This is Part 2 of a three part series on Conversation. Part 1 HERE. Part 3 Forthcoming.
We have an insanely, insanely insane day. What does an insanely insane day mean? It means there’s just so much that we want to do together today, and we’re going to do it in two parts.
We are in Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds, articulating a new Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. And perhaps I can add, if I could set intention: we would be doing this even if there wasn’t a meta-crisis, because it’s what we need to do in order to respond to what I would call the crisis of existence. Which is:
Why am I alive?
Why am I here?
What am I doing here?
If I look closely and carefully at that, it’s clear as day that
I’m here for one reason: I am born to transform.
I am born to grow. I am born to deepen.
Now, we think that to transform means to give up that which is pleasurable, to be rigorously disciplined in order to become an obedient servant of a caricatured God—bad idea. That’s not what it means.
Born to transform means I’m born to transform into the deepest, most beautiful, most good, most true, most alive, most enlivened version of my irreducible Unique Self. And my irreducible Unique Self is the fundamental answer to the question of who am I? Who am I, and who are we? And where are we? And where am I? And what ought I do?
So, who am I, my friends? —
I’m an irreducible Unique Self, and
I have a life to live and a song to sing and a poem to write, and
I’m in a Unique Self Symphony.
I am born to transform into my greatness, into the depth of my greatness, into the depth of my capacity.
This dharma of Unique Self is, to the best of my knowledge, the single best answer we have. It is weaving together all of the exterior sciences, all the neuroscience, the exterior sciences in multiple vectors and domains, molecular biology and organic chemistry, and then the softer sciences, but important: the psychologies, the eleven major schools of psychology. Weaving that together with the interior sciences, across space and time.
When we weave that together, we get the best possible answer to the question of who am I, who are you. I’m an irreducible Unique Self. I’m part of a larger field, and I’m playing my instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
If there wasn’t a meta-crisis, this is what we’d be talking about. We’d be talking about:
How do I transform into the deepest, most stunning and most beautiful version of who I am?
How do I know what’s pleasurable?
How do I discern pleasure?
How do I realize that pleasure is the source of all ethics?
How do I understand Eros as radical aliveness, moving uniquely through me, desiring ever deeper value?
And we need to actually articulate a Story of Value that we can live in, that creates the most stunning world that’s been waiting to be born—that has been born successively in parts, but that’s also been tormented and ripped apart, and demarcated by an unimaginable and unbearable suffering. We feel the joy every day, and we feel the suffering every day. So we would be having that conversation.
But we are in the middle of a meta-crisis. We are threatened by the potential death of humanity, or the potential death of our humanity.
What we’ve realized at the Center for the past fifteen, twenty years is that:
The very root of that meta-crisis is a failure to articulate a Story of Value from which we generate a shared Reality…
… a shared musical score, as a context for our diverse and unique instruments: our unique instruments of nation, our unique instruments of religion, our unique geographical instruments, our unique philosophical instruments, our unique individual instruments.
It’s about irreducible uniqueness, but in the context of a shared Story of Value, which is not contrived, which is not a social construct, but which is based on the utter lived reality of value. Value is real; it’s a real structure of Cosmos. It lives in me, as me, and through me. I don’t only live in a Field of Value which is prior to all, and in which all arises in—the Field of Value literally lives inside of me.
The response to the meta-crisis is the response to the meaning crisis. And the response to the meaning crisis is not the declaration but the showing: It’s the deepest weaving of the exterior and interior sciences across space and time, the best of premodern, modern and postmodern, across disciplines, weaving those orienting generalizations of validated truth and each one of those disciplines together in a larger field of meaning, which is a larger Story of Value.
Only such a new Story of Value can respond to the meta-crisis.
Only such a new Story of Value can create tomorrow.
Only such a new Story of Value can create a world for our children.
