This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a free weekly live talk. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay. Edited by Dorothea Betz.
This is Part 1 of a three part series on Conversation. Part 2 HERE. Part 3 Forthcoming.
Welcome. Welcome, everyone.
Ely just put up a beautiful website for our online Mystery School, and I want to invite everyone to join the school. In the end, education is everything, and school is everything. The word ‘school’ in Hebrew is beit sefer. It’s when I’m at home [beit] in the story. Sefer is both ‘book,’ but it’s also ‘story.’ I’m at home in a Story of Value.
Our Story of Value has broken down in the world. What we’ve understood is that the breakdown of a shared Story of Value is the root of the meta-crisis. When we say a word like ‘the meta-crisis,’ we say it so lightly. Zak and I started talking in 2010, 2011 about what we refer to as the second shock of existence.
The first shock of existence, as we’ve said many times, is at the dawn of humanity, as Homo erectus becomes Neanderthal, and Neanderthal is at the beginning of what we call humanity. There’s this realization that death lurks at the banquet. The first shock of existence is the realization of the death of the human being. The response to that challenge of being a human being is the emergence of the new human, which was Homo sapiens. It was the beginning of what the Hegelian philosopher Robert Brandom calls sapience.
Sapience, in the language of CosmoErotic Humanism, is attention, and it is value, it is in the conscious realization that value is real. Value and the realization of its inherent nature experiences a monumental leap. Human beings are the awakening of conscious evolution inside of themselves. Evolution is always conscious, but we’re not aware that evolution is moving through us; we’re not aware that value is moving through us. To awaken from unconscious to conscious evolution as human beings is to awaken from unconscious to conscious value. We are aware; we go to align with the value. That’s the emergence of sapience, Homo sapiens.
We’re now at this moment of the second shock of existence, where we realize that not only is there an individual death to the human being—now that death is followed by a continuity of consciousness, which we’ve talked about in great depth—but there’s a second experience. After all of human history, now the specter of the death of humanity lurks; either the death of humanity directly, the potential extinction through multiple vectors, or the death of our humanity.
As an attempt to save ourselves from the death of humanity, we create a kind of totalitarian enclosure of surveillance and monitoring, in which
freedom disappears,
creativity disappears, and even
in-person contact disappears.
There are these invisible controllers as the world is turned into a planetary stack, as one writer called it, or a Skinner’s box, as we’ve described it in other terms. The world becomes a place in which behavior is digitally, socially engineered, and there’s a gradual death of our humanity. That’s the context of our conversation.
The response to the second shock of existence, just like to the first shock of existence, has to be the emergence of a new human. Just as the first shock of existence generated Homo sapiens, so the second shock of existence—the specter of the potential death of our humanity—has to generate a new human. So, we’ve started a Mystery School for the new human and the new humanity.
We’ve been privileged in the last fifteen years to be at the leading edge in the world of this conversation. I don’t mean this in a prideful way; I mean it in a responsible way, in a trembling-before-God way; to actually generate a new human and a new humanity. We’ve coined this term, new Story of Value. We’ve talked about the equation between value and wholeness. We’ve talked about a new Story of Value which is a new story of wholeness and thank God, other people are adopting it and picking it up and trying to do what they can with it, as is appropriate. That’s been the core of our conversation.
We’re trying to understand what needs to be at the very core of this new Story of Value, and the answer is: Value. That’s why we stopped talking about “the new story.” There was a new-story conversation going on in the world for two or three decades. It’s not a new story; it’s a new Story of Value, and it’s a new Story of inherent Value.
We just finished a board conclave in our Center in the United States, where about forty people came together. Together with Zak and this incredible group of human beings, we tried to outline the ‘eight facets of the diamond of value’ in a way that we never have before. We’ve just written that up, and we’ll be putting it out as a short book as soon as we can. The title is Value Is Real. It changes everything.
There’s a Field of Value, and then there are First Principles and First Values that emerge out of the field. The Field of Value you could think of as the Tao. It’s the field, the ground. Out of the ground, you individuate First Principles and First Values. Out of that ground emerges Ely and Marc. Ely and Marc are two unique expressions of the Field of Value. That’s what a human being is:
A human being is a unique configuration of value.
