Intersecting Two Metaphysics: Peterson’s Narrative View with Wolfram’s Computational View
ABSTRACT
I’m going to propose taking Jordan Peterson’s focus on narrative and see how it can get updated with insights from the physicist Stephen Wolfram and his computational paradigm—known as the ruliad. Peterson’s perspective is referenced in his Maps of Meaning course and book. My summation of his metaphysics is that cognition and perception are never apprehensions of “raw facts”; they are inseparably intertwined so they are always apprehended as proto-narratives. I’m going to call these bundles sense-narrative quanta.
Reality, as experienced, is constituted by the continual integration of such quanta. In fact, reality--even without an observer--is conceivable in terms of sense-narrative quanta. Wolfram’s position extends this by saying, metaphysical reality is the execution, or running computation, of rules. Computation generates substrate; sense-narratives can thus be reconceived as qualitative approximations of computational unfoldings. The calculations the unfold as rules compute are never fully predictable. Thus, hallucinations are an ontological inevitability. Process-philosophy is a sympathetic filed to understand some aspects of boundedness; Stuart Kauffman’s “Reinventing the Sacred” is another.
The synthesis of narrative and computation enables us to critique Peterson’s supra-narrative based God without becomes trite. The logical possibility of an ever superlativating supra-narrative resemble a Cantor-set based view of infinity. Is it a logic-based hallucination, or is it a yet to emerge pattern-well that action continually brings into emergence? Viewing hallucination as integral to computational unfoldings completes a sense-narrative based metaphysic. Artificial intelligence reveals and exemplifies this structure. Narrative based hallucinations are not errors but a manifestation of computational irreducibility. The adjustability of their status is both forwardly and backwardly adjustable due to computational unfolding. “Post-modern-like” perspectivist framing may be more rigorously understood in terms of a rule-based computational unfolding. We perceive that as sense-narrative quanta and their superpositions. Wolfram’s physics based computational paradigm and Peterson’s narrative paradigm seem to yield a plausible metaphysic; one that might be useful for other fields of study, like Cliodynamic’s quantitative socio-history models.
POST
In Maps of Meaning, Jordan Peterson develops a metaphysics rooted in narrative. His discourse doesn’t delve into the standard realms of objective-fact vs subjective-perception. Instead, it pushes us to conceive of process metaphysics in terms of the psychology of narrative. To do this he suggests we must accept that ALL sensory and cognitive inputs are auto-processed; that stimuli and narrative are foundationally inseparable—at least to one functional degree or another. Once an observer is properly introduced into a metaphysical ontology, ANY experiential awareness and ANY thought(s) always arrive in nascent story form. I believe Peterson even suggests that this is not just true of cognitive/interpretation centers but of any nerve receptor. Nerve receptors have influential histories. They exist in surroundings that belie contextualessness.
For the sake of this paper, let’s call any such experiential information, meta-awareness, or historied-stimuli a quantum of “sense-narrative”. Instead of light hitting us as fully localized, contextualess, photons, we’ll assume that the reception, cognition, and/or integration of photons and such is best described in the form of sense-narrative quanta. These are little “story” bundles that exist via nerve stimulations and the processes which follow nerve stimulation. Sense-narrative quanta have an inherent history to them. They always emerge in a context. Contextualessness is a logic based hallucination.
I allow that our own thoughts are stimuli that our brain can process through sense-narrative quanta. We are conscious (or cognitively aware) not of “raw facts” or “raw objective properties” and the nerve-stimuli they produce, but rather we are conscious (or cognitively aware) of proto-narratives that combine with other proto-narratives, included nerve based thought, to form narrative superpositions, hierarchies, and multi-level embeddings. We think in story. We experience in story. In Peterson’s metaphysics, experienced reality IS story—story that flies around in “sense-narrative quanta”. Anything that interacts with us, no matter how weakly that interaction is, or how secondary it is, must be sense-narrative-able. Without us, sensory-able quanta still fly around, but when we fail to place an observer in the metaphysical mix, we foundationally misunderstand the universe’s metaphysical fabric AND the metaphysical fabric of our anthrophic universe (i.e. one with cognitive/meta-cognitive actors in it). Sensory-able quanta necessarily produce cascading fallibilisms. Thus, narrative based metaphysics must confront how, in this paradigm, one deals with “fact” and fiction; with myth based in “fit” biological selection history and myth based in “counter-fit” mis-approximations.
