Unlocking Reality: OODA Loops, Emergence, and the Mind's Hidden Boundaries

Dive deep into the intersections of John Boyd's OODA loop, emergence, and the nature of reality in this mind-expanding episode of No Way Out. Hosts Ponch and Moose (Mark) welcome patent attorney and author Luiz von Paumgartten, whose book The Abstractionist's Papers (freely available at WelcomeToTheBlueSpace.com) reveals profound connections between Boyd's work and concepts like meaning vs. happening, red space (the mind's interpretive world) and blue space (raw reality), orthogonality, paradoxes, and flow states.

Your mind’s map isn’t the world—it’s a living system that generates meaning from signals crossing a boundary we often miss: light, where inputs transform along neural pathways into interpretations. Luiz shares his journey from personal disruption to creating practical maps for navigating uncertainty, drawing parallels to OODA's Orientation—not a step, but the engine shaping perception, prediction, and action. We explore orthogonality (inside and outside on different planes), how paradoxes are gaps between interpretations and expectations (closed by reinterpreting, updating, or revising rules), and why novelty emerges when the cost of carrying mismatches exceeds reconfiguring orientation. Ties to Boyd’s Destruction and Creation, the free energy principle’s drive to minimize surprise, Eastern philosophy (like the Tao), quantum paradoxes, allostasis, and stability as an average of continuous reorientation amplify these insights.

Discover how information is variation until a mind assigns meaning, why we never exchange meaning directly, and how viewing OODA as linear misses the spiral of learning. If you're into Boyd, active inference, or unlocking hidden dimensions of thought, this

John R. Boyd's Conceptual Spiral was originally titled No Way Out. In his own words: 

“There is no way out unless we can eliminate the features just cited. Since we don’t know how to do this, we must continue the whirl of reorientation…”

March 25, 2025

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 2:05 The Abstractionist Papers Explained
• 8:50 Meaning vs Happening: Core Distinction
• 15:40 Light As Boundary And Orthogonality
• 26:30 OODA, FEP, And Alignment Of Terms
• 34:50 Perspective, Gaps, And Paradox
• 43:40 Agency, Induction, And Action
• 51:20 Multiple Minds And Non-Shared Meaning
• 1:00:00 Information As Variation And Interpretation
• 1:07:50 Quantum Paradoxes And Boundaries
• 1:15:40 Destruction–Creation And Learning
• 1:24:30 General Selection And Emergence
• 1:32:20 Spirals, Causation, And New Rules
• 1:40:50 Boyd’s Evolution And Misreadings
• 1:48:40 Orientation As Everything
• 1:57:30 Practical Implications And Closing

Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:20

What part don't you want to talk about today, Moose?

Mark McGrath: 0:23

Emergent things. But well, we will talk about that to some extent.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:26

But just know what happened this morning. Is that what you what you're saying?

Mark McGrath: 0:29

Yeah. Well, through our uh our friend and collaborator, Ed Brennagar, we've we've got another uh really interesting person in our midst to join us on No Way Out that seems to be talking about a lot of the same things that we're that we're talking about, maybe in some different languages. So maybe uh we'd start by welcoming Louise to our show. Thanks for uh thanks for coming on and joining us for a conversation. You you're not in court, so I know you're a lawyer, so keep the uh you know keep the uh lawyer ease to a to a minimum. Uh you're you're among friends, but we've really been interested in some of the things that you've discussed.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:03

Well, we'll leave all the legal stuff aside. Thank you guys for having me on the show. Yeah, so I I think I know you through Ed. Yeah. Really, that's yeah. So I saw your show. Ed's a great connector.

Mark McGrath: 1:15

We meet a lot of fascinating people. That's how I met Andrew McLuhan was through Ed. So Ed, Ed just Bretagar, we love you.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:21

Absolutely. No, I I certainly do. And uh and then I saw you there. I heard about Boyd and the Uta Sketch. It wasn't the first time I heard about it, but it was the first time I heard it from in that way. And then I think just a couple of weeks after that, I saw you on um on a different podcast, the John Backer podcast. Yeah, the debrief, I think. Yeah, yeah. And that was really good. And then I definitely saw there are lots of connections here and lots to talk about. So that was really good. Also, thank you for having me. That's really nice.

Mark McGrath: 1:53

Thanks for coming on. Well, there's so many directions to go. Why don't you start with uh you're wearing the hat? So why don't you tell us about your your book, The Abstractionist Papers? Why don't we start there?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 2:03

Of course. So I published the book earlier this year called The Abstractionist Papers, and it's freely available at welcome to the bluespace.com. And it's a book about reality from first principles. And it's a book that took me about eight years or so to write. I started in 2017 and again just published it this year. Lots of, you know, that so the book covers lots of ground. It deals with reality in a very practical way. It gives us maps that we can use to navigate reality, which is a lot of what I see, the connection with the with the UDA sketch, of course, is in the idea of maps to represent what is happening. Or how to how to how to deal with how to handle the happening, how to produce different happening, how to respond to happening. So there were a lot of commonalities there. But the book starts, uh, it's it's unique because it starts from a distinction that we're not taught to make from the time we're growing up, which just doesn't seem to occur to us. And it's a basic distinction about meaning and happening. So we start with this kind of abstract notion of what's meaning, what's happening, and that develops into a theory of mind that works. And then from there we look at an individual mind, how minds work with one another to create, to build the realities that we live in and create and uh destroy, if I may, loops. So that's all the beginning of the book. It's part one, and it's the human side of reality. But the book has much more, and we progress through nature, not just human reality, but just nature in general, causality, complexity. And in the meantime, we deal with emergence, we deal with paradox, we deal with all of these issues that usually come up when we're talking about things like reality. And so I was very happy about it. It's a project that I did, uh, I started working on for the kids. It's something that I did for the kids. So the project itself, and here's where I think, oh, maybe we're not gonna talk about emergence today. I think we can't help but talk about emergence. That may emerge. That may emerge. It may appear, yeah, it may. And so the project, um I had been a you're right, I'm a lawyer. I was a patent attorney, I am a patent attorney and I practice uh patent law. Uh it's the the day job, and I've been doing it for about 24 years. But years ago, I I uh went through a divorce, and that was a disruption in my life. And as in response to that disruption, um, that's how the book came. It was there came a need for me, I had three kids, and there was a need to guide the kids in some way without being there every day anymore. So, how do you guide people from a distance? It became an issue. And since I had the gap, I just started working on it. And what I brought to work wasn't it was the tools I had in the shed, is how I usually describe it, which is the patent, the patent work. And so the way that we were trained in the in the patent world to see things, to explain things, to understand. I started using those tools in that context. And then the whole project just kind of started building on itself, like these things usually happen. In the beginning, I think back to 2017, I was writing letters to my kids. And they were the oldest one at that time, it was only 10 years old. But I wrote to them as if they were grown-ups, and and that was that was a good exercise, but I was instantly faced with things like paradoxes that I couldn't explain. And it just got really complicated. So I thought, well, the kids are too small. I'll just start writing stories. So I started writing stories for them, and I have a bunch of those. They're also on the website, by the way, is everything is there. And uh and then the stories, but the main story that dealt with reality was called Nimbin and the Abstractionist. And that story was way too complicated for anybody to understand, really, the way it was written. So I spent a few years after that, three, four years or so, just explaining the story that I wrote on a blog somewhere. And then finally, by the end of that period, the blog period, I just started writing article type stuff. You know, it started to look more like a book. And then eventually, guess what appears? A book. So that's kind of how it came about is a story of emergence, just like any emergence, you know, you have some disruption, and if you have some capacity built in to deal with that disruption, you can handle it. And next thing you know, new things, you know, new forms appear, and new thing, good things can can novelty appears from that process. So it's been uh it's been a really uh fulfilling almost 10 years now. It's what I did for fun in my 40s. I'm 49 now, so I'm going into a different thing, I presume.

Mark McGrath: 7:05

But this is uh yeah, it was a I remember from our first convo, we're both 1976ers. So this is our our last couple months in the 40s. Uh right. Well, I think the work is beautiful, you know, the the personal story that you have of redirecting this energy and these feet, you know, these thinking into things that are publicly available. Anybody can anybody can uh get these. I always love it when when when books are uh filled with ideas and things that better make people better off that are actually put out open source.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 7:40

So well, and there are we have a big Right. And I mean thanks for noticing that. We have uh in the case of this project, it wasn't my intent from the beginning to make it freely available. I had no idea where it was gonna go. I didn't know there was gonna be a book to begin with, but but once everything came together, it became clear to me that putting something like this behind a paywall, it's only gonna make it harder for people who understand it to get to, you know. I my goal is to disseminate the work so we can have more eyes on it, not necessarily to protect it and, you know, um to profit from it, so to speak. So that is the goal that has been the goal along. I did it for the kids, but then at some point, like I said, I realized, oh my God, this is uh this is not really just a story for the kids anymore. Let's turn it into a book. And so we we have to deal with something really difficult here, which is to try to show people who have not been trained in this way to learn a very basic distinction in reality, which is the distinction between their own inside, the world of the world that their mind is producing. That world is of a different nature than the world outside of our minds where happening is occurring.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:02

I want to start asking a question, and this goes for both of you. So the distinction between a brain and a mind. The mind and brain are different. So one is physical, the other one is more uh cognitive. It's it's how a living system operates. And a mind could be extended. So we hear about the extended mind and things like that. It's not the extended brain. One of um uh Boyd's uh one of my favorite books about Boyd is The Mind of War. The mind of war. It's not the brain of war, it's the mind of war, right? So when you when you I just like how you I won't say discovered there's a distinction, but there clearly is. Can you talk a little bit more about what that how you came across that distinction between the mind and the brain?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 9:45

