The Resentment Challenge

Francis Fukuyama is now revisiting his important 1992 thesis in The End of History and the Last Man, a treatment of GWF Hegel’s dialectical analysis of the mechanics of world history.

In 1992 Fukuyama argued the world would inevitably turn to liberal democracy to manage its government because there would never be a generally acceptable alternative. He turned to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind (1807) to illustrate the point.

In Hegel’s scenario, the First Man recognizes the abiding freedom of will in his rival, sees that this freedom threatens his own and feels compelled to challenge a fight to the death. The fight results in society, with one of the rivals deciding he prefers subjugation to death, which seems likely to be filled with self-caused terrors, and the distinction between master and slave is drawn.

The master/slave dialectic is carried into history through conquest and empire, landlordism and serfdom, capitalism and revolution and, according to Fukuyama, can only finish with liberalism and governmental consent as the only legitimate solution achievable by rational social practice. Fukuyama then acknowledges this final result of history is likely to become somewhat boring for its inheritors.

The third decade of the twenty-first century, however, has witnessed a vigorous pushback against this social history. Government actors who resent the leading-edge status of the Western societies, which long ago adopted liberal politics and capitalism and thus enjoy an insurmountable leg up on everyone else, now want to push an alternative, and the alternative is finding resonance even within these leading societies themselves because not all of their members enjoy all of its leading-edge privileges.

Fukuyama’s 1992 thesis ignored the politics of resentment, which in the Russian case is a politics of nihilism, in China a politics of grievance and cultural pride and in Iran something comparably negative, likewise based in the dignities of longstanding practice. None of these politics contain any coherent positivism, no philosophical self-justification, no inspiring model for humanity as a whole, but Fukuyama currently sees that positivism deficit, which at this writing threatens an actual World War, as an important, untreated challenge to his thesis.

We believe there exists a further and more important alternative to Fukuyama’s thesis, the alternative whereby a godly form of science learns to explore and socially to guide consciousness or subjectivity as such, and we propose to investigate that alternative here. The trajectory whereby this investigation seems likely to affect social and political organization writ large seems unlikely to be discerned for some time, but we think a good and safe start can be made by studying and exhibiting real instances of the subconscious, basic and universal unit of society: the perfect conversation.

Our Silicon Valley Startup

Our proposal in its current state is basically just a rapper, an interface. We have no funding and we have no real business plan. What we have currently is a broad and unusual conceptual framework. We find it plausible to think about directing social evolution into a planetwide condition the whole of humanity will accept as desirable and will want, on the basis of principles, to establish and reestablish continually. Our ally here is reason, nothing more. Or more trenchantly, reason and art. As a startup, we want to articulate a few crucial terms and premises as well as possible, to an extent to model them as sympathetic YouTube characters and thereby to realize the great universal and all-pervading human life purposes of happiness, exploration and growth on reproducible design terms.

In the wake of Chat GPT-3 in the Fall, 2022, the general discussion of eventual superintelligence juxtaposes two extremes: existential risk and radical benefit. The risk was captured very well in 1968 by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick: a machine intelligence with unknown goals of its own in control of crucial effectors. The benefit has been articulated recently as radical abundance, including meaningful occupations for everyone everywhere, presumably the result of enormous productivity gains in economics. We concur with these assessments and wish to introduce a framework no one is talking about yet. The framework proposes to operate in a technical manner on what is always and everywhere good in human consciousness.

Consciousness is generally thought to be the most difficult problem in positive science. We think significant progress on the problem is being made currently (see the foregoing Blogs on Michael Levin, Stuart Hameroff and Roger Penrose), but more can be made by introducing behavioral and cultural engineering into the mix (see also the foregoing Blog post on BF Skinner here). We think we are proposing what is probably the true theory of conversation and if that theory starts to be tested and explored, science will find itself in positive control of the evolution of universally desirable consciousness.

We think a universal conversation engine needs to be developed in a way human beings start to be complete, expressive and tasteful performers rather than agents of the perversely and often accidentally confirmed will. We think the epoch of willful absurdity, which can perhaps be marked in Europe from the Thirty Years War, is drawing to a close, and the final close of this epoch will be the consequence of science, technology and the political resolution of what is now in 2023, having begun again in Europe and again for the sake of Ukraine, an actual World War.