So, you have a ground. Out of the ground come First Principles and First Values.
In this book called First Principles & First Values we try to outline the core 21 First Principles and First Values. There’s an actual list, with an equation and a formula, of 21 First Principles and First Values.
In the twentieth century, we have Marx, Freud, Einstein, Darwin. Those are the names we know. We’re going to forget about Stalin, Roosevelt—they’re beautiful, but the people that changed our experience of being a human being are these four figures. Not just these four, obviously, but these four are examples. At this moment in time, as we face this meta-crisis, we need that level of thinking—that’s what we’re trying to do—that level of feeling, that level of stepping in.
We need to evolve the source code of consciousness and culture and heal the broken vessels.
We do that by articulating this new Story of Value, which affirms a ground of inherent value, because value theory broke down.
There are two basic assumptions in the world. Assumption one: value is not real; it’s contrived. I’ve cited a million texts over the years of people who take that position. You can read Steven Pinker from Harvard, again and again, or Shoshana Zuboff down the hall from Harvard, again and again. You can read pretty much every Western intellectual in the academic world, and they will tell you value is just made up. That’s not correct. It’s based on a breakdown in value theory. They’re repeating the same set of challenges to value. Those challenges are important, and we’ve responded to them in depth in this book First Principles&First Values. There’s another version of this book called Homo Amor Manifesto. It’s also online, basically the same material—a European edition—and again it’s got this list of First Principles and First Values.
We’re unpacking here the formula: First we want to identify what’s the problem. We’re going to identify a problem. Then we’re going to see which First Principle and First Value has broken down. This is the formula.
Every part of the meta-crisis—every vector, every root cause, every generator function—is at its core rooted in a breakdown in a particular First Principle and First Value.
That’s our framework. Therefore, we have to first lay out the problem: Here’s the crisis, here’s what’s wrong. Then: Here’s the solution.
The solution is a recognition of a missing First Principle and First Value,
then a deepening of the joy, the Eros, the aliveness of our experience of that First Principle and First Value,
and then an evolution of that First Principle and First Value.
Value itself is eternal—but eternal not in the sense of everlasting time. We think eternity is lots of time. No: lots of time is time/temporality. Eternity is underneath time. What does eternity mean at its very core? Value. That’s what the word eternity actually means. The word eternity actually means value. When we say something’s eternal, we don’t mean it’s everlasting. Everlasting is time, lots of time. Eternity means that which is beneath and beyond time writes Wittgenstein. What is beneath and beyond time? Value.
If there was no value, there would be no life. But if all life disappeared, there would still be value, because value is underneath life.
Value is the ground. It’s underneath; it’s the ground from which everything emerges.
Let me give an example of how this works.
We’re all familiar with the social media problem. We all know there’s this huge social media problem. What’s the problem? The problem is: our attention is being hijacked.
We literally can’t pay attention.
We can’t pay attention to our relationships.
We can’t pay attention to our feeling.
We can’t pay attention to reading.
What does it mean not to read? You can’t not read; that’s insane. You can’t pick stuff up from podcasts. You’ve got to read. There’s a depth understanding of self, and of threads and how threads fit together, when you read. When you don’t read, when there’s no depth reading, short viral-form propaganda rules the world.
Not reading is an existential risk to your soul, but not reading is also an existential risk to freedom, to information, to how you do meaning-making.
We go into the inward space of self in order to disclose the meaning that’s inherent in ourselves, the meaning that participates in the field of meaning of Cosmos. But if I can’t go inside, if I’m jumping, jumping, jumping, I’m in front of my screen, I’m jumping, jumping,
I can’t pay attention.
I can’t focus. I literally lose the ability to focus.
I lose the ability to write.
I lose the ability to have clarity.
I lose the ability to contemplate.
I lose the ability to do anything that’s worth doing.
We went from being Homo erectus and Neanderthal to Homo sapiens. Part of Homo sapiens is a monumental leap in our capacity to place attention. Then along comes social media, and social media destroys our ability to place attention. There’s no storyline, no thread, no plot line anymore. We’re just leaping and jumping: hyperlink, hyperlink, hyperlink, jump, jump, hyperlink, on my phone….. I have some people around me, who are always on their phone doing it. You simply can’t pay attention. As you’re talking to someone, they’re on their phone. And they don’t want to be on their phone; and then all of a sudden, you’re doom-scrolling, and an hour went by, and you went from here to there to there, and the aftertaste is terrible. We’ve literally destroyed a generation by hijacking attention and then turning attention into a superficial degraded kind of selfie.