Right. So the distinction, the distinction is not exactly that. I'll I'll start from there. The mind, the distinction between the physical and the abstract, that distinction has been drawn for a long time, but it's riddled with paradoxes because the boundary between the physical and the abstract lives inside of the mind. It lives in interpretation. Whether something is physical or abstract is a classification that we give to something. So it's all inside of us. So that that's sort of a red herring boundary. It's useful, but it's not exactly in the right place. So the way it worked for me, and I do consider this to be a discovery because this is exactly how discoveries work. They start with a feeling, an instinct, an impulse, an idea that a nagging kind of feeling that something is not right. And then eventually you find yourself drawing things to make sense of them. And on one side you have the color red because you instinctively understand that's one type of thing. And on the other side, you have the color blue, and then you live with that for a few years, and then you go, hold on, what are we talking about? Here and you try to find the boundary. Eventually, that's how we're drawing. That's the boundary that works for this. And there's something special about it. But before I tell you, let me tell you, try to answer the question with a prop. I have a prop for you. So, meaning, what is meaning? How am I defining meaning? Meaning is everything that the mind produces. So every thought, every visual image that you perceive, every sound that you hear, absolutely everything. Your understanding of what I'm saying, your feeling of sitting on a chair or standing, all of all of this stuff belongs to meaning, to the category of meaning. That's why I say this starts from first principles, right? We have to define these things. And then on the other side, you have the category of happening, you have the world of happening. Happening is what occurs. One way to think about happening is actions, interactions, responses, behaviors. But the truth is, as soon as we start naming the happening, measuring the happening, we're no longer dealing with the happening, we're dealing with meaning again. So ultimately, we have an inside world of meaning. We usually color that red. And here's the prop. So you see this red sheet of paper? If you imagine that this is the whole extent of my mind, which by the way, it's not infinite, right? So if this is where my mind sits, then the way I sit right now is I'm enveloped by my own red space. This is all I have access to, to see. But I also live in the world of happening. And let's color that one blue, right? So I'm in my mind, right? There's no way out of this. And the world of happening sits not like this behind what I see, but it sits like this, like perpendicular to our, as we call it, orthogonal. So from the inside of our minds, we don't have any direct access to the world of happening as far as seeing it. And so then comes the problem, right? Well, so how do we deal? How are these things even connected? How is any of this working? And the answer has been in front of us all along. The way meaning connects to happening and happening connects to meaning is through something that we are used to calling light. So light is the boundary between meaning and happening. So let's take a moment to think about that and make sure it makes sense. So when I look at my cup of coffee, there's light that hits this thing and then reaches my eye. And in response to that light, my nervous system from the from the eye all the way to eventually lands on some mind on the inside, right? Uh that light gets interpreted as an image. Sound is the same way. You have pressure waves reaching your eardrum, and then it's light. It's electrical. Nervous system is electrical, right? So it's light that flows from the eardrum all the way to eventually turning into sound in the mind. And on the way out, how do we connect from the inside towards the outside? It's also through light. Everything that you and I do, sometimes we're like, oh, I'm going to send an email, but really all we're doing is moving a muscle somewhere to make that motor action, which then triggers a whole chain of other things. But what we're doing is mind shoots light. It's one way to call light, I guess, to the muscle, which then we so we receive with the input and the output, they happen through a light transformation where we interpret and then sort of deinterpret for motor actions. So we start from there for humans. Did that did that sound about right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:57

It does. I'm going to share something with you, and I'll walk uh our listeners through this as well. Uh there's no sound to it, but I want to just kind of give you an image of what you just shared with us. So you just identified that we have these sensory organs that pick up whatever's in the environment, right? Uh we'll call those observations or sensory organs. And what ends up happening is they they pick up photons or vibrations or whatever it may be from the external environment, and they send a signal to something that we're going to call our mind. Now, this is a brain, again, this is not to say that we're talking about the brain, we're talking about the mind here. And this is what you are describing, and and what this actually is, is a is a quick example of the free energy principle. And this is a basic foundation or what we call uh John Boyd's Oodaloop formalized. And in this video that's playing right now, we went from FEP to the outline of the Oodaloop, starting with our what you just described there, that our sensory organs are picking up this thing, uh, what you're calling light. Is that is that is that right? The light, is that the word it's picking? Yeah. So light is energy or vibrations, or it's it's on a spectrum. So that's the way I'm interpreting that. But the video that's playing right now shows that, and a lot of this information that you just shared, we we're borrowing from uh David Eagleman's book and a lot of folks that look at neuroscience and how the brain out or how we operate in this environment. And again, this is the beginning uh outline of what is known as the free energy principle, where that boundary, and and it's funny you bring up red because I use a red-purple boundary to explain an entropic state, meaning, you know, down red, and I may have this backwards, but uh high entropy is gonna be uh related to red, more disorder, more confusion, if you will, and more rigidity or certainty is gonna be aligned to purple, which is closer to blue. So I just wanted to share that with you because uh what you're saying is no different than what we're connecting between the ODA loop and the free energy principle. So uh any thoughts on that?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 17:04

It's not very different. It's not very different, but there is a wrinkle there. I do believe that, and it's the idea that um the outside and the inside, they play by different rules, they have completely different roles. I don't know if you captured that there. Well, no, not not in that video. It's it but I agree. So but Right, of course. So uh that's that's one distinction. And the other one, and I think this is where the work my my little work really comes in. It it sort of comes in before this stuff, because even the idea of what an observation is changes when you understand orthogonality. You understand you're dealing with a nonlinear thing that you don't have direct access to, and you're just trying to make sense of it inside in your way with maps, right, with models. And so I think if we flattened it all out, it would look identical, actually. So what you guys have, I think we have a general understanding of that. But that idea of things being orthogonal will lead to a lot of other ideas, as you see later on, about emergence, for example, where novelty comes from. It comes from acknowledging that orthogonality. But but you're right, it's absolutely in line with everything you said.

Mark McGrath: 19:06

Conceptual spiral, I think, makes me to a point, Ponchford.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 19:10

Yeah, to me, when we talk about the world of reorientation, the conceptual spiral, it is the whole system, right? Which includes the external environment. And I think that's what you're gonna walk us through on the um the orthogonal view of the external world.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 19:23

Well, that's right. Because I think so when I came in, I so like I said, I I watched uh I think I watched Barks on Becker, and there were two things that he said that I thought, oh, these are really good. And guess what? I've been working on these, maybe I can share it with them. And one of them was sort of a general, maybe frustration is not the best word, but uh let's just go with that for now. A general frustration that people tend to look at the UDA sketch and walk away with a sequential implementation, like a linear implementation that seems very frustrating. And so that's one thing I wanted to leave you guys with something. And the other thing was exactly where you were just talking about, which is orientation. You know, a lot of a cursory review of Boyd's work wouldn't, you wouldn't guess how much is actually how important orientation is or how how deep it goes, how it really works, all the nuances. And so with these two um with these two ideas, that's what I wanted to see. If I could walk you guys through what I've come up with to address very similar problems in a different way. Absolutely. That's why we're here, man. Okay. It's a conversation. All right, cool. Well, let me see. I did write some notes. Let me see, because we did talk about a lot of things. Let me see where we could um.

Mark McGrath: 20:36

Yeah, this could this could turn into a six-hour podcast pretty easily, I think, with uh the work that you're doing. We'll put it also put, we'll make sure to link it so people can.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:46

Hey, while you're grabbing that uh Luis, I'm gonna share something again and just have a quick combo with uh primarily for Moose, because this is something we were talking about last night. And Moose, uh, this is the uh so I talked to Moose, I said, can you do me a favor and look at the external on the the left side and the right side of the OODA loop? Um what we have here is some early work by Boyd, and I think uh Moose, what when you go back and look at this, or when I went back to look at this, it's a direct connection again, and you know this that. Everything when he created the OODA loop sketch, it was based on disruption and creation, patterns of conflict, organizational design for command and control. And what he did is he broke it down and said, Here's these things. So what I'm sharing on here is the early sketch of the ODA loop, which is his first one was O O D A, right? Then he goes in to start putting in um different acronyms, if you will, analysis synthesis, put hypothesis in there and test because he's thinking about what's inside of some of the briefs. But over here on the right side, I'm gonna have to flip this around and I'll try to read this. This is his own handwriting. And he says, But since orientation is the repository of genetic heritage, cultural traditions, prefs experience, therefore it shapes the way we observe, decide, and act, hence shapes the way we interact with the environment. Okay, so that's something that popped up. And then uh down at the bottom here, let me get back to that. He goes, all of this means we can now represent the OODA loop. Now that we have these the green book written, it's all out there. Now I'm going to represent it. And then he gets into his iterations of the OODA loop, which includes unfolding circumstances in the external environment, outside information, unfolding. I forgot what the E stands for early on, unfolding and environmental response. Environmental. Yeah, environment response. And then here on the right side, Moose, this is one that I was I was saying. This I just notice this.

Mark McGrath: 22:43

Unfolding interaction.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:45

Unfolding interaction input to the environment on the right side, right? So it's it's unfolding.

Speaker 2: 22:52

Pinch it out a little bit, or yeah, yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:55

But this is something that uh Moose and I are kicking around in the last 24 hours. And I think where we're going with this is the outside environment, understanding that. Boyd represented that simply with three things on the left side in his updated sketch from Chuck Spinney and Chet Richards. But you can see his iterating or his iteration on it and where he was going as he was developing this. So I just wanted to share that with our listeners, and and maybe this will trigger something for the external environment conversation. Moose, have you ever noticed that on the red side? Unfolding environmental input. Actions are input to the environment. That's what he put in there originally.

Mark McGrath: 23:32

I'm I'm pulling up my my version now and I'm looking at it. I mean, and this is I mean, this is goes back to like what what you know why that Becker interview is making such a getting I'm getting it from all sides, not just law enforcement people. Because we've actually gone to the archives and looked at these things. We could we could draw a pretty clear distinction of like how the pervasive poor view of Boyd really gets in the way of really truly understanding what it is that he's saying that aligns a lot with what what Louise is saying.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 24:00

I'm hoping that I'll be able to show you a little bit of my version of that scroll that you guys saw there. But it will take a little while to get to get there. I wanted to first address, if that's okay, the idea of the sequentiality of the sketch, the surface. You know, and the surface looks like just a sequence. People walk away with the linear idea of first I orient, then I observe, then I decide, then I act, and then I go around. And that there will be no novelty in that. Like you're not gonna be able to do much if you see things that way. To get the novelty, you're gonna have to spiral out of that page. And that's what I was hoping to share with you guys. Yes. Um so but so the idea of the map. Let me share something with you. I'll share one of my maps with you here. And here we are. This is chapter chapter two of the abstractions papers. Let me see if I can make this image a little bigger. Yep.

unknown: 24:55

Okay.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 24:55

And there you have something in blue, which is the world of happening that's outside of our minds, where you have processes. We have a fancy name for that, a causation domain, but it's just the world of happening. And processes are just they're just happening, they're operating, they're interacting. Inside the mind, the mind is surrounded by a boundary. And so the happening outside, it doesn't leak to the inside. We never observe happening. Because remember, the remember the papers, right? One is like this, the other one's like that. So from the inside, you can't see that one, right? You just don't. But in response to the signals that reach your boundary, which is light, the mind will then, in response to it, produce interpretations in this red space of meaning that now we are in the world of meaning. So interpretations are produced in response to happening, but they're not caused by the happening. They're responsive and they they belong to us. We produce them. And the mind then produces interpretations and compares them to some expectations. So it develops these interpretation the scenes, these scenarios, compares it to what it expects to see, using some logic. We see logic in the middle, the triangle. And that that's a logic comparison here. It's just the model, right? So we make a logic comparison, and if there is a gap, then the gap goes to the right, it turns into what we call a paradox. But here it's just a gap, a mismatch between your interpretation of the happening and your expectation of that you can associate to that in that scenario. And that's essentially what the mind does, it creates these gaps and then works to close them the best way that it can. It can't always do it, which then we we're gonna get to the interesting part, but it's always working to close gaps. So this is a functional diagram of how what essentially what the mind does all the time below awareness. This is all below awareness. We don't we're not aware of this. So let me illustrate this with an example, which I'm sure you guys are gonna be able to relate to with the with the UDA loop.

Mark McGrath: 27:24

Is I'm gonna reach out for uh Can I I just wanna I just want to say something to Ponch really quick. So, Ponch, when uh Luis and I first met, he showed me this, like I immediately thought of the Markov blanket around that yeah, that Chuck drew around in uh the epistemology.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 27:41

Yeah, it's this this checks out on everything so far. I mean, it's and what's fascinating about this is I'm I'm gonna say this in the rudest way I can. A patent attorney came up with this shit, okay? Well, it looks like it.