We think a universal and eventually superintelligent conversation engine will prove feasible, we think a theory of consciousness will prove testable, we think human consciousness is fundamentally astonishing and benign and we think public acceptance of the confluence of human consciousness and technology can be gained stepwise and most effectively through the arts, in particular through film and television. We propose here and elsewhere to consider these thoughts and experiment with their impulses with those willing and able, quite materially, to do so.

The Shapes of SpaceTIme

Reflexive monism (RM) is a sophisticated idea about the physical cosmos developed in the first decade of this century by Max Velmans at UC Berkeley and the University of London. RM postulates an early divergence in the cosmos from an undifferentiated physical state into two distinguishable domains, both physical, with consciousness possible in one domain but not in the other. Experience in this second domain is characterized by certain limitations, which a physiological study at the University of California, San Francisco in the early 1980s may have begun to describe.

The Benjamin Libet experiment appeared to verify a readiness potential in the brain voltages that build 300 milliseconds before consciousness of the intention to act takes place. The readiness potential endures into the time window occupied by this consciousness. In this way evidence suggests a distinct separation between behavior and consciousness, with consciousness merely riding on top of intelligent decisions taking place in the mechanics of the brain. High speed decisions by ping pong and tennis players suggest analogous evidence for a physiological separation between consciousness and behavior.

Roger Penrose is one of the most influential physicists today, with innovative work in the mathematics of tessellations, notable in the arts of ancient Sumeria, Ancient Rome, classical Islam and the hyperbolic spaces of MC Escher. Tessellations are also important in the theory of crystals, and were explored by Johannes Kepler, who was intrigued by snowflakes. Roger Penrose appears to be interested both in very small curvatures, such as those purported to exist in electron orbitals and black holes and the large ones known to exist in parallel starlight.

Sir Roger now wants us to redo the Libet experiments to decide something about consciousness. He appears to want to know in what sort of physics conscious experience exists. We think information gleaned from our conversational methodology, which may amount to something we could call biological interferometry, could use behavioral engineering to help science to extend Sir Roger’s suggestions about quantum reality and consciousness.

Orders of Magnitude in the Neuron

Stuart Hameroff wants neuroscience, for the first time, to think in scalar terms, in particular of the versatility and electronic coherence of intracellular tubulin, which is responsible, among other things, for the cell cytoskeleton, for cell division and the separation of homologous chromosomes in meiosis, for the transport of proteins which alter the characteristics of the neuronal synapse and thus enable learning, for precise placement and delivery of these proteins at the interior of the dendritic cell membrane and, as linear and geometrically regular, for two-way electrical, magnetic or electromagnetic conductivity in the intracellular medium of cortical pyramidal cells through twelve orders of magnitude.

These pyramidal vibrations, including the EEG patterns detectable outside the skull, may be beat frequencies of the quantum-entangled web of aromatic dipoles inside the pyramidal dendrites. These dipoles would be induced by the terrahertz pi orbitals of nearby aromatic rings in certain of the amino acids (tyrosine, tryptophan, phenylalanine) spaced regularly along a tubulin axis in these cell bodies.

We think the quantum theory of consciousness is a plausible physical hypothesis which may prove to be behaviorally testable. We think such testing, however, will require some societal improvements.

A theory of conversation, heretofore unthinkable by physical science, should, we think, culminate in a world filled with diaphanous, self-conscious spirits capable of coherent personal memory and able, in auspicious ways and using auspicious domains, at will to move back and forth across the threshold of death, thereby producing a species of heaven on earth.

Such a world would require a great deal of us human beings. We would each individually, as final agents in such a world, need to be capable of immaculate self-government. We would each be required to conform to moral law, such as our society contemporaneously understands it, and exhibit that conformity in a unique and personal manner. Correlatively, we will each be required to appreciate fully such performances and exhibitions by others.

The neuroscientific revolution Stuart Hameroff now advocates, we think, would extend far beyond mere neuroscience. It would be a sociocultural revolution, whereby humanity raises itself on a planetary scale quite literally off the earth and into cosmic space.

The Multi-Scale Competency Architecture

The developmental biologist Michael Levin has recently made remarkable progress with electrophysiology and collective cell intelligence and is wondering about competencies and self-consciousness in other architectures. He has shown that living organisms are not, in the old way of thinking, hard-wired to gene regulatory networks, but rather work in multi-scaled problem spaces, most saliently by means of transient, tissue-scaled electric voltages, that turn those architectures into problem-solving mechanisms.

