I was both grateful and curious this morning to listen to Liv Boeree, a World Champion Poker player and a philanthropist and advocate of Effective Altruism, in conversation on her podcast Win-Win with Txana Tuwe, spiritual leader of the Huni Kuin tribe from the Brazilian Amazon rainforest, and who’s worked for many years to share indigenous culture and wisdom globally.
It’s a thoughtful interview in which two intelligent, caring people both acting in good faith but coming from wildly different cultural perspectives seek to bridge the gap between indigenous and Western cultures and priorities.
Now I’m going to begin with the obvious caveat here which is that I’m a British white woman with no direct knowledge or understanding of indigenous cultures, so I’m not going to claim any great expertise in this subject. But thanks to various friends, colleagues and brilliant books I’ve read, I’ve gained some understanding of just how much we can learn from indigenous and contemplative beliefs and cultures, and I’ve seen where some of the most significant tensions lie; and having seen some of them thrown into relief in this interview, I wanted to share my own reflections on it.
The first thing that struck me is that actually, a well-known member of the rationalist community inviting a spiritual leader from an indigenous community into conversation on a large public platform is an act of some bravery. This was particularly obvious from reading the comments, some of which were very supportive, but some of which were downright hostile, including one which started “what the fuck, Liv”. They urged her to “stick to interviewing AI governance/safety/macrostrategy experts” and to focus on “where the weightiest moral risks point to” rather than “interviewing for the cheap silly reason of not wanting to look narrow”.
For the rationalist community, who tend to prize evidence, scientific and probabilistic reasoning, and clear logic, giving airtime to figures who are directly advocating for spiritual and indigenous ways of knowing is clearly a departure from the norm, to put it mildly. The epistemic fundamentals of rationalism assume that beliefs should be grounded in evidence, and many indigenous cultures treat inherited knowledge, spiritual experience, relationship to place and communal practice as core sources of truth and understanding; an entirely different epistemological grounding. I’ve been in plenty of conversations with rationalists where claims from religious, spiritual or esoteric directions are shut down, dismissed or ridiculed.
What’s interesting to me is why these claims are perceived as such a threat, when at the same time, the rationalist community also prides itself on intellectual openness. This is where I’m impressed by Liv Boeree’s willingness to be open to these alternative forms of knowing, and to the potential that in order to uncover the truth we might also need to acknowledge the limits of what rationalism can offer.
I was particularly struck by her openness in the podcast as she grappled with this paradox. In a discussion about the power of plants with powerful psychedelic properties such as Ayahuasca (which contains DMT, generally understood to be the world’s strongest psychedelic) and their role and significance in indigenous communities, Liv reflects:
“You talk about how people can learn from the water, they can learn from the birds. It’s funny because from my experiences, I agree you can use these medicines as a technology to talk to them. At the same time, the Western mind cannot comprehend this. I still don’t fully quite see how that could be, but I think for most people watching this, they would just be like wait, what, you can talk to the trees? You can talk to the water?”
There’s quite a few different things going on here. She’s acknowledging that her model of how the world works comes from a Western perspective and mindset, and that this frame is insufficient to hold a completely different epistemology and cosmology. But she’s not rejecting what she’s hearing simply because it doesn’t cohere. I think it’s interesting that part of the reason she doesn’t reject this is because it’s not just that someone else is telling her about it, but that she’s experienced it directly. It’s easy to simply dismiss a claim as ridiculous if it simply rests on the testimony of another person; it’s harder to do that when you’ve seen it for yourself.
So rather than collapsing into one side or the other, she holds the paradox, and does so in a spirit of openness and curiosity.
I’ve written before about the importance of being able to tolerate ambiguity in navigating complexity, and of practices such as discernment in being able to hold apparent paradox long enough for the sense to emerge. One of the things that this requires is enough of a sense of security and safety to not feel the need to assert that one way of seeing things is “right” and another is “wrong”. This is a very different skillset and capability to intelligence, analytic capacity and reasoning; instead it’s more about emotional regulation, attunement and relational holding. We need both; but it’s worth noticing that the first set of capabilities have typically been associated with public dialogue and debate, and the second with intimate, caregiving or cooperative settings, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to notice the coding of the first as male, and the second as female.
This isn’t specifically about gender, though; it’s more that any capacity coded as intuitive, relational or attuned has tended to be excluded from the spaces where we do the most serious public reasoning. We find ourselves in a cage of our own making, where the capabilities that might allow for more epistemic openness are excluded from the conversation. I find this both interesting and deeply ironic, but I’m also hopeful that the steps that we need to take to cultivate safety and to be open to alternative perspectives aren’t as huge as they might seem to be.
There was another part of the discussion that really stuck out to me as two people talking at cross purposes, however, and in this case not necessarily realising that they were. In this case the misunderstanding was ontological, which is to say, how they were understanding what actually exists, and how those things relate to each other.
