What If The Totalitarian Game Is Actually A Participatory Play? Musings on CogNarr, Eusociality, and Synanon

Yesterday I put together a 40-minute video in which I talk about Karl Friston’s “Free Energy Principle,” a theory developed in the 1990s that centers the unique narrative world models we hold internally and how those models in consciousness are shaped by sensory input, the incoming information hurtling towards us through the feed every day. I relate Friston’s work to a new effort by John Boik, a Houston-based bioengineer with a background in Oriental medicine who is now pursuing open source software in AI assisted direct democracy and community currency programs. If you’ve been following my work around Michael Levin’s research you can probably see the connection between Boik’s former career in cancer research and cooperative digital money systems – morphogenetic fields linked to expanding cognitive light cones.

In a recent presentation for the Active Inference Institute, based at UC Davis in Daniel Ari Friedman’s Entomology Lab (Deborah Gordon, Stanford ant behavior expert is an advisor), Boik laid out his plans for CogNarr, a system that would structure human “stories” in ways that would be intelligible to computers and facilitate collaboration at a scale of a half dozen people to several million. This parallels Thomas Seeley’s work on distributed decision-making described in his book “Honeybee Democracy.”

I am settling in here in Hot Springs and I met a lovely elder who placed in my hands a memoir written by her son who is around my age. It describes his educational journey as a divergent learner and his family’s decade-long involvement with the “utopian” community Synanon based in Marin County, CA with ties to influential group psychologists and likely an experiment tied to the Human Ecology / MK Ultra Project. The main campus was on the site of an old lodge built by Marconi for wireless telegraphy.

While founded as an addiction treatment program that used attack therapy, “The Game,” the community later attracted intellectuals who were interested in a collective “utopian” lifestyle. I believe Synanon was a testbed for exploring the opportunities and limits of a hive / colony-oriented communal behavior. In other words Synanon was an ant computer lab. I get the feeling that while a lot of media attention was paid to increasingly unhinged adults with weapon stockpiles, including a rattlesnake placed in a lawyer’s mailbox, the primary area of investigation may have been the children.

It’s funny, with the cooler weather I’ve been enjoying my sunporch, but I’ve found that I have to keep an eye on the sugar ants. There are regularly 3-4 foragers exploring my Ikea Kallax furniture. One afternoon I got preoccupied with sewing and left a plate of sliced apples unattended for a few hours. Yowza – pheromonic stigmergy in action! It was shocking, but also quite fascinating to see how the superorganism works up close and personal. This video that is part of the Santa Fe Institute podcast offers helpful insights into this dynamic: “The Physics of Collectives.” I keep pushing the idea of the ant computer in front of people, because we are trained into linguistic and conceptual boxes that fuel polarity – libertarianism vs. socialism, etc. etc. when most of the roads are all using custom stories to take us to the same place – Conway’s Game of Life, counting down the iterations until we get the gliders coming on.

Abraham Maslow was involved with Synanon as well as being affiliated with Julius Stulman, Fritz Kunz, and Ervin Laszlo via the Foundation for Integrated Education. Maslow contributed a chapter to Stulman and Laszlo’s book “Emergent Man.” Synanon shut its doors in the 1990s, but spun out other programs including an abusive pioneer in the “troubled teen” space CEDU. Paris Hilton is an alumna of that program. Rory Kennedy, Bobby’s youngest sister, produced a documentary on Synanon that was released this spring by HBO. I speculate that this documentary as well as last year’s Netflix expose on San Patrignano are pre-bunking efforts to neutralize resistance to the institutional “wellness,” addiction and mental health treatment programs Bobby has planned for rural areas across the United States. My gut tells me these centers, like refugee camps, will be testbeds for tokenized eusocial behavioral experiments leading to advancements in collective decision making using emerging technologies. Nothing new under the sun, only this time we have nano-photonics in the mix to make social signaling more seamless and intuitive.

Here’s my video:

There were some good questions and comments on this video. Given how those tend to disappear, I chose to transcribe one exchange that provides some additional insight into how I’ve been thinking about things lately. I know my theory may sound far-fetched, but remember, consciousness is a coherence engine. I’ve been pulling in A LOT of disparate information for years. Trying to weave it into a meaningful narrative is tricky. Certainly the plot line that seems to be unfolding is NOTHING I would have ever expected. I’m not saying I’m correct, but I think there is enough information of concern that my thoughts do merit public consideration with respect to ethics, informed consent, and guard rails. The past four years have given me a crash course in the subtle practice of knowledge management refined by well-trained and well-funded social scientists and psychologists. All that I’m asking is that we actually engage in information streams outside of the ones being poured down our throats by mainstream media, academic gatekeepers, and social media feeds. But at the end of the day, I am proposing a pretty far out story. It makes sense that it’s going to be near to impossible to get much traction. Anyway, if you want to immerse yourself in the information fields that brought me to this place, I have linked a ton of my Kumu.io maps. Click away. I’m eager to hear what you come up with. 

Commenter One:

“What I see is the constant reinforcement of being in mind, abdication of physical being, being in your body and developing a relationship with our humanness is the most important connection. I wonder if we stay truly connected to our human-manifestation would that stop people going automatic and getting lost with narrative.”

