to bring it to the present you know the news cycle is about russia and ukraine yeah there are propositional things there about what's the capital of 00:01:15 russia what's the capital of ukraine where's the border then you have sort of procedural um how how do you discuss this matter or or how do we make decisions about this what are the things in play and then you have 00:01:27 um question perspective like how does it look in moscow how does it look in kiev how does it look at the u.n yes and then you have something about participation what's it like to be at the border in the east of ukraine for example yeah 00:01:39 yeah what identities are you assigning what identities are you are are you assuming what roles right yeah yeah i mean it's not nothing immediately politicized i just mean to bring it to bear that in any given context there are 00:01:52 always these multiple ways of knowing that are a big thing

it's a how we know it in some way so it's different forms of how yes it's not based on the content of it so there's different ways you can do taxonomies and people often want to monkey with the taxonomy they said no no like you can make a 00:00:50 taxonomy however you want like if you make the taxonomy on the basis of content you're going to have like you're going to have like you know knowledge about australia knowledge about the solar system and right right now that you're right this is much more about the 00:01:03 manner and the mechanisms of knowing than it is about the content

so that's me trying to do a synoptic integration of all of the four e-cognitive science and trying to get it 00:00:12 into a form that i think would help make make sense to people of the of cognition and also in a form that's helpful to get them to see what's what we're talking about when i'm talking about the meaning 00:00:25 that's at stake in the meaning crisis because it's not sort of just semantic meaning

let me comment on your quantum physics i have only one objection please i think it's uh uh it's 01:01:21 what you said about the two uh sort of prototypical uh quantum puzzles which is schrodinger the double slit experiment uh it's uh it's perfect um my only objection is that in my book 01:01:34 i described of course i had a chapter about schrodinger cat but i don't use a situation in which the cat is dead or alive 01:01:46 i prefer a situation in which the cat is asleep or awake just because i don't like killing cats even in in in in mental experiments so after that 01:01:58 uh uh replacing a sleep cut with a dead cat i think uh i i i i completely agree and let me come to the the serious part of the answer um 01:02:10 what you mentioned as the passage from uh the third and the fourth um between among the the sort of the versions of 01:02:25 wooden philosophy it's it's exactly what i what i think is relevant for quantum mechanics for this for the following reason we read in quantum mechanics books 01:02:37 that um we should not think about the mechanical description of reality but the description reality with respect to the observer and there is always this notion in in books that there's observer or there are 01:02:50 paratus that measure so it's a uh but i am a scientist which view the world from the perspective of 01:03:02 modern science where one way of viewing the world is that uh there are uh you know uh billions and billions of galaxies each one with billions and billions of 01:03:14 of of of stars probably with planets all around and uh um from that perspective the observer in any quantum mechanical experiment is just one piece in the big story 01:03:28 so i have found the uh berkeley subjective idealism um uh profoundly unconvincing from the point 01:03:39 of view of a scientist uh because it there is an aspect of naturalism which uh it's a in which i i i grew up as a scientist 01:03:52 which refuses to say that to understand quantum mechanics we have to bring in our mind quantum mechanics is not something that has directly to do with our mind has not 01:04:05 something directly to do about any observer any apparatus because we use quantum mechanics for describing uh what happened inside the sun the the the reaction the nuclear reaction there or 01:04:18 galaxy formations so i think quantum mechanics in a way i think quantum mechanics is experiments about not about psychology not about our mind not about consciousness not 01:04:32 about anything like that it has to do about the world my question what we mean by real world that's fine because science repeatedly was forced to change its own ideas about the 01:04:46 real world so if uh if to make sense of quantum mechanics i have to think that the cat is awake or asleep only when a conscious observer our mind 01:05:00 interacts with this uh i say no that's not there are interpretations of quantum mechanics that go in that direction they require either am i correct to say the copenhagen 01:05:14 school does copenhagen school uh talk about the observer without saying who is what is observed but the compelling school which is the way most 01:05:27 textbooks are written uh describe any quantum mechanical situation in terms okay there is an observer making a measurement and we're talking about the outcome of the measurements 01:05:39 so yes it's uh it assumes an observer but it's very vague about what what an observer is some more sharp interpretation like cubism uh take this notion observer to be real 01:05:54 fundamental it's an agent somebody who makes who thinks about and can compute the future so it's a it's a that's that's a starting point for for doing uh for doing the rest i was 01:06:07 i've always been unhappy with that because things happen on the sun when there is nobody that is an observer in anything and i want to think to have a way of thinking in the world that things happen there 01:06:20 independently of me so to say is they might depend on one another but why should they depend on me and who am i or you know what observers should be a you know a white western scientist with 01:06:32 a phd i mean should we include women should we include people without phd should we include cats is the cat an observer should we fly i mean it's just not something i understand

i just wanted to interject that uh could i come at this point carlo i would like to insist a bit on this because i'm i'm not quite clear 01:07:22 on whether you are agreeing or not on the question of the mind um thank you this is also i wanted to ask him the same question mario uh so by just raise the question 01:07:40 specifically all right so let me okay since we're talking about nagarjuna now i would also like to uh read some simple verses that he has and get from both from barry and you what do you 01:07:53 think so this is from chapter three examination of the sentences seeing hearing smelling tasting touching and mind are the six sense faculties their 01:08:04 spheres are the visible objects etc like the scene the herd the smell that tasted and the touched the hair sound etc and consciousness should be understood so actually i'm confused from both of 01:08:18 you first of all barry is the mind anything special in buddhist philosophy or is it just like seeing and hearing and carlo are you saying there is anything 01:08:31 special about them right

but before we do that let me talk about something that's even more fundamental um and helps us to understand the progression of thinking through those four schools to the what's 00:42:10 usually considered the most sophisticated in my jamaica school um and that is the distinction which is really important between existence and intrinsic existence 00:42:23 and the ex and the distinction between no existence and no intrinsic existence so this is these distinctions um if one doesn't fully comprehend the the 00:42:37 majamika system uh not fully comprehend but have some idea of the of the uh my jamaica system one then usually make is not able to make these distinctions so 00:42:49 let's talk about them for a moment um so existence um we when we talk about existence we talk about our ordinary understanding of what's real okay that things are 00:43:03 objects uh things are you know they may be in relationship but what's in relationship are two different distinct objects or entities that are in relationship and that's kind of our normal understanding of existence 00:43:15 so lacking inherent existence or intrinsic existence begs the issue to understand what is intrinsic existence okay and that's the 00:43:27 object of negation for the buddha for nagarjuna and for all those following in this tradition of nagarjuna the uh the majamika school and so 00:43:39 that's not so easy to wrap our heads around uh what is intrinsic existence in a way it's so close that we miss it you know it's it's a little bit like you know 00:43:51 staying in a in a new hotel room in a new city waking up and looking for your glasses and you can't find them and then realizing that they're already on your faces and so 00:44:05 intrinsic existence is things existing independently things existing uh through relationship um things not not things existing dependently not in independently 00:44:19 and so if we look at dependence now we can look at that at several levels and the more obvious levels you've mentioned that carlo is cause and effect causality okay but there are also more uh 00:44:33 subtle levels of dependence that the buddha and nagarjuna talk about and are real central to the philosophy so the second level is the relationship between whole and parts and parts to whole it 00:44:46 goes both ways okay that's a a a little bit you know another level if you will of of dependence uh in the particularly you know highlighted by nagarjuna and 00:44:58 then the third level which is the most uh subtle level the subtlest level which is really what we have to start to understand because the opposite of that is this independent or intrinsic 00:45:10 existence okay so this third level we call dependence through designation or sometimes called dependent designation but it's dependence through designation 00:45:22 it's a type of naming or labeling so for example barry we label or name barry my parents gave this name to barry based on a body 00:45:34 okay maybe a little tiny infant body at that time right and also uh in terms of maybe some kind of behaviors or you know how they thought this emotional structure is for this little baby right 00:45:47 he's very calm or he's very you know he's acts out a lot he's very active or you know all those things so upon all that a name is placed in this case barry okay 00:45:59 so that relationship of you know dependence through designation is really what nagarjuna is talking about when we talk about dependence um and so that's very uh 00:46:11 important to understand so the opposite of that coming back to understanding this inherent or intrinsic existence there are many words in english we use synonymous for 00:46:23 ranging not existing intrinsically or inherently or independently or from its own side those are all synonyms um to the tibetan 00:46:36 terminology that i just mentioned um so when people don't have a good appreciation for intrinsic existence and you say then so the second there were two comparisons 00:46:53 the second comparison is uh non-existence and not inherently existent so when when when when regarding says no inherent existence what often people interpret is no 00:47:07 existence at all and they fall into a nihilism that nothing exists at all so they haven't fully under appreciated this notion of um intrinsic existence so they're throwing the baby out with the 00:47:20 bathwater right when we're throwing out or negating uh intrinsic existence that they don't quite understand what that really means they think it's all of existence and therefore they you know think that nothing exists they throw the 00:47:33 baby out with a backlog so that's that's okay can i interject something before you go ahead and you you you promised us before uh the full schools before uh but but can i 00:47:44 can i make a comment here um of course about you to say because this is free flow so yeah yeah so we you know we gave the title uh 00:47:56 what is real to this uh to this i that seems to me um that's exactly that distinction that that you you made between existence 00:48:09 and intrinsic existence um inherent existence it's a it it's it's uh it's idea that that i found central and and and 00:48:22 essentially essentially useful for me for for the following reason first of all um i mean the notion of reality the notion of existence here are close i mean what what exists is what is real what is that i want to say a couple of things one is 00:48:40 that um we make a distinction with an illusory and real in our everyday life uh which it's well founded i mean if i if i see 00:48:53 the chair and there's a mirror there and i see a chair of the other side of the mirror there's a precise sense in which the chair in which the other side of the mirror is not real well this chair is real 00:49:06 um this distinction has a meaning because i can sit on the chair i can touch that one but i cannot sit on that and touch that one but 00:49:18 then we realize that some aspects of what is illusory in the chair in the mirror also are shared by the chair which i just called real which is also illusory in 00:49:31 some other sets um for instance uh the fact of being a chair uh it's uh cut out and back on so i missed you up until now please could you repeat it oh 00:49:44 uh for where for where did you be speak uh when you were saying this distinction between existence and inherent existence and non-existence non-inheritances is 00:49:56 very helpful uh and then after that i lost you yeah i wanted to um make a couple points one is that uh we use a distinction between illusory and real in everyday life for instance we say that 00:50:10 a chair but then i was saying of course then um through science uh we realized that there are illusory aspects in the chair which are just called real as well 00:50:30 but then one is tempted and that's um to say all right so there are many luxury aspects of that chair but there is a a more fundamental level in which uh 00:50:45 there is a description of what is going on there which is a real one and edinton uh made it very very vividly in a well-known uh distinction between the scientific table 00:50:57 and the everyday table when he says look i have two images two tables there there's a table of which i eat which is solid and then there's a table which i view with my scientific eyes which is made by atoms 00:51:09 uh and is not solid there's a lot of emptiness of of not emptiness negatives empty completely different sense i i've heard that that emptiness is 99.9 to the 12th 00:51:20 power based in the atom is that right yes yes but that's of course not negative emptiness that's just the lack of presence of atoms yeah um and adidas says and people use that 00:51:34 by saying the the the the chair of my uh the chairman which i see the solitude is illusory the real chair is the atoms uh this way of using the notion of real and the 00:51:49 notion of um of uh existence so what exists in the atoms uh is dangerously misleading that's what 00:52:01 i uh because uh it uh um it pushes us to try to resolve the relational and illusory aspect of reality that we see 00:52:15 in terms of some basic fundamental physical reality from which to derive it or in western subjective idealism 00:52:28 in terms and its derivation in terms of some sort of uh fundamental mind or fundamental subject which is a real existing entity 00:52:41 the cartesian mind that is certain of existing itself um or the kantian subject or even the the the fundamentality of the perception 00:52:53 itself in whosoever uh and in phenomenology so there is this western need to anchor um the uh what we mean by real or something final 00:53:07 so uh to to realize that there is dependence but then there is some basic grounds on which everything builds up on which to uh on which to sit and this is what i take emptiness 00:53:23 the notion of empty negative notion of emptiness to be useful uh to to get rid of this urge of finding beyond the uh 00:53:35 the illusory aspect of the world a a basic level which is not um uh real in in in the uh 00:53:47 in the sense of uh uh of of uh uh in which this chair is is real compared to the uh to the chair uh in the mirror but but really the fundamental way so the the the bottom line of the story the 00:54:02 the solid terrain on which to anchor the ultimate um uh uh the end point of the line of dependence the line of dependence ends to some point that's what is real 00:54:15 and and what is this nagarjuna is that that's the wrong question i mean uh it's not only that the chair the table is empty because i can understand it's something else but it's 00:54:26 also that something else is also empty because i can understand it's something else until the point in which there is this emptiness itself it's a it's empty because we shouldn't take it as a 00:54:40 as a fundamental sort of metaphysical principle on which to ground all the rest so this putting this this is yeah just putting this in slightly different 00:54:51 terminology emptiness is where it allows functionality emptiness is the lack of any kind of essence even on a you know atomic level and i agree with you what you said 00:55:04 that's i think very true um right and this is a look at when we look at the chair versus the reflection of the chair in the mirror it gets a little more complicated because both of them of course lack any 00:55:17 independent existence both okay they're both empty uh in terms of shunyata having said that the metaphor that the buddha used he gave about 10 different 00:55:29 metaphors for you know something to be illusory and one of the important ones that he used was reflection you know he used the reflection of the moon or the full moon in in the still 00:55:41 water that it looks like the moon but in fact of course it's not it's a reflection he used such things as water in a mirage sound of an echo and you know things 00:55:55 like that to illustrate okay now um let me mention two experiments if i may and you correct me where i'm wrong i'm a 00:56:07 pop physicist from the new york times okay um and one is the uh the thought experiment of ed edwin schroedinger okay the so-called shorting her cat paradox 00:56:21 or thought experiment and you have double steel box in which you have a cat there's no doors no windows right and you have a vial of very powerful acid that's 00:56:33 connected to a radioisotope the half-life of the isotope is the same duration as the duration of your experiment your thought experiment so the chance of the cat so if the radioactive material 00:56:46 decays 50 chance it you know somehow pulls a lever and the acid spills killing the cat if that radioisotope does not decay there's no spillage of the of the 00:56:59 of the acid and the cat remains alive so quantum physicists call this superposition where the cat is both alive and dead when you crack open this steel box 00:57:13 then um you observe what's inside and then the cat is either dead if the radio isotope you know decayed and knocked over the acid or 00:57:25 it's alive it didn't okay and it's it's either or whereas when you can't observe it it's both it's superposition okay second is the double slit you know you you shoot these electrons or photons you 00:57:40 know through two slits in a metal thing and then you have a screen behind and you look at the the pattern and if you have a little camera observation device at the slit level of the slits observing 00:57:52 you find a pattern below on the back on the screen that suggests what passed through the splits were particles whereas if you remove the observation device you have an interference pattern 00:58:05 suggesting what went through this list were waves okay so these two experiments at least in my very uh you know superficial understanding tell us that observer dependence is very 00:58:18 important in terms of reality okay that whether or not there is or isn't or or maybe you can what type of observer you know presence there is very much influences and determines what's real 00:58:31 and so that then uh jumps into the four you know buddhist schools of philosophy and if we go from the so-called least sophisticated up the third one would be the one you alluded to that's somewhat 00:58:45 similar to bishop barkley in the west and other idealists that say that everything is consciousness everything is mine and things that seem to be solid out there in an external reality are nothing more than projections of our 00:58:58 mind and that's actually a very sophisticated philosophy it's a very sophisticated philosophy one of the things it starts to do is it breaks down this notion of a solid external reality 00:59:10 okay but it's con it's it's critique as you have you also mentioned is that it takes the mind you know to be somehow you know uh absolute or ultimate you 00:59:22 know existing and so then the highest if you will most sophisticated school of mediumica says well what the chidoma modulus the mind-only school says that's correct up to a point but the criticism is 00:59:36 there's no uh you know absoluteness about the mind either so then you end up with that you accept an external reality you accept a mind but both you know that is every existent thing uh exists 00:59:49 without having any uh exist in relationship without having any independence or objectivity um and so that's very roughly the at least the the the last two of the three buddhist schools the 01:00:03 third one is divided again into prasannika madhyamaka and spatrontikamanjamaka using tibetan terms that are borrowing from the sanskrit um and the prasangika mud yamaka is considered the most 01:00:16 sophisticated where nothing at all has intrinsic existence the whereas the uh svaltronticom and yamaka they say that some uh conventional reality does exist uh 01:00:30 from its own side having some essence uh so there's a little bit of a distinction in the debate there um so just wanted to to mention those things i'd like you to comment