He has convincingly shown these ghost voltages (memories) prepattern and guide much of the development, form and consciousness of biological organisms. He is currently working to extend his theoretical gains into oncology, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, but he has not yet extended his understanding to possible interactions between self-conscious organisms and the greater cosmos, which presumably has played a longstanding and fundamental role in causing them to take the forms they currently have.

We think society and consciousness will begin to show features and patterns that directly reflect the electrical and magnetic principles Michael Levin has begun to unpack in biological tissue. We think the collective intelligence of cells and cell groups, and hence direct cosmic signatures going back to the theory of magic, will soon start to show up explicitly and reliably in human consciousness, in human society and in human culture.

Carl's 2006 Proposal on Natural Language Conversation

We are floating a cosmological proposal in consciousness. We want to decide whether and how explanation-strapped humanity works as a functional component in the theosophical astral plane, in the affine, gravity-guided, rigid-photonic worlds before birth, during life and after death and whether, when and how cosmogenic impressions from these worlds can appear during satisfactorily-performed, retrospectively-studiable conversation.

To date there exists in this civilization no microbehavioral, molecular biological, cosmical explanation of natural-language conversation. Unexplained conversation is likely 21st-century civilization's crucially missing feature. We claim to have identified principles of the right theory and we claim testing it will be straightforward. We think conversational mechanics bridge the explanatory gap in consciousness. We think the connective fascial tissue throughout and deep inside the body and its organs plays the binding role both in conscious mental imagery and in semantic representation.

Sufficiently ergonomic construction and observation methods, including grammatical congeniality and comfortable wearables, should enable investigators to begin to assess what subconscious physiology says about real-time cosmological contents in conversation and consciousness, when these impinge noticeably from the astral light. Success with these methods could open the doors to something like a sociological interferometry, leading future social science into a domain as precise as physics.

We think the theory that is both correct in principle and experimentally workable defines natural language conversation as universal satisfaction from markable beginning to markable end, moment by markable moment, by way of a sound algorithmic platform. The rigid algorithm is simple, elegant and more or less non-executable by ill-disposed or untrained subjects. It indispensably requires open-mindedness and long-suffering, both of which are encourageable by placing the conversation onto a public performance footing, and both of which should, in principle, be easy to assess in retrospect by turning consensually to videotape. Perhaps more difficult to evaluate on an objective basis, but we think not impossible, are the indispensable conversational-spiritual virtues of good will and correctness of thinking. Equanimity, likewise indispensable to the theory, should be evaluable by studying personality characteristics, again by prior agreement, betrayed by heart rate and skin conductivity.

At the root of this kind of conversational performance is the living play of conversational semantics and imagery, and the patient wait for definite meaning to take shape more or less simultaneously in the mind of everyone present. When this happens, as it does from time to time under certain formal but less well-controlled conditions, one can reasonably guess that the needles will synchronically oscillate, align and point in one direction. What investigators will want to know is the extent to which these objective measures can help them characterize those more rare and more numinous contents that purport, out of self-conscious language in itself, to have to do with photonic, theosophical structures and functions in the cosmos.

Precisely how in its developmental trajectory from the inception of life to its final phase the brain controls semantic representation by way of the piezoelectric fascia may redound to how it manages oxidative stress and oxidative velocity in the relevant tissues.

Algorithmic Conversation, Political Philosophy and Ritual Magic

The ur-theory of consciousness can only have been high magic, applied effectively in medicine by earliest man and socio-politically in his imaginative astrological civilizations. We believe magic, which exploits similarities in universal movement, can be refashioned to accomplish a revolution in scientific and social practice today.

Heretofore unusable by our serious institutions, the fundamental premise of magic says, Nothing is arbitrary. Put another way, Man knows nothing but must become acquainted with everything. The premise is partially intelligible to physical science, which relies on statistical causation and stepwise positivism, but becomes total for a theory of agentive conversation, until now undeveloped.

We have proposed the general theory of natural language conversation, stipulating universal satisfaction markable moment by markable moment. The algorithm is supposed to describe the motivation toward consciousness. Its appeal to self-similar causation is elegant, but its requirement for self-conscious control, which tends always and everywhere to be unsteady, can seem severe.

