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I’m wanting to love this a lot, and I do love parts. There are many things this film does exceedingly well. But as it stands it’s not strong enough to share with my friends and family. This is a bummer for me because the message is as close to my world view as I’ve seen it put together in a single media, and it’s a perspective that I want people to hear.
So in the spirit of offering my embodied experience of this film as feedback for the next project, I’m going to share my unadulterated criticisms here in hoping they may shed some light on why I probably won’t share this documentary with friends and family.
1. Ambiguous exposition - this documentary has a well thought out structure in terms of the order of the ideas and narrative presented. However it still manages to feel disorienting and chaotic. Rather than establishing what to expect from the rest of the film as overture at the start, the intro sets up the problem space before whisking us into the rest if the film feeling seemingly blind as to what the film is about, where we are going, or where we currently are in the film.
2. Lack of sign posting - this adds to the above feeling of not knowing where we are or where we are going without strong visual cues to break up and punctuate different sections of the film . Sign posting is something that Rebel Wisdom got really right, and I think it would have made difference here.
3. Overly thematic / poetic / dramatic narration writing - this is a woo woo film, and I am not criticizing the necessity and inclusion of the trans-rational strokes. But what I experienced was a disconnect between the very lucid, intelligent but clear commentary from the guest speakers and the poetic, thematic, dramatic narration interludes. I get that there was an effort to make the film approachable to the ‘masses’ so to speak, but the masses in this regard are mostly coming from the rationalist mindset the film describes. In that sense the narration has the opposite effect of disarming. At times it’s reminiscent of new age and conspiracy docos, and for me it seems to cheapens the legitimacy of what the speakers have to say. I don’t feel I can show this film to my feminist friends, or progressive leftist friends without fear of them discrediting it (and my views) as new age woo woo nonesense, which defeats the purpose of the film. In a way, this is a dilemma of aesthetics and positioning.
4. Not explaining the Leviathan and leaving it as a mystery device - this is the worst offender of point 3. We are given no context early in the film about what the Leviathan is and what rational phenomena it refers to as a transrational symbol. So each time the narration jumps to the Leviathan as mystery and personification, the audience is forced to suspend disbelief, or switch off. For me, it felt bad, even though I trust you as an author and knew you were going somewhere with it. Simply covering what the Leviathan is and what it represents in concrete terms as exposition in the intro section would allow folks to more easily accept Leviathan as mythological symbol knowing that it was based in agreeable substance rather than woo woo ‘just trust me bro’s. For the record, I love the Leviathan as mythic symbol. But as it was it was work to accept those sections, and my tolerance for such things is way higher than the kinds of people I would want to show this film to.
The last set of points are about imagery and composition and I suspect these could easily be solved with more budget and creative personnel on board. So if these were simply the result of no budget and small team, I understand. These pointers might help if the next film is being made under similar circumstances.
5. Visual incoherence - comes with the territory of using all kinds of existing video and AI taped together. What I noticed is that some sections felt visually compelling (like the psychedelic surf section and the history of colonialism) and other sections felt visually weak (endless news reel sections, randomly juxtaposed AI), but between all of them there was a lack of central visual motifs to establish visual coherence across the film.
6. Lack of a strong core aesthetic - My suggestion to address point 5 would be to define a core aesthetic for visual sign posts and sections of the film where you want to return ‘home’ to give viewers a rest from the visual onslaught or highlight a core idea. I can see you had maybe done this a little bit with the goopy leviathan tendril monster, but it was too infrequent and too varied in its style to form visual cohesion across the whole film.
7. Not establishing an aesthetic ‘home’ in the intro - this one had a pretty significant negative impact for me. The first real images we see are an onslaught of hypermodern social media clips which sets up a tone of disorientation and ungroundedness. Perhaps this was the intended effect, but I think it yielded more negatives than positives. It felt like a container with no welcoming. Landing the audience in the visual ‘home’ of the film first before intentionally disorienting them with hypermodern media would help to anchor. It’s noted there is the abstract fractal at the very beginning, but this does not feel like a place to land, even if it does reappear later in the film.
8. Arbitrary symbols (maybe?) - related to the last part was a feeling of shallowness around certain symbol choices especially in regards to abstract cinematic AI clips. Some of them felt congruent in an obvious sense like the eyeball closeups. I felt that the psychedelic surfers were a visually meaningful metaphor about consciousness and fractals. But there were many where I felt confused by the choices. An albino woman in a tub of milk? Desert dancers with floating neon? Plastic looking pink cinderella on a beach with an orb? They gave a feeling that the choices were arbitrary and symbology shallow or unconsidered, and I found that distracting, even if the cinematic visuals were pleasing in of themselves.