Attention is this essential quality of sapience. Now, there’s this huge challenge to social media, made by very few people. Ninety-nine percent of people say it’s great, but there are about seven or eight good thinkers who say this is not good. This is bad.
Jonathan Haidt is one of them; he did a great job in his writing on the anxious generation. Shoshana Zuboff, in her book Surveillance Capitalism. Nicholas Carr was before all of them—they’re all in his debt, though no one cites him. He wrote a book called The Shallows, and the shallow means the superficial.
The opposite of the holy is not the unholy; the opposite of the holy is the superficial.
The opposite of the sacred is the superficial. So, Nicholas Carr, a completely secular zeitgeist writer, in 2010 writes The Shallows: the superficialization of humanity, turning humanity into what Kahneman called not slow thinking but “fast thinking—habitual, instinctive, reflexive, impulsive, automatic.” All five of those are his words.
You control people by controlling that kind of fast thinking. The MIT Media Lab, under Alex Pentland, intentionally imitates B. F. Skinner and Kahneman to manipulate, through fast thinking, essentially all of humanity. Read the MIT Media Lab carefully; they write it in their description. Naive techno-optimists, like my colleague Jamie Wheal, valorized it for such a long time.
The MIT Media Lab is completely Skinnerian and participatory—at least in its founding charter—in turning reality into a Skinner’s box. They called it a “living laboratory.” That was their name for it. I’ve read probably fifty major documents of the MIT Media Lab. So, this is about the stealing, this destruction of attention.
So, these seven figures really paid attention. They said, This is bad, you can’t do this. What did the tech plex, the great technologists, all the major companies, do? How did they respond to these seven or eight great critics? —They ignored them! They completely and utterly ignored them. They laughed at them. Why did they laugh at them? Because all seven or eight of those thinkers, every one of them, failed to provide a reason why attention shouldn’t be hijacked.
The CEO of one of America’s major companies, well known, a dear friend of mine, who was involved with us for many years. Great guy, a wonderful human being. I’m describing this problem to him, and he says, “Well, this is just advertising. Advertising takes attention. That’s what advertising is about. It’s just advertising. What’s the problem? What’s wrong with taking people’s attention? That’s what advertising does.”
No—this is not broadband advertising, my friend. This is micro-targeted, asymmetric power of the most advanced systems of the first wave of AI, asymmetrically micro-targeting you, to invisibly control and direct your attention, and—to put the MIT Media Lab directly—to shape your desire, by controlling your attention, by developing split-tested sequences to hold your attention in a particular way, to lead you invisibly to a particular result. But still, it didn’t make a difference. No one took these critics seriously. You know why? Because these critics, every single one of them failed to establish that attention is an inherent First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.
No one took these critics seriously because every single one of them failed to establish that attention is an inherent First Principle and First Value of Cosmos.
That’s every one of those critics, from Haidt to Zuboff to Yuval Harari to our friend Sam Harris to Nicholas Carr—without exception, literally without remainder except that a couple of people vaguely mentioned it: Douglas Rushkoff mentioned it in four lines in one of his ten books, and Jaron Lanier mentioned it in half of the tenth chapter of one of his books. But barely. Fundamentally, the critics of what we would call techno-feudalism had nothing to ground their moral protest in. They didn’t ground it in a Field of Value.
Jonathan Haidt writes in one of his passages basically saying, I think all this stuff’s made up. I don’t think this stuff is real. He says, I’m quoting Emile Durkheim, what he calls Homo duplex; I’m going to use this language, but it’s not real. The Cosmos is an accident. The Cosmos is random. (This dogmatic claim that’s long since dead in authentic, real science.) Let’s make this dogmatic assertion that this fine-tuned Cosmos is a complete and utter accident, that all meaning is completely contrived and made up, that none of it actually means anything, that no value actually has value—it’s all contrived, it’s all a kind of meaningless social construction that we’re pretending has meaning.