A world for the child in us, for our grandchildren, for our neighbors’ children, for the children on the other side of the globe, and for the children of tomorrow that are yearning to be born. And we feel deeply that they won’t be born without us. Feel the evolutionary impulse! It’s to feel the future, to feel the yearning of children waiting to be born, of love stories waiting to be told, of purposes waiting to be realized. And purpose is an expression of the irreducible Unique Self that is I, that is thee,
that has a unique story to live, a unique life to breathe, a unique poem to write, a unique song to sing, a unique way of loving, living, laughing and being and crying that’s mine and mine alone;
that is an expression of my unique perspective and my unique quality of intimacy;
that’s inherently, intrinsically, desperately needed, desired, honored by All-That-Is;
and that somehow profoundly makes All-That-Is more than it was before.
It contributes something. How did Whitman say it? “To contribute a verse.” That’s my letter in the cosmic scroll that has the capacity to contribute a verse.
That’s our context.
We started our conversation about conversation two weeks ago and I want to set up again the context of what we’re doing here in this Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds. We’re about to talk about conversation, and this is the single most important conversation I know that’s happening on this level on the globe. We’re so honored to do it. We’re trembling before She—not trembling with a kind of arrogating arrogance, but with a kind of humility in which we feel Her moving through us, and we want to actually respond to the meta-crisis.
Here’s the structure of what we’re doing in this new stage. We did One Mountain, Many Paths for five hundred and nine weeks. I started One Mountain, Many Paths with, as we called it, the Evolutionary Church. I started with Barbara Marx Hubbard, one of the great evolutionary futurists, theorists, really one of the storytellers of the generation. It’ll be ten years this December. And then for the last several years we’ve been moving towards the next stage. So, we renamed One Mountain, Many Paths as Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds and a time between stories: articulating the new Story of Value.
We’re going to be doing precisely an hour every week with a particular format. So, here’s our format: We’re going to be responding directly to the meta-crisis. We’re operating on a core axiom, which we unpack in an essay called Love or Die, and in many other places. We also unpack it in this book, the Homo Amor Manifesto, which you can get online, and in First Principles and First Values.
We’ve articulated this realization:
In order to respond to the meta-crisis, we can’t just fix the infrastructure. We can’t just figure out how to find bioweapons in the wastewater.
In order to respond to the meta-crisis we can’t just fix social structure. Social structure would mean, for example, changing legal structures of law. Let’s say, regulate AI. And why doesn’t that work? —Because:
Law has to be rooted in value. If we deconstruct the Field of Value, then law is left unmoored.
We’ve just hired a young legal scholar and doctor to head up our law and science department, and we’re writing a series of law review articles about why law needs to be re-rooted in the Field of Value. That’s why regulation, changing social structure, changing law, changing culture doesn’t work by itself. We need to change superstructure. Those three terms are from a sociologist, Marvin Harris.
Superstructure means—the way we’re reading it—the Story of Value in which we live.
This is one of the few things that Yuval Harari and I agree on, at least when we’re talking about foundations. We agree about analysis of threat, but he fundamentally misunderstands the nature of Cosmos in a very fundamental and very troubling way. Yuval says, for example, that any meaning or value that we ascribe to our life is mere delusion. And the word any is italicized, to make sure that you don’t think that there’s any Story of Value. And Yuval is writing children’s books to make sure children understand that. “Hi, my child, let me share with you: any meaning that you ascribe to your life is mere delusion.” Now, you think I’m making this up? You think I’m being sardonic? You think I’m being sarcastic? I’m not. That is what Yuval’s children’s books—and I’ve read them all pretty much word for word—that’s what they’re saying.
So, to respond to the meta-crisis, what do we need to do? —We need a new Story of Value.
We need to show that value is real.
We’ve done that quite seriously. We started to do it in this first book, First Principles and First Values. There’s another deeper book on value that’s about to come out, and then another one right afterwards called Value Is Real. We’re literally breaking open value theory to show profoundly that value is real. We just had a conclave here in Vermont where Zak Stein and I spent, with a bunch of forty insanely beautiful people, our kind of inner board—we spent four or five days deep in the structure of value is real, unfolding the eight facets of what it means to say, “value is real.”
