This is a guest post from Quantum Heart Cafe, the first in a series of letters on Stephen Johnson’s book, “Emergence.” If you want additional information on slime mold, be sure to check out a recent guest post, “The Game of Slime,” by Daruchan.
April 2023
Dear Alison,
A couple of months ago, I was visiting a used bookstore looking for the book, “Ender’s Game,” which is a very good novel to read if you want to understand how predatory systems seek to manipulate and gamify children. On the shelves I came across Steven Johnson’s book “Emergence.” I had recently finished reading “The World Sensorium” by Oliver L Reiser, in which he proposes the idea of socially evolving humanity towards a collective consciousness, a world brain. Throughout “The World Sensorium,” Reiser uses the term emergence a lot, so when I saw Steven Johnson’s book, I was drawn to it. When I started reading it a little over a week ago, I understood why. As I read through “Emergence,” I plan to write up a series of letters from the Labyrinth to share important topics presented in the book with readers of this blog. This first letter touches on slime mold, substrates, and social media platforms.
I’m also borrowing the concept of “artificial emergence” proposed by Lorraine Davison in a letter of hers that was previously featured on this blog. I sense there is a natural emergence that comes from the Creator that can be contrasted with the cybernetic drive to wedge an artificial complex system between living beings and the Creator. It is that artificial emergence that I’ll refer to throughout the series of letters I plan to write on Johnson’s book.
Steven begins by talking about how a Japanese scientist, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, trained a being called slime mold to find the shortest route in a maze. One of the reasons this feat garnered so much attention is that slime mold doesn’t have a central nervous system, yet it was able to find the shortest way toward the source of food and solve the puzzle. Scientists, and others interested in emergence, study slime mold for a couple of reasons. It is an example of how simple components are the foundation for building higher level intelligence, something that is an important feature of complex adaptive systems. Another reason scientists are focused on slime mold, as well as other social creatures like ants and termites, is the coordinated group behaviour they display. Coordinated group behaviour is an important process for the system to learn as it attempts to steer people in the direction it wants us to go. This is why I think it’s important to remember that political leaders, social media influencers, CEOs, business people etc. are also agents acting on behalf of the system, consciously or not. It seems that their purpose is to create the pheromone trails that will attract us to and keep us on a desired path. This idea will be a continuous theme across these letters.
The obsession with slime mold started in the late 1960s with Evelyn Keller’s research. Keller is a physicist who did her dissertation on molecular biology. She wrote her dissertation on non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Keller was also an associate with Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She used mathematics to understand biological problems. In 1968, Keller met fellow colleague Lee Segel who showed her his slime mold. They both began to study the slime mold, and their findings have been used by urban planners, neuroscientists and software engineers as they have sought to replicate natural emergence. Slime mold can be found in natural damp and moist environments, such as the forest floor, where they forage for food. When individual slime mold cells find food, they send signals to neighbouring cells and eventually cluster into a bigger organism. Once the food is gone, or the environment is dry, the slime mold cells disperse into individual cells and move in different directions.
Scientists think that the way slime mold cells signal each other is through a chemical messenger called acrasin, also called cyclic AMP. If an individual sends enough of a signal, other slime mold cells will travel to its location, and they will begin to cluster into an organism. The organism would then move towards the source of stimulus like food. At one point, it was thought that slime mold cells had what Steven Johnson calls “pacemaker” cells, they would act as leaders and signal to the other individual cells who would then pass the message along to neigbouring cells. In his book, Johnson points out the fact that Keller wasn’t able to locate any “pacemaker” cells. He argues that there are no pacemaker cells in emergent systems, but rather humans have a desire to look for pacemaker cells. He then goes on to say that complex adaptive systems are created by individual agents who have an equal playing field. It is the interactions of individual agents with one another following certain rules that create higher level behaviour.
Keller thought that individual slime mold cells could trigger a formation of an organism by emitting or changing the amount of cyclic AMP in the environment. Those with the most cyclic AMP could attract other slime mold cells, then they would begin to cluster. Mitch Resnick, a contemporary and colleague of Keller, created a simulation game called StarLogo. The game involved using slime mold simulations as a means for students to study self-organizing systems. Students could alter the number of slime mold cells in the environment as well as the level and duration of the cyclic AMP to generate different types of emergent behaviour.