9. Use of AI - more than anything this is a target market thing, as some people don’t care about this yet, but to those who do this is a serious weakness. Many of the people I’d want to share this film with are ideologically opposed to AI gen for art and writing. And having used both a lot myself, and done a lot of thinking on the matter, I have come to share the same view. AI used in place of paying visual creators while stealing the work of their commons without their consent is explicitly unethical. Short of caring about ethics, many are generally sick of the AI slop tsunami and cringe to see it. So even if you were in the position where you had no means other than break an ethical taboo to use AI, what I would suggest is to ensure every clip you use is exquisite in its artistry and use. There were many scenes in this film that used AI that were, frankly, rubbish. The clips of Socrates and of the hands weaving fabric come to mind. They were slop, and they weaken the credibility of the film, even ignoring ethics.
All that said, I want to congratulate you on the film. There is much to be appreciated about it. The way you have managed to fit all that information engagingly into such a short amount of time is an immense victory for this knowledge ecosystem in of itself.
Some of my criticism may seem scathing, but it is just me being very honest. The place it is coming from (and taking over an hour to write up my thoughts) is that I believe in the message you have to share and I want you to succeed in sharing it far and wide. My feedback is here for your consideration, and with the confidence that you are capable of achieving impact to the effect of a Netflix hit doco. Despite my criticisms, I hope this film does well and reaches the people it needs to reach. And if it doesn’t quite perform as hoped, then let it all be learning for the next.
I love and appreciate that you have taken the time to share your in depth review. I haven’t yet watched the documentary but came to the comments in search of a comment like yours, as I would also have liked to share this documentary with others based on my anticipation of the film, and the credible speakers who have participated. I hope the creators of the film consider taking your comments into consideration and creating a re-edit of this film so that we can share it with confidence.
I will for sure! Thank you :) I should add that the reason I had commented before watching it is that I felt some conspiracy theory vibes from the title and the language in the synopsis.
Besides image of the black ooze seeping inside us all, the two lines in the leviathan that stayed with me: the nuclear family has replaced the parish ;your job is not your “job” , it is to love those around you.
The documentary carries a great message but, truth be told, the analysis presented throughout is fairly surface level. If you touched upon some deeper concepts, I think it would have felt like a much more “complete” project.
Thanks for the thoughts - the film is designed to bridge complexity with the mainstream so we intentionally didn’t unpack complex ideas too extensively
This is brilliant Alexander and team! I am involved in collaboration working on a consciousness based automation integration map, which is a systematic framework for embedding love centered, wisdom informed principles into existing AI automation, infrastructure for planetary healing, and collective flourishing. There’s so much resonance with this and your other projects. I would love to connect to share more.
I appreciate the balance you created in this production. So contemporary, yet still performed via "a call and answer " continuity. Of course the deep concepts of connecting to our body and by extension the body to the space it exists in is radically important. In my work as an interpreter and underwater guide the most impactful messaging I have found is to show how, for example, the individual fish we are observing is not an abstract fish but an actual individual that lives "here" in this space , it's home. And their "home" here if disturbed can not be exchanged for another place further down the reef. They will not be welcomed. In fish society the animals protect and fight for the space they make home.
The natural world is the space we actually live in and therefore it is sacred. Simply that. Our connection to the space we are in and the moment we are in - is living. Simply that. I appreciate your efforts to synthesize what you are thinking about. And I appreciate the format of this work.
Thanks Erik! I appreciate the thoughtful response and what a beautiful metaphor and cool job you have - it reminds me of the ‘embedded’ E in 4E cognitive science, which applies to us as much as to fish
So what I hear you saying is, "Touch grass and stack sats" ;)
One disagreement with you, that may not be trivial, is that you say experience is more real than these abstractions. But that's not true. Some of the "abstractions" are actual mind-independent emergent phenomena, that we discover and track. They are real. Some of these "abstractions" are not mind-independent, but nonetheless have causal power not only in their own domains, but in the domains on which they supervene. I suggest that any pattern that has causal power is real.
The problem you run into with your point of view is that our experience is, itself, a mind-DEPENDENT pattern, abstracted atop of, supervening on, and emerging from its own subvenience bases. You'd have to say that electrons are more real than minds, or that neurons are. You can't just pick a point on the great hierarchy of emergence and say, "everything below this point is real".
So what's the upshot? When you don't dismiss these patterns, you begin to notice that something is happening on the level above human minds in the hierarchy is being born. I wouldn't be so quick to kill it. What we need to figure out, is how to conform to it in a way that points its development toward a symbiotic relationship with humanity. And that means humanity has to get more of the "touch grass" elements you have been talking about.
I guess this is just to say "The Leviathan isn't bad. It's just misunderstood."
I’m not averse to the idea that anything with causal power is real, but I still argue that embodiment is more real than any abstract concept, causal power or no. Why? Because there has never been an abstraction that didn’t arise from a body. You can have breath without abstraction, but not the other way around. My stance is something like Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” in which we mistake abstract ideas for reality. I don’t think they’re not real, just less real.