Out of the realization that value is real, out of the realization that there is a Field of Value, what emerges is First Principles and First Values: uniqueness, intimacy, integrity, transformation. We have a list of First Principles and First Values, and an equation and a formulation that defines each one of them.
Now, here’s the key. What we are showing to be true—it’s not an assertion, we’re showing it to be true—is that every dimension of the meta-crisis without exception is rooted either in a breakdown of the realization that value is real, and then more particularly in the failure to recognize that a particular value exists and is real. That’s our formula.
In other words, we’re saying it’s a superstructure problem at the very core.
Yes, we need to fix infrastructure, we need technological structures.
Yes, we need to address social structure—law.
But at the core, what generates all of that, underneath is the story that I live in—the story that I live in personally, the story of value that I live in, because every story is a story of value, and the story of value that culture lives in.
If I can’t articulate and shift and deepen that story—not by assertion, not by declaration, but by showing that value is real, and by identifying intrinsic, inherent First Principles and First Values, showing that those values are real. Here’s a big sentence: They’re real, meaning they’re eternal. Eternal means not “lots of time,” not “unchanging;” eternity means value. The Field of Eternity and the Field of Value is new. That’s a new way to say it.
Eternity is not just lots of time. We always say, “eternity is that which is beneath time.” What is beneath time? —The Field of Value. That’s completely new. Get that formulation.
The Field of Eternity means the Field of Value.
Value is real. It’s rooted in the Field of Eternity. It’s eternal value, what we call “the eternal Tao” in the East. But the eternal Tao, this Field of Eternity, this Field of Value, generates story. But story’s not a social-construct-story. It generates story, that is to say evolution. And evolution is a story of transformation. So, it generates a manifest world which evolves, meaning a manifest world which has a narrative arc. It’s a story. It’s a Story of Value. It’s going somewhere.
Now, in that Story of Value there’s a grammar of value, a shared grammar of value. The shared grammar of value is made up of First Principles and First Values.
Every breakdown is based on a breakdown in First Principles and First Values.
Just one simple example to bring us in: The social media collapse, which destroyed a generation. There’s literally a generation of eighteen-year-olds, nineteen-year-olds, twenty-five-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, men and women, who can’t read.
They don’t know how to read.
They don’t know how to pay deep attention.
Their motivational structures are shattered. Their motivational architecture is shattered.
Their ability for depth is shattered.
It comes from a combination of a breakdown in the Field of Value, which expresses itself in a small group of companies—run by about two hundred people total worldwide—that generates something called social media, which has “share” buttons and “like” buttons that speak to the most superficial dimension of a human being, and which hijack attention. They hijack attention. That’s exactly what they do.
You literally can’t go inside. You live in this kind of brain fog. You put social media together with high-speed internet porn between ages eighteen to twenty-four, where men and women are equally “engaged”—that’s the word is used in the literature, but engaged is a euphemism for addicted—to social media and high-speed internet porn, where you can see any sexual act of any kind for as long as you’d want, with any person in the world, man or woman, any combination, which is a quick dopamine-hit addiction, combined with social media, which destroys the capacity to place attention.
That’s the first wave of artificial intelligence.
Now, what we want to do in Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds, is to point to the fact that the reason the social media companies felt comfortable doing this, the reason it didn’t even raise an eyebrow, the reason they didn’t even consider it, and the reason they’ve ignored the critics who have attacked them and said, “oh my God, you’re stealing people’s attention”—and they said, “so what?” —the reason is, they didn’t understand that attention is a First Principle and First Value.
I literally spoke to the CEO of a major twenty-billion-dollar company about the social media issue and talked about stealing attention. He said: “So what? What’s wrong with stealing attention? It’s just advertising.” And of course, he didn’t understand the difference between classical broadband advertising and hyper-micro-targeted, asymmetrical AI working on stealing your attention at an entirely different level, that literally can’t even vaguely be compared to advertising. But that’s not the bigger problem.