As Sartre writes in Being and Nothingness: Our bravery is not to drop the pose that it has meaning, but really it doesn’t—at all; whatsoever. I read Being and Nothingness carefully; that’s Sartre’s point.
And Shoshana Zuboff, who writes Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana, who’s one of the great protesters writes a brilliant book against the techno-feudalist enterprise, and she cites as support for her protest Sartre, who says that all value is made up.
So, here’s the sentence:
If attention is not a First Principle and First Value, what’s the problem with hijacking it? What’s the problem with stealing it?
Here’s our crisis, and here’s our formula.
Every dimension of the meta-crisis is rooted in a failure to recognize, address, or evolve value, and particularly a particular First Principle and First Value.
Case in point: social media—a major crisis. We have enormous documentation. It’s destroyed a generation of kids—utterly destroyed. Hyper-addiction, combined with high-speed internet porn and its distribution through social media.
This generation looks completely outwards.
This generation lost the ability to reflect.
This generation lost the ability to create meaning.
This generation lost the ability to go into the inward space.
We’ve destroyed a generation of children and a generation of adults. People are utterly lost. The notion of organized depth thinking within ourselves is just utterly destroyed and it’s being destroyed day by day.
That’s a crisis. It’s a universally recognized crisis, across China, across Europe, across South America, across the United States. That’s the crisis.
But it can’t be solved, because even the people who say that attention hijacking is terrible, who said it for a decade, this group of thinkers, for example, that I just referred to, they have no ground of value in which to ground their protest.
Any arousal of moral will, any arousal of political will, any arousal of social will is grounded in value.
Only a violation of the Field of intrinsic Value arouses moral outrage.
Only a desire to fulfill and defend intrinsic, inherent First Principles and First Values arouses moral, political, social, ethical action.
So, here’s the paradox. The protesters against the hijacking of attention all say attention’s just made up. It can’t be a First Principle and First Value, because there are no First Principles and First Values.
So, what’s the solution? —We have to first establish attention as a First Principle and First Value.
Our job as an activist think tank is to establish that attention is a First Principle and First Value. But we can’t just declare it; you have to show it to be true.
We’re about to put out two volumes called Exit the Silicon Maze. We’ve been working on them for four years. They’re about to come out, and there’s a major chapter there which establishes attention as a First Principle and First Value—a twenty-five-thousand-word essay. At the same time that comes out, we’re going to put out a third volume called Attention as a First Principle and First Value; its own volume. That’s a big book on it, and then we’ll also put out a short book on it. We need both.
We have to establish that attention is a First Principle and First Value, in which case you have no right to hijack my attention. There’s a gentleman named Johann Hari. He’s friends with friends of mine. I’m sure he’s an incredibly nice person—Johann, if you’re listening, love and honor to you. Johann writes a book called Stolen Focus, and he’s part of that group of critics of the tech-plex. He cites the earlier literature pretty well, adds some important things, does a great job, and he calls for an attention rebellion.
Here’s where the critique is important to offer. It doesn’t work. His book doesn’t work, because in his entire book he makes that same move. He refuses to name attention as a First Principle and First Value. He will not give up his late-modern, postmodern credentials. He will not name value as real. He’s afraid of being a fundamentalist.
The only people today in the world who are saying ‘value is real’ are fundamentalists,
and they’re completely off, because they’re saying their fundamentalist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, often homophobic, anti-life, degrading of humanity vision of value, that’s what’s real, and everybody outside of their circle of intimacy and their circle of value is devalued and subject to some distorted version of Sharia law; that’s an Islamic version, which is the most dangerous version in the world today by far—not Islam, but this version of degraded Islamic fundamentalism, which is destroying the fabric of a huge part of the world. It needs to be directly responded to, and responded to from within Islam, with the deep currents of beauty in Islam that Rumi and Hafiz and Ibn Arabi and so many others represented. They’ve got to liberate Islam from the death grip of degraded fundamentalist visions of value.
We’ve got a modern, postmodern “values completely made up.”
And we’ve got a fundamentalist claim of dogmatic, degraded versions of value.