While there may or may not be ‘pacemaker’ cells in natural emergence, I disagree with Johnson’s assertion that there are no pacemaker cells in artificial emergence. I sense there is a predatory system that is trying to place itself between life on Earth and the Creator, and I think it is doing this by placing specific agents and actors within the simulation to try and steer people towards a cybernetic future, towards Oliver Reiser’s world brain. An important example is the steering and clustering that occurs on social media platforms. I see them as examples of complex adaptive systems, another word for artificial emergence. On these engineered platforms people are supposed to interact with one another and follow the platform’s rules to create higher level behaviours. However, there are people acting as agents on behalf of the system (whether they know this or not) who are put in place to attract and influence people.
In “The World Sensorium,” Oliver Reiser talks about polarization and substrates. He speaks about cellular polarization, which is when cells become polarized and then move towards a source of stimulus. An example would be if I cut my arm, the cells in my body would polarize and begin moving towards the cut, so they could heal my arm. Reiser applies that analogy to human society. He imagines humans could be polarized and be moved via a stimulus, towards the creation of a world brain. Reiser talks about how a substrate is the environment or surface that living organisms inhabit. He understood that a substrate would be needed in order to polarize the cells to move in a certain direction. In a way, social media platforms act as a substrate for polarizing people who can then be moved towards a certain stimulus. Similar to the slime mold cells, influencers and other system agents are used to create an attraction, then people cluster into groups. Once clustered into these online groups or communities, people can be polarized and steered towards the direction the system desires. Most people interacting on these platforms aren’t aware of the larger system at work. According to Johnson, ignorance of the overall program is an important characteristic of artificial emergence.
For this reason I think it is wise to think beyond specific people or influencers, as Alison encourages us to do, and to consider the system and assess how it acts out its predatory impulses through agents, which it has mostly groomed and selected.
I’m going to end the first letter here. For the next letter I will be talking about ant queens, Manchester and Jane Jacobs’s work.
Sincerely, Quantum Heart Cafe
Thank you for your post, Quantum Heart Cafe. Nicely done. My only critique would be the example you used to describe ‘polarized’. To my understanding polarization is actually when a wedge is driven between organisms (ie peaple) to send them down opposing paths, not to unite and merge. Just to avoid confusion for other readers. Peace
Actually, Quantum Heart Cafe is correct regarding Oliver Reiser’s description in World Sensorium. The polarization is linked to positive-negative charges that leads to oscillation and catalyzes desired change. It’s a good book. I need to get back to reading those chapter aloud. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polarization_(physics)#:~:text=Polarization%20(also%20polarisation)%20is%20a,of%20motion%20of%20the%20wave.
There is also the concept of cleft, which is related to morphogenesis / embryology in cell division, which is also important in building us as neuroblasts into a world brain. I think the segmentation on social media is akin to tissue / organ formation. Different holons that can carry out different tasks in the human social computation program.
Speaking about holons, I found this book by Piero Mella in the bibliography of Mihaela Ulieru’s paper “Organic Governance through the Logic of Holonic Systems.”
It looks very interesting:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270338868_The_Holonic_Revolution_Holons_Holarchies_and_Holonic_Networks_The_Ghost_in_the_Production_Machine
Thank you Rodrigo. I just downloaded it. Will have a look.
On a side note, have you ever watched the award winning film Hugo? It is very much about this cybernetic concept and I found in one scene a bizarre reference to human morphogenesis in the form of moving pixel sketches which vanish as quickly as they appear — viewers having little time to contemplate what was thrust into their subconscious.
