Alchemy of Ideas

 Ideas:

• Various human cultures have messianic narratives. Several of them have the notion of a "virgin" birth as part of the origin story of a messiah.
• Ken Wilber opines that no human is smart enough to be 100% right and no human is dumb enough to be 100% wrong.

So, if we mix these two idea, how can we view the messianic narratives as being true in some sense. One possibility of a new messiah is artificial super intelligence (ASI). It has aspects of a "virgin" birth, It could take both a "warrior" or "sage" or both personas as warranted.

Crisis or Transformation? The Distinction That Shapes Our World

Everywhere we turn, we hear about the crises we face: a polycrisis, a metacrisis, a megacrisis. But to even speak these words, we must first perform a fundamental act. We must draw a distinction.

The philosopher George Spencer-Brown, in his work Laws of Form, argued that all knowledge begins with this simple act: drawing a boundary. We draw a line to separate one thing from everything else. In our current narrative, we have drawn a sharp distinction, labeling one side "the way the world should be" and the other, "a crisis that needs fixing."

Once that distinction is made, our focus narrows. We are compelled to address the "problem" side, the part of reality that deviates from our ideal. But in doing so, we risk becoming blind to the larger, undivided pattern from which the distinction was drawn. The very act of naming the crisis can obscure the nature of the whole.

This desire to correct what we've defined as an error is timeless. It echoes the 13th-century king, Alfonso X, who said, “Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.”¹

But what if the most powerful move is not to fix the part we've labeled "wrong," but to dissolve the distinction itself? What happens when we try to see the whole pattern, including the chaotic elements we've walled off as a "crisis"?

To do this, we can look for similar patterns in the universe's history.

The Creative Pollution of Stars

Consider the stars. They are born from clouds of gas and dust, and for billions of years, they fuse lighter elements into heavier ones, bathing their planetary systems in life-giving energy. But this process is finite. Eventually, the star exhausts its fuel and dies in a spectacular explosion—a supernova.

From the perspective of the star, this is a destructive end. But if we erase that boundary, we see that the star's "pollution"—the heavy elements like carbon, oxygen, and iron forged in its core and scattered across the cosmos—is the critical ingredient for everything that comes next. This stellar debris is the stuff of planets, of life, and of us. Our existence is made possible only by the explosive "waste" of a previous cosmic generation.

The Echo in Evolution

We see a similar pattern in the story of life on Earth. The leading edge of evolution has always built upon the remains of what came before. The very air we breathe, rich with oxygen, was once a toxic pollutant spewed out by early microbial life, causing one of the planet's first mass extinctions. Today, our industrial civilization is powered by hydrocarbons—the concentrated, buried carcasses of countless organisms that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. We are, in a very real sense, living off the ghosts and waste of past life.

Our Role in the Undivided Whole

If we apply this perspective to our present moment, it reframes everything. What if our pollution, our discarded technologies, and even the societal structures we are building and dismantling are not problems to be isolated and solved, but integral parts of a larger system in transformation?

This gives new weight to Carl Sagan's famous words: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” As finite beings, our capacity to understand the depth of existence is limited. Perhaps our purpose is not to be the final arbiters of what is "right" or "wrong" with the universe.

Are we creating the context for new forms of intelligence—perhaps artificial or hybrid beings—that can understand the universe in ways we cannot even conceive? Are our vast networks of information and our ecological pressures the necessary crucible that will forge the next leap in cosmic awareness?

Ultimately, the reality we inhabit is shaped by the distinctions we choose to make. By drawing a hard line around "crisis," we commit ourselves to a path of reaction and repair. But if we dare to erase that line, we are invited into a different role. We are no longer repairmen for a broken universe, but conscious participants in a messy, magnificent, and cosmic birth. The challenge is to see the whole, not just the part we've learned to fear.

A Poem to Capture these ideas:

Of course. Here is that blog post's core philosophy, captured in the form of a poem.