I wonder if panpsychism solves your point around electrons being more
real than minds… I’m too tired to think it through at the moment but will come back to it tomorrow - thanks for opening up the dialogue!
Thank you for the thoughtful response! I like the idea of panprotopsychism (a term coined, afaik, by David Chalmers). Whatever foundational reality is, it is such that when organized as a living human, it has phenomenal experience. That doesn't mean that foundational reality is "minded" (as we understand the term), at root, but it does mean that the substrate ultimately responsible for "qualia" is probably part of base reality in some way.
You could also respond that atoms are themselves abstractions. There is something right about that, because "atom" as a concept, is a complicated mathematical object tied to macro-level experimental conditions.
However, it's the assumption of its reality that allows us to make sometimes counterintuitive predictions, and those predictions actually bear out. So in that way, there's something mind-independent about them - they asset themselves independently of our attitudes or beliefs.
I appreciate your original point Matt and ensuing discussion. (Caveat, I haven’t watched Leviathan full film yet.)
You both seem to have a deep understanding of the issues vexing what I would capture with the phrase reality science. So I’ll cut to the chase.
The pivot point to humanity’s existential angst is our comfort (lack of disorientation) when presented with analyses about reality that are human-centric. Even though they represent distortions, they are the ones we narrate through collectively.
From my essay “I’m Lost”…
Consider any observer (self) who wishes to characterize a multi-body planetary system and is oriented (fixed) to a given planetary body like Earth. The observable system (planetary bodies not fixed to the self) can be reasonably represented in two ways:
Geocentric. Oriented around the observer being in a sense prime distorter of (thus artifactually oriented to) the multi-body system. Fixed observer is immovable, and the complexity of the same multi-body system arises because relating to the fixed object (self + earth) as immovable distorts within a reasoning observer the Sun’s central position in the observer’s relationship to the system.
Heliocentric. Oriented around the shared fixed point between the observer and one of the bodies. Fixed observer is moveable [paradox embodied] and an observer on earth experiences cyclic phenomena related to the multi-body system comprised of the Sun and Mars. It results in an objectively simpler view, yet is objectively, one might argue inherently, confusing!
Distorted [as in the false representations that arise from a misunderstanding of the sun’s position] does not mean anything about the objectively real relationships mediating the multi-body system. Distorted refers to one’s prior and/or perceptual understanding when presented with the simpler, more objectively oriented representation. This is a big reason why relating that revolves around human inter-subjectivity is not only wrong but increasingly dangerous.
The referent for the word “relating” in the last paragraph is the previous essay “But We’re Not OK! Rewriting Humanity’s Relating Renaissance”
There is a relation between abstraction and experience - I think it goes both ways. Ian McGilchrist's stuff on the left and right brain can be helpful I think. His books are long and detailed but there's lots of Youtube by him.
The limitation of McGilchrist and adjacent approaches is the assumptions that undergird it also eliminate the reality that not everyone is always telling the truth. This is not an ethical or moral issue, but a phenomenological one. Dennett’s work on intentional stance (e.g. red stripped snake example) incorporates the reality that some things are hiding/hidden. Applying brainy and/or brain-centric assumptions doesn’t fix the seeming disconnect, because understanding reality is not a problem, except to people trying to apply brain-centric assumptions to it.
Many thanks to Alex, John, Yaris, Nora, and everyone who contributed to manifested this powerful documentary.
The quintessential message for me was @ 39:50:00: “This is how the leviathan took control. An ever expanding force that pulls us towards abstraction and away from embodiment: ecosystems became bureaucracies, awareness became surveillance, imagination became ideology. We became strangers in a world we used to be part of.”
My friend, I deeply admire what you're attempting here. It is arguably the most crucial yet most challenging topic to tackle and to try and make accessible to people: Laying out the root causes of our meaning crisis and potential solutions to it. And you've collected such a great cast of thinkers for this undertaking, although I would have liked to see Iain McGilchrist here. I know you talked to him recently. But, yeah, for someone who hasn't watched the 12 hour Vervaeke series or read the 3,000 page McGilchrist books or perhaps read Richard Tarnas or anyone else attempting to re-ensoul our world, you really have to find an engaging and transformational story that makes the case to the "uninitiated." I've been pondering this for years myself. I've chosen to AI as the entry point but there are so many facets.
And I too have been trying to come up with a name for this thing you call the Leviathan, the pandemic of hyperrationality, abstraction, and the extractive, dehumanizing machine metaphor. Leviathan is a pretty great name for it.
You also do a great job pointing to all the symptoms of this malady. But, around 40 minutes, when you start to bring it all together, putting myself in the shoes of a viewer not immersed in this stuff, I'm not sure it lands. But, again, it's an intensely difficult problem to explain, to illustrate. I empathize with the immensity of the challenge.