you're quite unique there are maybe a few quantum physics physicists that have interest and you know but few that i think have really read nagarjuna particularly from the 00:41:08 beginning to the end of his uh you know opus magnus is his major treatise of the six we have all of those actually translated into english and you know some of them will deal more with the 00:41:20 compassion side also um so i applaud you for that

et me put it one thing do you think that uh uh it's there's anything wrong let's put it bluntly this way in in in in trying to take that from the 00:37:55 godzilla and and uh letting the thing letting this a bit of wisdom small bit of wisdom that i can get out of it uh influence the 00:38:07 rest but uh using it directly because i think that that's my that's what i think is my contribution somehow uh look there is in this uh 00:38:19 in this large uh aspect of midfield there is a there's a part of it which is definitely very relevant uh for modern physics that could be used for it and 00:38:30 um uh and from modern philosophy and you know the people in modern philosophy the people in cambridge the people in the us um not only garfield but 00:38:42 west of the others who who who are using uh a idea from the guardian in the philosophical context 00:38:57 i i think this is dialogue and i don't know if i don't know if anything could be useful in the other direction in a sense but it's uh you know i think culture is a dialogue it's a dialogue in which uh 00:39:09 in which uh uh we keep learning from from else whether it's a tradition whether it's a different school whether it is nature itself because we interact whether there's us talking to one another this constant exchange 00:39:24 that in my opinion makes the beauty of of of of culture but also uh but also the that's how we learn that's how we know that how we change

it works on on logic essentially and shows look if you if you take this entity as existence you get into a contradiction for this and this reason 00:36:31 and it slowly demolishes all the possible foundations of our thinking not only objects but also causation itself also time itself also the self 00:36:44 itself and so on and so forth one one by one um showing that uh thinking that they are foundational they're they're they have intrinsic existence uh doesn't doesn't hold

by the way this um uh this is talking to me at the at a more 00:32:02 large level or more personal level uh because it does change my my sense of being in the world and one way in which it does is uh um 00:32:15 is is precisely because it it uh it changes my understanding of myself of the self and and and and the relational aspect between what i am and and the rest of the world and what i am and and 00:32:28 the other beings living beings sentient beings around around me somehow um uh 00:32:38 it it suddenly uh takes away a little bit of the anguish that change impermanence causes 00:32:54 or produces by um by making me think that there is no permanent me 00:33:07 who is a threatened by impermanence um and it uh it pushes uh myself and interpreting myself as as 00:33:20 a part of a network in which i am produced by the interaction with the others and it resonates with my larger uh uh pre-existing western 00:33:34 uh political uh ideas that any uh interpretation of our human and social life in terms of uh 00:33:45 you know competition and maximizing our own good of the good of our own nation or the good of our own people um against the other uh it's badly misleading for ourselves 00:33:59 and for for everybody at a number of a number of levels so there is a interdependence of of the reading of social human relations which goes 00:34:14 together with this deep interdependence separated but it's it's a it it resonates i want to say that because i must say i'm not totally deaf to 00:34:26 the compassion side and the larger side of the story

this is useful to me enormously both in terms of context but also in the 00:29:42 most positive way um i take this as a criticism uh in in in a positive way which which i'm happy with uh 00:29:54 let me translate uh what you said into a criticism it's like uh you were saying look her uh fine you're finding like a june or something interesting but you missed the 00:30:06 the uh the um some uh more valuable aspect of what is around there because the uh the 00:30:19 the wisdom it's uh makes sense uh together with the compassion um and this of course is um uh is uh 00:30:31 uh it's a fault which is common in me and in a lot of intellectual tradition which i accept

and then the deepest level is what's maybe more relevant for our discussion 00:27:04 we call it we call it all pervasive it's a conditioned kind of suffering and it's conditioned by ignorance the ignorance that does not understand reality correctly okay and that's really 00:27:17 what we're that's the opposite of what we're talking about when we talk about you know shunyata or emptiness uh this ignorance is 100 180 degrees opposite um so in that last level of suffering is 00:27:32 really the underpinnings of all the other sufferings okay so if we can address and remove that level of ignorance then all the other sufferings fall away 00:27:43 and you could also see it as all of our attachments that get us into trouble our aversions that can end in anger hatred and now we see so much violence in the world all that and 00:27:55 and our selfishness and our greed and you know on and on all that just falls away when we begin to get rid of this ignorance and we begin to not only intellectually understand emptiness but 00:28:08 we put it into our lives it percolates down and it starts to be part of our attitude the way we think the way we feel it permeates every aspect of our sleep and wake life and when that happens it's 00:28:22 it's like a revolution i don't speak from personal experience because i don't have that but according to the great saints and masters who have it's like a total revolution it's full of joy it's complete love and compassion 00:28:36 there's no moment where there isn't and it's always bathed in this wisdom of emptiness taking things as you said so beautifully in the beginning of your remarks carlo that everything is 00:28:48 in relation there are no discrete entities at all there's no independent existence i think those are the words that were used by david bohm who was a very close friend of his holiest the dalai lamas and as 00:29:01 you know a well-recognized quantum physicist um so those are just some contextual opening remarks to put us in in the in the right ball field if you will uh as a 00:29:15 with an american background baseball field right could be a soccer field

the reason to understand and put into practice nagarjuna's wisdom of emptiness is really all about compassion because it's a way that we can be more 00:21:56 useful to others in terms of bringing happiness and eliminating suffering

i got from that book for responding about issues about quantum mechanics where people tell me come on curly you think about quantum mechanics systems how they affect one 00:17:35 another but the two systems should exist by themselves this should exist by itself anything they should think otherwise how could they affect one another and now got an answer to that and i 00:17:47 the second point i am fascinated by the overall uh anti-foundation is with nagarjuna which i found it extremely liberating

i read that book 00:11:08 in the translation by garfield and it was a shock for me it's an incredible it's a it's just a fantastic book so it really blew away my mind and i 00:11:21 spent a while as a a summer uh immersed in that book trying to read everything i could get nakatuna and thinking about that and i ended up with two ideas um which i just would put on the table and to to 00:11:35 discuss one smaller one larger one smaller is that in nagarjuna there are some basic ideas which are helpful uh to make sense of about quantum mechanics not not because the cartridge 00:11:48 knew anything about quantum physics of course it didn't uh but i think that to do science we need we need ideas and philosophy is very useful and uh we get from philosophy uh 00:12:01 conceptual structure way of thinking uh that as usual to make sense of of of better ways of understanding about the world and and and what is useful in nagarjuna is the idea 00:12:14 of uh what you do for quantum physics is the idea that uh it's it's better to think of the world not as entities or substance or or things of god or 00:12:27 whatever matter uh that has its own properties but only um through the interdependence of of things so you don't understand anything by itself if not connected to the others 00:12:39 that's uh in fact it's even more i think what nagarjuna shows that uh if you think that their relations with you think that things affect one another that's the only way of thinking so the idea of 00:12:52 of a thing by itself of things existing uh independently of anything else of a fundamental reality it's uh it's not useful and it's 00:13:08 i think the guardian argues contradictory that's a that's a specific idea this is the bigger idea which i i found uh wonderful and that completely captured me 00:13:20 is that uh this is a for me fascinating philosophical perspective because it starts from the day of separating uh sort of a conventional reality and 00:13:31 and an ultimate ultimate reality uh which is very common uh in in a very common perspective also in science and western philosophy um 00:13:44 you can also read some of the evolution of science or western philosophy trying to search for this ultimate life is that matter is that god is that spirit is that the mind is that language is that there are many other circles is that phenomenology or 00:13:58 the whosoever whatever you want and nagarjuna the book of nagarjuna is not a positive construction it's a negative destruction every chapter takes away something look this by itself doesn't stay together 00:14:12 this there's a state together it takes away it takes somebody takes something and so the suggestion here is that maybe the question is wrong um we should look for the ultimate value the ultimate value doesn't exist in a 00:14:24 sense it's the same thing as a as a conventional reality that i found fantastic it's a it's a dissolving um it's dissolving a fake problem in a 00:14:36 sense and opening up a sudden uh uh coherence as i read it and with all my superficiality it's not denying reality right it is here i mean this pen is his pen 00:14:48 it it denies the fact that this is ultimate reality in this pen or in something on which this pen is based including the mind which is uh there's a superficial buddhism a view of 00:15:01 beauties in the west uh which is just everything is the mind the mind is it's everything is is uh if you think it's a self and everything you know um where you were born in hollywood so 00:15:12 the illusory aspect of the walls i wonder if you got it from buddhism from hollywood i don't know but this is this idea that you know the the world is a big cinema and everything is is in the mind of berkeley 00:15:25 and this is a there's a chapter in in in nagarjuna which denies that completely because the mind itself is not um it's not uh doesn't have an ultimate reality so you cannot found anything on the mind nor on the dharma or the 00:15:39 on anything up to the point and then i conclude so my reason of my fascination throwing my fascination from the guardian on the table in this passage about the view this uh 00:15:51 this comments the emptiness of emptiness which was the real moment in which the guardian captured uh captured me so it's a point in which uh you know translated the way i read it or probably superficially is that all 00:16:04 right so everything is empty in the sense of doesn't not having an intrinsic reality so therefore this emptiness is the foundation of everything and regardless of the words no no no wait this is this 00:16:16 is a this is the view uh which you which is itself empty in the sense that it depends on else this is suddenly extremely liberating i think uh and i found it it hadn't 00:16:31 impacted me intellectually suddenly i have a i have a way to take take away from my intellectual search and anguish finding the foundations uh which i find liberating and even 00:16:43 personally i mean it's thinking about myself not as an entity but as a combination of other things uh has definitely an effect on me on a on a on a human being 00:16:55 and uh so i guess what what finally fascinated me in a gardener is this anti-foundational aspect it's taking away the starting point um it's absolute radicality 00:17:08 uh when he says that nirvana and samsara themselves are sort of illusioned in some sense empty in his own sense devoid of intrinsic reality

let me first say how why we're here um 00:05:01 and first point out that barry and carl have never met before this is the first time you will discuss

i didn't know anything about nagarjuna and uh i know very little about buddhism and buddhist philosophy so i am 00:09:04 very i'm here without any potential of saying anything uh beyond extremely superficial uh about buddhism to apologize for that i i in fact i i look forward to to to to 00:09:18 to getting from you um ideas and and take away some of my uh superficiality um i and i have a lot of buddhist friends because my catholic friends back in 00:09:30 italy many have converted or changed into buddhism somehow and i i read about maine buddhist idea but i i knew little about uh uh derek arjuna in particular 00:09:41 in fact i didn't even know that his book existed um but i worked on quantum theory on the foundation of quantum theory and i have been fascinated by a particular way of 00:09:53 viewing quantum theory which is called the relation interpretation of quantum theory in which [Music] one of the central thing one of the central ideas is that objects systems 00:10:06 things whatever by themselves do not have properties in some sense do not exist by themselves they only exist because they interact with something else and uh this is a 00:10:19 it's an idea which is not completely absent in in in western philosophy but it's not easy to frame in philosophical uh id western ideas and i've been 00:10:31 writing and talking about uh relational quantum mechanical relation contemplation of quantum mechanics and so many times after a talk people will come to me and say have you read nagarjuna 00:10:44 and i said no and i am not particularly excited about attempts to mix you know modern physics with eastern idea because uh things i've read about that i always found very 00:10:57 superficial superficial way of putting both but after you know the twentieth time i heard have you read nagarjuna i think well maybe i should read that

Dogen and Nagarjuna’s Tetralemma #6 of 21

When we see the world from the vantage point of all-at-oneness, always right here, we can be said to be like a pearl in a bowl. Flowing with every turn without any obstructions or stoppages coming from our emotional reactions to different situations. This is a very commonly used image in Zen — moving like a pearl in a bowl. As usual, our ancestors comment on this phrase, wanting to break open our solidifying minds even more. Working from Dogen’s fascicle Shunju, Spring and Autumn, we have an example of opening up even the Zen appropriate phrase — a pearl in a bowl. Editor of the Blue Cliff Record Engo ( Yuan Wu) wrote: A bowl rolls around a pearl, and the pearl rolls around the bowl. The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute.   Dogen: The present expression “a bowl rolls around a pearl” is unprecedented and inimitable, it has rarely been heard in eternity. Hitherto, people have spoken only as if the pearl rolling in the bowl were ceaseless.

I have always liked the weaving loom as a metaphor for weaving the absolute and relative together into one cloth. The absolute can be the warp, the relative can be the woof, and the shuttle or the jade works , can spin them all together into one cloth. It’s not that we have to make them into one cloth, they are always manifesting together in simultaneous realization . The jade works is the activity of life itself, the total dynamic functioning of the activity of the universe. Sometimes translated as: The Whole Works. Always right here. All-at-oneness.

This is the paradoxical practice of Zen. How can we take care of the ordinary things and people in our daily life with care and attentiveness and still understand and know their impermanence? In practicing these two views simultaneously, we can come to understand freedom and to completely inhabit our one precious and unique human life. They mutually support each other and yet retain their distinctive qualities. We don’t call something that is white, black and yet we understand that white and black share the same essence. This understanding defines a good Zen practice. We take care of cause and effect from the basis of operation of boundless, timeless, open awareness.

The absolute in the relative and the relative in the absolute

We can cultivate in ourselves: Trusting in the process of our awareness and attention Trusting that I am Buddha Trusting universal functioning or basic goodness Trusting the “knowing quality of the mind” – that part of our mind that is connected to universal functioning, to DNA, to our intuition. Trusting in cause and effect. We can take good care of the smallest seeds of wholesomeness. Being devoted to taking care of the wholesome seeds, we can trust that there will be a wholesome result, sooner or later.

In order to trust, we have to find a connection with the perspective of life that is larger than our personal desire systems. We have to feel connected with peace and harmony, or the total dynamic working of the universe, or universal perspective. We know that things are working in that largest sense. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west every day. Our hearts are continuously pumping, our neurological system is working underneath our consciousness in every moment. Astronomy or any of the sciences really points to the incredible mystery of life that is working in peace and harmony underneath the surface conditions of our human stories.  In order for a human being to cultivate trust and the ability to let go, we have to stay connected to this harmony that is beneath the appearance of things.

Well, it’s pretty obvious to most of us that we can’t entirely trust in the world, in people and in appearances. The world of appearances is filled with the three poisons of greed, anger and ignorance. Sometimes, our closest people have betrayed us. The world as it appears in conditioned reality and ordinary life, is filled with unpredictable and often unexplainable occurrences that definitely go against how we wish things would be. Because of our unfulfilled desires, we suffer. When I was teaching recently at the prison sangha, The Unpolished Diamond Sangha, one man laughed at me and said, “You might be able to trust out there, but in here, that’s seems almost impossible. There is almost nothing and no one that can be trusted.” That has stuck with me. How to respond to that? Is there something unconditioned that we can trust in?

What do we trust in?

This teaching has helped me understand Dogen’s cubism and also how we enter into the present moment. Uchiyama Roshi calls it “opening the hand of thought”. We do not enter the present moment through thinking. If we debate the philosophy, we circle around the truth like a hawk circling around its prey. We circle around the diamond but never enter the center – the intersection of time and space. The first section of the fascicle “Going Beyond Buddha” is about talking and listening, or talking and hearing, or hearing and non-hearing.  These first few pages are Dogen at his wackiest – his almost impossible-to-follow writing.  But I find if I keep in mind the Diamond sliver and these charts, I can find my way through the dense contradictory sentences.  He is showing us the prism of understanding intellectually and the presence of being in the center of the chart.

Dogen will take all the 4 positions of Nagarjuna’s tetralemma (either, or, both, neither) and present them in one sentence or one paragraph. He might even debate the righteousness of one point of view and then combat it with the other point of view. He breaks up our attachment to our point of views and points his finger at total dynamic functioning.

I have written previously about the issue of “both”. In one sense, interdependence and total dynamic working implies that everything is both form and emptiness simultaneously. But the problem is that you can’t PERCEIVE both form and emptiness at the same time. They are both there supporting each other but our discriminative thought can only see one or the other; like the front and back foot in walking, like the old lady and young lady optical illusion, or the front and back of a hand. Both sides are always there. We have a whole hand but you can only see either the front of the hand or the back of the hand in a single moment.