Mark McGrath: 27:52

It looks like he was like an electrical engineer or something like that.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 27:56

But we are. That's what that's true. I can't address that at the end, but we that's exactly what we are. We're all engineers before we go to law school, and we still think like that after law school. But but the interesting thing here is so let me give you the example. That's where we were. So I'm I'm going to reach out for a cup of coffee. Why maybe I have an instinct that I wanted to take a sip, it's below awareness, right? I'm not paying attention, I'm just reaching for the cup of coffee. So I see visually, I know the cup of coffee is some distance from me. So I start to reach for it. As I do that, the expectation that I will, however you want to label that expectation, that I'm going to touch the cup, that I'm going to grab the cup, bring it back to my mouth. I'm always comparing what I see, what I sense, to what I expect needs to happen. If there is a gap, if I miss the mug and reach for a pen instead, then that created a gap. The expectation doesn't match what I wanted to do. And so now the mind works to close that gap by adjusting it. So there are three basic ways to adjust these gaps. Okay, one of them, and they're here in this diagram, is one, two, and three. The gap, remember, is the paradox in yellow. And it's already been produced. So how do we fix the paradox? How do we reconcile the paradox, the gap? We can reinterpret the happening. For example, if you just revisit the scenario in your mind and you go, oh, maybe that's not what they meant. That's an example of reinterpreting some happening to close a gap. Another example is maybe you just change your expectations. You're like, oh, this is really what this job is like. Like, I gotta, you know, whatever it is. And you make peace with the gap in that way, and you make the gap go away, you reconcile the gap in that way. Or maybe you change the logic that you're applying to make the comparison. Maybe you're playing a game and you think, oh, I can't jump over this piece in this scenario, somebody disputes it, you go back to the rule book, you read the instructions again, and you had missed the logic that leads to the answer. Now you have the logic, you acquired a new rule, you also reconcile the gap. So we have these three basic ways of reconciling gaps, and we're doing them all the time. Perspective is the closest thing in my work that I think associates relates to what Boyd calls orientation. But let me describe it to you guys and then you guys can tell me. But persp the way I see perspective in this work, it controls everything. Perspective determines how we interpret, what we expect, the contextual side of all this, which rules we apply to make these comparisons. And I think most important of all, what's our resistance to those rules? How do we relate to those rules? And so perspective is adjustment number four in the diagram. And perspective adjustments they happen when the cost of carrying those paradoxes inside, they outweigh the cost of reorganizing the inside. When that happens, it becomes an economic natural decision, and the perspective is raised to account for all of those gaps with a total restructuring, and that's natural emergence of the mind, that's how we progress through life. Did that make sense so far? Because I have an example to give to you guys about this that will probably make you really real.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:52

So I just want to uh make sure I got this right. The the way you look at perspective is is equal to or what the way we talk about orientation. Is that correct? I think it's very similar. It's the equivalent. Okay. So so um with it sounds to me like you've looked at Andy Clark's work and Anil Seth and and others that look at the coffee cup analogy and and that. So we're looking at active inference, predictive process processing, and uh Bayesian theorem, right? So Bayes theorem is how a lot of this works. So priors and and the connection to what's coming in from the external world. So uh expectations would be what we call decisions or hypotheses or predictions. So what's expected is a decision, uh, if you will. And and Boyd actually wrote that as an H. And one thing that Moose and I have been kicking around is uh within the ODA loop, that decision, that D, is probably doesn't need to be within the OODA loop because it's gonna happen to different places. And then uh those predictions or expectations are compared to the new information coming in from the external world, which you're calling uh the light. The light is sending a signal across the boundary into the mind, and it's being compared against those expectations. You're calling that a mismatch, and that's what John Boyd called it. And through the free energy principle, they call that surprise. It's another way to talk about entropy, right? So what we're trying to do is minimize that gap between what we expect and the new information coming in. And I think so. We're 100% aligned on this, different language, but any challenges.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 33:29

Very close. We're very close. But let me see if I can figure out a way to explain. So the the difference is that the way you described, I believe, was light will bring something across the boundary. So let me ask you a question. This is just natural world stuff. If I play some music here, I'm playing whatever music it is, and then you dance. Did the music make you dance? Or did you dance in response to the music?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 34:01

Oh, let's see. Okay, let me I don't know how to answer that. So let me try another way. The light touches the boundary in our sensory states, and from that it sends a signal in, which is an interpretation of that that what's going on in the external in the blue space. The idea is that the interpretation hit me.

Mark McGrath: 34:19

Because it actually happened to me last night. I was taking the recycles out, which is a you know, otherwise tedious job, and I put on the song uh New Age Girl by Deadeye Dick from the 90s, and like I just started jiving, and it makes the thing so like when you asked that, Louise, I really started to think like, wow, that just happened to me. What was it?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 34:38

Right. And so that's one of the things that we get trained, you know, as a patent attorney, we're always figuring out causality in a different way. It's not enough to see the sequence and say, oh, what came after was caused by what came before, because you do have a lot of responsive behavior. That's how nature works is it accepts, it receives like receptive, responsive behavior. Like some signal reaches the entity, and the entity inside produces its own interpretation that is produced in response to the signal, but nothing, the only thing that the signal brings is a variation that we then interpret as something. But the signal itself is just the way we model it, at least, right? It's just up and down variation. It doesn't have, for example, when you see an image of something, the image doesn't come in the light into your eyes. Light gets to your eyes, and then you produce that image inside. And I think when you right, exactly.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:38

So we would call that perception. And then Boyd wrote it down as implicit guides of control that goes from orientation to observation. It's a negative feedback loop, which actually acts as a filter. Going back to what Moose did is that perception or interpretation is what caused them to dance, not the music coming in. Did I get that right?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 35:58

So you dance in response to the music, is the answer I give to the to the um to that question. If you don't want to dance, you're not gonna dance. Sometimes you're not paying attention to it, but nothing from the outside like that can make you do anything. You're doing it in response to it. So what happens is you have this situation just with uh just with the so why do people look at the ODA loop, for example, and and take with their takeaway is one of sequentiality. The idea is they're looking at a map, which is a map of meaning that's representative of some happening. It's good for us to understand the happening, but the map itself is obviously, then you have the map territory distinction, right? The map's not the territory. But what people have been missing there, and what I try to add to this discussion is of course, everybody has talked about map and territory before. But usually we would look at a map as what? As an approximation of the territory, a simplification of the territory, a limited version of the territory. But what this work is here to say is that the territory is of a different nature than the map altogether. So the map is paper with symbols, and the territory is dirt, trees, roads. Those are not just different things, they're different types of things, right? And so when you confuse the two, like we usually do, we look at the inside of our minds or inside worlds, and we imagine this world that I see right now. I imagine it to be in this way, at least close to it, outside. Right? I expect this to be outside, which means I'm mixing my ability to produce meaning from what I can do. I'm confusing that for perception of causation. And that's where the map territory gets funky. The problem is not you can have a much better map with much more detail. It's still a map. It's of a different nature than the territories. Here we have uh when we can't make that distinction, when we wake up in the morning and we feel like we're plugging into this shared abstract world that everybody's in, uh then of course we tend to look at things that way. It's difficult to make a distinction between an idea on a piece of paper. An idea, an idea is not on a piece of paper, it's in our minds, but an idea we can express on a piece of paper in some actual happening that that idea helps us understand. Because the happening is always here. Let me show you, let me share another diagram for you because this map I think might even be more useful. Uh, we've been looking at this screen for a while, or I have, but let me see if I can do something else here. Another problem that I had to deal with in my work was the problem of um I love I love that graphic, honestly.

Mark McGrath: 39:04

I think it's another way to explain what Boyd's really getting at without using Noodaloop sketch if if people because it because it covers just about everything that we hit.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 39:15

Well, it's based on on paradox and it it's geared towards emergence. The reason why that diagram is there in this way is because we can explain emergence as an accumulation of unresolved conflict, natural emergence as an accumulation of.

Mark McGrath: 39:30

Would you say that paradox would be mismatch?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 39:33

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:34

I'm hearing the map is not the territory, not the terrain, and if we have an internal map that has whatever, and I think where we're going, and I'm I'm curious to see this orthogonal view. Actually, I want to I want to just let Louise go because I my mind's spinning here on what this means for what we're doing in markets.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 39:55

There will be useful things here, even for what we were just talking about. Like the so interpretation, expectation, logic, perspective, accumulation of paradox, the stuff that's in red is not the oodaloop, but it's also a map, right? And so you can you can take the impression of sequentiality from here too. You can say, well, first we interpret, then we expect, then we compare, then we decide how we're gonna apply that rule, and then we'll figure out what we're gonna hold on to. But that's not how it works, is it? Everything happens at once. Right. Right? Yeah. And so that's another example that you know, another problem that I have with this one that you guys have with the loop that's very similar. It's it's easy to look at this and totally think, oh, that's no, that's just an idea that it's use and a useful idea.

Mark McGrath: 40:45

That's squiggly, that squiggly line, that's like electrical engineering designed for connectivity, right?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 40:52

That's the symbol for a transformer. So thank you for pointing that out. That's very good. So the I'm a historian, so yeah, you gotta help me out here. In in natural that that's the simplest like engineering way I found to represent this, but it's the idea of a transformation.

Mark McGrath: 41:08

The only the only thing you got I would wonder, and this is where I Ask Punch on this if you saw the same symbology on the opposite side where the loop is coming back. So, so or is that could you look at that one that you have right there, and that's in and out, in and out, like it's because again with Uta, after we test the hypothesis form, and we're getting those feedback loops, it crosses that Markov boundary out back into the back into the reality, which would be the blue space. Yeah.

unknown: 41:40

Yeah.

Mark McGrath: 41:41

So you can so to So in other words, like I I look at that and I see the transformer symbol and the lightning bolts. Is that an arrow going in and an arrow going back out?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 41:50

So what I was gonna say was there's nothing going in and out. Light reaches the boundary and the inside responds to it. That's what that represents. So it's a transformation. It's um you guys are are very technical, so you will understand this, I think, right away. If you think about signal propagation, if you look at a waveform propagating in time, the analogy would be let's look at the waveform propagating in time as if it were happening. Okay, it's obviously not, it's our model of happening, but let's just say it's the happening for the analogy. Then we are looking at something that we usually call the time domain. We're looking at how the wave propagates in time. But how do we find out what's inside of the wave? We apply a transform, a Fourier transform is the name of this thing. And next thing you know, we're in this different place called a frequency domain, but now we have the whole spectrum of the signal, we have the frequency contents. So the inside and the outside are connected by a transform, and they're orthogonal domains. And that same principle applies here: the inside being meaning, what's in the mind, and the outside being happening, that blue space. Now it's not a perfect analogy, but it kind of gives you the idea of two orthogonal domains operating concurrently, and things happen or things existing in both domains concurrently. So the this idea of reality is that's just the mind, right? But you mentioned the mind and the body earlier. So under in natural reality, what is the body? That would be a what is the brain? How would we explain that? And so in natural reality, what we call the body is the mind's interpretation of the processes, the happening that gives rise to it, which is trippy. It's almost like you're looking at the roots of the tree and thinking you're seeing when you walk around and see all the bodies, you're missing the whole thing, right? You're just looking at your interpretation of the happening that gives rise to somebody else's mind, which you don't ever get to see, because, of course, not of course, but the way the framework is designed, mind sit in parallel. So the world of meaning is not shared. Everybody has their own individual mind. Wow. It's a distributed reality.

unknown: 44:20

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:20

And this is great. I got a couple comments here, uh, just back and forth real fast. So the the two state the the the lightning bolts you have on there, we would call um boundary states. They're on the boundary, that would be sensory states and active states, right? That's that's so the ooh loop, if you put a boundary around it, the only two things that would come in contact with the blue uh space would be the those two sensory states. That's it, right? So that boundary, uh, and going back to what you just said about um our mind's interpretation of what's going on. So my mind, uh just standing here as Brian Potch, I would think that my skin separates me from the external world, right? Because that's what it kind of looks like. To somebody else, it may be, hey, I'm actually part of this world, the boundary is further out than me, and that's the extended mind. You know, we're the enacted part of the what this is. This is an enacted system, it's an agent within an or uh within the environment, the same way we look at Boy Zulu. So we have the the you know, for e cognition, which and I think they're extending that a little a little bit more. So that is all based off of our interpretation of the physical world. And my current physical interpretation of the world, and it's it's just me being pretty generic right now, is my skin is my boundary between me and the external world. That is likely not true, right?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 45:40

Are we saying the same thing? In natural reality, it's different. The skin is not the boundary of you, right? Right? Yeah. It's uh it's the happening, so the blue space in natural reality, the blue space is one. There's one world of happening. And there's there are no divisions. There's no meaning, so we can't separate. We can't sit here and start labeling things and separating things. There's no meaning in the world of happening. Do we lose Ponch? Yeah, I was I was reading, I was reading for him to go back. Oh, there he is.