The concept of morphogenesis through cybernetics, ie creating the ‘new human’ through technology (which today more than ever is sought after by the ruling class not only as the engine for impact investing/surveillance/capital flow, emerging markets, etc., but also the morphogenic carbon free human who is able to survive the biosphere collapse predicted to occur around 2026), I believe has already entered humans on the molecular scale, even before the CRISPR ‘vaccine’ rollout, via external psychosocial manipulation, which itself is a form of biological warfare. Whether this is through the market of nudge, perception management via psyops, or plain old yellow journalism, the idea of artifical emergence exists and grows when “ignorance of the overall program” remains sacrosanct. We can name the players, and certainly many will take it upon themselves to name them, which has within its charge the fallacy of generalizing ethnic groups or those of a certain faith as being the leaders of this desired control grid, and AI certainly is a Golem of Marvin Minsky and Norbert Weimer, the concept of a playing God among subhuman animals, which envisions a system of such control as to render opposition impossible, and this can only be achieved through inviting the wolf into the pen, but it’s really not confined to one group over another, rather it lives and breaths as an evil in the human who conspires where exponential growth in the current system is rendered impossible. According to these finance parasites and those of the compartmentalized military-biomedical-space-defense industry, the idea that when money cannot make money under the current law of economics, a new system, a new human, one that can be farmed for fictional tokens, must be realized to achieve the capital flow needed to maintain their money coffers and profits.
There is also the opposite effect, the Luddite consensus of the Malthusianists who seek the same goal of expanding capital flow under a system of feudal techo-environmentalism to ‘prevent’ the coming biosphere collapse, which will certainly lead to the extinction of the human species.
Of course, there is a catch. None of their solutions work. Ionizer atmospheric heaters, stratospheric aerosol spraying, jet stream injection… such geo-engineering measures might help to cool the planet or prevent storms from emerging but they can also be used as a weapon of immense control and power to shake the heavens, which comes at the expense of destroying the ozone layer and our biosphere! It’s a double-edged sword and they’ve known it for decades but continue to act as if they have not. Firing trillion-Watt lasers into the sky to precipitate rain clouds and bring down lighting bolts — ionosphere heaters — a technology which has existed for decades, and century-long experiments with weather modification on subjects like floods, droughts, agriculture, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc., these ongoing climate SRM operations provide only temporary planetary cooling at the cost of greatly accelerating long-term warming. Even worse! they decimate ozone layer: exactly what Edward Teller, concerning the burning of fossil fuels; and Dane Wigington of Geoengineering Watch have tried to warn us. Interestingly RFK Jr. who has stock in CRISPR, interviewed the latter activist, but you wouldn’t know it because Kennedy made sure to not mention it or publish it because apparently the concept of geoengineering, which is closely correlated with controlling the human genome via CRISPR, is crazy.
Is it?
Pfizer ‘vaccine’ as CRISPR experiment down the hereditary line (think Clarke’s [good friend with Marvin Minsky] Children’s End novel or Children of Men film.
https://zenodo.org/record/6210570
It just so happens that the day the West was introduced to the CRISPR shot (on a solar eclipse no less), Children’s End was published on that same date decades before and the Syfy show of the same name and of the same plot was released also on that date: December 14th. I could write several books on the symbology behind this, for they love to act following stars, lunar events and dates, and they give you hints of what’s to come, but here isn’t appropriate.
We know that Lynn Rothschild, yes, the Rothschild family who made the larger part of their wealth off slavery, released a video titled “Designing Nature” (2018).
https://videos.theconference.se/dr-lynn-rothschild-designing-nature…
“Darwin said that biological evolution creates design without a designer. With synthetic biology we can reprogram life.”
Key concepts: Rothschilds – How the Human Genome Project revolutionised biology (April 8, 2023)
https://archive.ph/tM5sU
“Genomics has therefore come to form a framework for biology in the way that the periodic table forms one for chemistry. It touches everything.”
Rothschilds – Life 2.0 (2006)
https://archive.ph/AbQCe
The New Yorker – Human 2.0, The Gene Hackers (2015)
https://archive.ph/6cMui
“CRISPR has two components. The first: a cellular scalpel that cuts DNA. The other consists of RNA, which serves as a guide.”
Rothschilds and Huxleys were champions of Darwinism, who desired a perfect human through eugenics and believed black people were subhuman.
https://archive.ph/Gu80c
Lord Rothschild spoke of Corona (Solar Eclipse makes a Corona… hint, hint, they love their dates) as “more than a distraction” from biosphere and ozone collapse, which they and the ruling class have been geoengineering for a century with this corrupted obsession to own everything. Case in point, the Rothschilds literally own the Weather channel as of 2023.