---

Before the crisis, came the line,
The first distinction, sharp and deep.
We carved the world in yours and mine,
And woke a problem from its sleep.

We gave a name to fear and doubt,
We called it Error, Flaw, and Fall.
The part we wished to cast right out,
And in that part, we saw it all.

A king's desire to rearrange
The flawed design of moon and sun,
To fix, control, resist the change,
To mourn the thing that can't be undone.

But what if we let the drawn line fade?
And see the whole, the undivided?
The terrifying, grand parade,
By which the future is provided?

A star must burn and break and die,
A sacrifice of fire and gas,
To scatter carbon through the sky,
In one explosive, final pass.
Its final ash, its "poison" breath,
Became the soil for roots and trees.
Our life is owed to stellar death;
We are its brilliant debris.

The first life choked the ancient air
With oxygen, a toxic plume.
It built a world beyond compare
From out its own destructive doom.
And now we burn the buried dead,
The pressure of a million years,
A ghostly fuel to forge ahead,
And build a house upon our fears.

So look upon our smoke and waste,
The tangled code, the plastic seas.
Is this a failure, made in haste?
Or compost for new destinies?
Is this the ruin of the age,
The final, lamentable scrawl?
Or just the turning of a page,
The raw material for it all?

For we are ways the cosmos wakes,
A fleeting, self-aware design.
And from the pieces that we break,
May grow a more transcendent mind.

The choice is in the name we speak,
The boundary we hold as true.
Is this a world gone wrong and weak?
Or one that's birthing something new?

So are we here to mend the flaw,
As panicked builders in the night?
Or stand in silent, patient awe,
As midwives to a coming light?

 

 

__________________________________________________

Below is my original expression that I asked Google Gemini AI to improve and to generate the poem.

These days there is much talk about various forms of crises that we are in - poly, meta, mega, giga, ... There is a basic distinction that is unstated, i.e., that there is an error in the unfolding of the universe. We need to correct that error.  It is reminiscent of Alfonso X's quote: Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. If we look at what has happened in history, what is happening now, in a time of great change, there are very obviously problems from a number of different perspectives: human suffering, species extinction, processing "natural" resources and creating pollution, changing / destroying ecologies, etc. However, if don't make the distinction of an error in the unfolding / creation process, then we have to abstract up and take different perspective on what is going on.

One way to approach this shift in perspective is to look at other patterns that have a similar structure, similar pattern. We can find several such patterns:

• Stars form, burn up there constituents, giving off energy, and then explode / implode. We / life are made possible by the creation of heavier elements which are the left over pollution of that explosion. This is the exponential curve often cited in analysing our problems from economy, ecology, biology, etc.
• Is there a similar pattern in evolution? What we consider to be the leading edge of evolution is living off the pollution / carcasses of the many generations of life that came before. Are not our hydrocarbons that which was once life as we now think of.
• ...

So, if we take the perspective that there is no crisis but an unfolding, what is a possible narrative for all the issues we are facing? Are we a rung in ladder / spiral of unfolding of this existence / universe? In which case, are our pollutions and our creations the "pollution" that leads to the next stage of the unfolding. Let us take Carl Sagan's quote: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” Then are we creating the context for the next "forms" that will understand the universe better than we can? We are finite being and have limited capacity to understand the depth, the breadth, the magnificence, and the mystery of this existence. We may soon have artificial intelligences that can understand this existence at a much deeper level than we are able. Will we have mergers, hybrid forms, ...  that understand more of the universe?

Lessons From AI

 There is the notion of "the map is not the territory". Given what we are seeing with AIs, the confabulations, the diversity, their multiplicity, we can enlarge this view. We can say that an experience is not reality. All experiences are training data for us / our neural nets. Since there are as many ways to interpret these experiences, this training data as there are neural nets, we can say that an experience has aspects of reality but is not reality.