Commenter Two:

“This right here. There aro a whole slew of us that have been guided towards esoteric info to the point that we’ve started commenting “who’s here in 24?” To 10 plus year old videos. They think the algorithm has discovered that people really like this….I just think this is a test group of heavy users of you tube. A particular…group of people who would be prone to action in the physical realm. It’s a test for how well it neutralizes them. Doesn’t matter to them if it’s real or empowering or helpful or healing….just does it prevent action by a physical being and bend them to spread denying the physical. Many in that group have kids…many may be teaching their children to place the physical 2nd behind mental. And if that’s the case – why not climb into the box and never leave?”

Commenter Three:

“I would be curious to know more about this. So, to clarify, YouTube is pushing videos on a group of people to see if they will remain docile? I’ve often wondered about certain spiritual viewpoints, and if they serve to keep people from sticking up for themselves. Any specifics you have on this subject would be fascinating to me, thanks.”

Alison’s Comment:

“Robert Bosnak’s take is that apocalypse narratives are quite generative. I do see the ascension storyline as running parallel with the Christian imminent apocalypse storyline. Based on experiences I’ve had over the past several years as well as natural cycles, I sense that we don’t have a grasp of what spacetime really is and that it can loop back and feature recursion. If that is the case, the linear narratives of some transformative end point seem likely socially constructed for some purpose I can’t conjecture about. I’m skeptical of both. If you try on the theory I’ve been developing around heart-soul-based nested and networked human massive parallel processing with access to the field through quantum biology and companion microbiome management, then the system would need two phases – a foraging out-of-body ego-death phase where individuals or groups go into the field to retrieve information which is then processed in-vivo with support from bacterial colonies that live in and on us. I sense that both are required, but training and practice will be needed so people can do it as second nature.

Again, in both apocalypse narratives, the storyline and teaming aspect is super important. Consider the industries that have been built up around both from New Age TV and webinars and books, etc. to Christian megachurches and of course the Vatican’s deep dive into social impact and biotech and Oral Roberts setting up Bible verse magic AI mirrors in student dorms. It never occurred to me that “social impact” was meant to be a hub for ongoing remote cognitive-biological monitoring (now for “wellness”) that will enable society to become a noetic superorganism available for spiritual on-demand information processing. Just like I believe the Georgia Guidestones were an engineered memetic trope to focus negative energy and fear. I also think the apocalypse stories are meant to structure consciousness so that when the intended program rolls out it can be embedded in a dramatic arc each particular groomed group is already comfortable with. The question though…is it a cookbook?”

Commenter One Follow Up:

“So with the embodied imagination, which sounds a bit like shamanic journeying, it is the mind which is the ‘driver’ to facilitate this third state which is embodied. In the mirror’d virtual world it is presumably still the original mind inhabiting this new embodiment? I wonder also what happens to the energy field of the actual heart & body in the new embodiment. Is this measured by the galvanic response also? Narrative means each group (being coalesced) can happily volunteer to inhabit this state and the body can then be harnessed and utilised.”

Alison’s Reply:

“I just wanted to state I am working through this theory and don’t have everything. buttoned up – but as I picture it, it would be the physical body and etheric body working in tandem to facilitate the information processing – two cycles. So picture a bee scouting a site for a new hive. Bees do this “waggle dance” to communicate what they’ve found and make a case to their peers about why their location is good. Then, by consensus (think tokenized democracy) the bees come to a decision. So maybe we are using our etheric self to forage for information in the field, and we bring it back to “the collective,” but that collective isn’t a hive of bees, but rather a cosmos of microbiota and mitochondria who communicate not through dance vibrations, but perhaps through photonics in the fascia? Now picture all of us as agents linked in a parallel processing system via frequency facilitated by electroceuticals and liposomes, etc. in our “wellness” supplements. I’m kind of spitballing here and pardon me if I’m misinterpreting your framing, but I don’t think it’s – hey send your consciousness out into the ether and let the system use your physical body while you are gone. There is the issue of embodiment, narrative coherence, umwelt, and qualia. My logical self says that individuals need to maintain their integrity as agents over time in order to be productive in the collective decision making process. I think they want to be able to nest individual experiences and then aggregate them at a scale relevant to the particular “cognitive light cone” task. Think about ants – they are agents working within a social structure that facilitates complex emergence even if the individual ants have no clue what is going on at levels about their pay grade. As I have been researching Julian Gresser’s “intelligent heart” it seems that the torus field is useful for processing 4-D information. So that may be another reason, beyond the role of the microbiome, to integrate knowledge acquired through astral projection – to integrate the information in a space outside regular 3-D existence.

Also, Bosnak is very hip on group dreaming in VR “Asclepian” healing caves. My intuition tells me that tokens and the protocol layer could be an interdimensional language of manifestation. This paper shared with me today by Stephers has some interesting thoughts on consciousness and projecting geometry (sacred?). https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01680/full “

I mention psychodrama and Gurdjieff in the video. Here is a map I’ve been working on related to this:

This map links Maslow’s theories of self-actualization with Ocean Protocol (Trent McConaghy and Jim Rutt’s Game B), token engineering, game mechanics, sustainability, and AGI:

Lee Eyre, Boik’s collaborator on these papers, worked for Orange (ambient smart environments) for ten years. The video below is how the world looks when everything is run on a permission-based smart contract. This scenario presumes all agents have a digital identifier, which brings in Web3, blockchain, and spatial computing. Watch this with an eye towards interactions feeding into a personal story – qualia, umwelt.

LEDDA (Leda) is an interesting name / acronym choice here.