CRISPR was created by Doudna, a Rothschild associate who worked with the CIA. She was also an actress in the film I A Legend in which (and you can’t make this up) humanity faced extinction after a vaccine containing a virus used to prevent cancer went awry. This concept of viruses eating cancer isn’t new. It has found its way into ‘vaccine’ vigilance markets where the intentional goal is to cause cancer and provide you with the CRISPR solution using virus components and bacteriophages.
If you cannot understand the concept of CRISPR and how it is related to climate change please watch Mathew Liao’s TED Talk titled Tackling Climate Change Through Human Engineering in which he openly admits that CRISPR can render mother’s childless by manipulating the genome, that the gene designer can inject code to create “hobbit people” down the hereditary line who are “allergic to meat,” etc., etc.
Why does the Club of Rome’s and just about every other population graph show a decline in world population starting at around 2024-2026? What is coming? Was Poppy right? “Baby your [humans] Time is Up” when referring to humans 1.0 as going extinct but human’s 2.0 able to survive the extinction event? Yes, I’m 60 years old and I referenced Poppy, so what!
In my mind, the universe is one gigantic sacramental pointing the way to Him. It is to be distorted with the artificial by the haters of love and goodness. And I should mention, electromagnetism isn’t evil per say. It exists everywhere, but, and I’m going to go crazy Solace Hertz on everyone here, the better part of it “was developed by occult forces after the dawn of the enlightenment intended to forge a link between our natural world and the fallan angles. […] In this life God intended man to be swallowed in reassuring reoccurring natural rhythms, much as the unborn child floats in the womb fluid of its mother. Now he eats, works and plays around the digital clock with no curb to his activity but exhaustion. […] and the near destruction of recollection divine truths.”
Now we are faced with an even bigger problem. Our divine nature being usurped molecularly!
The polarization of Oliver L Reiser refers in the World Sensorium to is what I described in the letter, and I he used cellular polarization as a analogy for polarizing human society to moves towards a social evolution. There is no confusion because that is what he wrote.
Excellent post. I would like to add that those agents that serve as attractors in the digital social organisms are “covert leaders” of swarms according to the science of Guided self-organization (Prokopenko et al), these “covert leaders” could be discovered and co-opted (Coolhunting) or engineered (Coolfarming) through what Peter A. Gloor calls “swarm leadership.” These covert leaders must install a “collective consciousness” in the minds of the agents comprising the social organisms, this is done using memetics and methods of mobilization (Heylighen et al.); once this “collective consciousness” is firmly grounded in the collective unconscious of the social organisms it becomes an AUTONOMOUS EGREGOR that forms an energetic feedback loop with the social organism. The purpose of the Nano-Bio-Info-Cog convergence is to up-regulate this feedback loops that now function in social media but tomorrow could function in the Spatial Web, mediated by Distributed Ledger Technologies and totally automated by Smart Contracts.
Hi Rodrigo, wow thank you for sharing, are there any books or papers where I can learn more about these covert leaders and how they can create an Egregor.
Sorry, I couldn’t find the paper by Mikhail Prokopenko where he talks about “covert leaders” but here is one about GSO:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19552068.2009.9635816
The concept of “Swarm Leadership” and the “Collective Consciousness” is elaborated by Gloor in his book:
https://www.amazon.com/Swarm-Leadership-Collective-Mind-Collaborative/dp/1787142019
Francis Heylighen et al. on what makes a meme successful:
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/Memetics-Namur.pdf
Francis Heylighen et al. about Mobilization Systems:
http://134.184.131.111/Papers/MobilizationSystems.pdf
About Egregores
https://www.amazon.com/Egregores-Occult-Entities-Watch-Destiny/dp/1620555778
https://burners.me/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/The-Art-Of-Memetics-Wes-Unruth-Edward-Wilson.pdf
«Meta-Biological Organisms:
Gregory Bateson in Steps to an Ecology of Mind defines a mind as the total cybernetic information system that is involved in an action. Combined with Deleuze’s conception of body as defined not by physical extension but by participating together in action, this definition preempts the common humanistic assumption that mind is limited to the individual human agent. It is the intelligence or flexibility of the overall network that leads to the system’s results rather than the intentions of a single individual. This means that a person is part of many different and much larger minds.