Mark McGrath: 46:12

No, I was looking at um Yeah, I'm kind of overwhelmed by the not overwhelmed, but like, I mean, really.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 46:19

There's uh there there's there are gonna be new things coming from.

Mark McGrath: 46:22

Sometimes it's sometimes it's rare that Ponch and I are like speechless, but like Well, even when you think of the implications are many, I think, of this stuff.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 46:30

Where I'm trying to focus on the Oodaloop stuff with you guys, but the real value of this thing, if you were to, if that came up, I think is is elsewhere, really, because at the at a basic level, this sort of way of thinking allows us to account for other people in a different way. Should show me.

Mark McGrath: 46:51

Should be in that graphic, because I'm again I'm I'm just trying to make some see the the center the similarities between that and oodaloop sketch. Show me on the graphic, where would my orientation shape what it is I sense in the outside world? So let me let me Boyd would call that implicit guidance and control in the Oodaloop sketch, which shapes how I interpret. Right. Where would that be in this particular diagram?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 47:23

I'll show you with an example, if I may. So imagine you're eight years old and you set up a lemonade stand, okay? So you're outside, set up your lemonade stand with a friend, and the agreement that you have with your friend is we're gonna do, you know, it's gonna be a 50-50 split of the profits. Let's go in this, set it up, make some money. So it's you and your friend supposed to set up the stand, except on the day you're supposed to set up the stand, your friend doesn't show up. So it's just you there working all day. At the end of the workday, your friend shows up and says, Where's my 50%? And you give it to them. Why? Because up until that age, you have been taught and you have learned that fairness is a 50-50 split if there are two people. You used to think you came from a place where everything was all mine when you were a tiny little kid, mine, mine, mine. There's nobody else here. And then it was hammered into you that you have to be fair. And what fair means at that age is 50-50. That's the scenario it's starting from. So now your friend came, took 50% without doing any of that work. And so let's go back to our diagram here and look at the mind again. So your perspective is applying a logic of 50-50, but that doesn't feel good. When you make that comparison, something doesn't feel good. You accumulate some distance, a paradox, right? A gap that you can't reconcile. Something about it doesn't feel right. You don't need to know what it is, so it bothers you. Then the following week you set up the stand again, and the kid does the same. The other kid does the same thing. He shows up at the end to collect his 50%. You give it to them again, and more conflict accumulates inside. Eventually, you naturally realize that that's not what fairness is, not in this scenario. And it should be a rule of equity. It should be a rule of whatever we put in, that's the proportion we get out, perhaps. It shouldn't be the 50-50 anymore. And so your perspective on the whole thing changes. Your resistance to the rule that says 50-50 is right increases. You don't apply that rule in the same way anymore. The rule that used to say 50-50 effectively becomes something else. Because it was cheaper at some point to restructure your idea of fairness, cheaper in an economic sense. It's cheaper, not not I know it's talking about the dollar, the 50% split of profits, but it's cheaper in an economic sense here for the mind to readjust what it thinks fairness is, than to carry those gaps along. You don't want to keep paying the guy 50, you know, 50%. And so you naturally learn to see it in a different way. And so that's where that is, I think. That that's where I've not I'm gonna have a different diagram to show you this more clearly. Pull it up. You're pointing, you're pointing at the right place.

Mark McGrath: 50:34

Okay, so let's switch gears to Because one of the things that I thought of as you were saying that was yin and yin and yang, that there's a there's a tug and a push and a pull or whatever. And also, too, what Boyd said that if you're waiting for equilibrium, you're dead. And there's no such thing. There's no such thing there's no such thing. And even if they're even if you could determine, you would never even know where equilibrium happened. Even if it was occurring, you would never know anyway. There's no way to know.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 51:02

Equilibrium is our is our idea of stability, I think, but it's not it's not real in the world of happening. Like when you're driving a car and you have the steering wheel in front of you, if you want to go straight, the last thing you're gonna do is set it straight and keep it there. You're gonna have to go to the left, you're gonna have to go to the right. There's no other way to go straight. There's no such thing as going straight in real life, right? You're always adjusting from side to side. And on average, if you look at it for a number of iterations, you might call that stability. It's like, oh, this was stable because look, it stayed there. But uh but ultimately the way things move forward, this is sort of counterintuitive, but the only way to really move forward is to go side to side. And we see that everywhere. In politics, of course, we have polarization. I mean, it's it's in everything we do. It's easy to see the world in that way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:00

So my kids are studying for their biology test, and they were looking at homostasias, and I said, Hey, do you know what allostasius is? And they said, No. And I said, it's stability through change, right? So that's what you just described. And so I think that's yeah, and what's fantastic about this again, you're a patent attorney, right? Coming up with this and going, hey, and you probably saw this in in in you see it in law. I gotta go to mute gear, apologize. I've just got uh I've got people working around me. Sorry about that. Okay.

Mark McGrath: 52:26

So just like again, it keeps coming back into my head. I I keep thinking like yin and yang again. I don't know why.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 52:33

Yin and yang is uh that's a great example of another map that sort of gets misunderstood exactly like that.

Mark McGrath: 52:38

Because understanding that Tao was actually a big influence on Boyd through Alan Watts' book, Dow in the Watercourse Way and Eastern Philosophy and Lao Tzu and all that was a massive influence on particularly in the later parts of his work, but but it even at the emergence of it at the beginning of it, with with Sun Tzu and other things, these things were present.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 52:57

Absolutely. And I the only thing I know about the Tao, I read a book about Weenie the Pooh and the Tao of Weenie the Pooh, what a call. I think it was a fantastic fantastic book. And that's all I know about the Tao, but I can tell you, so you said I could ascertain this stuff is completely aligned with that because we don't claim to be modeling the happening ever. So I just got Holy Spirit until we decide to, and then on purpose, we wrangle it with minimal interpretation. We do that in part three of the book, but that's very contained on purpose. Outside of that context, we're trying to make it useful, so we gotta add meaning to be able to handle it. But outside of that, the blue space is not a space that we see or we deal with. It's just like in the Tao.

Mark McGrath: 53:39

I have to I have to have a quick side note on this. You're an attorney, so you appreciate a sidebar. But when you say the Tao of Pooh, I got Holy Spirit chills, you know, one of my favorite courses at Marquette, uh, because you know, in the Jesuit system, you have to take a ton of upper division philosophy, was on Eastern philosophy. And the professor was a guy, Father John Nauss, who is a Jesuit, and he was a very famous professor at Marquette. They have a whole thing named after him now. Anyway, it was the hardest class that I ever took, and he promised, he says, very few of you are going to get above a C. But I promise you, for the rest of your life, you will never forget what it is that we talked about. And he's absolutely right. So the deeper I was getting into Boyd, especially when Chet drew out this epistemology, and it shows in the last installment of his thinking before he died, when he came up with the essence of winning and losing in the Oodaloop sketch, Eastern philosophy and other Eastern things like the Toyota production system and Kaizen and other things were so influential on Boyd, and it just kind of registered back to what Father Nausa told me that these things you're going to remember these the rest of your life because it would inform your own faith, whatever it is, and you know, in my case, Catholicism. He says it will inform your own faith as an augmentation. And then when you started going back through Boyd's primary sources, even in Patterns of Conflict, there's so much Eastern stuff that he has in there that just goes over people's head. But what's curious is how you see all these gurus, you know, listening to Alan Watts. There's two Alan Watts books that were actually influential to Boyd's seminal presentation briefing, Patterns of Conflict. So when you're hitting that, it just like there's an interdisciplinary connection amongst all of this that a patent attorney, Marine, and a naval aviation guy can all see this stuff clearly from their respective backgrounds because what it's pointing to ultimately is truth.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 55:35

That's a beautiful thing. That's a beautiful way to say it. And I do think there are many roads that can lead us here, right? So it's not just one. Um, and it's it's very nice to compare them and go, hey, how did you get here? What do you see from where you are? And this appreciation for individual minds with the idea that uh here, I'll show I'll show this to you guys. It's not that hard. I figured out how to do this. I'll show you on the on the on the on paper what this looks like. So the way we actually model this in the book is here's a human being for you as a process. And so the human being has a mind inside, that's where its meaning gets produced by it, and it's separated by a boundary from an outside of happening. But when you think about the human being as a process, the human being includes the inside and the outside. So we have happening producing our minds or helping us produce our minds.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 56:34

So let me add to this, if I may. So what what you're I think you're le uh leading us to is a fractal nature of this. So it's not just the human body or human, it's pretty much all living systems.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 56:48

We'll get there. If we if we had time, we'd get there. That's part two of the book, yes. All right, yes. And frankly, it's not even for living systems. I'll I'll give you just a little piece here. What we call a photon is our interpretation of an electron's behavior when it receives a wave. But it's not an actual thing. And so the types of things we're talking about, they apply not only to living systems, but in a different way to non-living systems, because they also respond and react in their way. It's not meaning the way you and I would consider meaning to be meaning, frankly, but they have an internal thing that we can't see. That's why we're like, oh, where did that come from? And they're also behaving. And because we mix happening, we because we just think we see happening, we can't distinguish happening from meaning. When we see the electrons behavior, we model it as a thing, like a particle, like a photon's in there somehow. Hey, Ponch.