Finally, I would have liked to see more concrete things people can do about it. But I'm sure that's coming.
Anyway, getting more people to see / taste the conditioned water we all swim in is the task at hand for all of us philosophers and psychonauts. And I applaud your effort at doing that. All we can do is keep trying.
thanks again for your work and what comes through you into the world, it inspires much hope and soulful reflection alongside a much needed appreciation and integration of shadow
Thank you Alexander. I need to digest it and I would love to have conversations around what it brings. Yet I believe that my next questions are: where am I in all this? And where do I want to be? How can I play more effectively a role in the transition that I yearn? How can I meet the world around me in a way that keeps me walking towards that direction?
Such an enormous and powerful contribution to understanding and FEELING the hunger and the power of this time, so grateful for this work and collaboration of these great voices, many of my teachers (thank you Josh Schrei) I have held so many viewings now with others of this powerful force of art. I am so Grateful to have a viaual and historical tool to share with people to metabolize where we are in time and to weave through history why this work of embodiment is so vital, so essential, so critical to the collective. And how much this documentary shows the forces that work against the ability to connect to this place within our very own bodies, inspiration all the more for making it DEVOTIONAL AND DAILY. So grateful for your work. Endless gratitude Alexander!
Thank you for this reminder and this respectful cry from the heart. I hope your message tears through the veils of ignorance and indifference. We have, myself first and foremost, the need to dare to live a new paradigm where, free from fear, we accept the joy of life in all its forms and co-create a world where hope reigns.
If I wanted to organise a screening, is there any chance to have subtitles in languages other than English? I would be interested in Italian. Thank you.
I am so grateful to view this EXQUISITE film and will share it far and wide. I am a (youthful) 74 yr old physical theater performance artist, director, educator, activist and psychedelic explorer. I hold earth and body sacred as I learn to navigate the latter stages of my life.
The visual content and masterful editing in your film is extremely powerful, the interviews and narrative both haunting and inspiring. It left me wanting MORE, which is a great way to leave any audience.
I agree with a former comment re we need a Part 2, perhaps (partially) offering contemporary examples of alternative, community lifestyles and individual endeavors which exemplify practical and hopefully successful attempts at systems changes, while navigating the complexities of evolving consciousness in culture. This would be especially helpful to viewers who are not yet aware of options that are already possible and/or available.
I read The Bigger Picture and am totally grateful for the much-needed work that you are doing. Hoping I can do more to generate discussions about all this in the near future.
A work of ART doesn’t need to give didactic solutions (yawn). It hopefully provokes the viewer to think in provocative and novel directions, to self-reflect and feel big (and often conflicting) emotions, to be moved or revitalized to DO something, to shed complacency and accept responsibility for the state we are all in and to inspire the impulse to change and better our world and all life.
IMO, you hit the mark on all of the above.
Congratulations on this masterful and brilliant film!
In the beginning, when Leviathan was first mentioned, I thought it was going to be drawn out as something akin to trauma: something painful/fearful deep in our bodies (but collectively, as a society). Leviathan then went on to become abstract thinking, which cool, I dig that too.
But I wonder about the fear and the aggression that sustains this Leviathan of abstraction. Why do we run to abstraction? Why don't we stay in the body? What keeps us so very out of our selves-in/as/of-the-world?
I think the first step out of Leviathan and back into our embodied relational realty is to turn into the body to see what we left behind when fled into abstraction. From one perspective, this could be called a Minotaur in a darkened labyrinth that we have to find and slay, but also, it could be called the Angel with the flaming sword that guards the gate of Eden.
I think our fear of doing so is what creates the energy powering Leviathan. It is the pain and grief of missing something we don't want to admit we've given up. It terrifies us, but, at its heart, it is nothing other than the seed of the future we are longing for. And it is begging us to be brave enough to turn back to it.
Because if we can begin to face that, then we no longer need to run into abstraction, and abstraction can become a servant/part of the embodied/relational wholeness that is our unabstracted self. Which is what I understand you to be pointing to at the end as the hopeful potential.
Anyway, congratulations, this is an excellent film and it does an excellent job spelling out what is going on "under the surface." <pun intended, though I think you did it first?>
I’m wanting to love this a lot, and I do love parts. There are many things this film does exceedingly well. But as it stands it’s not strong enough to share with my friends and family. This is a bummer for me because the message is as close to my world view as I’ve seen it put together in a single media, and it’s a perspective that I want people to hear.
So in the spirit of offering my embodied experience of this film as feedback for the next project, I’m going to share my unadulterated criticisms here in hoping they may shed some light on why I probably won’t share this documentary with friends and family.