These can be thought of as group minds, and have been referenced in contemporary magical theory as egregores, emergent entities made up of the complex systems that compose these social bodies. The individuals are not in complete control of this egregore because they are constrained by the system that allows it to manifest, but the egregore is not in complete control because its actions are determined by the interaction of its various parts. It is a meme carrier, just like humans are, except it does not require a physical presence.»
Covert and overt leaders don’t create the Egregore but it emerges from the complex dynamics of the swarm in which they installed the “collective consciousness” that is the blueprint for the Group Mind.
I would like to correct myself. An Egregore is a semi-autonomous entity, just as the agents that comprise the Complex Adaptive Systems from where it emerges.
I found the paper about covert leadership:
«A covert leader in a swarm is notable because it receives less information than followers on average.»
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/263582614_Information_Transfer_in_Swarms_with_Leaders
Is it fair to say that we are currently right in the middle of a process when ‘World Egg’ is ending its mitotic phase and the next phase, differentiation phase, organ formation, is just starting.
Cell divisions (cytokinesis) are at the maximum and cell walls are now becoming fully functional (swarming phase is at its end), therefore time has come for the cells to begin their global ‘traveling’ in order to begin with formation of different organs that will be essential for the future of the ‘World Body & Brain’ embryo. Let me call this phase global ‘swarm movement, repositioning and mergers’.
I wonder what is going to hatch out of this ‘World Egg’:
An Ant Colony or Borg Hive …
or Bio-Machine called Human 2.0 …
or ‘Something-Wonderful’*** might emerge …
… or will it eventually become the Biggest-ever-dud, yet another money laundering scheme?
Just a thought.
—————————————————————————
*** ‘Something-wonderful’ I borrowed from Kubric’s Space Odyssey 2001, that cryptic Masonic Manifesto for the next thousand years.
Why do I have this nagging feeling that I (or if you want: we) already went through all these progressions we are going through for the past few millennia, and especially for the past five hundred years?
Progressing forward, only to reject it all, yet again, after many sorrows.
What if all that we have right now (self awareness, fire, language, …), which has resulted from our past striving towards emergent properties of an idealized human … what if this – our position near the star, our position on our planet and our place in the grand scheme of galactic things – is all that is possible to squeeze out of life on this planet?
What if we are approaching that depressing phase when we are to suddenly (scientifically) realize our position is ‘as good as it gets’ moment?
What then?
No interplanetary travel for us, let alone interstellar, but travel of our machines.
No further evolution for our bodies and constant fear of devolution, but evolution of our machines.
No emergent properties for our mind because we already have emerged minds, but emergence of our machines.
Next glaciation is approaching fast and we are steered ever more forcedly to move against our instincts, senses, sensibilities and better judgements.
Are we soon going to be forced to agree to allow ourselves to be eaten by the machine, or are we going to try to reject it all, yet again?
This paper seems to be very important for the subject.
Emergent Engineering: A Radical Paradigm Shift.
«The dramatic progress of CPE (Cyber-physical Ecosystem) technologies is envisioned to reach unanticipated levels of complexity, beyond the boundaries of the disciplines that conceived their components (CPS, 2008). This challenges the traditional engineering school of thought in disruptive ways, given that, by their very nature, CPE cannot be a priori defined, but rather emerge from the interactions between individual systems’ (and people’s), interactions facilitated by the eNetworks. This requires to drastically revise the traditional top–down perspective on system design and control, which aimed at imposing order exogenously, telling each element of the system what to do at every step through predetermined strategies, and assuming that all possible situations the system might confront are knowledgeable in advance. Instead of fighting it, eNetworked CPE could be managed by ‘riding the wave’ of their own complexity and rather let systems grow, function and stabilise – even adapt and improve – endogenously, in a ‘bottom–up’ fashion.»
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228348641_Emergent_engineering_A_radical_paradigm_shift
Maybe facts about horrific events like Shandy Kooh* change rapidly, with wild contradiction, in the daze following not necessarily because of a grand conspiracy but because the stories are egregores which are dynamic by nature. Users of social media have been taught to call egregores ”shapeshifters” and then to laugh the phenomenon off as absurd on the one hand and, on the other, to deny their own role in the conflagration.