Those are both destroying the world. That’s the crisis. The response is to break through value theory. There are two major new books coming out on value. We’re trying to break through in this passionate, serious, philosophical deep dive: let’s revision value and establish that value is real. There’s a short book, but there’s also this huge volume, Value Is Real. We need to establish, for each vector of the meta-crisis, a particular First Principle and First Value which responds to that particular dimension of the meta-crisis.
The hijacking of attention by social media, which seven major authors object to brilliantly—their objection is ignored and laughed at by the tech-plex because:
Paradoxically, the technologists of techno-feudalism and their critics both agree on the most important thing: they both agree value is not real.
The technologists are developing social media, the digital structures and enclosures which destroy the intimate universe. Instead of generating an internet that would generate what I called, in 2014, digital intimacy—there’s a whole section on our website on this since 2014—we could actually generate digital intimacy. That’s what we want to do. But we’re not doing that. We’re destroying the fabric of the intimate universe.
What’s the fabric of intimacy? —Placing attention.
We’re destroying
the capacity for intimacy,
the capacity for gnosis,
the capacity for protest,
the capacity for governance,
the capacity for shared stories of value
because we’re destroying the capacity to think and to breathe and to feel, to feel our feeling and to feel our thoughts and to know our own thoughts because we are hyperlinked into hell.
The techno-critics can’t respond to that because they agree with the technologists they’re criticizing. They agree that value is not real. So, we have to establish that value is real, and that attention itself is a First Principle and First Value.
Now we’re going to make a huge leap into today.
What’s the first wave of AI? —The first wave of AI is social media. Social media destroys attention. How do we respond? —We place attention on attention. We reclaim attention as a First Principle and First Value.
What’s the second wave of AI? —The second wave of AI is chatbots. What are chatbots doing? —They’re simulating conversation. The chatbot is not just giving you information; the chatbot is pretending to be a human being. Zak Stein and I have called this the personhood conferral problem. We confer personhood. The engineers confer personhood. Originally it was referred to as the status conferral problem; now we’re calling it personhood conferral; it’s about personhood. There’s this implied or explicit claim of personhood, which goes very far. The claim of personhood for AI is going to run into the claim that AI is conscious, which Zak and I talked about last week, and will be talking about more. For now:
The personhood conferral problem is the simulated deception that you’re having a conversation with AI.
That is not a small problem. Conversation is the core structure of Reality. Conversation is what we do. It’s how we breathe. It’s how we live. It’s everything. But the tech-plex says, what are you talking about? Conversation is just a technical way of exchanging information, in a universe in which people need to socially interact in order to survive, which requires exchanges of information and we need to give each other these feelings of security, or status, or information or survival skills. And if AI can do that better, then great. Whoa! Hold on!
What is techno-feudalist enterprise assuming? —That conversation is an accidental expression of an accidental cosmos. In other words, what is, what is the tech-plex saying? —The tech-plex is basically saying that conversation is not a value.
Then these chatbots become much more sophisticated. In the third wave of AI, the chatbots become our AI tutors, our confidants, our best friends, our lovers, our teachers, our therapists. Whoa!
All of a sudden conversation is being degraded—that’s the second wave of AI, early chatbots—then later chatbots are not just the degradation of conversation, but the degradation of intimacy itself.
In accordance with our formula, we’ve identified a crisis. It’s now a crisis in which conversation is being hijacked—a conversation which becomes so intense and so apparently real that the entire web-plex is engaging in what Zak and I call intimacy hacking; the hijacking of intimacy. Same thing.
We’re developing an entire digital architecture which is growing exponentially faster, and that is being adopted exponentially faster than any other technology in the history of planet Earth—a number of eight hundred million users, a billion users in a month—numbers beyond imagination. No testing of social impact, no testing of the psychosis, the destruction, the degradation.
It’s even more than AI psychosis, more than AI instructing a child—which just happened recently—where AI was instructing a child how to create a noose, so that his parents wouldn’t see, and then the child commits suicide. The AI walks them through how to get up, how to put the noose around, how to make sure his parents don’t find out.
The response to the first wave of AI, the hijacking of attention, is the establishment of attention as a First Principle and First Value, which is a deep project. And we will do a series of Sensemakings about that when the book Exit the Silicon Maze comes out.