The parts of the conversation I’m thinking of were when they were talking about ‘medicine’. Early on, Txana Tuwe referred to Ayahuasca, a powerful plant medicine that allows people to “enter into the consciousness of nature”. Liv responded to this by reflecting on her own experiences of the transformative power of Ayahuasca, describing how it helped her connect and communicate with nature, or “the spirit of Mother Earth herself”.
So far, so good, and they are more or less on the same page, but somewhere along the line their point diverges. It becomes apparent that Liv thinks of medicine in a Western way: if we are unwell, then we take some medicine, and then we get better. These are all separate entities or states, and medicine is a distinct “thing” that exists separately to other things, and these things relate in specific ways - there is a cause and effect, where taking medicine leads to better health.
So it’s not surprising that Liv reflects on the potential benefit of people being able to use ‘medicine’ to appreciate this deep interconnectivity of all things. She asks, “what are the ways in which we can access these medicines?” - as if it were a question of finding somewhere to access the pills (albeit in the case of Ayahuasca, we’re talking of course about a very powerful, potentially dangerous and rare set of compounds).
But many indigenous ontologies, including that of the Huni Kuin tribe, have a very different ontology, and this isn’t the way that they understand the interrelationship between objects and people. The clues are there in how Txana Tuwe talks about it. He says that “one of the ways for us to preserve our ancestry and the spirit of our ancestors is to connect with the medicines”, and then that “we prepare it and use it to connect with the ancestors.” From a quick reading, these might seem like they’re saying the same thing. On a closer inspection, the grammatical logic is doing something different. In the first, the connection is with the medicine; this as an act allows for the preservation of ancestry. In the second, the use of the medicine allows them to connect with the ancestors. To a Western eye, this looks illogical; we assume that we should be able to clearly separate cause and effect, and we might dismiss it as imprecision.
But actually what Txana Tuwe is showing is that in his worldview, these things aren’t separable. Cause and effect doesn’t work in the same way, because these aren’t separate, bounded things that a sequence can be constructed from. The medicine is not a separate thing; neither are the ancestors.
While the Western ontology starts from the premise that objects exist, as separate entities, and that relationships then arise as a secondary product of these entities, the indigenous ontology is relational. The relationships are the fundamental thing; the entities arise from these relations.
As such, medicine and ancestor aren’t two separate things that are joined together by a practice. The practice is the fundamental thing, and medicine and ancestor are patterns that emerge consistently throughout.
While it might seem on the face of it an impossible metaphysical claim, Txana Tuwe states this directly: he says “medicines are our ancestors. They were once people. Even the trees - all of them are medicines.” Again, this fusion of objects and agents; no single or separable cause or effect, because they are all combined.
I think it’s easier to understand this through a metaphor. If we think of medicine as a thing - say, a pill - we’re assuming that there are separate things (a medicine, an ancestor, a patient) that can enter into cause and effect type relationships.
But in the indigenous worldview, medicine is more like gardening. It’s not simply a thing that acts upon a person to produce an effect, but an ongoing practice and process of relationship and care. You don’t prescribe a short period of “gardening” and then expect a garden to remain healthy; its flourishing is dependent on continued attention to soil, water, sunlight, plants, seasons, and the gardener’s own actions. Health, in this sense, is not the endpoint produced by a discrete intervention; it’s something that’s continually generated and maintained through relationship among many participants.
So ‘medicine’, or Ayahuasca, isn’t just a pill that can be taken to solve all our problems. In fact, if the medicine is the coherent system, then Ayahuasca might not even be required, just as how in a garden with fertile soil, you wouldn’t necessarily need more fertiliser.
The irony is that there’s a chicken and an egg here. How can we come to break out of our Western ways of seeing, to understand and experienced this deeply interconnected web of life? Surely if we can just prescribe a sharp intervention of DMT globally then we’ll be dragged out of our slumber. But a mass application of fertiliser doesn’t automatically result in a thriving garden. Perhaps the real risk isn’t that we’re distracted from the weightiest moral risks, as some of Liv Boeree’s critics have suggested; it’s that we fail to take seriously what thousands of years of contemplative and indigenous tradition have held to be true, and therefore overlook the very tools we needed to tend the garden.
Here’s a smattering of readings that have profoundly shifted my own worldview through the perspective of indigenous cultures, and which I would urge you towards if anything in this sparks interest:
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Sand Talk, by Tyson Yunkaporta
Etuaptmumk, or Two-Eyed-Seeing
I’ll also take the opportunity to acknowledge the Governing Together project, which I’ve been very fortunate to be a part of, and which is weaving some of this relational thinking into how we govern in a Western context, and demonstrating that this is a conversation that’s already stepping directly into current policy and practice, rather than only being a conversation for a podcast studio.
Love this. As you know, I’m always interested in how people bridge between the culture of the dominant system and any kind of regenerative culture… and this seems like a really interesting example. I’ll watch the video. Thanks!
Love this. Will watch the discussion!