1. Ambiguous exposition - this documentary has a well thought out structure in terms of the order of the ideas and narrative presented. However it still manages to feel disorienting and chaotic. Rather than establishing what to expect from the rest of the film as overture at the start, the intro sets up the problem space before whisking us into the rest if the film feeling seemingly blind as to what the film is about, where we are going, or where we currently are in the film.
2. Lack of sign posting - this adds to the above feeling of not knowing where we are or where we are going without strong visual cues to break up and punctuate different sections of the film . Sign posting is something that Rebel Wisdom got really right, and I think it would have made difference here.
3. Overly thematic / poetic / dramatic narration writing - this is a woo woo film, and I am not criticizing the necessity and inclusion of the trans-rational strokes. But what I experienced was a disconnect between the very lucid, intelligent but clear commentary from the guest speakers and the poetic, thematic, dramatic narration interludes. I get that there was an effort to make the film approachable to the ‘masses’ so to speak, but the masses in this regard are mostly coming from the rationalist mindset the film describes. In that sense the narration has the opposite effect of disarming. At times it’s reminiscent of new age and conspiracy docos, and for me it seems to cheapens the legitimacy of what the speakers have to say. I don’t feel I can show this film to my feminist friends, or progressive leftist friends without fear of them discrediting it (and my views) as new age woo woo nonesense, which defeats the purpose of the film. In a way, this is a dilemma of aesthetics and positioning.
4. Not explaining the Leviathan and leaving it as a mystery device - this is the worst offender of point 3. We are given no context early in the film about what the Leviathan is and what rational phenomena it refers to as a transrational symbol. So each time the narration jumps to the Leviathan as mystery and personification, the audience is forced to suspend disbelief, or switch off. For me, it felt bad, even though I trust you as an author and knew you were going somewhere with it. Simply covering what the Leviathan is and what it represents in concrete terms as exposition in the intro section would allow folks to more easily accept Leviathan as mythological symbol knowing that it was based in agreeable substance rather than woo woo ‘just trust me bro’s. For the record, I love the Leviathan as mythic symbol. But as it was it was work to accept those sections, and my tolerance for such things is way higher than the kinds of people I would want to show this film to.
The last set of points are about imagery and composition and I suspect these could easily be solved with more budget and creative personnel on board. So if these were simply the result of no budget and small team, I understand. These pointers might help if the next film is being made under similar circumstances.
5. Visual incoherence - comes with the territory of using all kinds of existing video and AI taped together. What I noticed is that some sections felt visually compelling (like the psychedelic surf section and the history of colonialism) and other sections felt visually weak (endless news reel sections, randomly juxtaposed AI), but between all of them there was a lack of central visual motifs to establish visual coherence across the film.
6. Lack of a strong core aesthetic - My suggestion to address point 5 would be to define a core aesthetic for visual sign posts and sections of the film where you want to return ‘home’ to give viewers a rest from the visual onslaught or highlight a core idea. I can see you had maybe done this a little bit with the goopy leviathan tendril monster, but it was too infrequent and too varied in its style to form visual cohesion across the whole film.
7. Not establishing an aesthetic ‘home’ in the intro - this one had a pretty significant negative impact for me. The first real images we see are an onslaught of hypermodern social media clips which sets up a tone of disorientation and ungroundedness. Perhaps this was the intended effect, but I think it yielded more negatives than positives. It felt like a container with no welcoming. Landing the audience in the visual ‘home’ of the film first before intentionally disorienting them with hypermodern media would help to anchor. It’s noted there is the abstract fractal at the very beginning, but this does not feel like a place to land, even if it does reappear later in the film.
8. Arbitrary symbols (maybe?) - related to the last part was a feeling of shallowness around certain symbol choices especially in regards to abstract cinematic AI clips. Some of them felt congruent in an obvious sense like the eyeball closeups. I felt that the psychedelic surfers were a visually meaningful metaphor about consciousness and fractals. But there were many where I felt confused by the choices. An albino woman in a tub of milk? Desert dancers with floating neon? Plastic looking pink cinderella on a beach with an orb? They gave a feeling that the choices were arbitrary and symbology shallow or unconsidered, and I found that distracting, even if the cinematic visuals were pleasing in of themselves.
9. Use of AI - more than anything this is a target market thing, as some people don’t care about this yet, but to those who do this is a serious weakness. Many of the people I’d want to share this film with are ideologically opposed to AI gen for art and writing. And having used both a lot myself, and done a lot of thinking on the matter, I have come to share the same view. AI used in place of paying visual creators while stealing the work of their commons without their consent is explicitly unethical. Short of caring about ethics, many are generally sick of the AI slop tsunami and cringe to see it. So even if you were in the position where you had no means other than break an ethical taboo to use AI, what I would suggest is to ensure every clip you use is exquisite in its artistry and use. There were many scenes in this film that used AI that were, frankly, rubbish. The clips of Socrates and of the hands weaving fabric come to mind. They were slop, and they weaken the credibility of the film, even ignoring ethics.