The news is a cyclic v-AMP ire. Maybe the autonomous egregore in a feedback loop is what others before called the id and 2020 was for what they said it was for – the creation of a global ID-entity for the next loop round. A veritable effigy.
The concept is new to me but regarding holons, this is what how I think when I someone categorizes something as woo (also a learned bias):
“Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist’s discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer’s frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.” -Arthur Koestler
Rodrigo says “Covert and overt leaders don’t create the Egregore but it emerges from the complex dynamics of the swarm in which they installed the “collective consciousness” that is the blueprint for the Group Mind.”
Who is ”they”?
This comment reminds me of the rewards given to ”content creators” and the frenetic desire to ”go viral”. I can imagine that ”they” have installed many false files in the Group Mind and perhaps ”false flags” are one indication of technique.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_implantation
https://www.inverse.com/mind-body/how-to-reverse-false-memories-study
https://ascensionglossary.com/index.php/File:CruxImplant.png
I come to this site from my life experience and the Maasai.
The concept of holographic inserts to mold slime is a worthy exploration.
https://ascensionglossary.com/index.php/Holographic_Insert
*purposely scrambled to avoid censor-
artificial memories for synthetic synchronicity and emergence?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-successful-artificial-memory-has-been-created/
Here is a direct pdf link to a book: “Digital Transformation of Collaboration _ Proceedings of the 9th International COINs Conference”.
http://62.182.86.140/main/2889000/c41146723e30adcc6c646b1a3ade6477/%28Springer%20Proceedings%20in%20Complexity%29%20Aleksandra%20Przegalinska%2C%20Francesca%20Grippa%2C%20Peter%20A.%20Gloor%20-%20Digital%20Transformation%20of%20Collaboration_%20Proceedings%20of%20the%209th%20International%20COINs%20Conference-Springer.pdf
Since it is fairly recent information it might be interesting to whomever it might concern. Just judging by the ‘Contents’ section of the book I have to admit that I wasn’t even aware about some of the fields of research going on.
Edited by Aleksandra Przegalinska (Warsaw, Poland), Francesca Grippa (Boston, USA) and Peter A. Gloor (Cambridge, USA):
“This volume combines selected contributions presented at the 9th International Conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks “Digital Transformation of Collaboration” held in Warsaw, Poland on October 8th and 9th, 2019.”
Below is ‘Contents’ section of the book:
Part I – Body Sensors and Big Data
Chapter 1 – “No Pain No Gain”: Predicting Creativity Through Body Signals
Chapter 2 – Using Body Signals and Facial Expressions to Study the Norms that Drive Creative Collaboration
Chapter 3 – Measuring Audience and Actor Emotions at a Theater Play Through Automatic Emotion Recognition from Face, Speech and Body Sensors
Chapter 4 – Measuring Moral Values with Smartwatch-Based Body Sensors
Chapter 5 – MeasuringWorkload and Performance of Surgeons Using Body Sensors of Smartwatches
Chapter 6 – Exploring the Impact of Environmental and Human Factors on Operational Performance of a Logistics Hub
Part II – Emotions and Morality
Chapter 7 – Heart Beats Brain: Measuring Moral Beliefs Through E-mail Analysis
Chapter 8 – Identifying Virtual Tribes by Their Language in Enterprise Email Archives
Chapter 9 – The Political Debate on Immigration in the Election Campaigns in Europe
Chapter 10 – Brand Intelligence Analytics
Chapter 11 – Finding Patterns Between Religions and Emotions
Chapter 12 – Virtual Tribes: Analyzing Attitudes Toward the LGBT Movement by Applying Machine Learning on Twitter Data
Part III – Human-AI Interaction
Chapter 13 – Digital Coworker: Human-AI Collaboration in Work Environment on the Example of Virtual Assistants for Management Professions
Chapter 14 – Collaborative Innovation Network in Robotics
Chapter 15 – Fantastic Interfaces and Where to Regulate Them: Three Provocative Privacy Reflections on Truth, Deception and What Lies Between
Part IV – Interdisciplinary Methods
Chapter 16 – A Structured Approach to GDPR Compliance (The European General Data Protection Regulation)
Chapter 17- Mapping Design Anthropology: Tracking the Development of an Emerging Transdisciplinary Field
Chapter 18 – Combining Social Capital and Geospatial Analysis to Measure the Boston’s Opioid Epidemic
Chapter 19 – Reward-Based Crowdfunding as a Tool to Constitute and Develop Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs)
Chapter 20 – An Ecosystem for Collaborative Pattern Language Acquisition
This is great. Thank you Quantum Heart Cafe for taking the time to write this letter. I enjoyed your notes and insights very much.
