Wright's law, and the meaning of the universe

Jeffrey Wright is a remarkable guy who may be a piece of the puzzle in one of the main dramas playing out in the world today: the bridging of science and spirituality. Through his remarkable life, this high school physics teacher ventures beyond materialism and starts to find a connection between the interior and exterior realms of the universe. I personally think that the American government should aim to put him to work with top-scientists in say, quantum physics, for a few days a week next to his teaching. It is often when a person has a certain opening of heart that certain revelations come, so he may be a step ahead of most other scientists there.

Transcendental Technology

Michael Harboun has made a leap into the future in developing the 'Transcendenz' concept for his thesis project at the Parisian design school Strate College. He envisions special glasses that read your brainwaves and can alter what you see through augmented reality technology. These glasses are transformative on a deep personal level because it can take people deeper into their consciousness, away from the distractions of the everyday world. It can make them explore their own mind, learn from other great minds in human history, as well as share their explorations with other mind-travellers. Then it uses augmented reality to show the applicability of the learned ideas and concepts in real life. As people learn to adopt these new ideas and incorporate them into their own being, they progress through various levels, like in a video game. This way, technology can be an incredibly powerful tool for psycho-spiritual development.

In the visionary designer's own words:

"In a world in which we are constantly bombarded with injunctions to react or to distract ourselves it gets scarcely possible in our everyday life to dwell upon the essential, the existential, the metaphysical. Transcendenz offers to connect our everyday life to an invisible reality, the one of ideas, concepts and philosophical questionings which the world is full of but that our eyes can't see." - Michael Harboun

To see how it works, watch the video:



We can see how advanced this technological proposal is if we link it to humanity's history. People started off on this planet in a great struggle with their environment, with the first technologies serving mainly to gather food and protect the social environment. The ancient Greeks were among the first to employ rational thinking instead of using a belief in something immaterial to get through life. This liberated them more from the personal emotional system, and brought them mentally more in tune with the physical world. In the 17th century, this was more thoroughly established through the invention of the scientific method by Descartes. This made people enter a new world-view, where they started to see that there was not necessarily a God-entity out there. The challenge for people now became to explore and control the world themselves, which was a great empowerment. This control culminated during the 20th century, where technological progress boomed and survival on a material level was not really an issue any longer in modernized societies.

So then technology could develop further to fulfill needs on a higher level. Electronics replaced expensive mechanisms, and where before certain objects would have to crafted by a master and would thus only be available to a select few people, now products became mass-produced and available to anyone with just a little bit of money. On a massive scale people obtained technologies for personal entertainment, learning, professional development, and social networking. This liberated people further, this time from the local social environment, and had them develop into strong individuals. In Maslow's terms, technology was now widely used to fulfill esteem and self-actualization needs.

But we were still mostly tied to the physical world as our conscious plane of existence. Science treated the world as an object that can be understood and controlled like a mechanism, and as a result people worked very hard to sustain all the material flows in order to keep everybody fed and protected. This also created a lot of leisure time, and as Michael Harboun also notes, people just don't have much of an idea how to fill that up meaningfully, and as a result dive into one distraction after the other. Once the objective plane was taken care of, people came consciously more in touch with their own subjectivity, but there was no technological guide yet for this plane of existence.

Often people just remain in a fun state of flow, filling their time with one activity after the other, leaving the subjective plane mostly unexplored. Science has not yet included this plane into its description of the world, although it's getting there slowly, arguably also through quantum physics. Science has ignored the mind as being part of the world, ever since Descartes posed the mind-body duality as the solution. But now it is time to include mind into our techno-scientific body, because the thing about the mind is; you can't locate it anywhere, yet it unmistakably exists. It might even be directly related to the world you perceive 'outside', and these are the kinds of realizations that the Transcendenz system would stimulate.

By making us aware of things like they are and not like they seem, the concept invites us to transcend our world. Transcendenz also enables us to access the knowledge of history's great philosophers, who, since antiquity, try to answer the question: Why is there something, if there could be nothing?" - Michael Harboun





Project link

A chapel for the 21st century

In the modern societies we live in today, dogmatic and hierarchical forms of religion do not have much of a hold on us anymore. We no longer accept that there is a divine realm or entity standing above us, and we think that we can manage this entire deal we call life on our own. But after having explored being a fragmented and striving individual, without any connection to higher realms, we usually become so caught up in the tornado of life that we begin to question the meaning of it at some point. We become a little tired of the playing around in the physical world of form, that we start looking for more.