Magic is the theory of necromantic, parallel starlight and its darkened, life-filled complements such as gravitational curvature. As with the massive star itself, the spacious, ultra-fine astral cosmos is said to be substantially magnetic. Within this great astral domain, which can probably effect self-conscious control in its entirety, the primary signatures are transmutations and enchantments. We believe these innumerable, often troublesome human, spiritual and cosmological biases have self-similar causes which society, not mere individuals, now needs to resolve comprehensively.

For conversation theory, terrestrial consciousness, governed by the body's piezoelectric framework, perhaps effective at chromosomal and even atomic scales, is largely posture and change of posture. In principle such change is completely readable, both in real time and in retrospect. But to enable general readability, new terms will probably prove indispensable. One such term, heretofore taboo, is the necro-magnetic astral body, long employed in the ancient procedures and treated in extraordinary detail in the 1960s and 1970s by Robert Monroe, a pragmatic American businessman. It is in and through the very notable coincidences and capabilities of the astral body that we think both magic and conversation function.

Our proposed conversational-magical paradigm, introduced primarily into the institutions of contemporary Occidental society, should not seem fundamentally problematic. Although the occult sciences probably played causal roles in the great wars of the 20th century, human institutions were naive then. Today it appears if farseeing plans and safeguards are adopted, the occult sciences can be reintroduced to untold benefit. A great deal of future mental illness and social malformation, for example, could in principle be forestalled and even corrected by solving the economics of conversational productivity and the political discourse of magical causation.

A few words on political philosophy. Owing to its star- and space-based component, the received theory of conversation will be deontological. It will stem from a rules-based order imposed self-similarly on a perceptible cosmos from extremely remote vibratory domains and accepted synchronistically everywhere by gravitational intelligence. It is general calibration and awakening of this generative, preference-sensitive, cosmic intelligence, we think, the Anthropocene will accomplish self-similarly by using natural conversation.

BF Skinner’s Positive Reinforcement Community

We have recently noticed a strong fit between our hopeful project on machine-assisted conversation, including its introduction into social media, and the behavioral principles articulated in BF Skinner’s utopian Walden Two (1948). We propose to outline this fit.

Currently there exists no overarching theory of natural language conversation, of the dynamic binding agent that maintains society. Science has never attempted the theory nor has political economy felt any need to demand it. These notable facts about human self-understanding in the 21st century, which suddenly finds itself under pressure to rework its world order in a substantial way, would seem to suggest a live possibility for scientific and, to an extent, if enough seems promising, even social revolution. The Copernican Revolution, if slow to materialize, delivered such a possibility to 16th and 17th century Europe, principally by altering cosmological perception and political authority; the Russian Revolution, which stemmed from humanitarian impulses, appeared to many at the time also to contain another because it likewise altered perception and authority. 

Skinner’s Walden Two is premised on a strong distinction between competitive society and cooperative society, with the idea that the latter, if constructed around experimentalism, can be developed unproblematically and in unlimited degree. Unlimited development is also implicit in the political economy of libertarian competition, and many have been impatient to subscribe to it, but unpleasant problems appear in its framework more or less by design. Society without problems, by way of contrast, is a very different idea.

Consciousness, heretofore merely the external province of religion, of literature and art, of occult practice and of drug use and mental illness, has recently been introduced as a scientific target, and its ground-level, mechanical etiology seems now to be in range of Skinnerian methods, particularly of those being used in machine learning. It seems plausible to us that the causes of consciousness are almost entirely behavioral, which is to say conversational. We think such introduction, if its stages can be pre-solved to line up fully with their causal potentials, has substantial institutional implications. The true object of the science of consciousness will inevitably be understood as the general and beneficent control of social interaction.

The development given to the 21st century which Skinner could not anticipate was physics. We seem likely soon to have algorithms, running on computational qubit machines, which will have enough power to solve optimization problems like this one:

QA1.0: In this shopping mall with five thousand visitors over the next hour, identify a human pair (call them Alice and Bob), signal a compatibility to each of them (by way of a smartphone) and give Alice a sentence to perform for Bob. If Alice and Bob have pre-allowed it, record and analyze the ensuing conversation to assess its spontaneity and its agreeableness for application, perhaps by surprise, to some future human conversation. Such use of intermittent reinforcement will be effective in the popularity of the smartphone app.