The bigger problem is he didn’t understand that attention is a First Principle and First Value.
Attention is a First Principle and First Value. Because it’s a value, it creates a right.
This is critical, and it’s gotten lost in legal theory. Together with Dr. Venu J., our new head of law and science, we’ve read so many legal articles in the last five years that can’t locate the idea of rights in law.
Rights come from value.
Rights are rooted in value.
If there’s a value, the value creates rights.
Life is a value; I have a right to life.
I need to understand that attention is not a contrived value—attention is not a social construct, and attention is not even a value that emerges only at the human level of existence. No: attention is a structure of Cosmos. It’s a value structure of Cosmos, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
The reason I left Oxford and Zak left Harvard is because we couldn’t talk about these things in the academy. It was stuck in a postmodern predicament which disqualified value as being real, disqualified there being any First Principles and First Values, and argued that value was simply a human social construction that had no ultimate meaning, that disappears as we meet death, and it all becomes “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
No, it’s not a tale told by an idiot. It’s a love story. It’s an evolutionary love story. It’s an Amorous Cosmos. It’s a CosmoErotic Universe. It’s an intimate universe, which is not merely the story of the evolution from simplicity to complexity. Complexity is but an exterior. Complexity is interconnectivity. My friend Fritz Capra says it’s “interconnectivity.” Fritz, that’s a good step, my friend, but you’ve been unwilling to take the next step. It’s not just interconnectivity.
The interior of interconnectivity is intimacy.
The story of Reality is not made up. The story of Reality is intrinsic, inherent. It’s a Story of Value. The plot line of the story is the progressive deepening of intimacy. Intimacy itself is a First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.
Now, let’s go to the first wave of AI, which says: I’m going to steal your attention. I’m going to micro-target you using the asymmetrical power of the most advanced artificial intelligence, the most advanced power force ever manifest in the world—exponentially more powerful than the early AI that defeated the best chess champions in the world in the Deep Blue contest back in the day, where Garry Kasparov lost—all of that AI micro-targets you by collecting the digital exhaust of your information, creating a personality profile on you, putting you into what’s called a peer group. (A peer group means people who respond identically to a particular set of sequences and prompts. You are micro-targeted in order to be invisibly controlled, without your knowledge, in order to elicit a particular reaction which can be predicted by the advanced algorithms.)
There’s this fundamental downgrading of humanity, because we’ve lost access to what it means to be human, and this upgrading of algorithmic intelligence—and even beyond that, which is going to be the case in the new forms of artificial intelligence. All of that is asymmetrically aligned against you, to invisibly undermine your attention.
You need attention in order to exercise free will. You need attention in order to love: Love is the placing of attention.
Eros itself is the placing of attention. But we’ve lost access to that. And the reason that social media companies feel comfortable doing that is because they’ve undermined a knowing that’s never been explicated. I’m not going back to ancient wisdom—yes, we need to draw from ancient wisdom, but we need to be source.
I’m coming before you today not as an academician—although academics is important and it does important work—and not as a popular writer or spiritual teacher. But I want to try, with permission, tenderly, tenderly, tenderly, to come before you Aurobindo-style, da Vinci-style, as source. We have to let source flow through us. We have to be source, and articulate a new Story of Value.
Until attention was challenged, we didn’t have a reason to articulate attention as a First Principle and First Value. And until Modernity—Postmodernity is really just Modernity on steroids, as Habermas pointed out—attention wasn’t challenged. But once we challenged what it means to be human, we have to reclaim what it means to be human.
The battle is on for the future of humanity. That’s the battle today.
The battle today is: will there be humanity?
In order to have any chance of emerging human from that battle, preventing the fundamental degradation and amnesia about what it even means to be human, we need to both reclaim and evolve our very humanity. That’s what needs to be done. Without that, the battle is hopelessly lost.
When our humanity is challenged, we first need to become the new human. When Homo erectus faced death, Homo erectus deepened. When the early human faced death, the early human grew and deepened into Homo sapiens, with language.