Neither I nor Peterson are saying there is no functional difference between physical reality and narrative. Objectively, physical reality and narrative are clearly distinguishable; one persists without an observer, one does not (see Joschca Bach’s comments on spirit/geist in reference to AI informed metaphysics). Tritely, a tree doesn’t stop existing when no observer is around. But, with an interpreter in the loop, physical reality and narrative intertwine inseparably--at least for anything we as cognitive beings may say or interact with. In this metaphysic, describing reality without “observers” is hallucinogenic –it’s an imagined reality we can never physically interact with. I can allow for the possibility of existence without me, but this meta-cognitive sense-narrative is predictive and inferential. It doesn’t have the same “bite” as more universalizing sense-narrative quanta. For example, many types of animals, not just cognitively reflective animals, experience/interpret/integrate light similarly. If one asks about a foundational metaphysics that extends into universes without cognitive agents, to what extent does it matter as anything other than a logic test? It’s like asking how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? Angels aren’t physically real. They exist as a narrative possibility. The ability to conceive of such ultimately originates from sense-narrative quanta.
The sense-narrative quanta that give rise to hallucinogenic narratives exist as logical-narrative constructs. I can imagine a flying carpet. That doesn’t make a flying carpet physically real. I can imagine a rock falling on a planet in a non-observed galaxy. I have never directly interacted with that rock nor that planet. My only interaction with it is through secondary interactions I presume it has with other parts of the universe that may, in a chain link process, eventually interact with me. Or, I assume all things are at some level, connectable because of big bang point origin. The high probability a specific rock falling in a non-observed galaxy is or has occurred still induces a hallucinogenic separation from similar rock events I have interacted with. And, yes this does mean any arriving sense-narrative quanta is hallucinogenic to some degree. Later we’ll discuss a novel way to understand the hallucination slippery ontological slope.
In Peterson’s metaphysics, it seems that such logically theorized possibilities are real narratives—they can have concrete effects on us. But they are hallucinogenic in nature. The cognitive stimuli (sense-narratives) they excite are real. But, they are an abstraction of possibility. A flying carpet may get invented in the future, but it’s status as a physically existent prescient is only determinable once time’s paths have moved onto it. Until it exists, it is either an improbable or probable hallucination. There are no third party arbiters to appeal to. While we can imagine an outside observer “seeing” the distant rock fall that we can’t, the introduction of third party omniscience is the very problem Peterson’s narrative based metaphysics may be confronting; I’ll certainly confront it here. There is a need to incorporate hallucinations into narrative-based paradigms, and to do so in a fairly foundation way. This is what I’ll explore. And, this is where the hard-sciences can lend a hand.
A computational paradigm, like that of Stephen Wolfram’s, seems essential to this enterprise. This post’s simple goal is to extend Peterson’s narrative-based metaphysics to better incorporate objective reality. The hope is to then make sense-narrative paradigms a bit more understandable by hard-science folk. My personal goal is to do this so quantitative socio-history, like Peter Turchin’s Cliodynamic’s field, has some ontological tools folks might find handy. For instance, how do you justify a socio-history model made ground up from stacked and interacting harmonic oscillators?
COMPUTATION
From what I understand of Stephan Wolfram’s computational paradigm, computation occurs whether or not there is an observer. Rules do not need consciousness to execute. Rather, rules -in this space- generate what we perceive as substrate. In a low-resolution analogy, one could think of this as something akin to space-time substrate. In a low-resolution analogy, the emergence of substrate in both views occur as things propagate. In computation, substrate emerges as rules propagate. In space-time, substrate emerges/stretches as matter’s expansion/separation defines new coordinate-able positions.
In a computational paradigm, reality is not simply governed by rules; reality is, in a totally foundational sense, the running of rules. Some rules, or rule superpositions produce sensory quanta (think of a photon being transmitted and some observation happening somewhere down the line). Other rules, or rule superpositions, produce hybrid sense-narrative “auto-calculations”. Cognitive centers automatically shape nerve impulses or nerve impulse sense-narratives into stacked or multi-level narratives. How auto-calculative such processes are probably depends on the narrative’s hierarchical level, meta-cognitive time persistence, and free will shaping degree. Low level narratives that don’t even functionally exist in explicit cognitive awareness are probably pretty auto-calculative. High-level narratives are probably pretty auto-calculative too. That’s because high-level narratives gently shape or bias other calculations. Even though we think we can shape ingrained biases via the free will of conscious thought, and even though we do control, to some extent or another, what this produces, ingrained high-level narrative’s biasing nature can and should be seen as auto-calculative. Everything in between these two levels is probably spread out on various nature-nurture spectrums.
For example, Campell’s heroic journey structure has an evolutionary persistence, not because of its communicated form, but because it matches an autocalculative architecture that noticeably shapes incoming and outgoing narratives. This shaping occurs largely regardless of time and culture. It gets reproduced because it, or part of it, is at the gene level. And it does this, to some extent or another, on ideas we wouldn’t normally think are clearly Campellian. We have within us, and arriving to us, multiple rules whose operation have non-simple effects on sense-narrative processing, articulation, and shaping.