All that said, I want to congratulate you on the film. There is much to be appreciated about it. The way you have managed to fit all that information engagingly into such a short amount of time is an immense victory for this knowledge ecosystem in of itself.
Some of my criticism may seem scathing, but it is just me being very honest. The place it is coming from (and taking over an hour to write up my thoughts) is that I believe in the message you have to share and I want you to succeed in sharing it far and wide. My feedback is here for your consideration, and with the confidence that you are capable of achieving impact to the effect of a Netflix hit doco. Despite my criticisms, I hope this film does well and reaches the people it needs to reach. And if it doesn’t quite perform as hoped, then let it all be learning for the next.
I love and appreciate that you have taken the time to share your in depth review. I haven’t yet watched the documentary but came to the comments in search of a comment like yours, as I would also have liked to share this documentary with others based on my anticipation of the film, and the credible speakers who have participated. I hope the creators of the film consider taking your comments into consideration and creating a re-edit of this film so that we can share it with confidence.
You should probably watch it yourself before deciding, especially as you know the people you’d want to share it with…
I will for sure! Thank you :) I should add that the reason I had commented before watching it is that I felt some conspiracy theory vibes from the title and the language in the synopsis.
Besides image of the black ooze seeping inside us all, the two lines in the leviathan that stayed with me: the nuclear family has replaced the parish ;your job is not your “job” , it is to love those around you.
The documentary carries a great message but, truth be told, the analysis presented throughout is fairly surface level. If you touched upon some deeper concepts, I think it would have felt like a much more “complete” project.
Thanks for the thoughts - the film is designed to bridge complexity with the mainstream so we intentionally didn’t unpack complex ideas too extensively
Waiting for part II
This is brilliant Alexander and team! I am involved in collaboration working on a consciousness based automation integration map, which is a systematic framework for embedding love centered, wisdom informed principles into existing AI automation, infrastructure for planetary healing, and collective flourishing. There’s so much resonance with this and your other projects. I would love to connect to share more.
Alex,
I appreciate the balance you created in this production. So contemporary, yet still performed via "a call and answer " continuity. Of course the deep concepts of connecting to our body and by extension the body to the space it exists in is radically important. In my work as an interpreter and underwater guide the most impactful messaging I have found is to show how, for example, the individual fish we are observing is not an abstract fish but an actual individual that lives "here" in this space , it's home. And their "home" here if disturbed can not be exchanged for another place further down the reef. They will not be welcomed. In fish society the animals protect and fight for the space they make home.
The natural world is the space we actually live in and therefore it is sacred. Simply that. Our connection to the space we are in and the moment we are in - is living. Simply that. I appreciate your efforts to synthesize what you are thinking about. And I appreciate the format of this work.
Thanks Erik! I appreciate the thoughtful response and what a beautiful metaphor and cool job you have - it reminds me of the ‘embedded’ E in 4E cognitive science, which applies to us as much as to fish
So what I hear you saying is, "Touch grass and stack sats" ;)
One disagreement with you, that may not be trivial, is that you say experience is more real than these abstractions. But that's not true. Some of the "abstractions" are actual mind-independent emergent phenomena, that we discover and track. They are real. Some of these "abstractions" are not mind-independent, but nonetheless have causal power not only in their own domains, but in the domains on which they supervene. I suggest that any pattern that has causal power is real.
The problem you run into with your point of view is that our experience is, itself, a mind-DEPENDENT pattern, abstracted atop of, supervening on, and emerging from its own subvenience bases. You'd have to say that electrons are more real than minds, or that neurons are. You can't just pick a point on the great hierarchy of emergence and say, "everything below this point is real".
So what's the upshot? When you don't dismiss these patterns, you begin to notice that something is happening on the level above human minds in the hierarchy is being born. I wouldn't be so quick to kill it. What we need to figure out, is how to conform to it in a way that points its development toward a symbiotic relationship with humanity. And that means humanity has to get more of the "touch grass" elements you have been talking about.
I guess this is just to say "The Leviathan isn't bad. It's just misunderstood."
I’m not averse to the idea that anything with causal power is real, but I still argue that embodiment is more real than any abstract concept, causal power or no. Why? Because there has never been an abstraction that didn’t arise from a body. You can have breath without abstraction, but not the other way around. My stance is something like Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” in which we mistake abstract ideas for reality. I don’t think they’re not real, just less real.
I wonder if panpsychism solves your point around electrons being more
real than minds… I’m too tired to think it through at the moment but will come back to it tomorrow - thanks for opening up the dialogue!
Thank you for the thoughtful response! I like the idea of panprotopsychism (a term coined, afaik, by David Chalmers). Whatever foundational reality is, it is such that when organized as a living human, it has phenomenal experience. That doesn't mean that foundational reality is "minded" (as we understand the term), at root, but it does mean that the substrate ultimately responsible for "qualia" is probably part of base reality in some way.