Mark McGrath: 57:53

Ponch, can I ask? So when I look at that graphic right there with the red, the the gold band, the boundary, and the in the blue space, Ponch, you've you have that great sort of three-dimensional Uta sketch that you've put up on our on our site. That when I juxtapose those two, all I see when when Louise is showing us this, I see like a very simplified version of that to show the the reality between the cognitive space and the external space and the boundary between. So it's almost like, you know, people complain, oh, I would scratch it's too complicated, it's too many arrows, blah, blah, blah, blah. You you you reframe that, you simplified that by showing how this occurs in the mind, and there's the Markov blanket, the internal and the external. But if I was gonna, and if I was gonna just summarize that even further, it's it's this. We're our our orientation, everything we think, believe, everything that shapes all is happening in that red, which crosses out into the blue, which is the unfolding, the unfolding uh circumstances, the interaction with the environment, the outside information that crosses that boundary into that red space, into our orientation, which in turn shapes how we sense it, how we how we decide, how we test it, how we learn from it. That's what so when he was when Luis was showing me that originally, that's the that that sketch that you the way you framed Uda's sketch, it made me it it just brought me to that, that that's exactly what we're that's exactly what we're saying.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:34

Yeah, so there is a flow system here. So the basic foundations of a flow system are input and output. So that on that boundary, you already pointed out that we have something on the boundary that gives us access to the outside world or to the to the blue world. That is a basic flow sketch, right? That's that's what uh the constructal law is saying. The design of that is what Boyd put together, the minimum design of how to understand how living and non-living systems interact with their environment is what Boyd gave us, which includes I'll use um Lewis's words, maybe you get expectations, interpretation, paradox, um, and perspective. Or in Boyd's terms, or the way we look at it, you have perception, you have a flow state, which is implicit guides control, you have prediction, and you have planning. By the way, you have orientation, which is your internal model of the external world, and you can consider the whole everything inside that red space or inside Boyd Zoo loop as that internal model as well, right? And it's a fractal. So the only two states are observations and actions. So this is fundamentally in my mind the same thing that Boyd gave us without Boyd didn't explicitly put the boundary around that. It came from spinning, right?

Mark McGrath: 1:00:46

Yeah, but hold on, Luis. So and I and on top of that, Ponch, do you see what struck me when I first encountered this when Luis showed me this was that it's another way for us to help meet people where they're at, to teach them oodaloop in a different way, oodaloop sketch in a different way, authentically, without having to confuse them and confuse them. 100%.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:01:06

Because and this is what we do. And and when we do this, we talk about the external environment, and then we go, hey, we have this thing that separates. From that external environment, us, whatever, everything in the world. That's fundamental to the oodaloop. And that's what Boyd did not draw explicitly. He made it implicit. Spinny started to put it on there. We put it on there, and we put a boundary around it. Go, this is the oodle loop. Yeah. Look how, and this is this is what we're trying to get at is that creates a flow system that separates it, separates an agent from its environment, because you need some type of separation. But here's the kicker. There is no separation, right?

Mark McGrath: 1:01:39

Yeah. Yeah. Louise, this is we're we're gonna have to. I don't remember if the things I sent you. I don't know if I sent you Chuck Spinney's evolutionary epistemology of destruction and creation. I'm pretty sure I sent you destruction creation, but we could we could talk about that later because uh Chuck Spinney was Boyd's closest collaborator, and he's the one who actually helped him illustrate Oodaloop's sketch. And in this epistemology, what he does is he breaks down Boyd's core thesis of destruction creation and then showing Oodaloop's sketch as the uh you know, sort of the the map for it all and how it all works. But he did make the effort to actually draw the boundary that Boyd kind of alludes to. I mean, if you look at some of those original drawings, Ponch, I mean, we could infer that that Boyd probably did see a boundary there. But that's what we're that's what we're talking about.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:02:29

Let me uh let me see if I can if I can show you the closest thing I have to what you guys are talking about. But before I get there, so we started from chapter two, where we looked at the big diagram of the mind, but all of that would be contained in this red space here, right? Um as we go down, we start to appreciate that there are other minds, right, connected through this world of happening, but not directly. There's no meaning transferring between minds. What we transfer between minds is happening. We can produce a happening that then gets interpreted by another mind. They can produce a happening that we interpret, but we're never exchanging meaning. We're always having to interpret the happening. And they sit in parallel. We can see this diagram here that really shows the whole thing. Where you have the minds, the way it was showing that with the papers, right? You have the minds orthogonal to the blue space. And that's the arrangement we work with. Clarifying questions.

Mark McGrath: 1:03:31

So when I look at those red squares, that's one person, right? That's one, or is that one person, absolutely?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:03:38

Yeah. That's each one of us.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:03:40

So this I want to I want to add something. This is very important here. So your point about meaning. When we take surveys, we're putting a hypothesis in there. When we use a story and we try to have this, I'm talking about SenseMaker and the Kinevin framework now. We want to have the individual agent put meaning to their own interpretation of what happened, the happening. And that's what the difference is. And this is critical because what you're showing us aligns to what is the Kinevin framework and SenseMaker. And that is those individual agents understand meaning. I can't interpret your meaning because we don't share it, right? Absolutely. Okay.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:04:20

There is. But here's the trick from the inside, it doesn't look that way. Like the only reality we have access to directly that we can see is our red space, right? It's the meaning that we're producing. Because again, we define meaning as even perception. Like all of this stuff belongs to the category of meaning. So when you open your eyes in the morning, well, what you're seeing is your own inside, essentially. What you're dealing with directly is your own inside. But by dealing with your inside, you produce behavior outside. And that's how these things are connected, again, through light. And so the last thing I was going to show you was that connection, which is here. And we call this induction because it's an engineering term, I suppose.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:03

Boyd used it, to be fair. Boyd used it. He used induction and deduction in destruction creation.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:05:10

Okay.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:10

So that might be basically as analysis and synthesis, like breaking down and reassembling something.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:05:17

And so the the trick here to understand that how these things are coupled to really understand, for example, that we're not observing anything, we're interpreting it.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:29

Yeah, because you might look at the same thing and say, I don't see it.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:05:33

Absolutely. Absolutely. It happens all the time.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:36

Punch, didn't I tell you this guy was great? Like I knew I knew we I knew we'd get along with this because the parallel track is Yeah.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:05:46

We're not getting along because we share exactly this. It's just we're aligned in similar ways. Like the ways you guys are thinking about nature. I'm gonna challenge that. We're not aligned. We have harmony.

Mark McGrath: 1:05:55

We have harmony. We are harmonized, absolutely. We're harmonized, yeah. We also have we also have another Vaughn in our midst. You know, we have Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Bertel Anfi, and now we've got Luis von Pomgarden. We've got all these Vaughn. Another Vaughn. Yeah. Another Vaughn.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:06:10

So let me show you guys this figure four, just to show that sort of the connect slash disconnect between these two things. So as happening is taking place in the in this causation domain, let me see if I can make it a little bigger. You have cause states being transformed. And so on the other side, we have effect states, and so that's how we're representing a happening here. And then light will interact with this happening in some way, for example, reflect off the surface of something. Then it will reach us and it will reach our minds, and it will, but what is it it's not carrying any blue stuff with it, it's just carrying a signal. And then that signal becomes an induced cause state, which is not the same as the blue cause, is its own cause produced inside, right? After those chains of transformation, they go from the electron in your retina, whatever the first thing that touches the light, right? All the way through your cells and your nerves and to your brain being processed in there and then emerging into this abstract world of meaning. That cause that then you interpret is not the same cause as the blue cause because it's an induced cause. And so there's a lot of explanation in there, but that shows the disconnect, it shows that we're not observing the causation domain. We're interested in the city.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:07:38

We're interpreting the aligns with uh the free energy principle and active inference, which is the cause. And this goes back to Neil Seth and Andy Clark. It's the it's an interpretation of the cause in the blue space. That's all it is. It's not a one-for-one. Absolutely.

Speaker 2: 1:07:54

It's a really yeah, it's a good thing.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:07:55

It's a transformation. It's a transform, it's it's our own thing, really.

Mark McGrath: 1:07:59

Yeah.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:08:00

It's not it's not a good idea.

Mark McGrath: 1:08:01

It's our own cognitive operating system.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:08:04

Absolutely. And so, as far as what you guys were, what you were talking about just a minute ago, this is the diagram that I think is might be worth looking at, uh, which has to do with agency. At the end of part one of the book, we're covering the human side, and one of the things we wanted to leave people with was agency. And so that's the diagram that I think resonates with what you guys were saying earlier, which shows events. So happening is taking place as an event, that's your input. It gets induced, and transform the mind transforms that light signal into a reaction, some sort of meaning that's your reaction to that input. And then you end up responding to your own reaction, essentially. And then in response to that, you behave back in the blue space, and that's your action out. They also don't get to see it. You interpret it.

Mark McGrath: 1:09:05

I love the I love the fact that light is so heavily emphasized because when you think about it, everything is light. Like everything that you're interpreting that you're able to see. I guess it would depend on your faculties to have to have vision, but it's but even if I even if I couldn't see, everything that would be being described to me or whatever would would be because light existed and it could be interpreted, right?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:09:29

Right. Right. Ultimately, light is the boundary. They will get to you through a lot of things, a lot of happening, but to really get to you, we'll have to cross that light boundary.

Mark McGrath: 1:09:38

I mean, Ponch, uh hits me, it's like we say this all the time. We do not believe in pseudoscience. We believe in real science. And like how you're describing that through the physics of understanding light and everything else, that's that's legit.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:09:53

Like that's not that's that's not and we would say light is vibration and light is energy, so we're all saying the same thing. And geometry and all that.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:10:01

I think I think that where this work fits, Mark.

Mark McGrath: 1:10:03

Can I add a McLuhan angle? That's because that goes on, and then you know that we it's information. That's the medium is information. If you go and you read Understanding Media, he he emphasizes the importance of light and and the medium of the electric light as information that we've got to do. So I have a wrinkle there.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:10:27

I do have a wrinkle there that will uh so this orthogonal idea of blue and red space, by the way, applies absolutely everywhere, even when it comes to the idea of information.

Speaker 4: 1:10:38

Yeah.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:10:39

The way we treat information is we split information into two sides. There's the meaning side and there's the variation side. And they're orthogonal. When you get a signal, a radio signal, like think about the well, I don't want to come up with too complicated an example, but if you think back to like the Enigma machine, that had encryption. Let's just think about a simple um um so when when um let's let's switch from uh we're still gonna be using the light boundary, of course, between the ear and the mind, but let's just use sound just because it's easier. We're here talking to each other. When I say something to you, all I really do is I have an have an impulse, an idea to move my vocal cords, perhaps, my mouth, my tongue in a certain way, and I produce pressure waves. If you were in the same room with me, they would just reach you right away, right? They would reach your ears. When they reach your ears, light shoots up, you respond, right? You produce, I mean, you sort of invoke that light, right? You produce that light that shoots up your nervous system all the way to your brain and then to your mind. But that's the only part where meaning is attached to anything is once it gets into your mind. While light is progressing, not light, but while sound is progressing, ah, we're gonna have to cut this off. I'm so sorry I said it wrong. But while the air pressure wave is progressing towards you, there's no meaning in that. There's no sound in that, there's just variation happening. Yeah, you produce the sound, you produce your understanding of the sound and everything else that comes with it. And so when we think about information, when you get, for example, a light signal that's going up and down, your internal model has to then interpret that variation as meaning using something that perhaps you've agreed in advance to allow that communication to happen, right? Oh, if it goes up twice, I'll interpret this as a letter A. And that's the meaning I attribute to it. So if you just get a light signal without knowing how to interpret it, it doesn't mean anything to you.