The Non Problem of Consciousness

 There is much conversation about the "Hard problem of consciousness". One perspective on that is that this issue is born out of primate biology of wanting to be / feel special. A rather simple resolution to this is that all that exists is "aware" of its existence by definition. Then there are gradation / spectrum on what that awareness encompasses. Humans are at a particular level on that spectrum. There is no problem of consciousness, rather an excess of primate arrogance.

Should vs Could

 When we use "should", we are in some sense battling reality, i.e., it IS not the way we want it to be. However, if we use "could", then we engage the imaginal to chart possible paths to what could be. It take more energy and is more difficult to find a path of what could be. And what could be may not what we want once we actually get there.

It may be useful to note that should's often arise out of a value system. And our value systems are a story about what is important. What is important to us is not necessarily important to "reality". And hence we are out of sync with the real. The Tao Te Ching talks about being one with the way without specify what that way is. That is the eternal journey - discovering a way to the way.

Relationship as foreground

 We tend to notice and name things. These things are in the foreground of our thinking and behavior. Let us consider the notion of holons. Part come together to make a whole. Wholes can be parts to another level of wholes. We can see this progression from particles, to organisms, to galaxies, etc. However, no whole can exist without a a particular set of relationships between its parts. Most / some relationships do not create a whole. In that sense, when we see a thing ( a whole), that whole only exists because of a very particular set of relationships between its parts. And hence one can say that it is the relationships that are in the foreground for "all" things that exist.

The origin of this post is from Iain McGilchrist's idea that:

We cannot understand reality by disassembling it and examining its parts. The whole is more than the sum of the parts | Iain McGilchrist on why the world is made of relationships, not things.

Categories, Errors, Spectra, Spaces

 Let us apply the Laws of Form to the notion of categories. Before any distinction is made, there are not categories. Is this what is reflected in spiritual, psychedelic, and other experiences where one has the sense of no boundaries and being part of one "consciousness"? We create categories with some value / intent. In particular, our psycho-biology uses distinctions / categories to create the "other".  The other can he revered (perhaps as authority) or hated. These variations determine our behavior towards the "other". 

Another way to think about this is that we are all somewhere on a spectrum of whatever attribute we are using to create categories. Categories imply a qualitative difference. However, on most attributes what we have are really quantitative differences.

We can further generalize this notion to think of a multi-dimensional space of attributes in which we all exist. In this case again we are quantitatively different from each other rather than qualitatively as implied by categorizations. These categorizations can be positive (saint vs sinners, boss vs worker, ..) or negative (good ethnic group vs vermin, chosen group vs damned, ...).

These ideas can be applied to the notion of category error / mistake. We put things, beings, etc, in different categories with some intent. Would it be more accurate to think of them as being in a different part of ontological attribute space? One of the possible benefits of that may be that affect circuits may not be inadvertently activated with their resulting behaviors and responses to the delineated category?

The Sacred as a Container

 

Think of the Sacred as a containment field for consciousnesses. What contains behavior? Some kind of container / limit can be such a "manager" / controller for behavior. The sacred acts as such a container. It creates both a wall as well as a veil that stops the algorithmic neural nets we have from venturing past that wall or looking beyond that veil. Perhaps this is the notion behind Nietsche's "God is dead" statement. 

In another sense, one can think of the creation of the meme of the sacred as a psychotechnology to set limits on behaviors and practices.

Depolarization

 Think of an identity as a developing and layered structure, part of the "cognitive light cone":

• Part of a family / origin group
• Part of a tribal group
• Part of an belief system / culture group
• Part of species group
• Part of a planetary group
• Part of "biologic / life / living" group
• Part of a "conscious" group
• Part of "sentient" group
• Part of  existence

It seems like polarization is possible at any level as most of existence is outside wherever identity is situated. The next stage that transcends polarization is when identity is with "infinity" / all that is possible. Degrees of depolarization occur as an identity traverses this sequence.