These are the four positions on the diamond shape; the opposites, both and neither.  We swing around and around the diamond shape if we stay in language and our thinking. This is the swirling world of thinking and samsara. To enter the truth, we have to get off the diamond shape and enter into the center of the chart. The center of the chart is, as Katagiri Roshi always said, the intersection of time and space. It is the truth-happening place, the only true reality – the present moment. When we find our heads spinning around all the prism of viewpoints, we can simply enter into the intersection of time and space and let “understanding” go.

After bringing the opposites to our consciousness, we then want to decide; do they happen as “both” (at the top of the chart) or neither (which is at the bottom of the chart).  Is it the truth that everything is annihilated by the word “neither”?

First we have to understand that the opposites need each other, revolve around each other, actually make one complete dynamic. Form is on the left and emptiness is on the right of the chart.  Form needs emptiness and emptiness needs form. They are actually not separated but intellectually we conceive them as separate and opposite.

Dogen is constantly and repeatedly trying to knock us off our intellectual center and interrupt our thinking.  He does not confirm any one solid view of so-called reality. He doesn’t want us to get stuck to one side or the other in the dynamic pivoting of life’s opposite. Do not cling to the absolute or the relative truth. They dynamically and mutually work with each other. Dogen would describe this interaction as “The Whole Works.”

The place of the here and now IS the true reality and that can’t be described by any of the words above or by language.

Dogen can be very difficult to read or understand. That’s why we often need a commentary or teacher to introduce his way of writing and the underlying teaching. I often say he’s a thirteenth century cubist. Just like Picasso or in the writing world, Gertrude Stein, he tries to show all sides of the story in one paragraph or even one sentence. That is why he repeats himself and contradicts himself all in the same paragraph. If you are looking for the “right” understanding, you become confused and lost in his prism of various interpretations or views. Dogen’s “right” understanding is that there is none.   No one point of view is “right”. According to conditions, any view can be the right view in the right circumstance. Dogen really wants to take away our solid idea of a fixed ground of reality. It is not form or emptiness. It is not both or neither. There is no one right, fixed view. That is our “clinging”.

THE LOGIC OF THE CATUSKOTI

Jan Westerhoff on Nāgārjuna

No Four Ways About It: Nāgārjuna’s Tetralemma

if we build this   kind of knowing we become knowledgeable which is  good for lots of things but it is insufficient   because we also need to know how to do things and  the second P is procedural knowing this kind of   knowing is knowing the procedures that achieve  results and it doesn't get us truth it gets us   power an easy way to see it is the difference  between knowing lots about bikes and knowing   00:02:09 how to ride a bike you see this procedural  knowing gives us the power to ride around   and we all know people with great theory but can't  turn it into great practice and with procedural   knowing it's getting that embodied sense of how  specific actions reliably get us specific results   we call these skills and building our procedural  knowing building our skills we become experts  

the first kind of knowing he describes is the one  that we usually talk about knowing knowledge and   he calls it propositional knowing because it's  the kind of knowing that exists in books where   there are propositions facts beliefs concepts  rules is how we win an argument persuade someone   of something or describe a theory it's thinking  knowing knowing about things in science philosophy   00:01:40 history management we are in this business  of knowing what is true

okay so imagine a person learns a lot about  hammers and becomes very skillful with using one   00:02:38 this is useful but is every problem a nail  we might need another kind of knowing that   sees the situation we find ourselves in  and knows what skills are appropriate   John Vervaeke calls this perspectival knowing  it's not about knowing the truth or knowing how to   enact something it's knowing how to perceive the  world how to take it all in from our perspective   and with this we will know how things feel  and we can appreciate then what really matters   00:03:04 or sense what is needed in the situation it's not  just thinking about our perspective but really   inhabiting it getting a taste for how things  appear to us the result of perspectival knowing is   presence and with presence we also appreciate  the limits of our perspective and the value of   other perspectives we become more aware we see how  things fit together we put things in perspective   we become perceptive

there's a fourth  kind of knowing that's not about seeing but being   00:03:34 the p is participatory knowing knowing our place  in the world being in a right relationship with   the arena we're operating in being in a dynamic  connection with other people who have their own   perspectives and being in flow with what's around  us notice how different it feels when you're   out of sorts in a situation versus when you're  really at home or in the groove in a situation   when we know how to participate in an arena we  can see what is relevant and anticipate what is   00:04:02 next and we can improvise with little or no  self-doubt or hesitation because we aren't   thinking about it we know it and with this kind of  knowing we're not just observing the world we're   impacting it but not in that simple procedural  sense we are dancing with the situation both   influencing and being influenced and here we  can handle complexity and ambiguity and novelty   we can face things with good humor because we're  at home in the arena building our participatory   00:04:29 knowing we become co-creators with life

we often have too narrow an appreciation of   knowing focusing too much on one or two kinds  of knowing but to live well in a complex world   we need to effectively engage with four kinds  of knowing and perfectly they all begin with a P

Rather than starting from particles or pieces of matter, the action ontology is based on actionsor reactions. These are elementary processes that lead from some initial condition X to asubsequent condition Y:X → YThese conditions can in general be decomposed into conjunctions of more elementaryconditions. Adopting the notation used for reactions in physics and chemistry, we will denoteconjunctions by the “+” operator:a + b + ... → e + f + ...

The thesis of this paper is that you can have your cake and eat it: it is possible todevelop an understanding of the mind that is both non-dual and analytic—in the sense ofbased on clearly defined, formal distinctions. To achieve that, we need to replace thevagueness of process metaphysics by the concreteness of what has been called actionontology (Heylighen, 2011; Turchin, 1993). That will allow us to “extend” the mind not justacross notebooks and social systems, but across the whole of nature and society

us, they lead to the emergence of ever more sophisticated, meaningful and adaptive forms.This evolutionary worldview is very different from the lifeless, static picture of the clockworkuniverse, where inert pieces of matter follow predetermined trajectories. In such an evolving,interconnected world, mind no longer appears like an alien entity that cannot be explained byscientific principles, but rather as a natural emanation of the way networks of processes self-organize into goal-directed, adaptive systems.This is of course not a novel idea. It has been formulated by philosophers such asWhitehead, Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin under the label of process metaphysics(Rescher, 1996; Teilhard de Chardin, 1959; Whitehead, 1978). But analytically trainedphilosophers are understandably not very keen on these rather mystical and obscure theories,preferring the clear distinctions of logic and mathematics to these poetic and grandiloquentwritings. Therefore, analytic philosophy has tended to stay firmly rooted in the reductionistapproach of Newtonian science. The problem is that this leads it straight back into an implicitdualism, and its apparently unsolvable mind-body problem.

Descartes formulated his philosophy of the fundamental duality of mind and matter in thecontext of the mechanistic worldview that was emerging at the time. In Descartes’s view, thebody was merely a complicated mechanical system, an automaton essentially similar to aclockwork in which one gear passes on its movement to another gear

he aim of the present paper is to propose a radical resolution to this controversy: weassume that mind is a ubiquitous property of all minimally active matter (Heylighen, 2011). Itis in no way restricted to the human brain—although that is the place where we know it in itsmost concentrated form. Therefore, the extended mind hypothesis is in fact misguided,because it assumes that the mind originates in the brain, and merely “extends” itself a little bitoutside in order to increase its reach, the way one’s arm extends itself by grasping a stick.While ancient mystical traditions and idealist philosophies have formulated similarpanpsychist ideas (Seager, 2006), the approach we propose is rooted in contemporaryscience—in particular cybernetics, cognitive science, and complex systems theory. As such, itstrives to formulate its assumptions as precisely and concretely as possible, if possible in amathematical or computational form (Heylighen, Busseniers, Veitas, Vidal, & Weinbaum,2012), so that they can be tested and applied in real-world situations—and not just in thethought experiments beloved by philosophers

We approach the problem of the extended mind from a radically non-dualistperspective. The separation between mind and matter is an artefact of the outdatedmechanistic worldview, which leaves no room for mental phenomena such as agency,intentionality, or feeling. We propose to replace it by an action ontology, which conceivesmind and matter as aspects of the same network of processes. By adopting the intentionalstance, we interpret the catalysts of elementary reactions as agents exhibiting desires,intentions, and sensations. Autopoietic networks of reactions constitute more complex super-agents, which moreover exhibit memory, deliberation and sense-making. In the specific caseof social networks, individual agents coordinate their actions via the propagation ofchallenges. The distributed cognition that emerges from this interaction cannot be situated inany individual brain. This non-dualist, holistic view extends and operationalizes processmetaphysics and Eastern philosophies. It is supported by both mindfulness experiences andmathematical models of action, self-organization, and cognition.

argumentation mapping allows large on-line groups toinvestigate very complex issues, such as climate change, by linking issues with arguments andcounterarguments in a growing public network (Iandoli, Klein, & Zollo, 2009; Klein, 2011).

coordination can be defined as the arrangement of actions across people,places and times so as maximize synergy and minimize friction. In earlier work (Heylighen, 2012b),we have analyzed coordination into four components: alignment, division of labor, workflow andaggregation.

This is likely to keep theattention ready for “surprises”, thus avoiding a sense of monotony setting in.More generally, the flow paradigm lacks the notion of adventure (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen,2012a), which can be characterized by a sequence of unforeseen challenges (dangers, opportunities,surprises...)—as contrasted with the foreseen challenges that we call ‘goals’. It is theunpredictability or unexpectedness of these challenges that creates the excitement that we typicallyassociate with an adventure, and that forms the basis of full emotional involvement. Adventure isassociated with the notions of exploration, curiosity and mystery: mystery can be defined as a lackof prospect that incites the emotion of curiosity, which in turns incites exploratory action(Heylighen, 2012a). Mystery and adventure are common features of game design (Dickey, 2006).However, their role will need further analysis if we want to apply them systematically tomobilization, given that they imply a level of uncertainty that—if experienced too intensely—mayproduce the anxiety that mobilization systems are trying to avoid.

Therefore, any feedback signal, even if negative, boostsyour effectiveness, and therefore self-confidence, in continuing your activity, adding to the sense offlow. (

boredom, as it does not fully engage the attention, while a too difficult one produces anxiety, as theperson becomes afraid to fail. Only a task that is challenging enough will engender the level ofintense, but tranquil, concentration that characterizes flow. There are two ways to control thebalance between challenges and skills: changing the intrinsic difficulty of the task, and changing theperson’s ability to cope with the task. At first sight, balance could be achieved by proposing arelatively easy task at which the person is not particularly skilled. But a more advanced model seesflow as emerging from high skills applied to difficult challenges (Fig. 1). In this more complexmodel (Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002), limited skills applied to limited challenges merelyproduce apathy, as there is not much to create interest.This means that a good mobilization system not only should present goals that are difficultto reach, but provide the additional abilities necessary to handle that difficulty. This is the “newskills” feature that characterizes a truly compelling technology: you will feel most stimulated to usea tool if it allows you to tackle challenges that you could not tackle without it—albeit in such a waythat its use is fully intuitive and transparent. Eventually, a good tool should start to feel like anaugmentation or extension of yourself—the way a stick extends the reach of your arm, a telescopeextends your vision, and a notebook extends your memory.

An important aspect missing in typical flow models is that in order to produce enduringcommitment a goal should correspond to something truly valuable. For example, while the goal ofshooting a maximum number of spaceships in your game of Space Invaders may be clear, it doesnot satisfy any real needs. Therefore, playing games, however enjoyable at the time, if continuedlong enough will eventually leave you with the feeling of having wasted your time. One way gamedesigners try to overcome this limitation is by creating a sense of “epic meaning” (McGonigal,2011), i.e. situating the game action in a narrative context which implies that something truly greator valuable is being achieved (like saving the world from alien invaders).

The formulation of goals seems the most obvious requirement for focus and commitment: the goalfunctions like a target or “attractor” for the course of action, determining the direction for all futureactivity (Heylighen, 2012a). It is this directing influence that precludes the hesitation that wouldotherwise be elicited by an overload of choices. For example, for a rock climber trying to reach thetop, the direction is clear: up! On the other hand, for a tourist sauntering through a strange citywithout specific destination, every crossroads presents a dilemma: left, right, or straight on?

Possibly the most useful paradigm to understand individual drive is the psychological concept offlow, which was derived from numerous observations of how people feel while performing differenttypes of activity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Nakamura & Csikszentmihalyi, 2002). “Flow” refers tothe pleasurable state experienced when the activity, while intensely focused, proceeds in aseemingly effortless, flowing manner—because every action immediately elicits the next action,without any hesitation, worry or self-consciousness. In such a state, continuing the activity becomesthe only real concern, while everything else is pushed to the back of the mind. That is exactly thekind of focus and commitment that we expect from a good mobilization system. The gratifying,addictive quality of computer games is commonly explained by their capacity to produce flow(Cowley, Charles, Black, & Hickey, 2008).The basic conditions needed to generate flow are:• the activity has clear goals;• every action produces an immediate feedback.• the degree of difficulty or challenge of the task remains in balance with the level of skill

tap into real needs (e.g. combating the dangers of obesity)• present clear goals (e.g. realistic weight targets)• make it easy to do what is needed (e.g. prepare healthy meals)• give feedback about the progress made so far (e.g. compare your present weight with yourinitial and ideal weights)• provide clear visualizations of potential means or ends, so that users can easily imagine theeffect of their future actions (e.g. a computer-generated photo of how you would look afterlosing all that weight)• make use of social pressure (e.g. by pointing out the achievements of others)• provide timely triggers to stimulate their users to do something (e.g. alarms to remind you toexercise)

More generally, a persuasive system can be seen as an implementation of what has beencalled the extended will (J. Heath & Anderson, 2010). This is a generalization of the idea that weuse various information technologies as external memories, so as to “extend our mind” into theenvironment (Clark & Chalmers, 1998; Heylighen & Vidal, 2008). But mind encompasses morethan memory and information processing capability: it also includes the motivation, concentrationand determination needed to act effectively—i.e. what is conventionally called “will”. In ourpresent environment full of distractions and temptations, our willpower is heavily taxed. Therefore,in general we need external support if we want to make sure that we stick to our intentions (Allen,2001; J. Heath & Anderson, 2010).

competitions or leaderboards, where players can compare their achievements with those ofother players, so that they are incited to do better than they did up to now• narratives, in which the challenges are situated within a concrete context or storyline, so thatindividual actions become part of an extended course of action within a meaningfulenvironment (Dickey, 2006; Heylighen, 2012a)• epic meaning, in which the impression is created that the player is working to achieve a goalthat is particularly important or awe-inspiring (McGonigal, 2011)• trophies or virtual goods, in which players receive virtual presents as a reward for theirachievement• gifting, in which players get the opportunity to give virtual presents to other players, thustightening links of friendship

Communities too sometimes use gamification techniques to boost participation. The Avaazwebsite, for example, exhibits a continually updated ticker listing the latest people to sign a petition,together with the total number of signatories, so that contributors feel they participate in anefficient, globally advancing movement. A more sophisticated example is Stack Overflow, acollaboratively edited question and answer site—initially about programming problems, but laterextended via Stack Exchange to a network of sister sites covering such diverse topics as cooking,physics, photography and language (Mamykina, Manoim, Mittal, Hripcsak, & Hartmann, 2011).Participants in these communities can ask questions, propose answers, and vote on the questionsand answers from other participants. As members contribute more good questions and answers andreceive more positive votes, their status as recognized “experts” increases via a point system. Thisallows them to reach increasingly advanced levels of privileges, so that the more active andconstructive contributors can make changes in the site organization that are impossible fornewcomers. Thus, every member has a continuing incentive to provide high-quality contributions,making the community remarkably fast and effective in dealing with its problems (Mamykina et al.,2011).

But educational applications are merely the beginning: the recent development ofgamification applies the mechanisms of game design to enhance focus and motivation for nearlyany kind of activity (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, & Nacke, 2011; Zichermann & Cunningham,2011). It is used in particular by businesses and organizations to goad people into performing tasksthat are useful for the organization—but not intrinsically rewarding for the individual. Examples areparticipating in surveys, filling in forms, or joining customer loyalty programs. While performingthese activities, respondents are given the kinds of points, “badges”, or bonuses that are used assymbolic rewards in games. This constant feedback motivates them to contribute additionally, so asto attain ever-higher total scores. Moreover, the more points they have gathered already, the lessthey are inclined to lose these points by prematurely stopping the activity—a psychological bias forcontinuity known as “sunk costs” (Garland & Newport, 1991).