Mark McGrath: 1:13:02

I got to go back on understanding media again and dig on that because even as you describe the interpretation of an A, that's a medium that's having an effect on me, my human faculties, and then I understand A as A and how it's pronounced, and then I read it linear or whatever. That's that's affecting me. Right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:13:20

So I'm gonna read something that we have in our briefs, and I get this from David Eagleman, and it goes like this it goes, uh, your sensory organs, your eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin act as interpreters. They interact with the outside world and detect a motley crew of information sources. These include photons, air compressions, waves, vibrations, molecular concentrations, pressure textures, temperature. And what they do is they translate them into a common currency, we'll call it the light or electrochemical signals, and that's what goes to the mind, or in this case, it goes to the brain, right? And it gets interpreted. It's not what is actually out there in the blue space. Yeah, 100%.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:13:57

That's the key. And we call that the blindfold, like we came up with a name for this. This is we're naturally blindfolded to this idea. We're never observing the outside. All we see is our own inside, and we take it to be the outside because it feels that way. And so what happens is imagine living in a world where actual causation is happening, but we live with our own interpretation of it, causality, maybe give it a different name. And we mistake the two all the time. We expect causality to be causation when they're different kinds of things, right? And so that's we even have a name for that because of how serious it is. I do have a chapter here just about light, but I don't think I have any diagrams here for you guys. But I'll tell you this: when we look at the boundary in this way and light in this way, we can solve even quantum paradoxes. Like, for instance, is light a wave or a particle? Like wave particle duality, right? We do have that. Is it a wave or is it a photon? In natural reality, the light that propagates across the boundary is a wave. But the behavior that certain processes display when they receive that signal in response to it is discrete behavior. And we call that behavior itself a photon. So by splitting the orthogonal domains, just like this one, we solve many of the quantum paradoxes. We solve in the sense that we reconcile them. We don't change the science. None of this will change the science, of course. If I drew a map that changed what we already know to be true, we could throw that map away, right? It's just not going to work. So the map is uh compatible with all of this, but it adds this extra dimension that has been missing from our lives, I think, from the beginning. But I wish I had a diagram to share with you guys. This is the same induction diagram I've already shown, just in a slightly different way.

Mark McGrath: 1:16:00

So we so to angle the Boyd aspect, how would you work in deduction? Because that's what that's what he did. Tell me a little more about about deduction. So so basically, the what he posits in destruction and creation is that it well ultimately what he comes up, which because part of the uh Udloop sketch and orientation, is the difference between analysis and synthesis. Analysis is the deduction, it's the breaking, it's the breaking down of things. Induction is the reassembling of components into something novel that didn't previously exist. What he's trying to do is help us understand the learning and creativity. Would you add any of that to that Ponch? No, you got it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:16:44

You got it.

Mark McGrath: 1:16:45

Yeah. And it goes back to this is this is why we say anybody that when we when we parallel with Boyd or when we when we and you heard you heard me say it on the on the on the uh uh debrief with John Becker, you have it to talk anything Boyd, you have to understand, not necessarily read, but you definitely have to understand what he's trying to get across in destruction and creation, because that's gonna be the the core kernel of everything that he's gonna build off of until his death, which finalizes with the essence of winning and losing an oodaloop sketch. And everything in between, it's all gonna continuously riff off of uh destruction and creation. It's it's essential. And I believe, and I'm sure Ponch could add some color to this. I really do believe that it clicks with everything that you're that you're talking about. I think that Boyd would like to have this conversation.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:17:38

I think we're heading that way. Let me uh make a quick stop at what I call general selection so we can look at another map that then we'll tie into all of this, I believe. Let me see here. So at one point, I was then describing nature, that's part two of the book, and I decided to describe change. And there are two kinds of change easy and hard. Easy change is what we call evolution, you're making small adjustments to things, right? Hard change is where the new stuff comes from, right? Like, how does that work? There are these two kinds of change, and we live with them. But one has been explained, I think, for at least 150 years, when Darwin did his natural selection work, that pretty much explained how select how an environment selects its entities. I don't think there's much dispute over what he described, but what was missing was where does novelty come from? Like evolution does not describe where novelty comes from. And so that's what this chapter was about. And we start from um mapping the idea of what we call general selection. We know that selection happens not only in biology, but in any space that's big enough to be considered natural, like an economic space will have selection happening there. Cultural spaces have selection happening there. It really applies everywhere. So we called it general selection, and we created this loop. One, two, three, four. One is interaction. Entities interact, processes interact. Two is variation that results from those interactions. So you accumulate, you have some variability. Three is the selection effect. It's not an affirmative selection. It's just what happens when you're better than everybody else. Like you've developed a trait that nobody else has that's advantageous. You've been selected in that way, right? Four is an accumulation of features, like the features that have been working, they accumulate. And then you interact again. Uh, so you interact, you vary, you select. It's a lot like an oodda loop in a way. Uh but this is on the paper, right? If you go around this loop, what you get is evolution. You don't get novelty from this. Where does novelty come from? So we got to keep going a little more and understand that even this thing that I drew here is a just like the oda loop, it's a model. We use it to make sense of change, but it's not what change is, it's just a useful map for doing stuff. Change is outside of us. This map that I just drew is at least right now inside, right? So let me see the next diagram. So this is the kind of change, and this is gonna look super technical. Actually, I just realized there's something missing in this paragraph. I gotta fix something here. But it's gonna look super technical, but this is the idea of a change that you change your relationship to the rules. Imagine back to the first diagram I showed you here one, two, three, four. That diagram works well if the rules never change. If everybody's always paying playing by the same rules.

Speaker 4: 1:21:12

Then you have this sort of predictable You just debunked game theory.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:21:19

Well, I don't I don't know what you're talking about, but but uh maybe who knows? So here there's some changes.

Mark McGrath: 1:21:25

Well you're presupposing that everybody's different, right? Like you're presupposing that everybody's perspective and orientation is different, so there's no way to aggregate them into one anomalous, you know, or one mass of of the same thing.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:21:39

Well, we can we can do it that way. There might be contexts where we want to do it that way. Like if you want to mark if you want to so um this is not I think what this work does is it helps us understand how things naturally work. So then we can use that knowledge to tweak them and to make things work better, not just to necessarily not just for the appreciation side, but as a practical tool for navigating the unknown, really. Um and so what this diagram shows is I'll just I think I know what matters here, which is if there's an interaction happening on this plane N, so there's a plane N and there's an interaction happening there, and this lambda arrow going down is a representation of decay. So decay is the incentive. Most change, which is this delta going up here, most change they either fight decay directly on the same plane, or they sometimes accelerate the decay, or sometimes they're decay agnostic, they're just neutral changes. Like they don't really change anything, you know, as far as decay goes, but they're all happening on that plane, the plane N. What this diagram shows is a change that's orthogonal to the plane where the interaction was happening with the rules that go with that interaction. When you move orthogonally from that plane, what you get is a different resistance to those rules. And we have a name for that, we call it incoherence, is a change in your impedance, your resistance to the application of the rule. And you start to pop off that page in this way. Remember earlier when I was telling you guys about the lemonade example, and you have that 50-50 rule that's causing you a lot of problems? Yeah, eventually that rule transforms into a different rule. And what we call that change in the rule application, which effectively creates a different rule, we call that incoherence. It's the the change in the resistance. And so when you look at the hard problem of change, everywhere you look, yes, the hard problem of change is where novelty comes from. It invariably comes from some process that figured out a different relationship to some rules that weren't there before. Right? So you guys have um let me show what this looks like. Mismatch.

Mark McGrath: 1:24:21

Right? Right, right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:24:23

But I don't think it is strategic game of interaction, isolation, the features of the world, flow states, yeah.

Mark McGrath: 1:24:28

Everything's right here. Everything's right here.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:24:31

So we're adding a dimension to the way we think about the universe. We used we usually think about the universe as space and time. But in our work, um, this comes later in the books, not in the beginning, but we reinterpret space and time to show that they're useful concepts, but they're meaning, they're not happening. And what we do here is we add an axis that shows the closest thing that we can. Well, of course, we can't see happening. We already established that. But with minimal interpretation, what's what could be taking place in the world of happening? And so we add this causation axis, which adds a third dimension to what we saw before. And one, two, three, four, that's still the same loop. But now you see the different colors. What those colors show is different rules. The rules they start to change as you go along. You emerge, right? And what that does is it gives you the spiral that we're usually looking for. I'm not going to go through the math of orthogonality. I don't think that makes sense. But this is Oiler. As a historian, I say things. This is my life is fifth grade math. That's what I do with my team. I'll do that all day, but maybe not this. But this shows in the, you know, so Euler was a genius, but his genius was recognized in his life because his solution to the problems he was dealing with dealt with orthogonality. Essentially, in the world of math, at some point, this is not an accurate historical version of the story, it's just my story, okay? But at some point, we mathematicians were faced with the idea that we couldn't find the square root of a negative number. There's no number that once you multiply it by itself, will then produce another negative number. And so you can't find the square root of minus one, for example. It's not it's not in the world of real numbers. What Euler did, he created another dimension. He saw a different domain, called that an imaginary domain, and started working with it. And so what he did was he created a real plane and he didn't create this, but he modeled, I guess, a real plane and imaginary plane, and he said the square root of minus one, we're gonna call that the letter I. We're gonna say it's an imaginary number, and then we're gonna see what happens. And he solved so many problems that way. All you know, the like the idea using complex numbers is not just math. It's in telecom, it's everywhere. Like we can't do much in terms of radio communications or any communications really, without dealing with these math concepts. And it came from the idea of orthogonality. And what you get from having these two planes is as your impedance to let's look at this figure 24. You can see that same loop, one, two, three, four, going, emerging, coming up and off the page along an axis we can't naturally see. So, Ponch, what are you Luis?

Mark McGrath: 1:27:46

Go back to the original to get us to this, go back to the first one where you show the loop. No, no, no. Yeah, okay, okay. So, Ponch, what Luis just walked us through. This is what I see. I see Boyd at the early start talking at UDA and patterns of conflict about getting inside someone's Orient Decide and Act loop without expanding about orientation, which comes later. Then go to your next graphic that you had this with the causation. You're adding another dimension down further. Like you're, you're, you're, you're going down. Okay, and right there, and then you're showing those other colors. And what you're showing is it's not just a simple circular loop, that there's actually layers and complexities to it that go beyond the original description. Just like with Boyd, he evolved the same exact way. He's talking, he's not drawing. He's talking about UDA as getting inside someone's observe orient decide and act loop. And what it evolves to is the Oda loop sketch, which then turns into your next thing, which is taking in causation time space layers. Like it's it's it's dealing with the actual that we go back. I'll go back to go back to that. So the other one, when you had the real plane and the imaginary plane, right? The real plane is that blue space in the external world, the imaginary plane. That's what I have, because I only have it, and that's envisioned my controlled hallucination inside my orientation, my interpretation, which then brings me to your last thing, which is akin to like what he was leaving us with before he died, to build on this. So now we're not looking at it as a one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, one two, three, four, one, two, three, four. We're looking at it a complex understanding of what actually happens across time space and causation in the cognitive space and in the external reality that has that very clear boundary between the two. That's the next iteration of Udaloop's sketch where Spinny and Ponch has shown, where there's a Markov blanket from the internal to the external Ponch. Did I just follow that the way?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:29:46

No, you got it. I'd say the only thing I have in here is the conceptual spiral is not it's just like it's drawn right here. It's the slinky analogy that blue uh Lou Hayes talks about.

unknown: 1:29:57

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:29:58

Yeah. So yes, right.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:30:00

And so where the blindfold comes in is a a natural.