With this in mind, let’s see how Peterson’s insight about narrative or sense-narrative-quanta can be recast with a light touch from computation.
INTERSECTING THE COMPUTATION AND NARRATIVE META-PHYSICS
Parables, thought trains, conversation, etc. are forms of computation. They don’t just represent our approximation of the universe’s computation—they are part of an unfolding computation that is giving rise to the universe. These narrative-computational-quanta are not always quantitatively precise. When sharing or experiencing a sense-narrative computation or computational representation, we don’t relate precise details about nerve level stimulations. Nor could we relate every first order, second order, or higher order touch that has been involved in those stimulations. Sense-narrative computations and computational unfoldings function as qualitative approximations of the rule structures or rule-products/rule-superpositions in which we are embedded and which are always running. This includes the narrative rules we ourselves run to observe, understand, and predict the computations which unfold around us. Rules produce their own semi-accurate and inaccurate rule descriptions. What we call “facts” are simply points of attachment—anchors—that allow us to express computational stories in the quantitative language of science. In this metaphysics, it is hallucinogenic to think of a photon’s frequency as an objectively coherent piece of independent material reality. While its existence and nature and point-time properties do not change with or without a cognitive observer, an observer’s description of any of these properties is hallucinogenic. It is hallucinogenic in the sense that narrative can’t be separated from observation or communication and our communication of an objective reality about the photon necessarily assumes the exist-ability of a third-party observer frame. That many people may agree on the photon’s point-time properties may reduce our sense that this could be hallucinogenic. Charles Sanders Peirce did a lot of work on this with his triadic semiotics. In many cases, we may all agree on approximations to a photon’s point-time properties; and even more, we suppose that if another intelligent being were to come into future existence it would recreate functionally equivalent communications and conclusions. But, in a process philosophy sense of things, we can’t communicate something like photon frequency without necessarily simplifying the entanglement of other things associated with frequency or associated with the thing whose frequency we are describing. Stuart Kauffman’s “Reinventing the Sacred” is suggested as a reference for more detail on this perspective. I believe the humanities as of late also have an increasing number of sub-fields which deal with this idea. Some branches label this field of study “extended assemblies”.
In a technical sense, in this computational-narrative metaphysics, the objective reality which emerges from computation is not reduceable to point-time properties (like photon frequency values). While we can use the very good approximations that point-time properties enable, they are not reality—they are a story about reality. Reality is computation. Computation unfolds computational substrate. A photon is an instantiation of the substrate computational rules have unfolded. Experienced reality is sense-narrative quanta and their narrative integration. Described reality is the articulation of this--and, it is NOT fully point-time stable. The things rules produce may seem stable, especially over our lifetimes, but their pattern is always a product of computation—and computation is ALWAYS running. Because of information irreducibility and the lack of any fully accurate third-party observer frame, we can never be sure the patterns we narratively describe are complete and non-hallucinogenic.
SUPRA-NARRATIVE --> GOD
Peterson’s framework posits a hierarchicable assembly of narratives. Some narratives can encapsulate the functional essence of others. Supra-narratives may not have all the details, but they are a rule-like encoding which when run can yield the directional effects of the rules they subsume. Peterson calls the top supra-narrative God. Because things evolve, the top-supra narrative is never fully definite in anything other than a rough directional sense. I think one can think of this as a Cantor-set approach to infinity. Peterson’s God seems akin to Cantor-infinity; and Peterson’s framing of narrative seems akin to a Cantor-set rule frame. It just has much more fuzziness and complexity to it.
But Peterson’s metaphysics makes some mistakes. He supposes hierarchicability implies the logical possibility of a grand-unifying narrative. If two narratives exist, there is by logical necessity, a third narrative which can subsume the other two—at least in narrative form. Just because we can imagine a unification of narratives does not mean reality will yield one. The problem, to lift a term from Wolfram, is informational irreducibility. Wolfram shows that no compressed description can capture the outcome of running a computation—you have to let the computation play out. Peterson should not be assumed to be a philosophical fool here. It is safe to assume he believes an imprecise, and perpetually refinable supra-narrative, can spit out the functional equivalent of rule insight. What’s worth knowing about the universe, for our own good, need not be point-time articulable; it can be rule based; and, the main thing needed, with respect to rules, is to look for possible supra-ordinate rules/narratives.
One finds supra-ordinates by sensing good vs bad directional gradients. Good and bad are ill-defined by Peterson. I think of them as Cantor set directions--is our set size increasing or decreasing? Thus, a charitable interpretation of Peterson’s metaphysics would seem to suggest that the ability to sense good-bad directional gradients, ultimately through sense-narratives and sense-narrative compilations, enables the formation of an evolvable rule direction, whose gradient is superlative. And while, like a Cantor infinity, it is never reachable, this is functionally meaningless; the conceivability of approximation yields all the same things (over time). Reality need not be physically/objectively reachable in the sense that it would persist without an observer--like a rock does. Rather, reality is reality of narratives. And, narratives are always unfolding. Therefore, to think of the supra-ordinate as a largely permanently fixed thing, like a rock, is to misconstrue it. But even rocks—as experienced—aren’t fixed things. They are time extended possibilities that we collapse into a point-time thing. This is the process philosophy of Peterson’s position.