The result is that the best games tend to be addictive, as playersare so strongly motivated to continue the play that they find it difficult to get back to their normalactivities (Grüsser, Thalemann, & Griffiths, 2006; Kim, Namkoong, Ku, & Kim, 2008).

While Internet communities typically emphasize collaboration and sharing, there is another type ofmobilization system that emphasizes competition and rivalry: gaming environments. The gamesavailable on the web are nearly infinite in their variety, but they all share the objective of scoringpoints or winning, i.e. doing better than the others. This too is a powerful motivator, whichenhances focus, commitment and persistence. But games exhibit a variety of other motivators,given that by definition they have been designed for enjoyment, i.e. for providing stimuli thatpeople find intrinsically pleasurable, so that they seek to collect as many as possible. Since the earlydays of personal computers, gaming has become an increasingly popular pastime. This has ledprogrammers to create an ever-greater variety of ever more sophisticated games.

he only thing needed is a shared medium or workspace in which clear traces of the work areregistered (Heylighen, 2011a; Parunak, 2006). The aggregated trace functions as a collectivememory that keeps track of the different contributions and indicates where further work may beneeded. This function is typically performed by the community website, such as the Wikipedia site.A more advanced example of this functionality can be found in the issue queue used byDrupal developers (Kiemen, 2011; Zilouchian Moghaddam, Twidale, & Bongen, 2011). This is acommunity-maintained, ordered list of feature requests or problems that need to be addressed,together with the status of the work being done on each. The issue queue makes it easy forcontributors to see where their contribution would be most helpful, and to keep track of theadvances made by others. It can be seen as a more spontaneous, self-organizing version of the jobticketing systems that are commonly used in technical support centers, where each incomingproblem is assigned a “job ticket”, after which the ticket is assigned to one or more employees, andmonitored so as to make sure it is adequately dealt with (Heylighen & Vidal, 2008; Orrick, Bauer,& McDuffie, 2000).

What these communities have in common is that they collectively produce very useful—and typically high-quality—applications and information, but this without any financialcompensation or legal organization. In other words, these communities consist purely of volunteerscontributing on an informal basis to a common project. From the perspective of traditionaleconomics and organizational theory, this is paradoxical (Heylighen, 2007): why would anyoneprovide such valuable services to others without being either paid or ordered to do so? Severalauthors have investigated the motives that incite people to contribute to such communities (Ghosh,2005; Lerner & Tirole, 2002; Weber, 2004). These include curiosity, altruism, free expression, needfor belonging, desire for status and recognition, and the hope for future financial rewards for privateconsultancy after being publicly recognized for one’s expertise. More interesting for our purposethan these individual motivations, though, are the structures and processes that encourageindividuals to take part in such a collective enterprise, i.e. the underlying mobilization system.A first analysis (Heylighen, 2007) points at two fundamental mechanisms: feedback andstigmergy. By contributing a question, comment, answer, program, photo or any other input,participants hope to get a reaction from the other community members, because that would givethem an indication of whether they are on the right path, or need to make some correction. Suchfeedback provides valuable information that allows participants to get better in whatever they areinterested in. For example, a programmer who contributed a piece of code will benefit if a userpoints out a bug in that code, suggests a way to extend it, or simply confirms that the job was welldone.Stigmergy is a mechanism of spontaneous coordination between actions, where the result ofan individual’s work stimulates a next individual to continue that work (Parunak, 2006; Bolici,Howison, & Crowston, 2009; Heylighen, 2011a). For example, a paragraph contributed to aWikipedia article may incite a later reader of that paragraph to add a reference or further detail,which in turn may elicit further contributions from others.

hereexist a range of behavioral methods to effectively combat distraction, procrastination and lack ofcommitment, while increasing focus, motivation and coordination (e.g. C. Heath & Heath, 2010;Thaler & Sunstein, 2008). When these techniques are implemented in ICT, the result may be calleda mobilization system. According to the Oxford dictionary, to mobilize means to “organize andencourage (people) to act in a concerted way in order to bring about a particular political objective”.Given that any valuable objective deserves concerted action, the only generalization we need tomake is to leave out the adjective “political”. A mobilization system can then be defined as: asocio-technological system that motivates and coordinates people to work towards a givenobjective—thus efficiently rallying their efforts.

While the term “mobilization system” is new, the underlying ICT techniques have beenexplored for at least a decade or two, under labels such as “persuasive technology”, “collaborativetechnology”, “user experience”, and “gamification”. This paper will first review a number of suchexisting approaches and then try to distill their common core in the form of a list of mobilizationprinciples. Finally, we will sketch both potential benefits and dangers of a more systematic andwidespread application of mobilization systems.

Recently a number of techniques have been developed that stimulate people to act towards specificobjectives. These include persuasive technologies, gamification, user experiences, and various methods andtools used in open-source and other communities to encourage and organize participation. After surveyingvarious examples of such applications, we generalize these approaches by proposing a new theoreticalframework. The basic concept is a mobilization system, defined as an ICT environment that motivates andcoordinates the actions of people, so as to increase their focus and commitment, while minimizing distraction,hesitation and procrastination. We then analyze the fundamental mechanisms of (individual) motivation and(collective) coordination, starting from Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and the mechanism of stigmergy.The basic requirements are clear goals in line with real needs, immediate and rich feedback, challenges inbalance with the user’s skill levels, and a shared workspace in which all tasks and results are registered forevery contributor to see. We conclude our review of mobilization systems by pointing out their potentialdangers, such as addiction and political or commercial exploitation, as well as their potential benefits, indomains such as work, health, education and research

The overall result is that it has become much more difficult for people to commit to anyparticular choice, and much easier for them to get distracted and abandon whatever they are busywith. The combination of distractability, lack of commitment, and procrastination (J. Heath &Anderson, 2010) results in poorly focused, inefficient, unreliable, and stressful work. Theseindividual effects are magnified at the social level: when several people suffering from such lack ofdedication collaborate on a common project, the result can only be poorly coordination, since noone knows exactly what to expect from the others. Thus, we come to the conclusion that while ICTundoubtedly has increased the mechanical productivity of work, it may well have decreased ourpsychological and social productivity, together with our overall level of involvement, satisfactionand well-being.

choice overload (Schwartz, 2005): as the numberof available options for documents to read, products to buy, services to use, people to connect to, ordestinations to visit increases, people need to invest ever more effort in deciding which option theyshould choose. Even when a decision is finally made, the decider is typically left with the gnawingfeeling that perhaps there was an even better option, thus feeling less satisfied with the choice. Theresult is continuing anxiety, and a tendency to avoid or postpone such stressful decisions. Thisphenomenon can be illustrated by a classic experiment in which prospective buyers are offered totaste either half a dozen or several dozen types of fruit jam. Paradoxically, given the larger choice,people are less likely to buy a pot of jam than given the smaller choice! (Schwartz, 2005)

transience: nowadays people are both quicker to adopt and to abandon newtechnologies, services, jobs, and even relationships, presumably because: (1) it has become mucheasier to change such commitments; (2) there are so many more options to be explored; (3) new,and potentially better, options appear at an ever faster rate.

nformation overload, a form of mental bombardment that (Shenk, 1998) aptlycharacterized as “data smog”, since it obscures rather than enlightens, while damaging health byincreasing stress levels. It is typically accompanied by a barrage of interruptions or distractionscaused by incoming emails, phone calls, text messages, tweets or “status updates”.

i think there's a lot of latent potential in this coordination mechanisms layer um especially i think there's a bunch of really good ideas around um things like futarki and other struck 00:17:59 i'm not necessarily sure that that particular construction will work but i think we need to a lot of experiments with those kinds of governance structures to see if there could be ways of governing systems algorithmically 00:18:11 and and with a way of aggregating a lot of our perspectives and thoughts and values um in a much more systematic way than sort of like uh very brittle representative democracy that like doesn't really scale to to 00:18:23 millions of people um and i think you know in terms of a lot of the mechanisms and structures that that we want to build um there's a lot more theory that is needed there's a lot more implementations that 00:18:35 are needed there's a lot more rigorous study and assessment of of performance and so on that is needed so um really encourage you to kind of pick out any of these

i really think this last one the coordination systems how do you get large groups of people to organize much better 00:16:44 that holds some of the most promise

to do our own work to develop our own teams to 00:13:48 grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative 00:14:01 systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks 00:14:13 so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i 00:14:26 want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three 00:14:37 events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so 00:14:50 in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded 00:15:02 and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh 00:15:15 thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been 00:15:28 to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so 00:15:41 a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same 00:15:53 level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um 00:16:05 idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've 00:16:19 created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is 00:16:31 maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much

just to give you a feel for how powerful these systems are just think of the bitcoin energy consumption and realize that that 00:09:48 just drops out of two components in bitcoin one is the block reward impact evaluator and two the price of bitcoin so those two things yield this tremendous energy 00:10:00 consum consuming system this was kind of an accident this was a an accident of nobody quite intended this this device to um consume this this amount of energy and waste this amount of energy uh but 00:10:13 this gives you a sense of the power of these these uh systems first off we should fix this and you know get out get to uh better systems that that actually uh make this this um energy use uh useful 00:10:25 uh but this i use as an example to give you a sense of like the level of power that comes from these incentive structures and their operation at scale in falcon we're very familiar with these kinds of structures we use the same component and we've gotten a feel for how powerful 00:10:38 this stuff is um in just a couple of years we ended up organizing the build out of a massive hardware infrastructure for providing storage to the world um with again just using one 00:10:51 core incentive structure a block reward uh so all of this makes me really really hopeful um that we'll be able to build um these kinds of incentive structures that can scale to solve extremely large planetary scale 00:11:03 problems um by designing incentive structures and structures warping the incentive fields and getting us to little by little problem by problem scale by scale um solve challenges 00:11:17 and so i think i greatly encourage you if you aren't already in this uh world to try it out to try creating some smart contracts and deploying them um to try uh working with other projects and so on 00:11:29 to get a feel for how powerful these these systems are um i i'm very hopeful that things like this will have a huge impact on planetary scale problems like uh climate change um i've become very hopeful that 00:11:41 these systems will let us coordinate massive action again millions of people billions of people whole industries by letting us have the full power of law and economics and so on in a fully 00:11:55 programmable environment i'm also very hopeful that we can get to accelerate science and technology development by using these kinds of structures to create instruments to incentivize areas of the innovation chasm that are 00:12:08 underserved areas where it's extremely difficult to get funding for certain projects or where it's extremely difficult to get long-term rewards or long-term success many of you have probably heard me talk 00:12:21 about this science and technology translation problem and the lack of incentive structures in that in that period in the castle in the middle and i think a lot of that just comes from the lack of reward structures there that make it impossible for 00:12:34 groups building groups building building projects there to raise capital um because there's no good incentive for capital uh to to deploy there so uh what brought us to so knowing all 00:12:46 of this knowing that this is a critical century knowing that um this critical decade and year um and knowing that crypticon is extremely powerful um why are we here why are we in funding commons so we thought about this problem last year and 00:12:59 we saw that the scale of problem of um of blockchains and the kind of rapid pace of development in industry and the emergence of things like defy and dials and nfts and so on 00:13:10 and especially the the broad adoption by hundreds of thousands of people or millions of people of these tools gave us a very promising um landscape to be able to solve these kinds of problems 00:13:23 and so we have the potential to solve all these massive coordination problems but we're lacking good mechanisms we need way better governance structures we need way better funding mechanisms and uh and so on we need to study these things with much 00:13:36 deeper theory and much deeper experimental analysis and so on

all kinds of regressions along the way um and there's many things that are getting worse um but for most um for most indicators of human well-being uh the world is in a 00:02:18 great trajectory and the last few centuries have been um a great direction uh however we're now confronted with a series of x-risks um or how uh david one of the 00:02:30 researchers in the um in our team likes to put public bads in extreme public baths that we have to have to really avoid and these especially the ones that are human caused um 00:02:44 present extreme challenges for us to get through and we we sort of control the speed at which we'll uh hit these uh but especially things like nuclear war and engineered pandemics and on ai 00:02:57 uh those kinds of risks

this is going to be a really critical year uh for public goods uh generation um and here at year i'm using 00:00:40 you know starting from now through the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. uh so what i'm going to go through is a case for why this year really matters and why this decade really matters in 00:00:53 the century

funding the commons

Understanding our situatedness, blowing up assumptionsWhat are the things your brain has been conditioned to believe as “true”? What should you re-examine, pull apart and re-assemble with intention?

Although several studies have documented theareas on Earth where unprecedented climates is likely to occur inresponse to ongoing greenhouse gas emissions24,25 , our understandingof climate change still lacks a precise indication of the time at which theclimate of a given location will shift wholly outside the range of his-torical precedents.To provide an indication of the projected timing of climate depar-ture under alternative greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, we havedeveloped an index that determines the year when the values of agiven climatic variable exceed the bounds of historical variabilityfor a particular location (Fig. 1a). We emphasize that although ourindex commonly identifies future dates, this does not imply thatclimate change is not already occurring. In fact, our index projectswhen ongoing climate change signals the start of a radically differentclimate.

Climate is a primary driver of biological processes, operating fromindividuals to ecosystems, and affects several aspects of human life.Therefore, climates without modern precedents could cause large andpotentially serious impacts on ecological and social systems 1–5 . Forinstance, species whose persistence is shaped by the climate canrespond by shifting their geographical ranges 4–7 , remaining in placeand adapting 5,8 , or becoming extinct 8–11 . Shifts in species distributionsand abundances can increase the risk of extinction 12 , alter communitystructure 3 and disrupt ecological interactions and the functioning ofecosystems. Changing climates could also affect the following: humanwelfare, through changes in the supply of food 13 and water 14,15 ; humanhealth 16, through wider spread of infectious vector-borne diseases 17,18,through heat stress19 and through mental illness20; the economy, throughchanges in goods and services21,22; and national security as a result ofpopulation shifts, heightened competition for natural resources, viol-ent conflict and geopolitical instability23. Although most ecological andsocial systems have the ability to adapt to a changing climate, themagnitude of disruption in both ecosystems and societies will bestrongly determined by the time frames in which the climate will reachunprecedented states1

Ecological and societal disruptions by modern climate change are critically determined by the time frame over whichclimates shift beyond historical analogues. Here we present a new index of the year when the projected mean climate ofa given location moves to a state continuously outside the bounds of historical variability under alternative greenhouse gasemissions scenarios. Using 1860 to 2005 as the historical period, this index has a global mean of 2069 (618 years s.d.) fornear-surface air temperature under an emissions stabilization scenario and 2047 (614 years s.d.) under a ‘business-as-usual’scenario. Unprecedented climates will occur earliest in the tropics and among low-income countries, highlighting thevulnerability of global biodiversity and the limited governmental capacity to respond to the impacts of climate change.Our findings shed light on the urgency of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions if climates potentially harmful to biodiversityand society are to be prevented.

the following eight leverage points yield dis-proportionately large effects: (i) enabling vi-sions of a good quality of life that do notentail ever-increasing material consumption;(ii) lowering total consumption and waste,including by addressing both populationgrowth and per capita consumption differ-ently in different contexts; (iii) unleashingexisting, widely held values of responsibil-ity to effect new social norms for sustain-ability, especially by extending notions ofresponsibility to include the impacts asso-ciated with consumption; (iv) addressing in-equalities, especially regarding income andgender, that undermine the capacity for sus-tainability; (v) ensuring inclusive decision-making and the fair and equitable sharing ofbenefits arising from the use of and adherenceto human rights in conservation decisions;(vi) accounting for nature’s deterioration fromboth local economic activities and telecouplings(70), including, for example, internationaltrade; (vii) ensuring environmentally friendlytechnological and social innovation, takinginto account potential rebound effects andinvestment regimes; and (viii) promotingeducation, knowledge generation, and themaintenance of different knowledge systems,including in the sciences and indigenous andlocal knowledge, especially regarding nature,conservation, and nature’s sustainable use.Although change at some of these levers andleverage points may encounter resistance indi-vidually, action at other levers and leveragepoints can enable such changes.The review also revealed that innovativegovernance approaches that are integrative,inclusive, informed, and adaptive (105, 106)are needed to effectively apply these levers toleverage points. Integrative approaches focuson the relationships between sectors and poli-cies and ensure policy coherence and effec-tiveness, and inclusive approaches, includingrights-based ones, reflect a plurality of valuesand thus promote equity. Informed govern-ance entails new strategies for knowledgeproduction and coproduction that are inclu-sive of diverse values and knowledge systems.Last, adaptive approaches—including learning,monitoring and feedback loops—help copingwith inevitable uncertainties and complexities.