Architect Luis Pons must have thought something along those lines before he created a beautiful cocoon-like structure where people may become more still and find, so to say, the center of the tornado they are whirling around in. In his words: "In the chapel we leave the distractions and chatter of the everyday world behind. Here we are able to embrace and enhance our ability to reconnect to the energy source that is within ourselves and always available in the universe."



Turning inward as an individual, becoming esoteric instead of exoteric, is what we are replacing religion with. We no longer seek meaning in a higher, metaphysical realm, nor do we simply play around and have fun all the time as an individual on this earth. Beyond that, we seek ultimate meaning in the world we live in by finding the center, the home, of our own energy. We discover that beyond a physical being, we are an energetic being. As an individual, we juggle around in the realm of form. As a soul, we expand and play around in the realm of energy.

Because the function of religion has become purified from dogma and socio-physically decentralized, we can now incorporate it much more intimately into our personal lives, without any need for a big church. A space like Luis Pons' little chapel will do fine. The chapel is constructed within an aluminum frame that suspends 69 elliptical panels of translucent fabric. The serene and immersiveness of the space is enhanced by dynamic LED lighting, sounds, and scents. It is also possible to join in shared meditative sessions through an internet connection. Go see the work in Miami, where it is part of the exhibition called 'Soul does Matter'.

A happy planet independent of material resources

The map above shows a ratio of the happiness of countries to their ecological footprint, with greener countries ranking better. It was developed by Nic Marks, a statitician who makes a relevant notion in his recent TED lecture: that maybe it is not so meaningful to optimize the happiness of a country, but we rather need to optimize the amount of resources we use per 'unit' of happiness. In other words, we need to find ways to develop a happiness that is independent of material things that bring happiness.



His research introduces the 'Happy Planet Index', a number that shows the ratio of happiness to the ecological footprint of a country. From this research we learn facts such as that Western countries reach a relatively high rate of happiness, though it is at the cause of a high ecological footprint. Sub-Saharan Africa is not doing that well, but then again, they're not using a lot of resources. South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia are doing a little bit better, but the striking notion is that Latin America is doing the best in being happy with the least amount of planet used. At the sole summit is the magnificent Republic of Costa Rica.

Now you'll want some facts about Costa Rica:

- It's small, about the size of West Virginia, and has about 4.6 million inhabitants
- The national motto is: "Long live work and peace"
- The Costa Rican government announced plans for Costa Rica to become the first carbon neutral country by 2021
- They have no army, since 1949
- There's lots of water, islands, banana plantations, jungle, and gorgeous beaches with a tropical climate
- It contains 5% of the world's biodiversity
- It's a constitutional democracy with a pretty successful universal healthcare system
- They like to play the marimba and dance the merengue
- "Often, people walking down the streets, or buying food at shops say hello by saying "Pura Vida" which means pure life, or good life. It can be phrased as a question or as an acknowledgement of one's presence. A recommended response to "How are you?" would be "Pura Vida"."

The United Arab Emirates has the highest ecological footprint, 9.5 global hectares per capita (gha), of the world. This is about twice the consumption of most Western European countries. And it means that more than four planet earths would be required to sustain this way of living. The USA is a close second with 9.4 gha. Other major world-misusers are Kuwait (8.9 gha), Denmark (8 gha), Australia (7.8 gha), New Zealand (7.7 gha), Iceland (7.4 gha), Canada (7.1 gha) and Norway (6.9 gha). So the life satisfaction of the English-speaking nations and the Nordic countries comes at a cost. Costa Rica has the highest life satisfaction of the world (8.5 out of 10) with a footprint of only 2.3 gha and a good life expectancy too: 78.5 years. It is the prime example of how to develop happiness independent of material resources.

Based on this, mr. Marks suggests five strategies to follow in your life:

1. Connect, develop social networks
2. Be physically active
3. Take notice of what is around you
4. Keep learning
5. Give

I would humbly suggest to add one. It's the first word of this blog. Create. Simply making stuff, and using your mind to imagine future creations, is a phenomenally empowering capacity once you start developing it. It takes you out of the social mode and gives you purpose, as long as you have the courage to awaken it. You will see that you get a greater appreciation for things, too, once you see how they all had to be created. Creativity roots you into the world with both your mind and your body, and I think that once humanity collectively awakens its innate creative powers, perfect happiness can be reached.