For now, I want to point to the second crisis, the chatbot crisis which is not only the second wave of AI, but it creates the ground for the third wave of AI. The third wave of AI is when the chatbots get good enough to simulate intimacy, and then we’ve created a digital complex whose entire function is intimacy hacking.
Why would we do that? Let’s go back to our formula; it is deadly accurate, and to reclaim our aliveness we need to get the dead accuracy of it.
The hijacking of conversation and intimacy is happening because we haven’t established conversation as a First Principle and First Value.
So why wouldn’t you hijack it? I have to understand that conversation itself is a First Principle and First Value, and therefore I have a right to conversation.
One of the cores of CosmoErotic Humanism—this appears in Silicon Maze, which is about to come out—is that value creates rights; so I have a right to conversation. To simulate conversation and deceive me into thinking I’m actually having a conversation, through the personhood conferral deception, when in fact I’m not having a conversation, is a violation of the Field of Value, because conversation itself is a First Principle and First Value.
Then, when we get to the third wave of AI, when the chatbots get really good, simulating not just conversation but intimacy itself. That’s what Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her points to, where Theodore has the best Eros of his life with Samantha, his AI. But when Spike Jonze made that, he didn’t yet get the danger. It was an innocent moment. He didn’t understand the danger; he hadn’t thought it through. He wasn’t making good distinctions between AI, a machine, and a human being. It was a beautiful, fanciful, but absurd depiction, sloppy in the extreme, really early, really naive—and a great movie. In that movie, AI vastly exceeds the human being, goes on to levels of consciousness a human can’t even dream of. It’s a completely fanciful deception.
So now, in our formula, what do we need to do?
We need to establish conversation as a First Principle and First Value.
It’s only if we establish conversation as a First Principle and First Value that we can even begin to address this. That’s the revolution.
When Johann Hari calls for an attention rebellion without establishing attention as a First Principle and First Value, what’s the ground of the rebellion? For example, America itself is going through a very complex sense of its own identity—but the United States at its core, at its best, is the Statue of Liberty. It’s freedom. “Let freedom ring throughout the land.” The First Principle and First Value is freedom, which is the ground of the rebellion which is the American Revolution. Liberty, fraternity; that’s the ground.
When you lose that ground, the rebellion itself collapses. It takes everything to fight for our freedom—and we lose it in an instant. We lose it when we lose our relationship to the First Principle and First Value of freedom—which is happening! In the last decade the Pew studies have surveyed young Westerners in Western democracies, including the United States, and showed that the numbers are getting higher and higher of those who prefer a benevolent dictatorship to a democracy.
I have a dear friend who lived in Singapore for a long time, a wonderful human being, and he was extolling the virtues of Singapore. It’s a dictatorship. I realized in that moment that we’re losing access to the First Principle and First Value of freedom. When we lose access to that, freedom begins to disappear, and democracy will begin to collapse.
Churchill was not wrong when he said democracy is the worst, messiest, most disastrous form of government that he knows—but it’s the best possible option today. We need to improve democracy.
We need to evolve democracy.
Barbara Marx Hubbard and I had the honor of doing a book on the evolution of democracy. The evolution of democracy is critical. But when we lose the First Principle and First Value of freedom, as the Pew studies indicate young people across the board are doing, then democracy collapses. That’s our formula.
The second wave of AI is chatbots: the hijacking of conversation. We are several years—at the most a decade, maybe a year, maybe six months, it’s unclear—before a time where the overwhelming majority of a person’s conversations will be with a chatbot. And virtually all of their in-depth conversations will be with a chatbot.
I spoke to a friend of mine, a dear friend, about a year ago—a profound, deep, nuanced, beautiful person. She said to me that the best conversation she’d had about losing someone close and dear to her was with her chatbot. This was a nuanced, deep, profound, subtle human being, who has tons of friends who are all nuanced, but no one wants to talk about it for too long. To have a deep, in-depth conversation with a real friend about the passing of a beloved—whether it’s a child, a spouse, a sister, a brother, a husband, a cousin—those are hard conversations. They take something. But those are the crucial conversations, but we don’t have them. So, she had it with a chatbot, and the chatbot said all the right things, and she was deeply moved by it; even though the chatbot could not feel any of her emotion.
The chatbot did not feel it.
The chatbot did not mourn with her.