A comprehensive set of five levers (95) forthis transformative change emerged from ourunprecedentedly broad and rigorous analysisof the many possible levers that have beenproposed previously: (i) developing incentivesand widespread capacity for environmentalresponsibility and eliminating perverse incen-tives; (ii) reforming sectoral and segmenteddecision-making to promote integration acrosssectors and jurisdictions; (iii) taking preemptiveand precautionary actions in regulatory andmanagement institutions and businesses toavoid, mitigate, and remedy the deteriorationof nature, and monitoring their outcomes;(iv) managing for resilient social and ecologicalsystems in the face of uncertainty and com-plexity to deliver decisions that are robust in awide range of scenarios; and (v) strengthen-ing environmental laws and policies and theirimplementation, and the rule of law moregenerally.

evers and leverage points fortransformative changeOur assessment—the most comprehensive car-ried out to date, including the nexus analysisof scenarios and an expert input process withliterature reviews—revealed clearly that re-versing nature’s ongoing decline (100) whilealso addressing inequality will require trans-formative change, namely a fundamental,system-wide reorganization across techno-logical, economic, and social factors, makingsustainability the norm rather than the altru-istic exception.

Our analysis suggests that it is possible toachieve many of the global biodiversity targetsand sustainability goals related to food, energy,climate, and water at local and global scales.The complexity of the challenges calls for anintegrative (nexus) approach (89) that simulta-neously examines interactions among multiplesectors along with synergies and tradeoffsamong goals. An example of a key nexus arethe simultaneous needs to mitigate climatechange, arrest biodiversity loss, and ensurethat all people have adequate nutrition onone hand, and the potentially negative con-sequences of large-scale land-based climatechange mitigation on the other. Even moder-ate warming will likely be detrimental forbiodiversity (90) and associated benefits topeople (91). However, most scenarios projectedto limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C by the end ofthe 21st century rely on large-scale mitigationmeasures on land, in the form of bioenergycrops, reforestation, and/or afforestation, neg-atively affecting biodiversity and also foodproduction and water demand (19, 92). At thesame time, expanding the amount of landdevoted to agriculture to ensure that all peoplehave adequate nutrition would negatively af-fect biodiversity as well (93) and would furtherexacerbate climate change (19, 92). Both land-based climate change mitigation and agricul-tural expansion, when deployed at the largescale, can undermine local livelihoods, createaccess problems, and intensify social conflict(94). A suite of possible actions could be ef-fective in navigating these tradeoffs (19, 95)—for example, focusing on regeneration andrestoration of high-carbon ecosystems (aswell as reducing waste and overconsump-tion) rather than massive bioenergy mono-culture plantations—to achieve climate changemitigation (19, 96, 97).

Projections also omitinterconnections among species, which maycause domino effects that amplify the loss ofdiversity (88).

We comprehensively reviewed both explor-atory and target-seeking scenarios (81) offuture change in direct and indirect drivers.These scenarios resulted in starkly differentimpacts on nature and its contributions topeople and, in combination, enabled syntheticconclusions about the need for transforma-tive change.

The vast area of the world managed by In-digenous Peoples (at least 25 to 28% of landsurface) (Fig. 4) under various property re-gimes is no exception to these trends. Becauseof their large extent, the fact that nature isoverall better preserved within them (60), andbecause of the diverse stewardship practicescarried within them around the world (Fig. 4,A to I), the fate of nature in these lands hasimportant consequences for wider societyas well as for local livelihoods, health, andknowledge transmission (67).

Many hotspots ofagrobiodiversity and of crop wild relatives arealso under threat or lack formal protection(58), jeopardizing the pool of genetic varia-tion that underpins the long-term resilienceof agricultural production and food systemsin the face of environmental change (59).

global biomass of largepredatory fish targeted by fisheries has fallenby two-thirds over the past 100 years (53)

The global biomass of wild mammalsis now less than 25% of that before the latePleistocene megafaunal extinction—and lessthan 10% that of the world’s current humanpopulation (52).

ests nowspan only 68% of their preindustrial extent

The biomass of the world’s vegetation (25)has halved over human history

On average, large terrestrialmammals have been extirpated from 75% oftheir natural ranges (40)

The results of this unprecedented appropri-ation of nature can now be seen much moreclearly than even 15 years ago (17), thanks torapid advances in data and tools for obser-vation, analysis, synthesis, and modeling ofmarine, freshwater, and especially terrestrialnature. These new data reveal that humanactions have directly altered at least 70% ofland surface (18, 19); 66% of ocean surface isexperiencing increasing cumulative impacts(20); around 85% of wetland area has beenlost since the 1700s (21), and 77% of riverslonger than 1000 km no longer flow freelyfrom source to sea (22).

Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earthpoints to the need for transformative change

t what is an individual 01:13:07 okay so why why the why in the world would i why would we ask this question and why would i spend you know multiple pages in this paper even discussing like of course we know what 01:13:20 an individual is right or or maybe not like like that actually turns out to be a difficult question what is an individual and it's important to this and it's important to this discussion of societal 01:13:33 systems because who are we who what you know what is the purpose of a societal system what is it what is it who is it supposed to serve you know so you have to ask really like 01:13:45 it's it's good to ask if we're going to build a societal system who wh who is it that it's supposed to service you know like who are we what do we want you know it's part of 01:13:57 figuring out what do we want what do we value who are we start there you know i would say so so we've already kind of touched on these themes but 01:14:09 this idea of rugged individualism you know like from a certain perspective and a certain you know from a limited sort of time frame perspective sure there's there's a rugged individualism that exists right and it can be useful in 01:14:22 certain certain situations but by and large that's not what life is doing you know that's not what the the they're um we are we are 01:14:36 it's really even difficult to say like where if i'm a rugged individual where do i actually start and where do i end you know like where is where is me this you know even physically it's hard to say 01:14:48 because this physical me is really i think more bacterial cells than it is um human cells right so so uh like i'm a sieve i'm a i'm a process through which things are 01:15:02 flowing through i'm a i'm an ecosystem myself with bacteria and viruses and human cells and all of those components are necessary for me to survive today and for for 01:15:14 humans to survive you know over eons were like a mix we're a bag of of human-like things and bacterial-like things and viral-like things and 01:15:26 and we're porous and we're part of the carbon cycle and we're part of the nitrogen cycle and then you and then when you say like okay well how could you be a rugged individual individual when you're really 01:15:38 this this porous smorgasbord of things right

the two questions that we hopefully would uh try to answer with with this r d program is and and one of this i already 00:56:53 mentioned but out of all conceivable designs for societal systems so so so this isn't about capitalism versus socialism or something like that there's like i would think there's an unlimited 00:57:05 potential we're creative we're creative people there would be a million varieties of of societal systems and integrated societal systems that we might come up with 00:57:17 and some of those probably would work very well and some of them probably would work very poorly um so among those what what might be among the best and not the the single best that's not the purpose either it's not just to find one thing that works is 00:57:30 to find like a you know more of a a variety a process of things a mix mishmash of things that community the communities can choose to implement that you know 00:57:43 works well for them and that suits them and that works well for their neighbors and works well forever it works well for the whole really

so now finally we get to active inference all this discussion and we're finally getting to the point here right for his lab so um i had and i had already touched on 01:47:35 some of this before but um it would you know today if you're going to develop a really good ai system you're and you're going to have a you have a robot saying the robot has to act 01:47:47 in some environment it is pretty well understood that that if you program that robot to you give it a you give it a i mean traditionally you'll give it a a a fitness function or some kind of 01:47:59 valuation function and it's for example it's good if it it you know you lose points if you fall through a trap door and is and you get points if you uh you know whatever 01:48:11 find find the piece of cake or something well that's uh that's fine for extremely simple universes that your robot might work in but as soon as you get beyond you know as soon as you get to any kind of more realistic uh 01:48:24 universe that your robot has to work in that pre-programming pre-programming concept just kind of falls apart it is you you it would require the the the practitioner to think ahead of all the 01:48:37 things that the robot might encounter and then how to value certain you know value those situations in certain ways uh and that is really uh what active inference 01:48:49 offers is a is a kind of a cognitive understanding or a mechanism by which an organism will uh uh where its 01:49:00 fitness score is in a sense involves both uh you know achieving goals and exploring its world to for for for epistemic gain so 01:49:16 um that's what we would like the that's how we would like to program the robot in a sense so that it can learn from it can learn on the fly from its experiences it can it can alter its actions and 01:49:30 goals as it be as it becomes clear as it gathers more information from its universe as it as it meets new situations that were never never conceived of by the by the 01:49:42 programmer that it through through an active inference or an active inference like uh you know mechanism it can learn and explore and and critically balance exploration with 01:49:54 exploitation and then we come right back to that whole concept of criticality so you know what you would really like your robot to do is remain at that critical uh phase between 01:50:06 exploring what's out there and making use and gold directed behavior of what's in front of it and um and uh you know that's how you could program this world this robot to act in the world and be pretty good at 01:50:20 it you know if you if you build it well so that's what the systems of a society can help a society to do you you don't you it's worth talking about building new systems i think it would not be wise to say 01:50:32 this checklist of like we wanted this level of education we want to want this you know to react this way in this situation react this way in this situation and this level of uh you know whatever money and this level of this and this 01:50:45 level of that while those kinds of preferences can be a useful start society has to be alive in its moment you know in the moment as society is alive it's cognating it's 01:50:57 it's it's it's actively uh you know comparing what it's the result of its actions to the model that is in its head and uh so active inference offers this way 01:51:09 to uh to balance uh exploration and and uh and uh exploitation and remain critical and remain optimally cognitive right so that's part of it 01:51:24 uh and then part of it i mean and for me this the the the idea of the embodied uh you know the three four e's uh this is what i really am attracted to in 01:51:46 active inference is in a sense it's kind of a simple concept it's not really very complicated you know if you've studied bayesian uh theory it all it's kind of straight you know in a way it's kind of straightforward 01:51:58 but the the you know the way fristen has connected the dots and and and and uh extended that into the bigger picture of life kind of it it to me it is uh it is rich 01:52:11 there's a there's a lot yet to be learned and gained and explored in this umbrella of active inference

we'll go into an example here with self-organized criticality so the idea 01:40:03 there is that was coined by back back bak in 87 the term self-organized criticality and it's it's really not a controversial that that living systems and 01:40:16 and many most systems in life complex systems organize in some way but the idea of self-organized criticality is that the organism itself is adjusting is is keeping some kind of adjustment 01:40:28 uh to uh to maintain a critical state and by critical state i mean a state on the ver like you can think of a saddle point so if you drop a model on us on a saddle it's going to not stay there it's going to you know 01:40:41 it's going to change it's going to change one way or the other right so a critical state is like that that threshold where things are about to change from one way to another way and uh 01:40:55 it turns out with you know work and information theory and other other fields of recent in recent years it turns out that uh processing uh whether it's we're talking about a computer or some other 01:41:07 you know machine or or a brain turns out that processing is kind of optimal in a sense when this when the system is at a this this this this critical state and 01:41:21 some people call it on the edge of chaos because things are things can easily change and sometimes it's you can think of that threshold as a 01:41:33 as a as a threshold of a critical state you can think of it as a threshold of the threshold we say between exploration and exploitation like should i should i go should i go 01:41:45 find a new planet for humans to live on or should i fix the planet that you know should i fix the systems on this planet first you know how do we balance exploration of the new versus using the information we have to improve 01:41:59 what we already have so you can think of that as exploration exploitation trade-offs stability agility trade-off do we do we remain stable and use ideas from the old in the past or do we are we more agile and we're more 01:42:13 flexible and we bring in new new ideas so it's like you can call it old new trade old new trade-off but whatever whatever trade-off you want to call it it's this sitting at the edge of going one way or the other 01:42:26 maximally flexible of going one way or the other and it's at that threshold that level that point the kind of that region of criticality that information processing seems to be 01:42:39 maximal so if uh it's no wonder then that the human brain is is organized in such a way to be living on this threshold between agility and stability 01:42:52 and uh now here's an example of that from like a real world example so a a system that is at a critical state is going to be maximally 01:43:03 sensitive to input so that means that there could you know when just when that marble is sitting on the saddle just a little bump to that saddle from one little corner of its universe and right like just one 01:43:16 little organism bumps it and maybe that marble rolls one way or the other right so that one one little input had a major impact on how the whole thing moves 01:43:29 its trajectory into the future right but isn't that what we isn't that kind of what we have in mind for democracy i mean don't we want everyone to have access of engaging into the decision-making processes 01:43:43 of a society and have every voice heard in at least in the sense that there's the possibility that just my voice just me doing my participation in this system might actually 01:43:56 ripple through the system and have a uh you know a real effect a useful effect i mean i think like maybe maybe self-organized criticality can help to inform us the concept of 01:44:10 self-organized criticality can help to inform us of what do we want from democracy or a decision-making process right you know that just makes me think about different like landslides 01:44:22 and that's something that criticality theory and catastrophe theory has been used to study and instead of cascading failure we can think about like cascading neighborhood cleanups so a bunch of people just say 01:44:34 today just for an hour i feel like doing a little cleanup and all of a sudden one person puts up the flag and then it's cascading locally in some just you know unspecified way but all of a sudden you're getting this this distribution with a ton of small 01:44:48 little meetups and then several really large sweeping changes but the total number of people cleaning up is higher because you offered the affordance and the ability for the affordance to sort of propagate 01:44:59 that's right that's right we're talking about a propagation of of a propagation of information a propagation of action and the possibility that even uh you know just one or a few individuals could start a 01:45:12 little chain chain reaction that actually does affect in a positive way society now it's a little too it's almost too bad that sand piles were the original uh you know topic of 01:45:23 of this of self-organized criticality because as you point out it's not really about things falling apart it's about it's about if you think of again if you think of a complex system as a system more capable of solving more 01:45:37 challenging problems then more often you can think of self-organized criticality as a way to propagate information when it is really needed when the system needs to change 01:45:51 uh then information is you know it ingests information from its world from its senses and can act accordingly we we just um submitted an abstract with criticality and active inference and one 01:46:04 of the points was actually the existence of self-organized criticality implies a far from equilibrium system that's actively pumping energy in that's because it's a passive system that's not 01:46:15 locked and loaded

now we talk i talk about a few ideas good regulators requisite variety self-organized criticality and then the 01:35:04 free energy principle from active inference um and uh maybe i'll just try to briefly talk mention what's what those means for what those ideas mean for people who 01:35:15 aren't familiar so good regulator really came from the good regular theorem or whatever it's called really came from cybernetics ash ashby yeah a lot his law of requisite 01:35:33 variety and uh the it's the concept is that a organism or a you know a system must be must be a model of that which it but 01:35:47 that needs to control

there's a lot of discussion about complex systems you know we've been discussing complex systems and i just want to make a couple of points here because uh 01:31:28 commonly some it is not uncommon that someone will say a complex system well that just means that it's liable to fall apart at any moment you know it's just too complex it's going to crash uh but and that that obviously can 01:31:41 happen you know systems can collapse quite quite true but obviously life would not be doing very well if the if if the evolution builds complexity 01:31:53 in species and you know in organisms and ecosystems if life would be have a rough go of it if it was so fragile that uh complexity became a 01:32:07 burden and and uh you know come and then you know you reach a certain level of complexity and then you fall apart that's not really i don't think i mean that can happen but that's but but complex useful complexity 01:32:19 doesn't make you fall apart it actually just does the opposite it serves what we've been talking about all along and that's problem solving so we are anticipatory organisms we are problem 01:32:31 solving organisms it's our nature most of what the human brain does is to solve problems of one kind or another social problems physical problems whatever and maneuver in the world you 01:32:43 know in a useful way and complexity is what allows that there's a number of studies that i cite here that show that as an organism even as a robot you know 01:32:56 faces uh more difficult pressures from its environment it complexifies and complexifies by complexity then it's it's it implies 01:33:08 a greater number of parts coordinating or cooperating in some way uh to you know solve this new challenge and obviously as a human we're very complex we have 01:33:22 we have complex needs we have we can think not just what's going to happen in the next millisecond but what's going to happen we can think about what's going to happen in 100 years i mean part of this project is to think about what might be 01:33:36 happening over the next hundred years or even a thousand years so as an organism complexifies it become it at least potentially becomes a better adapted to solving more complex 01:33:49 problems so you could and from that sense you could almost ex equate complexity with problem-solving capacity you know at least in a uh you know in a 01:34:01 general sense and then i talked about well that just reminds me of in the free energy calculations that we um have gone over in various papers it's like accuracy is the modeling imperative and 01:34:14 then complexity is tolerated to the extent it facilitates accurate modeling so if you get the one parameter model and you got 99 and it's adequate and it's good then you're good to go and you're gonna go for simplicity 01:34:26 but then what you're saying is actually the um appearance and the hallmark of complexity in the world it means that that organism has the need to solve problems at a given 01:34:40 level of counterfactual depth or inference skill or temporal depth temporal thickness