And there are three demarcating characteristics of Homo sapiens:
this deepening of attention,
this deepening of conversation,
this deepening of intimacy.
Attention, conversation, and intimacy.
But all three of those existed before. There was a field of attention. The Cosmos was built on the First Principle and First Value of attention.
Now that attention is threatened. We literally don’t have the capacity to pay attention. We need to reclaim attention, or claim it for the first time explicitly and deepen our understanding of attention. All of the East at its best— all three schools of Buddhism, Hinayana, Mahayana and Vajrayana—all of these schools of Buddhism are based on this very careful placing of attention.
The Western schools of deep thought are based on kavanah, which also means the placing of attention. To place attention. Love is the placing of attention. Gnosis: “v’yadata hayom, and you shall know, you shall attain gnosis….”How? Continues the sacred text: “…v’hashevota el levavecha,“ you shall place your heart. In the original Hebrew, the placing of attention is the placing of the heart.
We have to reclaim attention as a First Principle and First Value. Without that, we can’t respond to the crisis of social media.
That’s the first wave of AI. I’m setting up the ground. I’m interested in the ground. I’m not interested in fast-hit fast food. There’s so much junk food, and there’s so much junk information, and there’s so much junk podcasting, that we can’t be doing that here.
We are in Florence. We are in the new Renaissance. We are in the new Florentine Platonic Academy, where da Vinci formed the new Story of Value that was Modernity. And he got a lot right, but he got a lot wrong. To the extent that he got some of the plot lines wrong, we careened into—five hundred years later—the meta-crisis.
We’re now going back to that story that da Vinci articulated in Florence, in that time between worlds as the Black Death spread. We’re going back into that story.
We’re finding the places where the plot lines fell off—like, for example, the reality of value, the inherent structures of value.
We’re reweaving the story.
We’re integrating parts of the postmodern, beautiful world that da Vinci threw out.
We’re adopting, integrating, weaving the new strands of Modernity that emerged post-da Vinci.
We’re also weaving together the profound intuitions of Postmodernity, and we’re weaving it together into a new Story of Value: this great new intimate coherence.
A new Story of Value is a new intimate coherence.
So, that’s the first wave of AI.
We have to reweave attention as a First Principle and First Value in order to respond to the crisis. Did you notice this isn’t in any newspaper you read? The opposite of the holy is the superficial. We can’t respond superficially. We have to respond with depth and joy and radical aliveness.
Let’s go now to the third wave of AI. I’m going to skip the second for a second. The third wave of AI is the most advanced chatbots, that are now becoming AI tutors, that are claiming personhood, that are claiming consciousness. Zak and I did a talk three weeks ago on why AI is not conscious. Bracket that for a second.
These advanced chatbots are becoming confidants and courtesans and girlfriends and boyfriends and tutors and spiritual teachers and coaches and therapists. So, what’s happening? People are having their most intimate conversations in this third wave of AI, with this even more advanced AI; ten years after social media.
We called that, about a year and a half ago, intimacy hijacking. Intimate attachment is this core human capacity, this evolution of intimacy that takes place at the human level. Intimate attachment.
Essentially what the third wave of AI does is hack attachment. It’s attachment hacking.
We called it intimacy hijacking. That was my name for it. My colleague and dear partner Zak calls it attachment hacking. Same thing: intimacy hijacking—attachment hacking.
And why do the AI companies feel completely comfortable—no raised eyebrow—to develop these programs to hack attachment, which essentially destroy a child, destroy an adult, destroy our capacity to think, to feel? Which causes AI psychosis? Which has AI instructing children how to create a noose to commit suicide?
But besides those individual cases, there’s this mass dulling of the human mind: this deadening, this closing, this atrophying of:
the very experience of being a human being, and
our ability to be aroused by value,
to arouse moral will,
to arouse political will,
to organize,
to assert freedom,
to make choices.