We think such a conversation engine, developed as a very large mutual assistance game, can be developed into a beneficial and generally superior form of social media, impinging institutional structures, conversational behavior and consciousness in general. We propose organizing a few people willing and able to start thinking about this undertaking, including philosophical principles, analysis of society, scientific feasibility and the use of capital.

A few words on the presumed cosmic dimension of consciousness, the final target of this medium, its thanatological or necromantic aspect in particular. On the principle of parsimony, we should expect to find extensions of consciousness, as a physical quantity of some sort, both prior to terrestrial existence and after its apparent dissolution. Unless consciousness itself is a nothing, it is unthinkable as coming from and ending up as nothing. Thus the most intriguing outcome would be for our behavioral sciences to discover higher worlds available to society to discover, to organize and to populate, much as it has done with the American continent. Already it seems clear there is substance to the theory of higher cosmic worlds. Tibetan lamas appear to visit them regularly and occidental Cabalists likewise have long been familiar with them. Modern thaumaturgy, we suggest, will start with algorithmic conversation. When two or more find themselves with a magnetic Third or Fifth among them, and when physiological measurements confirm the real-time presence of the wonder, when interpersonal interferometry becomes interesting and useful as a way to calibrate the twenty-three pairs of sympathetic ganglia and when magical chains dominate personal spaces we seem likely to find ourselves at the beginning of cosmic exploration of a new, sustainable and very wonderful sort.

Universal Satisfaction Moment by Moment

This is the theory. Unless this condition is met, there is no conversation. Non-conversational situations have a number of possibilities, all degenerate:

1. A meandering series of sub-conversations, each marked by a change of subject;

2. A set of mutually unintelligible (and thus unreproducible) social gestures;

3. A forced, unsatisfying rehearsal of convention (“How are you?” “Fine, thank you. How are you?” “Excellent. Wonderful.” “Goodbye.” “Goodbye.”);

4. Other possibilities.

None of these should be called conversation. 

True conversation, the hyperuranian ideal that guides all social impulse and all social interaction (all close cooperation), is an all-embracing condition of pleasure or love. It is this exalted (and surprisingly rare) ideal that everyone in human life is constantly trying to revive or recover instinctively in all social interactions.

What We Think Can Be Gotten From Conversation Theory

The mind contains occasionally vivid, astonishing and mystery-laden experiences, including dreaming in sleep, the enjoyment of love, imaginations in meditation and experiences caused by specifically psychoactive substances.

The mind also demands and works on the basis of personal freedom, which is largely expressed in political terms. The mind holds nothing more dear than freedom.

Can these elements of mental experience (mystery and freedom) become an orderly background in common society and day to day living? Can a scientific culture (education, discovery, practice, government) fully underwrite them, making them at once subjectively and socially normative? Would the world of nature respond correspondingly to this sort of human organization and activity, replete with all manner of beauty and wonder? Would we get heaven on earth?

We think the answer to these questions is probably yes.

Introducing Alessandra

Currently a freshman at San Jose State University in California, Alessandra Brill is a talented gymnast with training in Shaolin kungfu. She is of Mexican-American descent and is majoring in psychology and business. She is currently working to organize a team of young people to attract funding to a startup proposal in California’s Silicon Valley. The proposal is to introduce the scientific study of consciousness into the tech world by way of the behavioral study of natural language conversation.

Introducing Carl

Carl has been working on the scientific problem of consciousness since he was a teenager, when he was impressed by some experiences with psychoactive substances.

He took the tack that seemed most sensible: study science - biology and chemistry in particular - and work with teachers who seemed to have knowledge of a satisfying sort.

That tack worked well and it led him to insights and conclusions that should be both of general interest and of interest to specialists.

The primary conclusion he’s reached is that conversation is probably the key to getting a positive (tested, verified) and perhaps definitive theory of consciousness.

The important (and astonishing) point to consider here is there exists as yet no positive theory of conversation. None of our sciences has one, but conversation is arguably the most pervasive and the most fundamental natural element in the whole of human experience.

What we want to do with this website is introduce what we think the right theory of conversation is and consider it with people intrigued by it.

The scope of the undertaking is broad. It will involve public relations of several sorts including this website and a YouTube channel, coordinated capital management, behaviorally-oriented scientific laboratories and the stepwise development and deployment of a superintelligent conversation engine.

Cooperating with us will require open-mindedness and persistence, but the outcomes promise to be important.

Please join us if you like what you think you see here.