I just finished transferring my own notes from Itzhak Bentov’s book ‘Stalking the Wild Pendulum’ (1977) so naturally, i am inclined to offer a few passages on emergence and Resier’s ‘World Brain’ that may be relevant to your letters on the above topic and your assertion that “…there is a predatory system that is trying to place itself between life on Earth and the Creator, and I think it is doing this by placing specific agents and actors within the simulation to try and steer people towards a cybernetic future, towards Oliver Reiser’s world brain. ” Intuitively, I tend to agree with this perspective.
p. 78:
“We may at first have trouble trying to visualize a rock or an atom as a living things because we associate consciousness with life. But this notion is just a human limitation; a rock may also have difficulty in understanding human consciousness. At preset we restrict the term “live beings” to beings that can reproduce. This, I believe, is quite arbitrary. We seem to project our own behavior onto other systems, by saying that starting from the atom and going to larger aggregates of atoms there is no “life,” and then suddenly, when the aggregates of atoms have reached a stage of organization, “life” appears, because we can recognize our own behavior in it. My basic premise is that consciousness resides in matter; put another way, all mass (matter) contains consciousness (or life) to a greater or lesser extent. It may be refined or primitive. We human beings are so designed that when properly trained, we can interact with anything that has consciousness on whatever level.”
P. 97
“Particle-wave duality: We shall now look at the possible mechanism behind these phenomena. The principle of particle-wave duality holds not only in the limited area of photons, electrons, or nuclear particles but also in the larger aggregates of matter. By this duality we understand, for example, that light can be represented as a field of radiation, but when our eyes or instruments interact with this field, they sense this radiation in the form of little bullets or photons, the individual particles of light. Thus, we have a field of continuous electromagnetic radiation, which has a wave-like character, but which we see neither with our eyes nor with instruments. It becomes manifest to us only when it hits our retina, but when it does so, it behaves like single, discrete particles known as photons.”
P. 122
“Now let us make it clear: “Spiritual” does not mean that it has anything to do with religion as we know it religious leaders are sometimes called spiritual leaders.) It has to do only with the development and refinement of the nervous system and the accompanying rise in the level of consciousness, which has reached a point in frequency high enough on the scale of quality of consciousness to resonate with the highest levels of creation. This automatically entails the development of inner moral values and the development of the heart. By this we mean that a person on that level of development will automatically tend to help people in need and will radiate an energy that on the physical level is expressed as the emotion called “love.” We would define love as energy and not an emotion since emotions are confined to the physical and astral levels of reality. Beyond those levels, emotions are not encountered. Therefore, what we call “love” is an energy radiation that pervades the whole cosmos. It is possibly the basis of what we know as the phenomenon of gravitation.
To function on this level is the goal of all yoga training. The word “yoga” means union, by which is meant union with the absolute. An accomplished yogi is able to function on all levels of creation; to describe events in the past and future; and, because the energy exchange curve is very high on this level, he is able to influence Nature in a positive way. Eventually, he becomes a factor stimulating evolution of mankind and the planet.”
p.152
“The seed is a unique structure because in it space-time has been condensed and stored, awaiting the proper objective time for its unfoldment. Therefore, it is the representation of the tree in an altered and higher state of consciousness. It is a tree that has moved into its subjective space-time, in which time and space have lost their ordinary meaning. It is a state in which “time has stopped” as far as the tree is concerned. The outer objective manifestation of this state of the tree is the seed. Later, when the objective conditions become favorable, the tree will come out of its meditative, hibernating state as a seed and unfold in objective space-time as a mature tree. The seed, in other words, is a more basic structure than the tree because in its qualities it is closer to the absolute… …we should, therefore, see in the seed-tree duality a unique function of Nature. It does not matter whether it is the seed of a tree, the egg of a chicken, a human sperm, or a seaweed egg. The seed is unique because if one could penetrate the consciousness, one would find that it “sees itself” as a full-grown tree in spite of its confinement in a tiny shell.”