You could also respond that atoms are themselves abstractions. There is something right about that, because "atom" as a concept, is a complicated mathematical object tied to macro-level experimental conditions.
However, it's the assumption of its reality that allows us to make sometimes counterintuitive predictions, and those predictions actually bear out. So in that way, there's something mind-independent about them - they asset themselves independently of our attitudes or beliefs.
I appreciate your original point Matt and ensuing discussion. (Caveat, I haven’t watched Leviathan full film yet.)
You both seem to have a deep understanding of the issues vexing what I would capture with the phrase reality science. So I’ll cut to the chase.
The pivot point to humanity’s existential angst is our comfort (lack of disorientation) when presented with analyses about reality that are human-centric. Even though they represent distortions, they are the ones we narrate through collectively.
From my essay “I’m Lost”…
Consider any observer (self) who wishes to characterize a multi-body planetary system and is oriented (fixed) to a given planetary body like Earth. The observable system (planetary bodies not fixed to the self) can be reasonably represented in two ways:
Geocentric. Oriented around the observer being in a sense prime distorter of (thus artifactually oriented to) the multi-body system. Fixed observer is immovable, and the complexity of the same multi-body system arises because relating to the fixed object (self + earth) as immovable distorts within a reasoning observer the Sun’s central position in the observer’s relationship to the system.
Heliocentric. Oriented around the shared fixed point between the observer and one of the bodies. Fixed observer is moveable [paradox embodied] and an observer on earth experiences cyclic phenomena related to the multi-body system comprised of the Sun and Mars. It results in an objectively simpler view, yet is objectively, one might argue inherently, confusing!
Distorted [as in the false representations that arise from a misunderstanding of the sun’s position] does not mean anything about the objectively real relationships mediating the multi-body system. Distorted refers to one’s prior and/or perceptual understanding when presented with the simpler, more objectively oriented representation. This is a big reason why relating that revolves around human inter-subjectivity is not only wrong but increasingly dangerous.
The referent for the word “relating” in the last paragraph is the previous essay “But We’re Not OK! Rewriting Humanity’s Relating Renaissance”
The essays are here https://www.notion.so/earthstarone/Read-the-First-3-Wise-Resign-Essays-16739c494151814788adcdba734a0e90?source=copy_link#16739c49415181e987e9fd4f47414dd9
There is a relation between abstraction and experience - I think it goes both ways. Ian McGilchrist's stuff on the left and right brain can be helpful I think. His books are long and detailed but there's lots of Youtube by him.
And some decent Substack conversations too 😁 https://open.substack.com/pub/beiner/p/iain-mcgilchrist-on-what-truly-matters
The limitation of McGilchrist and adjacent approaches is the assumptions that undergird it also eliminate the reality that not everyone is always telling the truth. This is not an ethical or moral issue, but a phenomenological one. Dennett’s work on intentional stance (e.g. red stripped snake example) incorporates the reality that some things are hiding/hidden. Applying brainy and/or brain-centric assumptions doesn’t fix the seeming disconnect, because understanding reality is not a problem, except to people trying to apply brain-centric assumptions to it.
Many thanks to Alex, John, Yaris, Nora, and everyone who contributed to manifested this powerful documentary.
The quintessential message for me was @ 39:50:00: “This is how the leviathan took control. An ever expanding force that pulls us towards abstraction and away from embodiment: ecosystems became bureaucracies, awareness became surveillance, imagination became ideology. We became strangers in a world we used to be part of.”
Thank you, Paul! I was going to go back and find this.
My friend, I deeply admire what you're attempting here. It is arguably the most crucial yet most challenging topic to tackle and to try and make accessible to people: Laying out the root causes of our meaning crisis and potential solutions to it. And you've collected such a great cast of thinkers for this undertaking, although I would have liked to see Iain McGilchrist here. I know you talked to him recently. But, yeah, for someone who hasn't watched the 12 hour Vervaeke series or read the 3,000 page McGilchrist books or perhaps read Richard Tarnas or anyone else attempting to re-ensoul our world, you really have to find an engaging and transformational story that makes the case to the "uninitiated." I've been pondering this for years myself. I've chosen to AI as the entry point but there are so many facets.
And I too have been trying to come up with a name for this thing you call the Leviathan, the pandemic of hyperrationality, abstraction, and the extractive, dehumanizing machine metaphor. Leviathan is a pretty great name for it.
You also do a great job pointing to all the symptoms of this malady. But, around 40 minutes, when you start to bring it all together, putting myself in the shoes of a viewer not immersed in this stuff, I'm not sure it lands. But, again, it's an intensely difficult problem to explain, to illustrate. I empathize with the immensity of the challenge.