Mark McGrath: 1:30:04

But just but just but just back to back to this. So this is where this is where people I think really F up Boyd is that they stop at that first interpretation and they don't consider these things that you've just you've just explained. They left one perspective. They didn't bring in Euler, they didn't bring in causation, they didn't bring in multi-layered dimensions, they didn't bring in evolution. Boyd did. Boyd actually did. You go through all his. I'll look up Euler really quick because I'm sure it's in there. Boyd actually did and brings us to Ouda Loop's sketch, which is basically a multidimensional understanding of the complexities that our orientations interact with in the real world as circumstances unfold.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:30:46

And so one of the one of the interesting things is exactly what you were saying. When when we look at the OODA loop or at this general selection loop from the top of these stacked boxes, which is our natural way of seeing things, we see a loop. We see a sequential thing that doesn't really go anywhere. To really see where novelty comes from, where new rules appear and people start behaving differently, and now we're going, now we're inventing. You have to take into account make space for a world we don't usually have to, we don't usually care about, which is the world of happening. And so you have to almost see it sideways. You can't see it from the top. Like when I have the piece of paper, remember the piece of paper around my thing, that's the flat loop in front of me. The rest of the loop that you guys are talking about, the reason why I don't see it is because it's like this behind it. Yeah. Right? It's the causation axis, it goes in a different direction.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:31:47

Gosh, man, there's so many other connections here. Just on the Euler number, we were looking at something from Robert Ever Grant. I can't remember if it's the uh uh complex numbers to the power, but uh uh in the last couple weeks, they they really worked out the fine structure constant. I'm I'm just throwing this out there for our listeners. We have episodes on these, we talk about it for harmonics inside of the market and other places. So this is popping up. I think this is what this will evolve into is that uh blue space. And we get into the we call it it's called the platonic space or whatever it is right now, where this geometry that's actually driving a lot of behaviors within our universe. And it's it's freaking mind-blowing. I get it, but that's what what I'm interpreting from all this is we're not looking at this right. We can't, right? We cannot experience this. But that's I think that's why we're here, you know, to kind of figure this stuff out. Yeah.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:32:41

Absolutely. Let me see if there's more here. So one thing I wanted to point out to you guys, which I think will dial in the idea of orientation as everything. Hey, can you do that in my way of it?

Mark McGrath: 1:32:52

Louise, before before you do that, though, just to keep augmenting because our our listeners are gonna be relating this to what pawn shot. Can you can you stop share for a second so I could just show one screen? Because this I want you to see this. This is this is from our friend Chet Richards, who I think would really be enjoying this conversation right now. But this is basically Boyd's uh epistemology of his discourse that goes from, say, 76, our birth year, um, all the way up to his death when he came up with the essence of winning and losing. It like as as you were describing that development from the circular loop from time and space, and then introducing causation and then the the you know, the real and the imaginary plane, et cetera. And then you got back to that last image. I mean, I feel like that tracks to this, that the more, the more that he dug on hundreds of like articles, you know, over a thousand books that are that are in the archives that that of going on this, you can see that he kept building off of that original flat 2D thing. And Ponch, we could even say, like, when he with the theory, when the when the Top Gun guys said, hey, don't forget it's a complex adaptive system. There's a pilot in the cockpit, right? Like it's just it's constantly building and taking a different shape to deal with a complex reality of multi-dimensions, not flat linear time and space. So when you look at this, like you see uh right in the second part operating inside oodaloops, he just talks about it. He doesn't draw it, but then he goes further and he's getting into theory of evolution and neuroscience and genetics and complexity and dissipative structures and da-da-da-da-da. And then the Eastern philosophy, and then he winds up with something that really lines up to what you just showed in a completely different way. It's like coming at the same conclusion from a completely different, like is an engineer patent attorney would versus a fighter pilot that had a degree in engineering and uh economics.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:34:50

Would you add anything to that? No, just go back to how we started this conversation earlier on in the conversation where I showed the evolution of the sketch and how he said once we had all of these things that you're showing through the green book, through his briefs, he was he then goes, now we can finally sketch this thing, and here's what it looks like, here's what I think it looks like, right?

Mark McGrath: 1:35:08

And here's where we submarine and cruise missile the linear Oodaloop BS to show you that if you're operating on that, you are so far behind because what Luis just described and what Boyd did over the course of his work is so far beyond a little tactical thing right in your immediate environment.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:35:27

Yeah, yeah. This is deep, really deep stuff.

Mark McGrath: 1:35:29

But excessive. So, all right, go back. You can share now. Sorry.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:35:32

One thing that I think relates very well to your mission of explaining to people that orientation is such a big deal that we can see from this diagram, I'm gonna share it again if that's eyes on this. Is the way I described general selection in this diagram, quick recap, it's interaction is one, and then variation, then selection, and then accumulation, then it loops again. But when you really think about it, in the world of happening, there's not one, two, three, and four. They're all happening at this at once, right? And when you think about what the happening is, it's really just one. It's the interaction. The variability is our interpretation of a consequence of the interaction. Three, which is selection, is just an effect in the presence of decay. Whatever can beat decay more will last longer, so we have that selection effect. It's really just an interpretation again. And number four is an accumulation. We're just making an observation in our world so that these things accumulate. And so when you think about the meat of this, it's really just one step, it's just the interaction. Everything else is sense making that helps us understand what might be going on outside, but it's not what's going on outside. And I think that ties very well in some ways to the idea that orientation really is everything. That's it's one thing. But when we see all these boxes and we go around the loop, we can make better sense of what we're doing. So this is just a different way to describe intelligence in a way.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:37:14

Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. And that's how I explained the Oodaloop to my my wife this morning, is she goes, it's just how natural intelligence emerges. And I'm like, yeah. And she's like, why don't you explain it to people that way then? I'm like, okay.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:37:30

Well, there's subtleties. There are subtleties. When you explain, so when you explain your idea to somebody, I just talked to Ed about this the other day. Because your red space is where your ideas are, when you send me a signal, guess what's not in that signal? Your idea. The idea is not in the signal at all. So I have to figure out where your idea might be from my own thing, right? Which harmonized hopefully harmonized, but not always. And sometimes it's good to not have harmony everywhere. Sometimes there's something to be said about that. Where where are the where's the conflict gonna come from that we can grow out of? So there's something to be said. I think things are the way they are, they work this way. But the truth is, I think the uh the the the similarities between just drawing maps, whether we're talking about the yin, yang, ouda, or this general selection, or how the mind works, ultimately we always are faced with this map territory distinction that's hard for people to make.

Mark McGrath: 1:38:37

It's McClure figure and ground, you know, people focused on the figure and missing the ground.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:38:43

The idea that we can get to the edge of our minds, the idea that the mind has an edge, you can get to it, and then you don't know what's outside of it. I think that idea must have been around for a while. We just didn't know how to move from it. And so this work is a suggestion of how to model um from there. Let me see, where do I have this map? I have another map for you. This was more, this was more fun to draw.

Mark McGrath: 1:39:13

Well, you're doing a great job of you know perpetuating what Ponch and I put forward all the time. If you're if you're listening to No Way Out and you're reading the World of Reorientation, this is a school for leaders and operators. It's not a it's it's not entertainment. Not that we're not entertaining, because I think that we're No, absolutely.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:39:29

And I see it that way too. We look like clowns.

Mark McGrath: 1:39:32

Yeah, that's for sure. Well, I I mean this is definitely an episode where I would encourage people who are gonna want to watch the YouTube uh and and not not merely not merely listen because follow along in Louise's work on the site because it is it is very i I think it augments and reinforces what it is that we teach.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:39:49

Yeah, this is pretty advanced boyd too. Let's start there. Uh if you if this is your first episode jumping in here, you're gonna be gone. You're gonna be lost. Yeah. So you need this is this is big boy boyd, right? Yeah. Yeah this is good stuff.

Mark McGrath: 1:40:02

Well, this is the boy, this is the boy that if you know and understand and your competitors don't, you're certain to win. You're not gonna you're not gonna be wanting for for victory, right? I mean, you don't want you don't want your competitors learning this before you do, let's put it that way.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:40:17

Well, and so what I was alluding to earlier was the problem of getting to the edge of the mind, I think has been known just just not handled because you really got to sit with that problem for a long time, I think, to make headway. But it's illustrated here, and on the left side, we have this red space where a person is sort of living their lives. I'm not going to explain everything as we says right now, but that's your mind, right? It's on the left. And so, how do we start to explore the blue space of happening, the space outside? I think first of all, categorizing it as where happening occurs is a big step. And being orthogonal to what's inside or the transformation in between is a big step. But ultimately, you have to get out, you have to model what it would be like to get out of your mind with minimal meaning, just minimal interpretation of things. Don't add too Much color, don't add too much human stuff. Just what's our best guess of what is happening here? And so we look at the physical space what we call the physical space, which is not blue. By the time we call a space physical, that's not the world of happening anymore. That's somewhere between blue and red, it's a purple space. Because we already added meaning to the happening. We're saying it's physical. But looking at the physical world gives us very good clues as to what's happening. We don't have much else to go off of at that layer.

Mark McGrath: 1:41:45

Well, when you say, when you say, like, I mean, basically what I just heard you say is you can't wait around for perfect because you, as Boyd told us in Destruction Creation, because of the nature of entropy, incompleteness, and uncertainty, waiting around for perfect is a fool's errand. You can't do that. Don't don't wait for perfect. It's not coming.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:42:03

Right. You're stopping your own show, I think, when you do stuff like that. You just have to start doing and getting better at it.

Mark McGrath: 1:42:08

So do and reorient. Do and reorient. Destroy and create. Absolutely. Destroy and create. Yeah.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:42:12

Yeah. So happening and meaning, they seem like these, I mean, they do work together all the time, right? Meaning gets transformed into happening. Yeah. And happening gets transformed into meaning. And we, you and I, we're all vehicles for this process. So we are the living transforms that take happening into meaning inside and then give back some more happening as this thing progresses. So it's an interesting idea. It's an interesting idea to deal with the unknown head on. Like we really don't know what it is, and we're going to handle it that way.

Mark McGrath: 1:42:48

Well, see, what you just said what you just said is what so many people completely disregard. And that's the point that Boyd was trying to make. There's no such thing as certainty. And then if you're operating on that, if you think that that map is perfect and you're not constantly revising and updating your models, you're going to get hosed. You're going to become obsolete or irrelevant. Right.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:43:08

And so the problem is maps are very, very incredibly useful, as we know. But the understanding of the map is also important. What can it do? What is it doing? What does it cover? What does it not not cover? I'll give you an example. Paradoxes come from not making this distinction. May I show you one? Sure. I'll show you one here. Another diagram since you guys have been so kind to spend all this time with me, and that's been so nice. Thank you.