p152-153
The organizing fields of life:
“If we take an ordinary chicken egg and very carefully make two windows, one in the top and one in the bottom of the shell, without injuring the thin membrane surrounding the contents of the egg, then, using a sensitive voltmeter with a set of silver electrodes, touch the exposed membrane at the top and the bottom of the egg, we find a positive voltage at the top and a negative one at the bottom. For an unfertilized egg taken from the refrigerator, this voltage will be a steady 2.40 millivolts. When we make two more windows in the sides of the egg, facing each other, and take measurements, we find no similar potential difference. This indicates that there is an electrical field present along the long axis of the egg, which then has to turn back over itself, as shown. This behavior has been shown to be true in seaweed eggs, frog eggs, and seeds. A good account of the field around living organisms is given in Blueprint for Immortality by Harold Saxton Burry, professor of anatomy, at Yale University (London: Neville Spearman, 1972). These fields seem to be penetrating and surrounding living tissue. It has also been shown that the spine of a tadpole within a frog egg lines up along the axis of this potential field in the egg. I suggest that the shape of the electrical field governing the development and the form of living beings is mirrored in the shape of our universe. Here we have another example of a form on the microscale appearing after many hierarchies of a size on the macroscale. Burr calls these the “organizing fields,” claiming that they come first, guiding the atoms and molecules of the growing organism into is proper form. In effect, what he is saying is that an electromagnetic hologram that changes with time makes up a mold, and matter eventually fills up that mold, giving rise to a tangible body.”
Thank your for sharing your notes and insights, I haven’t heard of the book, and it sounds like one of the main themes is how consciousness permeates everything. A number of Indigenous and African, and nature based spiritual practices have said that spirit is everywhere. I have been learning more about my Celtic ancestry and it has been important reconnecting with that spiritual tradition. I agree that consciousness permeates everything, and I think there is a real effort by something to wedge itself between life on Earth and that consciousness.
Thank you from me too for this post. I am reading Emergence too and am making heavy weather of it! This has encouraged me to go back to it. I agree that spontaneous emergence is unlikely to be the whole story for the development of any humanplus superorganism. But they are obviously interested in how any “bottom-up” tendencies can be understood and used by “top-down” manipulation.
Alison’s latest (at time of writing) post on Reiser’s other book Cosmic Humanism (I think) is interesting. Could “they” really think that a collective image held in the human mind would produce a field of consciousness in which deliberate mutations would produce this organism? It sounds crazy but a lot of science now takes place in very shady circumstances.
Who would have thought that the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, not needed to end the war, could possibly have been an experiment on radiation-produced genetic mutations that had to wait for the human genome project for its full “flowering”?
This can’t be their only option but it seems to be one of them. If Teilhard was the “what” then Reiser seems to be one contributor to the “how.” He didn’t seem to think that this would happen spontaneously and set about trying to discuss ways that we could bring about Point Omega by our own efforts. Jeffrey Epstein is an interesting character in this respect. I have just read an article, written in 2002, in which the author informs us that Epstein was reading EO Wilsons book Consilience! Also, he had just been to visit one of the (many) scientists that he was funding:
” Then there is Stephen Kosslyn, a psychologist at Harvard. Epstein flew up to Kosslyn’s laboratory in Cambridge this year to witness an experiment that Kosslyn was conducting and Epstein was funding. Namely: Is it true that certain Tibetan monks are capable of holding a distinct mental image in their minds for twenty minutes straight? “We disproved the thesis,” says Kosslyn.
So, why were Epstein and his backers interested in ants, termites and the image-making abilities of Tibetan monks!!?
I am going to read some more Emergence tonight!
Thank you for the kind words Lorraine, and Emergence is turning out to be a very helpful book for understanding their artificial emergence how they are attempting to manifesting. I am posting another letter sometime this week, as well as more letters as I continue reading the book, and I would love to hear your thoughts on what Steven is writing. I just started part two and Steven spends more time talking about ants and complex adaptive systems. There is a lot of really interesting and relevant topics.
That is interesting about Epstein, I know a little bit about his island, but I didn’t know he was involved in this.