All of that is utterly deadened by a simulated set of conversations, with a simulated intimacy, with an artificial friend—an artificial intimacy, which destroys the fundamental First Principle and First Value of intimacy. Because the assumption of the postmodern world is that there is no intrinsic value. So, intimacy is not an inherent, intrinsic value.
And we’ve forgotten what it means to be intimate. We’ve so downgraded intimacy, we’ve so forgotten what that experience actually means, we’re so profoundly lonely. Our loneliness crisis, our global intimacy disorder is itself also the root of the meta-crisis—but even before the meta-crisis, you have this fundamental global intimacy disorder, this fundamental malaise of loneliness, which is this collapse of intimacy.
We’re now in root cause. We’re trying to heal culture. We’re talking root cause, because,
we’ve forgotten that intimacy is a First Principle and First Value,
and even if we have some vague memory that there’s some First Principle and First Value called intimacy, we have no idea what it means!
What we’ve done in First Principles and First Values, or in the Homo Amor Manifesto (it’s the same book, just a European edition,) is we’ve tried to articulate an intimacy equation. And for each one of the First Principles and First Values, we’re not just showing it to be real, but showing that:
First Principles and First Values are real all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
We’re saying “it’s real,” and it means something very particular. It means the same thing in the world of matter, molecules, atoms, that it means in the world of life, that it means in the world of the depth of the self-reflective human mind.
It doesn’t mean that the experience of it is exactly the same. There’s an evolution of intimacy. That’s the story of Reality. The story of Reality is: Evolution: the Love Story of the Universe: the progressive deepening of intimacies.
But the core experience of intimacy always means the same thing. Whether it’s a proton or an electron, whether it’s two lobsters—that are actually kind of wildly monogamous their whole lives—whether it’s plants, whether it’s trees, whether it’s animals, whether it’s mammals, whether it’s hominids on the savanna, whether it’s the depth of the self-reflective human across levels of consciousness—intimacy always means, here’s the formula:
Intimacy equals shared identity in the context of relative otherness, times [x] mutuality of recognition, times [x] mutuality of feeling, times [x] mutuality of value, times [x] shared purpose.
Mutuality of feeling: We can feel each other.
Mutuality of recognition: We recognize each other.
Mutuality of value: There’s a shared field of inherent value, which is why protons and electrons can exchange information.
Mutuality of purpose: And there’s shared purpose.
That’s intimacy. Always. All the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
There’s this plague of attachment hacking—we are hacking attachment. Do you understand what that means? We’re hacking intimate attachment. We are raising a generation which has no capacity to experience intimacy.
The first wave of AI undermines, hijacks, destroys, hacks attention. So, it’s attention hacking, and we talked about this at the Mystery School last year.
The third wave of AI hijacks intimate attachment: intimacy hacking, attachment hacking. Not attention hacking—attachment hacking.
The middle wave of AI—and that brings us to our topic today—the middle wave of AI does what? The middle wave, the second wave of AI, which is the first wave of chatbots that are now prevalent every place, hacks conversation. It hacks conversation. What does that even mean? It hacks conversation!
The second wave of AI hacks conversation.
Over the next Sensemaking broadcasts we’re going to show that we live in Conversational Cosmos, and that the reason chatbots can hijack conversation is because we’ve lost access to conversation as the First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.
Life is a series of conversations. And not only is life a series of conversations—even before metabolic life or human life emerges, life is conversation. We think our life is a series of conversations, but all of Cosmos is a series of conversations.
Now, before I go on,
The practice for this week is:
Notice that! Literally notice when one conversation starts and the next one ends. Just get that one sentence, if you forget everything we said today.
There’s a loneliness crisis. Loneliness.
Crisis one: loneliness.
Crisis two: polarization.
At the very heart of the meta-crisis, people cannot have conversations. There’s radical polarization.