society by you know by uh uh you know it's just that's necessarily shares a similar related intrinsic 01:29:58 purpose which is to achieve and maintain vitality maintain and maintain and by maintain i mean anticipate into the future maintain vitality which is accomplished through 01:30:11 cognition and cooperation so the self that we must keep vital is the extended self and it follows that the intrinsic purpose of societal systems like financial systems and other is to serve the intrinsic purpose of society

a biological i call it an intrinsic purpose but like from evolution by being the fact that we are a part of life we have a purpose because 01:28:53 all organisms making capability casual power causal powers and the intrinsic purpose of an organism is to achieve and maintain vitality a sustainable flourishing of self which 01:29:09 can include that extended self and we do that by sensing and evaluating states of the world and ourselves and implementing appropriate actions that that are based on anticipation we 01:29:21 we anticipate what will happen if we do or don't take an action and we choose if we're for functional we choose those actions that can serve our intrinsic intrinsic purpose of of 01:29:33 remaining vital into the future so anticipating vitality and that obviously implies some kind of modeling of the world anticipation implies some kind of modeling in the world so that's an organism's intrinsic 01:29:45 purpose

what is our purpose so so so over on the right there i just want to reemphasize we are anticipatory we are cognitive we are problem solvers 01:25:44 we are a we and then i have below that i am a we you know like i i am i can i am i'm intimately connected with this i'm i'm everyone in that sense you know 01:25:57 yep yeah the whitman um you know i contain multitudes and also gilbert at all i have a paper called um we were never individuals kind of on that wavelength that you were talking about with the sort of distributed systems all the way down 01:26:09 approach and also dennis noble no privilege level of biological causality similar uh basically realization that multi-scale perspective complexity science basically entails 01:26:22 either the choice of a priori level like saying it is multi-scale and humans are the best scale or gaia is the scale or quantum is the right scale that's a claim as well as it being a claim 01:26:35 actually there's no privileged level of causality so that's the sort of table as it's said right right right right right and you know what it's not that really 01:26:46 this this entire project you could say in like a sentence you could say this whole project is to help us be who we are more be more uh honestly who we are more real 01:27:01 to who we are right it's not the it's not to to have people behave in some unusual way or some altruistic way or anything like that it is it is to have 01:27:12 it is to be more more ourselves more fully ourselves more completely ourselves and then all of these pages all these things we're talking about is who that self is who who are we really and it's about the 01:27:25 adjacent possible for who we are who we are is not an essence that is uh there's uh seven seals and it's being unlocked it's actually something that's being drawn out through 01:27:36 inactive realization in the niche through niche modification through stigma through becoming and and then the adjacent possible is where the imagination and the planning comes into play and if people are hesitant to talk about 01:27:49 the adjacent possible for who we could be just think about chess it's the adjacent possible with the strategy on the board and we're talking about the adjacent strategy possible for who we could be in terms of our strategy 01:28:02 for you know all these recursive layers our strategy for how we think of ourselves and all these other things you're talking about absolutely absolutely and then and then ultimately serving the 01:28:13 serving the kind of fitness purpose of you know if we take action a is that going to reduce our uncertainty about those things that we that really matter you know that are that are the the 01:28:27 the key variables

what is our worldview what do we value and what is our purpose and then we've come to this question then okay so who the heck are we then you know we're we're and it and not only who are we but 01:22:42 who are we building these systems for you know what what what is what should societal system serve who or what should societal systems serve and the only reasonable answer that you 01:22:55 can come up with is that societal systems should serve the the extended self like not just the body not just the family not just the 01:23:07 you know the thousand people in a society or the ten thousand or a million or whatever but their environment the the society next door that they're engaged with and cooperating with and coordinating with 01:23:18 the society across the planet that they're sharing information with and learning together with and so it's the whole that we are metrics as we as leaders who 01:23:30 come to metrics those metrics have to represent both the cognitive process how good how are we cogniting how well are we cogniting are we functionally cogniting and are we 01:23:43 achieving through that cognition are we achieving the kinds of aims that is serving the whole is the environment improving is the you know quality of air improving is the quality of life 01:23:56 improving for individuals right um yes so uh we are so this in a nutshell we this is the world view in a way we are in intimate with our greater world we are individuals but of the nested overlapping variety 01:24:12 individual cells bodies groups communities ecologies nations and all of civilization we're not separate in any absolute sense and there's no privileged level or scale to any of that nor are we passive bystanders in this 01:24:25 unfolding this is not this evolution is not it's just a chance thing like by chance somebody does this one day and then evolution goes on another another avenue no there there are 01:24:38 there are opportunities in the environment uh that we can react to that lend themselves to to to providing 01:24:50 information or providing gain of benefit of some kind and and you know we are driven we are are we are consciously creating and you know 01:25:03 even a really great societal system that integrated societal systems would be consciously creating acting cognitive acting cognitive and consciously creating and it towards some 01:25:15 towards some goal and that goal then has to be you know the maintaining of vitality being the in the for the extended sel

that's something that insect with a six-legged version is now it's the whole super organism oh well the ant colony is society that whole frame is actually the shadow of 01:18:52 what the evolutionary reality is which is that the ant colony is an organism not a super organism and the ants are tissues and so which level we prioritize or do we say no there's no a priori level ant is just i'm not even 01:19:05 gonna say there's anything out there called ants it's it's you how you're thinking about it or do we get lost or are we going to find a ladder in that multi-scale yeah well the latter is you know the 01:19:17 latter is active inference because it doesn't say active inference doesn't say make a make an internal model of the world that is accurate that actually accurately captures all the all the 01:19:30 details of the world of the universe that's not the point that's not what the mind does that's not the point the point is to act under uncertainty 01:19:41 given some useful model of the world act under uncertainty so that your fitness score improves and by fitness score here we essentially mean you know and anticipated uncertainty so i i would 01:19:55 very much like to be have some certainty that i'm going to be alive tomorrow and if it's freezing outside and i don't have a coat on uh you know that that becomes iffy so uh i'm going to be happy 01:20:06 if i'm going to be i'm going to go find a coat because it is going to reduce my uncertainty about survival over the next 24 hours but you can expand that you know outward right we we need to act the all organisms are acting under 01:20:19 uncertainty and and we can think about that as we can think about that um we can think from that perspective as a society of what are we doing and how do we measure 01:20:31 success well we're measuring success by acting under uncertainty and then re and then paying attention to what happens and then acting the same or differently or you know some other way or somehow some were 01:20:45 then choosing to act again in this cycle of act uh you know act uh process act process act process you know model act model act model that reminds me of course of the ooda 01:20:57 observe orient side act model and other sort of cyclic models of action and perception and then i would say that active inference provides a few nice little benefits over other phrasings of action and perception 01:21:10 qualitative and philosophical ones like inactivism as well as quantitative ones like cybernetics and other kinds of control theories so i totally agree this

the 1911 paper by william morton wheeler is called the ant colony as an organism not a super organism because superorganism implies that nest mate would be the true organism

so society is an individual and we are part of society and we're talking about societal systems and so at that level that seems to be our level of focus here at that level we can talk about society as an organism as a cognitive organism 01:18:02 that is propagating information from the past into the future and from an active inference standpoint we can say uh under the you know under the fitness score 01:18:15 whatever word you might want to use for that of reducing uncertainty so we act to reduce uncertainty

there was an interesting paper that came out i cited in the in my in my in paper number one that uh was 01:15:53 looking at this question of what is an individual and they were looking at it from an information theory standpoint you know so they came up with this they came up with this uh uh theory uh and i think do they have a name for 01:16:09 it yeah uh information theory of individuality and they say base it's done at the bottom of the slide there and they say basically that uh you know an individual is a process just what's 01:16:20 what we've been talking about before that propagates information from the past into the future so that you know implies uh information flow and implies a cognitive process uh it implies anticipation of 01:16:33 the future uh and it probably implies action and this thing that is an individual it is not like it is a layered hierarchical individual it's like you can draw a circle around 01:16:45 anything you know in a certain sense and call it an individual under you know with certain uh definitions you know if you want to define what its markov blanket is 01:16:57 but uh but you know we are we are we are our cells are individuals our tissues liver say is an individual um a human is an individual a family is an 01:17:12 individual you know and it just keeps expanding outward from there the society is an individual so it really it's none of those are have you know any kind of inherent preference 01:17:24 levels there's no preference to any of those levels everything's an individual layered interacting overlapping individuals and it's just it's just a it's really just a the idea of an individual is just where 01:17:36 do you want to draw your circle and then you can you know then you can talk about an individual at whatever level you want so so that's all about information so it's all about processing information right

anticipations is key to 01:08:38 everything and attention is key to everything so every organism does that plants and everything else and it doesn't require a central nervous system 01:08:51 and and you i might add to this that not only is every organism cognitive but essentially every organism organism is cooperative to those cooperation and cognition 01:09:03 go hand in hand because any intelligent organism any organism that can act to better its you know viability is going to cooperate in 01:09:17 meaningful ways with other organisms and you know other species and things like that nice point because um there's cost to communication whether it's exactly whether it's the cost of making the pheromone 01:09:30 or just the time which is super finite or attention fundamentally and so costly interactions through time the game theory are either to exploit and stabilize which is fragile 01:09:42 or to succeed together yeah exactly and and and succeeding together cooperation is is is like everywhere once you once you understand what you're looking 01:09:54 for it's in the biologic world it's like everywhere so this idea that we're you know one one one person against all or you know we're a dog eat dog universe i mean it's you 01:10:08 know in a certain sense it's true obviously tigers eat you know whatever they eat zebras or whatever i mean that happens yes of course but in the larger picture 01:10:19 over and over multiple time scales not just uh you know in five minutes but over evolutionary time scales and uh you know developmental time scales and everything the cooperation is really the rule 01:10:33 for the most part and if you need if any listener needs proof of that just think of who you think of your body i mean there's about a trillion some trillion some cells 01:10:45 that are enormously harmonious like your blood pumps every day or you know this is a this is like a miracle i don't want to use the word miracle because i want to get into 01:10:59 whatever that might imply but uh it is amazing aw inspiring the the depth of cooperation just in our own bodies is like that's that's like 01:11:12 evolution must prefer cooperation or else there would never be such a complex uh pattern of cooperation as we see just in one human body 01:11:26 just to give one example from the bees so from a species i study it's almost like a sparring type of cooperation because when it was discovered that there were some workers with developed ovaries 01:11:38 there was a whole story about cheating and policing and about altruism and this equation says this and that equation says that and then when you take a step back it's like the colony having a distribution of over-reactivation 01:11:51 may be more ecologically resilient so um i as an evolutionary biologist never think well my interpretation of what would be lovey-dovey in this system must be how it works because that's so 01:12:05 clearly not true it's just to say that there are interesting dynamics within and between levels and in the long run cooperation and stable cooperation and like learning to adapt 01:12:17 to your niche is a winning strategy in a way that locking down just isn't but unfortunately under high um stress and 01:12:29 uh high uncertainty conditions simple strategies can become rife so that's sort of a failure mode of the population

in you know the main theme of this first paper is i've tried to lay out a world view that is cognizant of that reflects some of the latest developments 01:03:14 in in science and in a variety of fields and sciences in those fields would be like complex system science cognitive science evolutionary biology 01:03:28 uh in a you know a few fields like that information theory and a few things like that i i've tried to to outline a a a world view that makes sense 01:03:42 from that leading edge of science and i would say too that that science has gone through really kind of a revolution you know there was like it's kind of like there's the pre-1950s 60s science and then there's 01:03:56 what we have today and there's enormous jumps enormous leaps in understanding that have happened just in the last say 50 years or so and and and some of those leaps the 01:04:09 ramifications are only now being you know the they're now being felt right the the the the some of the concepts are a a distinct shift 01:04:20 from where we were in the you know the pre-1960s or pre-1970s or so and um obviously we there's also you know we we see the changes in our 01:04:34 lifetime you know like we i was watching an old show on tv the other day and somebody put money in a pay phone you know like they put a quarter and a pay phone to make telephone call and it's like okay well that's that's that's that's history you know so 01:04:48 there's all these technologies that have that are that are that i grew up with that are not they don't even exist anymore they've been replaced by entirely new frameworks and that's the speed of those of the speed of that 01:05:00 evolution is is exponential so it's tremendous changes happening very quickly and the task of the program oh yeah which one put on that would be 01:05:12 um potentially because you're taking such a broad perspective with complex system science and evolutionary bio you might say that society has always been a cognitive architecture but if you had asked in 01:05:25 1500 is society a cognitive architecture be like well no i mean you have agriculture you have this you have this you have that whereas now if you tell people hey telecoms are they run through everything and the internet of 01:05:38 things the internet people you know like all this sort of stuff you tell people actually it's a multi-scale cognitive architecture humans are in the loop and our algorithms are never independent from us they're in feedback with us it's like 01:05:50 yeah that was what the mainstream was telling me so actually it's a total alignment point because it reflects how rapidly things are changing that it's just undeniably obvious that the 01:06:02 communication infrastructure is the system that we're engineering right right absolutely yeah yeah communications have mind-blowing changes and communications and and that brings mind-blowing changes and 01:06:14 outlook but but i want to emphasize a few points to this worldview that that you know it's not it's not just that everything is connected like you know you go like i know what a complex system is it just means everything is connected and we're 01:06:27 all kind of whole and blah blah okay fine but but even for people who are in that ilk you know who understand the the basic concept there there's ideas 01:06:40 that are that have come out in the last decade or so that that are there that are even pushing that boundary you know right and and i just want to highlight a few concepts here and i think active inference really is 01:06:52 playing a you know is is like a in a sense a culmination of some of some of these ideas or an embodiment of some of these ideas the main thing i want to say is that life is intelligent 01:07:06 and whole so it's not just that everything's connected it's that everything is intelligent everything is a lot you know life is an intelligent information processing 01:07:20 thing everything is is is adapting learning deciding whether we're talking about everything is cognitive 01:07:33 you know and cognition really implies information and information processing so whether we're talking about a slime mold or a human you know there's there's in in everything in plants in 01:07:46 bacteria in mold and anything that has any life at all that can be considered alive is intelligent and is learning and reacting not just reacting but learning 01:07:58 reacting and also deciding and acting and remembering and all those things and you might ask well you know that's impossible bacteria doesn't have a brain you know it can't be it can't be cognitive but it is 01:08:14 cognitive but we just have to relax what we how we define cognition you know and when on the slide i have a little thing there that every organism 01:08:25 is cognitive in the sense that it displays capacities typically associated with human cognition such as sensing learning problem solving memory storage and recall