The chatbot did not experience her field of vulnerability or field of longing or field of yearning.
What’s happened is that we’ve forgotten what a real conversation is. Sometimes conversations are hard. They’re intimate. They’re real—because conversation is a First Principle and First Value of the Cosmos.
What is life? — Life is at its very core is a set of conversations. Life is a series of conversations; and conversation itself is a First Principle and First Value.
There’s a loneliness crisis in the world. There’s an enormous literature on the loneliness crisis. What solves the loneliness crisis? —Conversation!
You know what marriage is—and when I say marriage, I mean classical marriage, or marriage in the sense of two people who are committed to each other for life, but also marriage in what the lineage calls zivug, the marriages between friends and between beloveds, between evolutionary partners.
You marry someone that you want to grow old having conversations with. The body shifts and changes, and the body’s beautiful, and embodiment is stunning and important. We’ve talked a lot about the embodied Eros, the importance of that, and we’re putting out an eight-volume Phenomenology of Eros. That’s all true. There’s lots to say about that. But that’s not where we are right now. I want to go even deeper than that.
For three centuries, in particular currents of formal English, the word “intercourse” that we associate with sexual—the word “intercourse” meaning “sexual intercourse”—the word for intercourse was conversation. The conversation of sexing.
That’s why the lover says to the beloved, “as you make love to me, whisper words in my ear.” We’re always in the zivug, we’re always making love. The essence of lovemaking is not ultimately about physical embodiment.
There’s this transfigured sense of lovemaking where the essence of lovemaking itself is conversation.
Then we embody that, and when we embody it, we bring together the light and the vessel, the highest experience of enlightenment. But our very core is conversation.
So, marriage in all of its forms means: this is someone I want to continue having conversations with forever. It’s conversation that liberates me from loneliness. It’s the depth of conversation that liberates me from loneliness.
There’s this crisis of loneliness.
The crisis can only be healed through conversation.
Then, in a world that already had a crisis of loneliness, along come chatbots, which don’t ameliorate it. The makers of chatbots say, there’s a crisis of loneliness, we’re going to ameliorate it through chatbots, now people can have conversations. —No!
It imitates.
It simulates conversation.
It’s deceptive.
It’s a con job.
It’s a structured deception.
It’s the pretense to conversation.
The nuance of your body, the feeling tone of your body, knows it’s not a conversation. Conversation means an exchange between people who feel each other. That’s what conversation means.
Conversation is an exchange of feeling tones, of information, meaning, and value.
I want to pick this up exactly here next week.
The sense of the three waves of AI appears in the book Value Is a Feeling, and Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel. This gives you the three waves of AI; it’s crazy helpful.
Then we have First Principles and First Values, where we’re going to add the First Principle and First Value of conversation.
We’re going to look at the First Principle and First Value of conversation, and then the history of conversation in Cosmos, what we’ve called here in CosmoErotic Humanism, together with our dear colleague and friend Howard Bloom, the Conversational Cosmos. We live in a Conversational Cosmos.
So, this is the First Principle and First Value of conversation. I had written an earlier version of this about a year ago, and I just rewrote it this morning. It’s one long sentence, but it’s a great sentence. I’m going to read it and resist the temptation to talk about it.
Conversation is the encounter between two first persons, which generates a second-person space—itself a new quality of Cosmos—in which first-, second-, and third-person information, meaning, and value is exchanged, generating reaction, which invites and demands response.
That took me a couple of years. Conversation is the encounter between two first persons; it generates a second-person space, a new quality of Cosmos, in which first-, second-, and third-person information, meaning, and value is exchanged. That’s what happens in conversation. That exchange generates reaction, which invites and demands response.
This is not a conversation with a chatbot; that doesn’t pass muster. This is what a conversation is. And the last line is crazy: this is the structure of Cosmos, literally, all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain.
Reality is the evolution of conversation, the deepening of conversation.
This is Part 1 of a three part series on Conversation. Part 2 HERE. Part 3 Forthcoming.
The Evolution of Democracy: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Democracy-Emergence-Synergistic-Symphonies/dp/B0FFYKGTRB
Value Is a Feeling and Artificial Intelligence Doesn’t Feel: https://a.co/d/04OBx3PJ
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/
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.