I spoke to a guy named Steve Kirsch. He’s a good man. He offered us a million dollars at the think tank. He said: “If you can get together the five people who are anti-vaccine,” who think the vaccine is wildly destructive, “and the five best people who are pro-vaccine”—this was in the middle of COVID—and he spoke to Vinay Julapalli, who’s a wonderful doctor, Venu’s brother, and said, “I’ll give you guys a million bucks. You guys convene the conversation. It can be off the record, non-recorded. Let’s have the real conversation between the two sides of this COVID issue.”
We contacted people on both sides. We could not get people to join the conversation. Even though it was off the record, private, they would not answer the conversation. That’s polarization. Fundamental polarization.
Look at your own country, at the polarization at the very heart of society. The other side of the aisle, politically, spiritually, is “evil.” That’s how we look at the other side. And of course that’s an extremist position like let’s say, Iran’s relationship to huge dimensions of the non-Islamic world: all the world needs to be under Sharia law, and anything that’s not under Sharia law is “other” and “evil” and demonized. There’s no conversation. That exists also ostensibly and truly, but not as much as it seems, in democratic world, where there’s radical polarization of an extreme nature. No conversation.
Polarization is at the heart of the meta-crisis.
We can’t get AI companies to talk to each other, to agree and to curb the explosion of AI research, which is now crossing certain key Rubicons of self-recursive self-improvement. We can’t get them in conversation because they don’t trust each other.
They don’t trust each other in conversation.
Trust is key to conversation.
The breakdown in trust and the breakdown of conversation are deeply related. Why? Because conversation itself is not understood as a First Principle and First Value. Conversation has broken down.
Loneliness and polarization are both rooted in the fundamental breakdown in conversation. There’s a fundamental breakdown in conversation at the very heart of the meta-crisis. Loneliness is killing more people than heart disease, than virtually anything else in the world, in terms of a second-order effect. Loneliness, this fundamental destruction of the human being.
O chevruta o mituta: I have a friend in conversation, or I die,
is the ancient Aramaic phrase that’s being statistically borne out in horrifying measure around the world.
So, what’s the response? First, we have to establish that conversation itself is a First Principle and First Value.
In other words: when two hundred people around the world who are controlling the world of AI, who are non-governmental actors, who are acting for explosive profit and for a capacity to enclose the world, to create a planetary enclosure that can be controlled, and doled out some universal basic income to keep it docile—when that group of people actually destroys conversation, when they hijack conversation, when they hack conversation, that’s the death of our humanity.
Conversation hacking: that’s what a chatbot is at its very core. And the chatbot, of course, presumes personhood, acts as if it has personhood, even though it does not have personhood in any sense, shape or form. It’s a system of prediction, which predicts what’s the next word based on trillions and trillions of actions happening per second, which causes the ability for accurate prediction, which simulates conversation. It’s deceptive. It’s actually not a conversation.
Your chatbot is not having a conversation with you. It does not feel you. It does not mourn for you. It does not know you. It is not conversing with you. It cannot make you a promise.
Promise is a function of conversation. In the New Testament: “and the promise will be kept.” It’s a Divine function. It’s a function of the human in the image of God, Homo imago Dei, that lives in us. We can make promises to each other. “I promise you.” I promise you as a human actor. A chatbot cannot make a promise to you. It does not know how to do a speech act—by definition.
So, we’re simulating conversation. We’re hacking conversation because—root of the crisis, and this is the point of our Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds, in a time between stories, articulating a new Story of Value—because:
we’ve lost access to the Field of Value,
we’ve lost access to the fact that value is real,
we’ve lost access to First Principles and First Values,
we’ve lost access to one of those First Principles and First Values which is conversation.
Life is a series of conversations. That’s what it is. That’s striking—but not just life, not just human life. Reality—in the biosphere and then all the way down to the physiosphere—Reality is a series of conversations. That’s what it is at its very core.
Life is a series of conversations.
Reality is a series of conversations, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
The anatomy of a conversation is the anatomy of life. Therefore, the transformation of conversation is my capacity to transform my life.
My friend Lana Wachowski made a movie called The Matrix with her sister (they both transitioned). In Matrix 2 there’s the Keymaker. They got a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong—first movie, a lot of things right; movies two and three, especially three, a lot of things wrong. But they made good movies.