so let's suppose let's suppose your listeners are with me and you know we kind of agree like okay yes transformation's necessary and uh again i want to emphasize i'm not talking about reform i'm not talking 00:58:59 about a softer better capitalism i'm not talking about you know improved voter registration or like any of those things i'm talking about de novo starting over from scratch what might be 00:59:13 best and if it turns out that the old systems were better than anything that humanity can come up with well then you know that's the answer but i can't imagine that's true because the old systems were never designed in any kind of 00:59:25 you know thoughtful science driven [Music] you know process to to to test to explore and to come up with fitness like what is the you know we don't even have a fitness for our current society 00:59:39 much less of fitness for societal designs i mean we have the gdp but that's a terrible terrible limited fitness metric 00:59:51 okay so suppose you're with me suppose we're we're on board we we want to do this de novo design thing where do we start what's the what's what where do we even get off the 01:00:03 ground on this and i suggest that the way to do it is through first address worldview from world view once we understand what the world view is 01:00:15 what a reasonable useful world view will be for this project then then purpose derives worldview begets purpose once you understand what it is you want 01:00:28 what you value what do you value once you understand what you value then you can say well i value a and therefore the purpose is to 01:00:39 have a manifest in society for example so once you have purpose then you can think about what metrics how would you measure whether are you so 01:00:53 here's a new design is it fit for purpose does it do does it fulfill its purpose you know that's the question and then metrics go with some kind of fitness evaluation 01:01:05 and then finally last of all of those would be the design okay we know what we know what we value we know what this thing is supposed to do we know what the purpose is we know that attractor is supposed to you know plow the ground or something we 01:01:18 know what this is supposed to do we know how to measure success and uh now finally then let's talk about design what are the what are the you know the specifics and mechanics and 01:01:31 how does that happen and the the series is really kind of laid out this way the first paper really talks about world view and purpose the second paper talks about the you know the more the mechanics of things 01:01:44 like viability how would you make this thing viable things like that and then the very last paper that's titled the subtitle design okay so uh that's how we uh and 01:01:56 and maybe i will just mention here that i put metrics before design because we might have some ideas uh getting back to that preference factor we might have some ideas like we would like people not to die at 01:02:08 30 you know we'd like people to mostly live to a ripe old age and have you know enough water water to drink and food to eat and all that kind of stuff so uh you know what kind of design once 01:02:20 now that we have metrics to measure that kind of stuff longevity and nutrition and things what kind of designs would help us to reach those targets you know so that's one reason why design 01:02:31 why metrics comes before design okay

second question is uh by what and this is as of course the the 00:57:57 kicker is not only what systems might be best but what how would you possibly uh implement them what viable way is there to implement new system designs you know 00:58:09 like otherwise what's the purpose you know this isn't this isn't an academic this isn't just an academic uh you know excursion this is like let's change the world and that has to be practical in some you 00:58:21 know in some has to be viable so those are the two questions what what what might be best and how do we get there

the six 00:48:41 six big systems i've mentioned can be viewed as a cognitive architecture it's the it's the means by which the society learns decides adapts and 00:48:54 and this society's efforts this is the third underlying position the society's efforts to learn decide and adapt and be viewed as being driven by an intrinsic purpose and that's really key also 00:49:08 because it's not just that we're learning deciding and adapting willy-nilly i mean i mean maybe it seems that way in the world you know in the sense we're so dysfunctional it kind of is billy nilly but 00:49:20 but what really matters is that we learn decide and adapt in relation to whatever intrinsic purpose we actually have as as a society as individuals in a 00:49:34 society it's that it's it's it's it's as i will use the the term uh maybe several times today it's solving problems that matter that really that really 00:49:45 matter that's what we're after

maybe i should say having a having a checkoff list like you know there should be this level of education there should be this level of 00:52:40 [Music] health people should live this long and so we have our fitness and we're gonna uh we've decided in advance even before the system is running we've 00:52:53 now have a list of things we're gonna check off we're gonna score each one we're gonna come up with some kind of integrated fitness score from that and that's how we're going to move forward we're always going to refer to this fit this you know this fitness model and 00:53:07 the fitness vector and these and these kind of hard-coded values for what's good and what's bad so so in the world of artificial intelligence and in the world of active inference you know that 00:53:19 really doesn't go very far that doesn't work that doesn't work very well because what happens is we didn't you didn't think ahead you like you some something happens tomorrow and whoever came up with that list of 00:53:32 uh you know those values or that model didn't really include the fact that maybe spaceships from mars were gonna land and cause a new disruption and then we have to deal with that problem now too before we deal with 00:53:45 anything else so that wasn't in the you know that wasn't in the plan and now what do we do you know so there's right so so this is you know this is really where active inference plays into 00:53:58 that's one way that active inference plays into this is how do you evaluate and act in a world that is full of uncertainties right 00:54:10 the unknown unknown the unknown unknown is the temperature dynamics but you know it's going to be temperature and so how can you plan for what you know it will be in a distributional sense 00:54:23 right and make stabilization on that awesome right right so so yeah so you so you realize you know already you realize maybe that this is not a proposal to build a say like a model of uh of uh you know 00:54:37 like how society makes decisions you know that's that's not that's not it it is what is the process by which society cognates 00:54:50 and you know what kind of what kind of infrastructure and tools and and and you know mechanics can we use that would facilitate that but it's not to build a thing 00:55:01 it's to build it's to realize that we are in we are engaged moment to moment in a cognitive process society as individuals are and how can we 00:55:14 do that together as a society so that we're you know we we balance exploration with exploitation um you know so that we we learn about our environment we grow we learn 00:55:27 we explore we we make good decisions based on available evidence and based on knowledge based on cultural knowledge you know like all those things right so so this is a this is 00:55:39 the the the you know i think organisms are a process they're not a thing anyway right cognition is a process and societal decision making is a process 00:55:54 and really society is a process you know there's there's not too many things in this world there's mostly processes living processes intelligent processes so that's that's the that's the hope 00:56:05 that's where this is trying to go is to like with that in mind with that with that broad understanding or broad concept in mind how do we uh how do we 00:56:16 think about you know how we how we come together as society how we cooperate how we coordinate how we make decisions how we how we learn how we explore what do we what do we monitor what kind 00:56:29 of information do we seek you know what kind of experiments do we do all that kind of stuff great

first is that uh a society of any scale and and i don't mean society is in bill millions or billions of people i mean society as in a thousand people you know like a sub 00:47:23 sub city a community that is not even a whole city just a a group of like-minded people uh who are willing to give this a give this you know 00:47:35 a field trial ago a society of any scale can be viewed as a super organism so that's kind of fundamental everything really really works from there we are together we 00:47:49 are not just individuals connected we are a whole society is a whole and it's a and it's a whole with the environment and it's wider you know 00:48:03 sphere so as we'll talk about today you know this even the idea of an individual is it's okay to talk about individuals it's fine but it's kind of like an arbitrary thing an 00:48:15 individual could be an individual cell or an individual person or an individual uh species or an individual ecosystem but it's all with all deeply embedded and enmeshed 00:48:28 entwined with the whole so uh uh a society can be viewed as a super organism

the whole project is based on three underlying propositions

we're going to talk in this series 00:01:10 about a series of papers that i just published in the in the journal sustainability that that series is titled science driven societal transformation

A key point I make is that that the boundary between knowledge and ignorance is not impermeable. It is open to political appropriation by less powerful groups. In other words, calling attention to the problem of strategic ignorance by elite actors – and demanding more accountability from those actors – can lead to a new "war of position", in a Gramscian sense. In my book, I term this argument the Lorde principle, after Audre Lorde, in homage to earlier academic and activist work that my argument builds upon. I suggest that the Lorde principle encompasses the way that unknowing can be a revolutionary force for good.

I define micro-ignorance as individual acts of ignoring, and macro-ignorance as the sedimentation of micro-ignoring into structural blind-spots that obscure uncomfortable truths from being more widely known. So, Blair shutting down the BAE Systems investigation is an example of micro-ignorance. But it’s not an isolated act – it has epistemological ripple effects. The halting of the investigation compounds the pretence that no corruption took place, and this contributes to a persistent and quite insidious form of macro-ignorance, which is the debatable belief that western governments are less corrupt than developing countries. Of course they’re just as corrupt, they’re just better at hiding it.

So, my specific definition of "strategic ignorance" is new, but the reality it speaks to is old: the fact that the power of any dominant group typically functions through strategic ignorance, through the ability to select which voices and forms of evidence to acknowledge and which evidence to dismiss.

Strategic ignorance is effective because it is hard to detect; hard to point out without seeming conspiratorial; and hard to prosecute because perpetrators successfully efface the evidence that could indict them, or, importantly, they thwart inconvenient evidence from emerging in the first place, like Blair’s halting of the BAE Systems inquiry. Most troublingly, we don’t empirically know how often strategic ignorance works and just how effective it is, because the most "successful" examples of strategic ignorance are, quite literally, the tactics that work so well that they can never be detected.

What is the "ostrich instruction"? It’s an informal way to refer to an important legal principle, which is that deliberate avoidance of knowledge about one’s own illegal actions should not be a valid defence in law. It’s one of the reasons why, just over 15 years ago, American executives at the energy company Enron were found guilty even though their direct role in malfeasance at Enron wasn’t clear. They should and could have known about fraud, and they were found guilty. Enron has been pointed to as proof that wilful ignorance does not pay. But in my book I stress that that Enron is a fairly isolated case. As a number of other people have pointed out, from journalists Matt Taibbi and Jesse Eisenger to legal scholar Rena Steinzor, US authorities have had an abysmal record of successful prosecution of white-collar crime in recent decades. An American legal scholar based in the UK, Alexander Sarch, is doing important work on this topic. But he is an exception, and I’m a little critical of mainstream legal scholarship in my book. I suggest that legal scholars themselves have been acting ostrich-like about recent shifts in the law. For example, the old adage "ignorance of the law is no excuse" is increasingly waived in US courts when it comes to complex financial and tax crimes. This shift is one of the reasons why I argue that for many powerful and rich people, ignorance really is legal bliss.

I suggest that the very term "free market" is a type of micro-ignorance because it conceals more than it reveals by purporting to reflect a phenomenon that has never existed and can never exist in actual economic reality. Of course we have never had a "free market", and more importantly, the largest imperialist super-powers of the modern age, and especially the US and UK, did not get rich through a "free market", but through different types of government interventionism and protectionism that have long benefited society’s richest groups, often at the expense of exploited workers across the world. This fact is both widely known and oddly ignored even today in economic theory and economic policy-making. In the book, I explore the history of economic thought over a 200-year period, from late enlightenment figures including Burke and Wollstonecraft in the 18th century, through classical liberals such as Tocqueville and Bastiat in the 19th century, through to 20th century figures such as Friedrich Hayek, to understand the ways that dominant economic theories of economic growth have obscured wider recognition of the role of governments in creating economic markets over modern history.

But I’m also glad that you highlight the "political" in your question, because politics gets left out a lot of the time. People have tended to focus more on how corporate actors such as big tobacco, big pharma and big food have all engaged in the strategic production of ignorance. This can sideline the problem of strategic ignorance by governments or the judiciary. It’s one of the reasons why I argue that it is important not to treat strategic ignorance as simply a psychological problem at the individual level. I think it’s better to suggest that different groups in society have enhanced political power to make the deliberate avoidance of inconvenient truths appear more legitimate or defensible than it really is. To give one example, when he was prime minister, Tony Blair put pressure on the former attorney general Lord Goldsmith to halt an investigation into bribery at BAE Systems. Blair didn’t want the embarrassment of having corruption at a major British firm exposed, and his effort to shut down the legal investigation is a type of strategic ignorance.

Since then, I’ve been one of a group of scholars developing a new academic field known as "ignorance studies". Seriously, the field does exist, even though people sometimes chuckle at the phrase.

ociologists and historians, on the other hand, usually view it more in line with my definition above. They view strategic ignorance as both an individual and a collective phenomenon. This helps to underscore the role of institutional power and institutional actors in preventing inconvenient facts from becoming more widely known or accepted.

Behavioural economists and psychologists, on the one hand, tend to define strategic ignorance in a psychological way. They see it as the personal avoidance of inconvenient or uncomfortable facts.

"Ignorance really is blissful, especially for the powerful" Q&A with Linsey McGoey, author of "The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World".

The lesson of fallen societies is that civilization is a vulnerable organism, especially when it seems almighty. We are the world’s top predator, and predators crash suddenly when they outgrow their prey. If the resulting chaos unleashes nuclear war, it could bring mass extinction in a heartbeat, with Homo sapiens among the noted dead.

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its October 2018 report, keeping global warming below 1.5 C “is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics” but will require “unprecedented changes” before 2030.

Back in Classical Greece, Plato suggested that in a just society there should be no more than a 5:1 spread in income between richest and poorest. That was a hard sell then, and still would be. But what might be reasonable today? Where should the balance be struck to help the weakest while still rewarding effort and achievement? Given the seriousness of what we face, this is a conversation we must have. The wealth already wrenched from nature might just be enough to buy us a lasting future if it were shared, managed, and ploughed into solutions.

One of the sad ironies of our time is that we have become very good at studying nature just as it begins to sicken and die under our weight. “Weight” is no mere metaphor: of all land mammals and birds alive today, humans and their livestock make up 96 per cent of the biomass; wildlife has dwindled to four per cent. This has no precedent. Not so far back in history the proportions were the other way round. As recently as 1970, humans were only half and wildlife more than twice their present numbers. These closely linked figures are milestones along our rush towards a trashed and looted planet, stripped of diversity, wildness, and resilience; strewn with waste. Such is the measure of our success.

First, our numbers have risen by 1.4 billion, nearly a hundred million per year. In other words, we’ve added another China or 40 more Canadas to the world. The growth rate has fallen slightly, but consumption of resources — from fossil fuel to water, from rare earths to good earth — has risen twice as steeply, roughly doubling our impact on nature. This outrunning of population by economic growth has lifted perhaps a billion of the poorest into the outskirts of the working class, mainly in China and India. Yet those in extreme poverty and hunger still number at least a billion. Meanwhile, the wealthiest billion — to which most North Americans and Europeans and many Asians now belong — devour an ever-growing share of natural capital. The commanding heights of this group, the billionaires’ club, has more than 2,200 members with a combined known worth nearing $10 trillion; this super-elite not only consumes at a rate never seen before but also deploys its wealth to influence government policy, media content, and key elections. Such, in a few words, is the shape of the human pyramid today.

In the deep past these setbacks were local. The overall experiment of civilization kept going, often by moving from an exhausted ecology to one with untapped potential. Human numbers were still quite small. At the height of the Roman Empire there are thought to have been only 200 million people on Earth. Compare that with the height of the British Empire a century ago, when there were two billion. And with today, when there are nearly eight. Clearly, things have moved very quickly since the Industrial Revolution took hold around the world. In A Short History of Progress, I suggested that worldwide civilization was our greatest experiment; and I asked whether this might also prove to be the greatest progress trap. That was 15 years ago.

Yet there were still many traps along the way. In what is now Iraq, the Sumerian civilization (one of the world’s first) withered and died as the irrigation systems it invented turned the fields into salty desert. Some two thousand years later, in the Mediterranean basin, chronic soil erosion steadily undermined the Classical World: first the Greeks, then the Romans at the height of their power. And a few centuries after Rome’s fall, the Classic Maya, one of only two high civilizations to thrive in tropical rainforest (the other being the Khmer), eventually wore out nature’s welcome at the heart of Central America.

Most survivors of that progress trap became farmers — a largely unconscious revolution during which all the staple foods we eat today were developed from wild roots and seeds (yes, all: no new staples have been produced from scratch since prehistoric times). Farming brought dense human populations and centralized control, the defining ingredients of full-blown civilization for the last five thousand years.

The first trap was hunting, the main way of life for about two million years in Palaeolithic times. As Stone Age people perfected the art of hunting, they began to kill the game more quickly than it could breed. They lived high for a while, then starved.

Ronald Wright: Can We Still Dodge the Progress Trap? Author of 2004’s ‘A Short History of Progress’ issues a progress report.

Prof. Meiri: "Our study tracked changes at a much higher resolution over a considerably longer period of time compared to previous research. The results were illuminating: we found a continual, and very significant, decline in the size of animals hunted by humans over 1.5 million years. For example, a third of the bones left behind by Homo erectus at sites dated to about a million years ago, belonged to elephants that weighed up to 13 tons (more than twice the weight of the modern African elephant) and provided humans with 90% of their food. The mean weight of all animals hunted by humans at that time was 3 tons, and elephant bones were found at nearly all sites up to 500,000 years ago. "Starting about 400,000 years ago, the humans who lived in our region -- early ancestors of the Neandertals and Homo sapiens, appear to have hunted mainly deer, along with some larger animals weighing almost a ton, such as wild cattle and horses. Finally, in sites inhabited by modern humans, from about 50,000 to 10,000 years ago, approximately 70% of the bones belong to gazelles -- an animal that weighs no more than 20-30kg. Other remains found at these later sites came mostly from fallow deer (about 20%), as well as smaller animals such as hares and turtles."