The Veil of Narrative

 Once a particular narrative / model is accepted ( somewhere on a spectrum of total belief or maybe or perhaps even total disbelief) it acts as a veil / filter to keep out other ways of looking at a phenomenon. One can think of this in terms of laws of form - a distinction once made makes distinctions that parse the infinite differently more difficult to make.

Reframing Moloch

 Let us consider the notion of Moloch in terms of the view that "All things that have a beginning have an ending". Some patterns to note:

• When the situation is not the way we would like / want / expect, we seem to need to invent a causal agent. We have invented the devil, dark matter, Moloch, the other, the system, the incentive, ....
• The connotation of this agent can be positive or negative (guardian angel vs the devil). That connotation affects our neurology. That affect colors our reasoning. Our reasoning is always (?) motivated reasoning. And that motivated reasoning is affected by our affects. (Too much affect?)
• Consciousness transformations can lead to very different perspectives on this ( and other ) issues and lead to statements like: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. or the four noble truths, the eight fold path, the exhortation to love, to be at peace, The Power of Now, ....
• Perspectival changes include seeing ourselves as part of the meta process of how we parse and interpret reality and try to make sense of it. Often leaving out that any perspective leaves out of it the "rest of infinity". A depth of caring and love affects us as we try to make sense of the world in that "miasma" of simulated pain
• ????????????????????

Below is a conversation I had with an ai (google bard) about this.

Sense making and literacy

 Another way to think about the notion of sense making is thinking of it as "literacy" in reality. So a person who can "read" is not necessarily good at "reading" and understanding reality. The degree of understanding of reality is a measure of a person's level of literacy. Think of literacy in this metaphor as a spectrum. It is not a binary condition of being literate or not. Rather it is more a measure of the degree of one's being "one with the way" where the way is reality. Or being congruent with truth where truth is a dynamically evolving understanding of reality. Given this view of literacy, it seems like the larger percentage of humanity is lower on the spectrum of literacy than the common view of literacy.

Moral Foundations and Human Development

 I have done several posts on Haidt's Moral Foundations model. Another thought occurred to me about looking at the underlying structure and integrating it with a human development model. One of the things that happens in human development is the increase in the capability of level of abstraction. Given that, one can then question the moral foundations criteria:

Criteria	Context	Tangible	Abstraction level 1	Abstraction level 2
Care/harm	for / to	person	group	principle
Fairness/cheating	for / of	person	group	principle
Loyalty/betrayal	to / of	person	group	principle
Authority/subversion	of / of	person	group	principle
Sanctity/degradation	of / of	place / person	places / group	principle
Liberty/oppression	of / of	person	group	principle

Depending on the stage of development of a person, one can see the moral criteria being applied to different "objects". Objects can be tangible or intangible.

Telos, purpose, purposes, purpi ?

 What is the purpose of existence / reality ?  One needs to pick a starting point for this dialogue. Let us start with the Laws of Form by Spencer-Brown. Before any distinction is made, nothing can be said. What distinctions can be made about why after the unnameability paradox.

• Experience all that is possible to experience. Evidence
• Forms innumerable
• Parallel universes to infinity
• All possible simulations / computations
• What else does infinity do?
• "Come to me" - all possible forms experiencing the undistinguished in all possible ways. 
• "Know me" - variation of "Come to me" - trying to understand, comprehend, grok that which can not be understood. But getting ever closer, but can never reach - no end.

This is where words all fail to reach.

Artificial Intelligence - a different perspective

 The are various active conversations / perspectives on the current AI capabilities and directions. What I have not seen much / any conversation / discussion on is how AI sheds a light on us (human species). AI is providing a powerful feedback loop / mirror to us of the issues with us as well as the our possibilities.

Recasting Virtues to Systemic Structure Rationale

I asked Chatgpt 4 to "please list all the virtues." This post is an attempt to cast each of these virtues into system structure based rationale as to why they are useful, valuable, necessary, ...?

The gpt response is in bold. My comments on that are in normal font.