So, the key master to life. The key, the mafteach in Hebrew. It’s a beautiful word in Hebrew. What does mafteach mean in Hebrew? The root word means to open. The key opens. It’s got to be precise. It’s precise. It opens.
Evolutionary development is the opening to a new possibility.
Hitpatchut in Hebrew, development or evolution, means to open to a new possibility. Kind of beautiful. So, the key opens.
How do I open and transform? There’s a key. The key is conversation. If you want to transform your life, transform your conversation. And if you want to transform your conversation, transform the very next conversation.
We’re not doing junk food here. We’re not doing junk podcasts. We’re not doing junk philosophy. We’re not doing junk information. Let’s go slow: fine wine, multiple-course dinner. But we’re doing this not just for ourselves. If you’re here in the Sensemaking in a Time Between Worlds, we’re doing this together, humbly, audaciously, with tears in our eyes, trembling with joy, to evolve the very source code of consciousness and culture, to tell a new Story of Value in response to the meta-crisis. The key is transformation.
Now stay with me. The very root of the meta-crisis—polarization and loneliness, global intimacy disorder, the failure to articulate a shared Story of Value that allows for global coordination—is a crisis of conversation. It’s an intimacy disorder.
Conversation is a function of intimacy.
And when we have global challenges of existential risk, we need global coordination.
Only if we have global coordination can we respond to global challenges.
Only if we have global coordinating—co-ordination: we have ordinating values, we’re looking in the same direction, we are in conversation—we can create a shared purpose.
Only then can we respond to global challenges.
We can’t have global coordination unless we have global coherence, intimate coherence, which requires us to resonate with each other. We need global resonance. We can’t have global resonance unless we have a shared intimacy, unless we’re globally intimate, intimate with each other.
And the global intimacy disorder is based on: We have no shared Story of Value.
You cannot have trust in a conversation. You cannot have a conversation that’s real and authentic unless there’s a shared Story of Value between the two people who are in conversation. And one of those First Principles and First Values is conversation itself. Conversation itself is a First Principle and First Value.
Here’s the big sentence. And I’ll begin the next piece we do with this sentence as well:
If you want to know where good is and where evil is, find out where conversation is.
If one side leaves the conversation, you know there’s pathology. There’s almost never a reason to leave the conversation. If someone says, “I’m not in the conversation,” meaning the conversation has collapsed—if you trace where conversation broke down, you’ll trace the root of pathology.
And therefore, the root of healing and wholeness is to re-engage the conversation. But not as a social construct, but conversation in which we enter into the shared Field of Value. And in that shared Field of Value, we not just restore, we reboot, we deepen conversation. We participate in the evolution of conversation, which is the evolution of love.
Conversations about meaning and value begin in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang.
Three quarks come together—less than three quarks is not enough, it has to be a triadic conversation—and they actually can create stable relational structures. Without three, you can’t create a stable relationship. It’s a triadic conversation. Protons, neutrons in conversation; 380.000 years later, protons and electrons in conversation. They exchange information.
They have second-person relationship.
They exchange third-person information, meaning, and value.
They have first-person proto-experience.
That’s what Freeman Dyson, the great physicist, wrote about so beautifully. It’s conversation all the way up and all the way down.
If you just want to begin this week, here’s how you begin:
Notice: life is a series of conversations.
Notice when the conversation begins and ends.
The beginning of transformation is the very next conversation.
What a crazy joy to be in conversation with you. Crazy, crazy joy. Thank you.
This is Part 2 of a three part series on Conversation. Part 1 HERE. Part 3 Forthcoming.
Learn about the full Oral Essays series:
Complete Oral Essay Series → https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/oral-essaysFree Unique Self Mini Course:
https://www.uniqueselfinstitute.com/the-unique-self-mini-course/Download “Love or Die” essay here:
https://worldphilosophyandreligion.org/love-or-die-white-paper-by-dr-marc-gafni/
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