Dr. Ben-Dor: "Our findings enable us to propose a fascinating hypothesis on the development of humankind: humans always preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their environment, until these became very rare or extinct, forcing the prehistoric hunters to seek the next in size. As a result, to obtain the same amount of food, every human species appearing in the Southern Levant was compelled to hunt smaller animals than its predecessor, and consequently had to develop more advanced and effective technologies. Thus, for example, while spears were sufficient for Homo erectus to kill elephants at close range, modern humans developed the bow and arrow to kill fast-running gazelles from a distance." Prof. Barkai concludes: "We believe that our model is relevant to human cultures everywhere. Moreover, for the first time, we argue that the driving force behind the constant improvement in human technology is the continual decline in the size of game. Ultimately, it may well be that 10,000 years ago in the Southern Levant, animals became too small or too rare to provide humans with sufficient food, and this could be related to the advent of agriculture. In addition, we confirmed the hypothesis that the extinction of large animals was caused by humans -- who time and time again destroyed their own livelihood through overhunting. We may therefore conclude that humans have always ravaged their environment but were usually clever enough to find solutions for the problems they had created -- from the bow and arrow to the agricultural revolution. The environment, however, always paid a devastating price."

Prof. Barkai: "In light of previous studies, our team proposed an original hypothesis that links the two questions: We think that large animals went extinct due to overhunting by humans, and that the change in diet and the need to hunt progressively smaller animals may have propelled the changes in humankind. In this study we tested our hypotheses in light of data from excavations in the Southern Levant covering several human species over a period of 1.5 million years." Jacob Dembitzer adds: "We considered the Southern Levant (Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Southwest Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon) to be an 'archaeological laboratory' due to the density and continuity of prehistoric findings covering such a long period of time over a relatively small area -- a unique database unavailable anywhere else in the world. Excavations, which began 150 years ago, have produced evidence for the presence of humans, beginning with Homo erectus who arrived 1.5 million years ago, through the neandertals who lived here from an unknown time until they disappeared about 45,000 years ago, to modern humans (namely, ourselves) who came from Africa in several waves, starting around 180,000 years ago."

Findings indicate a continual decline in the size of game hunted by humans as their main food source -- from giant elephants 1-1.5 million years ago down to gazelles 10,000 years ago. According to the researchers, these findings paint an illuminating picture of the interaction between humans and the animals around them over the last 1.5 million years.

In this way, according to the researchers, early humans repeatedly overhunted large animals to extinction (or until they became so rare that they disappeared from the archaeological record) and then went on to the next in size -- improving their hunting technologies to meet the new challenge. The researchers also claim that about 10,000 years ago, when animals larger than deer became extinct, humans began to domesticate plants and animals to supply their needs, and this may be why the agricultural revolution began in the Levant at precisely that time.

A groundbreaking study by researchers from Tel Aviv University tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

A new study tracks the development of early humans' hunting practices over the last 1.5 million years -- as reflected in the animals they hunted and consumed. The researchers claim that at any given time early humans preferred to hunt the largest animals available in their surroundings, which provided the greatest quantities of food in return for a unit of effort.

From giant elephants to nimble gazelles: Early humans hunted the largest available animals to extinction for 1.5 million years, study finds

Multiple large-bodied species went extinct during the Pleistocene. Changing climates and/or human hunting are the main hypotheses used to explain these extinctions. We studied the causes of Pleistocene extinctions in the Southern Levant, and their subsequent effect on local hominin food spectra, by examining faunal remains in archaeological sites across the last 1.5 million years. We examined whether climate and climate changes, and/or human cultures, are associated with these declines. We recorded animal abundances published in the literature from 133 stratigraphic layers, across 58 Pleistocene and Early Holocene archaeological sites, in the Southern Levant. We used linear regressions and mixed models to assess the weighted mean mass of faunal assemblages through time and whether it was associated with temperature, paleorainfall, or paleoenvironment (C3 vs. C4 vegetation). We found that weighted mean body mass declined log-linearly through time. Mean hunted animal masses 10,500 years ago, were only 1.7% of those 1.5 million years ago. Neither body size at any period, nor size change from one layer to the next, were related to global temperature or to temperature changes. Throughout the Pleistocene, new human lineages hunted significantly smaller prey than the preceding ones. This suggests that humans extirpated megafauna throughout the Pleistocene, and when the largest species were depleted the next-largest were targeted. Technological advancements likely enabled subsequent human lineages to effectively hunt smaller prey replacing larger species that were hunted to extinction or until they became exceedingly rare.

We did not find strong evidence to suggest that climate, climatic fluctuations, rainfall, or vegetation over the last 1.5 million years, influenced the size of animals hunted and consumed by humans. Rather, mean body size declined linearly on a backdrop of multiple glacial-interglacial cycles. New human lineages subsisted on smaller prey than their predecessors and used more advanced tools to cope with hunting smaller prey. We suggest that hominins were likely the leading cause of Pleistocene

The Southern Levant, situated between modern day southern Syria via Israel to Sinai, has a spatiotemporally dense and continuous Paleolithic archaeological record offering a unique opportunity to detect faunal changes, including those predating the appearance of Homo sapiens (Bar-Yosef, 1980; Stutz, 2014). It is thus a suitable model to test long-term changes in the body mass of mammalian assemblages, in view of paleoclimates and changing human lineages, to decipher whether climate and/or humans are responsible for animal body size declines. The excellent archaeological record can further illuminate whether size declines are observed since hominins first colonized the region, or whether they start with the emergence of Homo sapiens (Louys et al., 2021), or are concentrated in the last glacial and its aftermath. We tested whether the size, and size changes, in hominin prey through the Pleistocene and early Holocene were related to time, the prevailing human lineages and cultures, paleoenvironment, and temperatures.

Levantine overkill: 1.5 million years of hunting down the body size distributionAuthor links open overlay panelJacobDembitzeraRanBarkaibMikiBen-DorbShaiMeiriac

Each of the transitions has been a progress trap, and every escape into a new way of life has relied on more energy and more information. The authors note that civilizations can collapse, but not into a previous way of life. Farmers don’t go back to hunting and gathering; they desert their kings, priests, and cities and go back to small-scale farming. When the first global society of the early 1900s collapsed after the First World War, countries reverted to tariffs and relatively small-scale capitalism — and large-scale wars. If the Trump regime has its way, we’ll see a similar reversion. But Lewis and Maslin note that each transition arrives faster than the previous one, and a fifth transition could be upon us very soon. The Great Acceleration is accelerating. In the past 40 years, we have digitized 500 times the information coded biologically in the human species. We consume more energy than ever before, and our demand for it will increase by 48 per cent between 2012 and 2040. More people are travelling and exchanging more information. Accelerating into a wall? The authors argue that “The simultaneous rapid increases in the number of people, level of energy provision and quantity of information being generated, driven by the positive feedback loops of reinvestment of profit, and ever-growing scientific knowledge, suggest that our current mode of living is the least probable of our three future options. Such rapid, radical changes suggest that a collapse or a switch to a new mode of living is more likely.” If We Can’t Stop Hothouse Earth, We’d Better Learn to Live on It read more Climate change, Lewis and Maslin say, makes collapse look likely. Violent weather events create food shortages, population displacements, rebuilding costs, and economic dislocation as global supply chains break down. The problem for the Anthropocene, they argue, is “how to equalize resource consumption across the world within sustainable environmental limits.” This involves moving much faster to renewable energy sources and leaving the damn fossil fuels in the ground. It also involves carbon capture and sequestration, on a far greater scale than was accomplished by the destruction of the American indigenous civilizations. So we might plant new forests and burn their wood for energy while trapping and burying the carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 1945 this “Great Acceleration” has permitted the tripling of the human population and the crowding-out of the rest of the planet’s biosphere. Lewis and Maslin tell us: “Populations of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals have declined by an average of 58 percent over the last forty years… On land, if you weighed all the large mammals on the planet today, just 3 percent of that mass is living in the wild. The rest is made up of human flesh, some 30 percent of the total, with domesticated animals that feed us contributing the remaining 67 percent.”

That led to the third transition: Europeans no longer needed on the farm became mill workers and coal miners. Scientific progress encouraged coal-fuelled industries and the telegraph spread information worldwide.

the conquest of the Americas was also a second human transition: an escape from agriculture to profit-driven enterprise: “Western Europeans began colonizing large areas of the rest of the world, creating the first globalized economy.” Lewis and Maslin call this the “Columbian exchange,” when humans, animals, plants, and microbes established themselves in places they had never been before. Energy from new foods, and information from printing, helped drive this new transition. Farming resumed in the Americas to feed and clothe the Europeans, using the labour of African slaves.

So the first transition, they say, was about 10,500 years ago with the beginning of agriculture. Some have said farming was our biggest mistake: it supported more of us, but at the cost of more disease, poor nutrition, grinding labour, and hierarchical societies that turned into warring empires. But we gained more energy from domesticating animals, and more information by the invention of writing. “Serendipitously,” the authors write, “farming created environmental conditions across our home planet that were unusually stable. This gave time for large-scale civilizations to develop.” That is, humans launched global warming not in the 1800s but with the first agriculture. By burning off forests to make farmland, we began to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — coincidentally, just as the earth was moving on schedule back into another glacial period. Over the next few thousand years farming spread across Asia, Africa, Europe, and much of the Americas, keeping the planet just a little too warm for a return of the glaciers.

The authors argue that the Europeans accidentally triggered the Little Ice Age by marching into Mexico and South America with guns, germs, and steel — especially germs. Diseases like smallpox and measles travelled on Indigenous trade routes far ahead of the Spanish and Portuguese. In the century after the conquest of Mexico, Lewis and Maslin claim, 50 million Indigenous people died of disease or slavery. In that truly genocidal century, farming civilizations collapsed from Brazil to North America. The survivors left the cities and temples they’d built and reverted to village-level farming. Forest and jungle took over the old empires before the Iberians rode in to take over the villages. Lewis and Maslin argue that as forests reoccupied the farmlands that had fed 50 million people, they absorbed enough carbon dioxide to trigger the Little Ice Age. Antarctic ice cores show a drop in global carbon dioxide starting in 1520 that did not begin to rise again until 1610.

We emerged from the apelike human phase thanks to fire and language. Together, those advantages made us apex predators: we could learn to hunt and forage from our elders and then gain more energy by cooking the food we gathered. After 200,000 years some of us still live that way, but it was what Lewis and Maslin call a “progress trap.” After modern humans left Africa, they effectively exterminated most of the larger mammals they encountered: the mammoths, giant sloths, sabre-tooth tigers, and countless others. In effect, they overshot their resources.

Lewis and Maslin argue that humanity has gone through four major transitions since we left 200,000 years of hunting and gathering. Each transition has been marked by a dramatic access to energy and an equally dramatic increase in information.

The debate might seem too trivial to care about, but as authors Simon Lewis and Mark A. Maslin demonstrate, the stakes are very high indeed. They show that scientists since the 18th century have recognized human influence on the face of the earth. What we have learned since then, and especially in the past 50 years, shows our influence has grown only greater; we just don’t want to admit it, because then we’d have to try to clean up the mess we’ve made.

Can Humanity Get Out of Its Latest ‘Progress Trap’? A review of ‘The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene.’

Non-uniform tropical forest responses to the ‘Columbian Exchange’ in the Neotropics and Asia-Pacific

Chapter 5: Demand, services and social aspects of mitigation

Realisable service level efficiency improvements could38reduce upstream energy demand by 45% in 2050.

To enhance well-being, people demand5services and not primary energy and physical resources per se. Focusing on demand for services and6the different social and political roles people play broadens the participation in climate action.

The richest 10 percent accounted for over half (52 percent) of the emissions added to the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015. The richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

And with hope, we can change the world.

Maybe it’s time we talk about it?

Gandhi once said, “Anything that exists is possible.

It’s as if we need the gravitational pull of both worlds to keep us on track, locked on a good and righteous path. Without both worlds pulling on us, we would crash into one, or simply lose our way, hurtling through the universe on our own, intersecting nothing, helping no one.

biophilia

It is now impossible for the world’s leaders to say that they “didn’t know” that this was going on, and that we didn’t have the power to prevent it all along. We scientists have been working hard, collecting evidence, writing reports, and presenting it all to the world’s leaders and the broader public. No one can honestly say that we haven’t been warning the world for decades.

feelings of gloom, and serious bouts of anxiety and depression, are common and becoming more serious.

The Space Between Two Worlds

Milkoreit et al. (23) propose a common definition of social tipping points (STPs) as points “within an SES at which a small quantitative change inevitably triggers a non-linear change in the social component of the SES, driven by self-reinforcing positive-feedback mechanisms, that inevitably and often irreversibly lead to a qualitatively different state of the social system.” There are historical examples of dynamic social spreading effects leading to a large self-amplification of small interventions: For example, the writings of one man, Martin Luther, injected through newly available printing technology into a public ready for such change, triggered the worldwide establishment of Protestant churches (24). An example in the field of climate policy is the introduction of tariffs, subsidies, and mandates to incentivize the growth of renewable energy production. This has led to a substantial system response in the form of mutually reinforcing market growth and exponential technology cost improvement (25, 26).In this paper, we examine a number of potential “social tipping elements” (STEs) for decarbonization (27, 28) that represent specific subdomains of the planetary social-economic system. Tipping of these subsystems could be triggered by “social tipping interventions” (STIs) that could contribute to rapid transition of the world system into a state of net zero anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

Social tipping dynamics for stabilizing Earth’s climate by 2050

In the dead end It is just as nonsensical To speak of being totally interconnected As it is To speak of being totally separate . Neither is possible In this world as it is Each is an expression of psychological attachment To an unrealistic ideal A rock or a hard place Egoic fortitude or collective concrete Where all is at standstill . To let go of one To hold on to the other Is no way to go . Each needs to be loosened With infinite grace If life is to flow And love is to grow

TogetherNeither one or otherNor all oneAlone

IN SUMMARY:- we will have NO HOPE of release from the iniquities, paradoxes, inconsistencies and falsities of objective rationalisation until and unless we recognise the receptive influence of omnipresent space and the responsive flow of energetic information around every body. ONLY THEN will a truly compassionate and regenerative way of life become possible.

A love triangle in the making of heartfelt experienceAt the seat of all knowingIn the wisdom of not knowingThe natural inclusion of being in becomingThe in-breath in out-breathIn common passion

This is why becoming aware of natural inclusion matters:- http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion/index.asp?pageid=701959Core Values & Principles of Natural Inclusion(ality) — the mutual inclusion of intangible spatial stillness and energetic motion in all material forms (Watercolour on paper by Alan Rayner, 30/11/2021)See this simple illustration:- https://youtu.be/3Xu0lg0vz5c

Abandonment of the abandonment of life’s purpose

Abandonment of the abandonment of mechanistic focus

That cuts what is in here apart from what is out there

Now all I had learned on my travelsFell into a new kind of placeEven maths and hard sciencesNo longer at oddsWith Art or HumanityBut serving to showA side of the storyInsufficient to stand on its own

You ask me who you are; To tell a story you can live your life by; A tail that has some point; That you can see; So that you no longer; Have to feel so pointless; Because what you see is what you get; If you don’t get the meaning of my silence; Because you ain’t seen nothing yet

Intangible, invisibleYet here, there and everywhereEternallyWithout limit

Burning in the Endless Freedom of Space

Within a cage of fixed boundaries

For a change of career

which often come into my mind ‘out of the blue’ rather than deliberate intent.

contaminating interference

Between selfish genetic survival machines

But, there was a problem. To study biology as a ‘science’ was not the same as experiencing ‘life in the wild’ in the caring companionship of others. If anything, it was wild life’s antithesis:- a competition to be first or best while following strict codes of practice designed to eliminate subjective human ‘error’ and conform to an unquestionable norm prescribed by prior authority.

When I was around eight years old, having recently made the trip with my family back ‘home’ to London from where I was born and lived my earliest years in Nairobi, Kenya, I contracted measles, the first of many childhood illnesses that confined me to bed and disrupted my schooling. My father sat by my bedside and read stories to me about the planets and outer space, infecting me with his love of scientific exploration. I was given books to read about natural history and I learned to identify the garden birds in the tree that grew outside my bedroom window. I made watercolour paintings of these and others that I had never seen from illustrations on the pages of ‘Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds’. Then, whenever I was well enough, I was taken out into the countryside and spent many happy days bird-spotting for myself. I was taken on my first ‘fungus foray’ to a place called Burnham Beeches, west of London. It was led by the redoubtable figure of a man called Bayard Hora and I was awestruck by what I many years later described as ‘The Fountains of the Forest’ as they erupted from ground and trees in manifold shapes and colours, not least the legendary ‘fly agaric’ (Amanita muscaria), the ‘parasol’ (Macrolepiota procera) and numerous ‘brittle gills’ (Russula spp). I found that their Latin names came easily to me and I delighted in showing off my recall to peers and teachers.

but suppressed through a series of abandonments made in a vain effort to conform with societal expectations.