Mark McGrath: 1:43:36

Well, you're adding a lot of value to the to the story, and you're helping us uh develop these ideas. You're giving us other ways to frame it because like some of these things are really I can think of people I want to go back and show. I want to say, hey, I know you say you didn't understand what I was talking about. Look at this. They're gonna be like, oh, yeah, I get it.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:43:53

Right. Well, thank you for saying that. That was my hope, too, that maybe there would be something that you guys could use here, and something I could use from you guys, of course. But let me show you how paradox how where paradoxes live and where they come from in one swoop. So what we're looking at is a scenario where a person is in their minds, right? They're red space, and they have this rule, this reasoning in them, this rule of reasoning that says to them, and based on their experience, everything that goes up must come down. So they live their lives that way. They see they see apples falling from the tree, they see things jumping and falling back down. And so that reasoning always works for them until one day they look up at the sun and they realize hold on, the sun's been there since yesterday. The sun's not falling down. What's going on? And that's their paradox. So they can't reconcile how come the sun is up in the sky if everything that goes up must come down. That's just the rule they have inside. It's a simple rule. It's not what we know to be gravity today. But we all have to start somewhere, and that's the reasoning they have. So, what this diagram shows is the causation domain or blue space, this world of happening, you have that circle number one, and what that represents is a happening. It's a happening where the sun is up in the sky. Number two, still in the blue space, is another happening, let's call it a subsequent happening, where the sun is still up in the sky. And so, how does our person, our observ as quote unquote observer, see any of this? They they see from inside their minds this yellow dotted line, which is light. It doesn't actually cross the boundary, but that was just the way I found to show where things were going. But light hits the boundary, and then in response to that light, you produce an interpretation A. That interpretation, that meaning could be, for instance, the visual image that you get when you look up at the sky. So up until now, blue and red are perfectly okay. You have a sun up in the sky in item one, and you have the meaning of the sun's up in the sky in A. But the person's mind applies the reasoning. Well, if the sun's up there, it should be coming down, which leads to C. Meaning, C is the idea that the sun shouldn't be up there, it should have come down. But what they get otherwise is they look up at the sky and they see their interpretation of event number two, which is not that the sun fell down, is B. Is the sun still up in the sky? So they expect C because of their reasoning, but what they what they see is B, and in that gap lives the paradox. So a lot of times, yeah, it's the mismatch between their because the reasoning is not the it's not the happening, right? It's not the rule.

Mark McGrath: 1:47:10

Let me like that the chessboard thing punch that you show with the case. Yeah, yeah, it's the um yeah, it's the uh what I expect to see versus what I actually checkerboard.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:47:20

So let me throw something at you. So the expectations that you brought up there, uh the pathway that is within the Oodaloop, we it's a simulation pathway or planning or course of action or whatever you want to call it. But it is its purpose when you align it to the free energy principle, is about expected free energy, what you expect in the future. It's about minimizing risk, right? So uh it's a it's a projection forward of what I think needs to happen. It's not an action on the external world to confirm it yet. So when we talk about risk inside the OODA loop, we don't need to add risk explicitly. It's already it's embedded in there. We and that's what this is this way I'm interpreting this is that reasoning that leads to C, if I'm getting if I remember this correctly, is expected. We call it expected free energy. All right. So the alignment again is is very again, if I'm getting that correctly, the alignment between what you're saying, what expected free energy and the free energy principle and what Boyd has, they're spot on.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:48:22

I mean, it's it's a way What I'm understanding from what you said about the free energy principle is essentially we're gonna do, I mean, we're gonna do what leads to the easiest, not the easiest, but the most economical thing, which in the beginning, before a conflict appears, is to use the reasoning you already have inside of you, the rules you've learned about how things work. And so you start from there. Yeah, that's the easiest energy.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:48:47

So that's a so the worry updating the orientation is actually the hard thing, right? Absolutely. So updating that requires energy, which means if I'm gonna allow new information to come in, I'm gonna have my paradigms um uh shattered, right? And that's that's a hard, that's an ego thing, too. I don't want to learn something new because that means I wasted all my 30 years of my life learning, you know, whatever, 40 years of my life learning something that isn't true.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:49:14

So I'll tell you, I'll tell you something. I I think they relate, but in complementary ways. You know, years ago, the first letter I wrote to the kids, as I was telling you guys, was a letter about happiness. And what I wanted to do, what I set out to do was to explain to the kids how to be happy, come up with a formula for happiness so that they can use it. And then, of course, you start dealing with the pursuit of happiness and start to think a lot about it. We realize I don't even know what happiness is. Like I don't know how to model this thing. But what I did in that letter to them was I went sideways, and instead of talking about happiness, I talked to them about unhappiness, which is a way to manage your space. If you can only be happy or unhappy in that model, but you can manage your unhappiness, then now you have all this room for happy stuff to happen, whatever that is. You don't need to know what it is. You just manage the bad stuff, right? And I think when you talk about free energy principle, you're looking at I'm being pulled towards where I'll have more energy, perhaps.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:50:19

Whereas no, no, it's it's more about don't think of it like that. It's it's more about entropic states, right? So we're trying to minimize free energy, minimize surprise, minimize mismatches, right? So we want to close the gap between what's expected and what we what are we sensing.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:50:37

Right. And so, but here in this case, the push to emerge is by the accumulation of the conflict inside. It's not necessarily it's it's um which I think gets to the same thing, but in a sort of a backdoor kind of way, just like the happiness thing. So what we're saying is so the person accumulated, created this paradox inside where they can't reconcile C and B. And so what happens there? Well, it depends. If they are attached to this issue for some reason, they feel strongly about it, they might go look for answers, they might resolve the paradox in some way. If they're not attached to it, they don't care, then they'll just live with, like it just won't matter to them. But the more it matters to the mind, to the person, and the more it accumulates, the more pressure it builds, just like a pressure cooker, for that reasoning to grow. Like it's gotta go somewhere. So you see, it's like we're talking about pushing and pull, is about the feeling I'm getting. Is it are we pushing or are we pulling? But ultimately, that's kind of how we're moving. It's like half empty or half full kind of thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:51:42

Is that is that no, that's it. So so the the simple way to think about it is you update your internal, you update the mind or you change the external world.

unknown: 1:51:50

Right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:51:51

That's the same thing. Right, absolutely.

Speaker 4: 1:51:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:51:55

I want to uh we we gotta we're coming up too close to time here. I want to share something before we do, if you don't mind. And it's kind of uh and I'm sorry to we'll definitely have to. Yeah, so I'm gonna what I'm gonna do is share something. That's right. Okay. I'm gonna just share something that goes back to something hopefully I got it right here. So this is uh Boyd's early sketch. And where he's going with this, and Moose, I think uh I got this interpretation right. It produces orientation, mismatches, analysis synthesis, reorientation, mismatches, analysis synthesis, continues and continues. And this produces a change in reality and novelty, right? Exactly what you just said earlier. So this is I can't remember if this is like early 90s when he sketched this or drew this up, but this is what late 80s, early 90s per chat.

Speaker 2: 1:52:46

Yeah. So this is I I just want to share that. Go back to that really quick, Ponch. Sorry. Go back to that really quick. One second.

Mark McGrath: 1:52:54

And you know, for the people watching, and you know, for Louise, I mean, this is Ponch and I have sifted through a shitload of Boyd sketches, and there's a ton of them in the archives, and they're they're all trending towards what becomes Oodaloop's sketch, but his thought, like that's going into it, like his arguing with himself, it's all over these these pages. When I saw this, it it's like that Instagram I sent you last night. I can't get out of my head, you know, as within, so without, right? Which produces it goes up to started from the top.

Speaker 4: 1:53:29

Like, what is he saying above that? Yeah, there we go.

Mark McGrath: 1:53:34

R can be, which leads to Oudaloop's sketch, which produces, right? Then it flows down, right? Which produces changing reality and novelty.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:53:47

Yeah.

unknown: 1:53:48

Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:53:48

So all all this is the evolution again where he starts at the beginning and he goes, Hey, I gotta look at DNC, patterns of conflict, organic design for command and control. The strategic game of isolation, interaction, isolation. That's what you brought up with the circles, right? Yep. Right. And that's his evolution of this into hey, I can actually draw this thing now that I know this shit that that I've looked at over the last 20 plus 30 years, and here's what I think it is, here's where we're going with it, and this is what we have to do. And then later on, he he and Chet and Chuck Spinney end up uh creating the loop.

Mark McGrath: 1:54:22

So P I C W up top, that was the one of the ones that we were stumped on. I mean, we have that uh right there. So so one and two, right? You have yeah, that's the one that has been bothering us. Uh even Chet and Chuck, we couldn't figure that one out. So then like the internal, external, right? Like the I and the E. I and the T or the I and the E? I and E, like internal, internal, external, external. Yeah.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:54:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So all that is pretty early on, and it is there's no key to it, but that we know of. And then what is its uh it wasn't Grand Strategy. It was uh Yeah, I think it is GS. Yeah. Yeah, it is, yeah, yeah. Grand Strategy from TSG, which is the strategic game. Hey, throw this out to your audience.

Mark McGrath: 1:55:06

The PICW is something that's one of the acronyms that we were stuck on. Yeah. And even his closest people that still work with us, you know, and we we have the blessing of collaborating with. We that's one of the ones that we've been trying to crack. So if anybody can think of it, let us know. PICW. Louise, maybe you know.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:55:22

Maybe you I'll have a look. I'll have a look. But one thing I wanted to say was that the end of his notes is beautiful because what you see at the end is an expression of nature. Like nature, it works exactly in that way. You can see the spiral in his writing, the construction, deconstruction of things, destruction of things. And it's happening everywhere all the time, in our minds, all around us. It really is the only show in town. It's this emergence thing. And everybody is trying to come up with better rules to to do things by, to come up with the worlds that they want to be in.

Mark McGrath: 1:55:54

I will say, like, you're subject to this stuff, and it's happening whether you care or not. So the better you understand it, then the better that you can you can use it to your advantage. You can leverage the advantages that are afforded to you by this versus versus getting getting clobbered by someone that does understand it. So Right.

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:56:11

And you can potentially calculate some of these things because if you look at emergence as an accumulation of strain, then you can come up with models for measuring and accounting for internal strain, which will then will give you some good indications of where the emergence could be happening. So there are going to be useful things from this beyond just an appreciation of nature. Like I think it's actually pretty practical in a different way. It might be a little different than what you guys are dealing with, but that's what I've been working on.

Mark McGrath: 1:56:41

We're going to have to pause because this is clearly the first of several more discussions around this. We're going to make sure that everybody gets a copy. You know, first of all, that we direct them to all the stuff because you've put everything online. And I would encourage people, we talk about using Google Notebook LM to create your own, your own kind of classes to put Louise's stuff in there and have a have a conversation with the work that he's done. Um, because there's a lot of uh there's a lot of harmony and alignment to the things that we've been teaching everybody here on No Way Out at the World of Reorientation. And also, too, I might add our our professional work, advising leaders and operators across different different disciplines that we do professionally through our business AGLX. So, Luis, we want to give you the final word. Thank you so much for for coming, and we'll let you uh we'll let you end it here for us. What do you got?

Luiz von Paumgartten: 1:57:27

Thank thank you guys very much. It's very nice to meet people that think about these things. So I worked on this project for about eight years so far, and the whole time it was just inside. Like I wasn't really trying to meet people to talk about these things. Um and so it was nice to come out here and discover that, hey, there are other people on similar journeys doing the same sorts of things. It's just a beautiful way to share. Yeah. So thank you guys.

Mark McGrath: 1:57:51

And special thanks to Ed Brenegar, our friend, who uh got us connected with Luis. Once again, he's done a very uh very adept job of uh connecting us with uh really brilliant minds to help get mutual benefit from each other's works. Thanks to uh coming on, Louise, and thanks for everybody for uh tuning in to No Way Out.

Speaker 2: 1:58:09

Thank you.