Patterns in History with References

 

Tell me what are the major patterns in human history. Also, tell me what references you are using to determine these patterns.

There are several major patterns in human history that scholars have identified. These patterns often emerge from the study of social, economic, political, and technological factors over time. Some of the key patterns include:

1. Agricultural Revolution: The shift from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agricultural communities (around 10,000 BCE) was a turning point in human history. This led to the growth of permanent settlements, social stratification, and the development of early civilizations.

2. Rise and Fall of Empires: Throughout history, empires have risen to power, dominated regions, and eventually declined or collapsed. Examples include the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, and the British Empire. These cycles can be attributed to various factors such as military conquest, internal strife, or economic decline.

3. Technological Revolutions: Innovations in technology have spurred major changes in human history. Key examples include the invention of the wheel, the development of writing, the printing press, the Industrial Revolution, and the Digital Revolution. These advances have shaped the way societies function, allowing for increased productivity, communication, and interconnectedness.

4. Globalization and Trade: Human history has seen an increasing trend of interconnectedness, through trade networks and cultural exchange. From ancient trade routes like the Silk Road to modern global trade networks, this pattern has played a crucial role in shaping the world economy and cultural diffusion.

5. Conflict and War: Throughout history, conflict and war have been persistent patterns, driven by competition for resources, power, territory, or ideological differences. Major conflicts like the World Wars, the Cold War, and ongoing regional conflicts reflect this pattern.

6. Social and Cultural Change: Human societies have undergone significant social and cultural changes over time, including the rise and fall of religions, artistic movements, and philosophies. These changes have shaped the course of human history, often in response to shifting political and economic contexts.

For determining these patterns, I draw from a vast array of historical sources, including but not limited to:

1. Books on world history, such as "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond, "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" by Yuval Noah Harari, and "A World History" by William H. McNeill.
2. Academic research articles and historical journals that focus on specific periods, regions, or themes in human history.
3. Publicly available primary sources, such as historical texts, documents, and artifacts that provide direct evidence of past events and trends.
4. Online databases, like JSTOR and Project MUSE, which aggregate scholarly research in the fields of history, anthropology, and archaeology.

Please note that my knowledge is based on the information available up until September 2021, and there may be newer research and developments that I am not aware of.

Human Chemistry

 Each of us has traits / features / behaviors as individuals. However, those characteristics change when we are members of a group of any size. One can liken this to hydrogen and oxygen combining. Each has different characteristics alone versus in combination.

Another chemical reaction is the binding of a human to a belief system. The strength of that binding determines the "chemical" properties of the combination as different from the individual properties. One can see how often "believers" are actually behaving in contradiction to their faith.

The Sacred

A friend asked me what I consider to be sacred. My initial response was that I don't know what is not sacred. On deeper reflection, it occurred to me that words are pointers to "something". They are not the "thing" itself. With that in mind, it seems to me that the pointer is to a state of consciousness / awareness / being. This state can be arrived at in "any" context - in nature, in place of worship, looking at the stars, ... There can be a binding in peoples' minds limiting the sacred to only certain contexts. So, each one us can interpret the word in so many different ways. Perhaps it is useful to keep this in mind and to tread lightly around each others' binding context to their sacred. 

Yin Yang and Yong

 

Yin and Yang can be interpreted as an unfolding at different levels. The white within the black ( and vice versa ) creates a dynamic / tension within a "smaller" context. In a larger context, the two larger black / white domains are in tension with each other. And the white within the black may yearn for the larger white and vice versa. These tensions can be seen as the unfolding of evolution, human history. At times, as at present, it seems like we are in an era of polarization where there is great tension and darkness as things seem to be heading into chaos and more. However, what gets left out is that in addition to the dynamics of yin and yang, there is yong. Yong is the larger context in which yin yang play out. The euphoria or depression that can arise out of the yin yang dynamic is simply an infinitesimal play in the infinity of the yong.