culture now to instead of letting the tech technocrats continue with the same behavior that has got us into the situation, we can have a civic discussion around some of these topics. And as as a collective society, say, look, we're gonna define meaning moving forward. This does not need to be done for us. This is this is our responsibility in our culture to define meaning for a changing time. So that's really what I was saying in this paper. So if any of your listeners are interested in that, they can reach out to you. We can yeah, we can talk.

SPEAKER_05 54:26

Yeah, well, I mean, I think a lot of my listeners are interested in that. Um I'm hoping that this conversation helps them to see that. You know, both my clients and a lot of people listening to the show, they are asking this question, right? I know I don't live in a mechanistic universe. I know that my life is complex. I know I need to create meaning. I know I need to, you know, make decisions based on data that isn't within the data set that is given to me in an MBA. And so I I can help them do that, you know. But what you've done here in this paper is help us develop some of the framework that I think maybe some other people will be able to grab onto another scene. So good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 55:09

All right, well, thanks for tuning in and thanks for listening to the Coherent Business Podcast. I hope this conversation sparked something from you. And I'd ask you now just to take the time to comment, to rate the show, and to think of someone who might be wrestling with similar questions that you can share some of these conversations with. That's what we're here for, is to try together to advance the state of the art when it comes to running a coherent distance. Until next time, keep thinking, keep listening, and keep weaving things together.