Peterson’s God, then, is a hallucination. It is a moving placeholder that always morphs into whatever emerges as supreme. Because this happens in the future, we can only abstract its supremacy. Like Cantor-set based infinity, we can only ascribe a rule for it. Peterson would likely say that this is what reality actually is:
narratives which emerge from sense-narrative quanta,
narratives which emerge from our conscious cognition and integration of sense-narrative quanta, and
narratives which are made functionally real by acting on them in some way.
HALLUCINATION AS FABRIC OF REALITY
This brings us to hallucination. If computation underwrites reality, then interpretation of computation faces an intractable informational problem. It takes more information to interpret a process than to run it. This guarantees the presence of hallucination. Once an observer/interpreter is introduced into the system, false and false-seeming ideas become a part of reality. Logically, this is because reality cannot be exhaustively compressed into “true” statements. Even knowing all the rules does not enable one to specify how they will unfold. Computation must be run. Wolfram is exceptionally strong here. Even simple rules produce technical chaos whose products and conclusions can’t be predicted; but they can be run—via computational rules.
Some hallucinations eventually prove correct—from a point time perspective; others don’t. But hallucination cannot be dismissed as external error. It is in the fabric of reality for this metaphysic. Stuart Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred points toward this: novelty and emergence cannot be captured in advance. They are products of in-progress-computation.
In cultural evolution, this is obvious: myths, errors, and counter-fit cultural traits can stabilize societies or even prove adaptive over long horizons. A taboo against eating certain foods may look irrational in the short run, but across centuries can reveal itself as protective. And across an even longer time, it may again be counter-fit. Hallucination is not the opposite of “truth”; it is a substrate of observed computation. “Truth” is a substrate of observed computation. Each perspective is a point-time measurement that is computationally naive. The unfolding of computation determines which point-time perspective is for that time period “true” or “not true”. But, like Kauffman suggests, this ONLY works for backwards-observeable time frames. And even, then, key points may be missed. Assessments is ALWAYS probabilistic, probably in a Peircean way.
IMPLICATIONS FOR AI
AI reveals this dynamic in stark form. We often criticize large language models for “hallucinating.” But under computational metaphysics, hallucination is inevitable. It is what happens when informational irreducibility collides with interpretation.
A look at AI’s nature reveals insights about conceptualizing reality as constituted by rule running. Around the 1900’s, branches in the biological sciences produced countless “developmental biology rules,”. But, rules, like Wolfram’s Rule 52, are descriptions of potential or pending computations. Only when executed do they yield the admixture of narrative and experience that we call reality.
Thus, AI hallucination is not merely a defect. It exposes how reality itself works: computation must be run, and its products—true, false, or indeterminate—are woven into the fabric of lived experience, and perhaps the substrate of space-time itself.
Christianity, like some other indigenous traditions in the world, may have anticipated a rule-running paradigm or just stumbled into it through the evolution of folk-psychology. Repentance, sacrifice, and grace reflect the way error is constitutive of--not accidental to--truth’s unfolding. Hallucination, falseness, and narrative overreach are not necessarily external threats to reality. They are part of its generative machinery.
CONCLUSION
This discussion has suggested that Peterson’s narrative based metaphysical enterprise may not as naïve as some critiques may suggest. This discussion suggests that updating narrative based metaphysics via hard-science computation insights yields an interesting paradigm. It produces a paradigm where sense-narrative-able quanta are the foundational ontology of space-time. It incorporates the insights of process philosophy, including Peircean triadic semiotics and Kauffman forward prediction bounds, to produce a standard hallucinogenic perspective. But, the mixing of Wolfram-computation and Peterson-sense-narratives makes, in my opinion, reduces the slipperiness of the hallucinogenic slippery slope. The unfolding of time--whose phenomenal existence is ultimately based on rule computation—becomes a transient arbiter. Final arbiters are not possible but rules, hence time, are always running. Thus we update Peirce’s epistemology from probabilistic to calculatively probabilistic. And, we elevate the value of narrative from a “quaint” social science idea into a foundational multi-disciplinary one. The world is understood through story, because the fabric of reality is story—an ever unfolding one based on computation. And, computation is poorly conceived as point-time rules, but rather as the unfolding of those point-time rules. We can never fully specify those rules because to do so would take more informational power than the universe itself has produced. This is one formulation of Wolfram’s informational irreducibility.
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