Finally, I would have liked to see more concrete things people can do about it. But I'm sure that's coming.
Anyway, getting more people to see / taste the conditioned water we all swim in is the task at hand for all of us philosophers and psychonauts. And I applaud your effort at doing that. All we can do is keep trying.
Very good indeed, really enjoyed Alex and beautiful production. Felt a bit like an Adam Curtis doc for millennials !?
Thanks! The aesthetic I was going for was ‘Adam Curtis on acid’ so I’ll take Adam Curtis for Millennials :-D
Millennials on acid!
thanks again for your work and what comes through you into the world, it inspires much hope and soulful reflection alongside a much needed appreciation and integration of shadow
Thank you Alexander. I need to digest it and I would love to have conversations around what it brings. Yet I believe that my next questions are: where am I in all this? And where do I want to be? How can I play more effectively a role in the transition that I yearn? How can I meet the world around me in a way that keeps me walking towards that direction?
Such an enormous and powerful contribution to understanding and FEELING the hunger and the power of this time, so grateful for this work and collaboration of these great voices, many of my teachers (thank you Josh Schrei) I have held so many viewings now with others of this powerful force of art. I am so Grateful to have a viaual and historical tool to share with people to metabolize where we are in time and to weave through history why this work of embodiment is so vital, so essential, so critical to the collective. And how much this documentary shows the forces that work against the ability to connect to this place within our very own bodies, inspiration all the more for making it DEVOTIONAL AND DAILY. So grateful for your work. Endless gratitude Alexander!
Thanks Tracey, good to hear it resonated!
Thank you for this reminder and this respectful cry from the heart. I hope your message tears through the veils of ignorance and indifference. We have, myself first and foremost, the need to dare to live a new paradigm where, free from fear, we accept the joy of life in all its forms and co-create a world where hope reigns.
This was very very special. I took notes throughout the viewing. I'd like to spread the world about this documentary in my small way.
Thanks Marlo!
If I wanted to organise a screening, is there any chance to have subtitles in languages other than English? I would be interested in Italian. Thank you.
Yes we can look into that!
I am so grateful to view this EXQUISITE film and will share it far and wide. I am a (youthful) 74 yr old physical theater performance artist, director, educator, activist and psychedelic explorer. I hold earth and body sacred as I learn to navigate the latter stages of my life.
The visual content and masterful editing in your film is extremely powerful, the interviews and narrative both haunting and inspiring. It left me wanting MORE, which is a great way to leave any audience.
I agree with a former comment re we need a Part 2, perhaps (partially) offering contemporary examples of alternative, community lifestyles and individual endeavors which exemplify practical and hopefully successful attempts at systems changes, while navigating the complexities of evolving consciousness in culture. This would be especially helpful to viewers who are not yet aware of options that are already possible and/or available.
I read The Bigger Picture and am totally grateful for the much-needed work that you are doing. Hoping I can do more to generate discussions about all this in the near future.
A work of ART doesn’t need to give didactic solutions (yawn). It hopefully provokes the viewer to think in provocative and novel directions, to self-reflect and feel big (and often conflicting) emotions, to be moved or revitalized to DO something, to shed complacency and accept responsibility for the state we are all in and to inspire the impulse to change and better our world and all life.
IMO, you hit the mark on all of the above.
Congratulations on this masterful and brilliant film!
Loved this, I loved the interviews especially.
My only small note would have been to say that Luigi *allegedly killed Brian Thompson. Maybe I am remembering wrong and this is what was stated.
Great job with this project!
In the beginning, when Leviathan was first mentioned, I thought it was going to be drawn out as something akin to trauma: something painful/fearful deep in our bodies (but collectively, as a society). Leviathan then went on to become abstract thinking, which cool, I dig that too.
But I wonder about the fear and the aggression that sustains this Leviathan of abstraction. Why do we run to abstraction? Why don't we stay in the body? What keeps us so very out of our selves-in/as/of-the-world?
I think the first step out of Leviathan and back into our embodied relational realty is to turn into the body to see what we left behind when fled into abstraction. From one perspective, this could be called a Minotaur in a darkened labyrinth that we have to find and slay, but also, it could be called the Angel with the flaming sword that guards the gate of Eden.
I think our fear of doing so is what creates the energy powering Leviathan. It is the pain and grief of missing something we don't want to admit we've given up. It terrifies us, but, at its heart, it is nothing other than the seed of the future we are longing for. And it is begging us to be brave enough to turn back to it.
Because if we can begin to face that, then we no longer need to run into abstraction, and abstraction can become a servant/part of the embodied/relational wholeness that is our unabstracted self. Which is what I understand you to be pointing to at the end as the hopeful potential.
Anyway, congratulations, this is an excellent film and it does an excellent job spelling out what is going on "under the surface." <pun intended, though I think you did it first?>