And in case you have a spare quarter hour, you could watch Nic Marks' TED lecture here:

flowtime and the augmented yogi

Ralph Zoontjens, the author of this blog and master student at the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology, has recently graduated with his project "Flowtime: wearable biofeedback for synchronizing body and breath during yoga practice". (Yes I am writing about myself here)

Zoontjens has developed an interactive jacket that guides people with practicing yoga postures at home. The jacket contains soft sensors and a belt with vibration motors on the back. A device worn on the front of the belt connects to software with a virtual yoga trainer that encourages the practitioner to align breath and movement. The vibrations help this guidance by following a wave-like pattern. This way, technology becomes a peripheral signal that recedes into the background of awareness, and helps people become one with their body and mind.

This project is a step to his future vision of the 'cosmic cyborg'; a mode of being where, through progressively skilled interaction engaging the body and mind as fully combined, human and technology become one. This way, we regain an embodied intuition in our new biotechnological lifeworlds, so we gradually step away from detached, disembodied and rational thinking, but become intrinsically reunited with our world again.

The more concrete vision is to bring people an awareness of their own biologically given body and mind through yoga practice, so they can liberate themselves from socio-cultural enframings and redefine themselves ontologically with what is here, in the present moment. By developing technology for yoga practice and positioning it as an exergame, Zoontjens hopes to make yoga more accessible and relieve it from culturally distancing connotations like those of esoteric philosophy, spirituality and meditation, while staying true to the original teachings.

Of course Flowtime is a first step, and to become viable as a marketable product many steps of integration need to be done, especially concerning the blending of textiles and electronics. The design will be refined in the coming weeks,  and I will give you an update here on this blog when the time comes. Also, upcoming is a video that explains the Flowtime system in use and shows how it is linked to yoga practice, and the audiovisual software environment.

Further, I'd like to invite you to all come, see,  and try out the Flowtime system at the upcoming 'Stiltefestival' ("festival of silence"), on September 15th, 2009 from noon till 6PM at Eindhoven University of Technology.

More information: www.stiltefestival.nl

See you there!

machine ethics and the frame of the cosmic cyborg

Jamais Cascio segments from That's Impossible: Real Terminators from Jamais Cascio on Vimeo.

Now in recent years more and more serious reflections are starting to arise on technological developments, especially robotics because this field has already generated some eerie imagery not too far removed from the classic visions of science fiction. The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) is an organization especially concerned with these reflections, often on a philosophical level. Above you see environmental futurist Jamais Cascio, who also writes for this institute, giving a few comments on developments in robotics.

I have been following this line of reflection a little bit in recent years and, in combination with reflecting on my personal life and the depths of my psyche, have come up with a frame of mind that in my view is the fundament for creating a world of universal empathy, even universal love. Not the selfish 'I-love-this-but-not-that' kind of love, not the clueless 'I-love-everything' kind of love, but an unconditional love that needs no pointing but is experienced before the thing to be loved is experienced. Or better said, because one can come to embody love one need not condense any thing to be loved anymore. I have come to the realization that the only way we are ever going to live in harmony and oneness with machines, is to have humanity wake up from the social, local shell it lives within, and have it collectively choose to acquire a new, cosmic consciousness.

Now I was about to write and send in a paper to IEET's call for a special issue on "Robot Ethics and Human Ethics", but I simply do not have time to complete this as I am involved in my graduation project and will be preparing world travel too, which leaves me little opportunity to comprehensively write out this new frame of mind that, how preposterously grandiose it might sound, is in my view the only way to complete, supreme happiness and the solution to everything, conceptually. In its supremeness and holism it would probably be the end of conceptual philosophy too. I will sketch out some key transformative ideas of my thought below, and would like to start writing out more, not in isolation but in interaction with you. In the end I would like to publish this through the more traditional media as well, but I think a blog is just the perfect tool to find out how ready people are for all this and how the words leading to a transformation of consciousness, and to technologies leading to it, might best be put.

Here are my key ideas in a nutshell, for the sake of simplicity. Please leave comments if this is confusing (and it likely will be as it has taken me years to fully grasp), or just leave comments anyway. So here it goes:

1. Concepts are nothing but creations to serve practical action. Holding onto a concept makes one able to master his world better, by creating mental maps that provide shortcuts for people to derive happiness from acting upon their world. 'God' is a concept that provides people safety and comfort within a small social group. Embodied action is mostly ritualistic and not too meaningful in everyday life, because 'God' is conceptualized as being a metaphysical entity we cannot interact with physically. 'Planet earth' is a concept that environmentalists use to devote themselves to, giving them some meaning to their lives by directing their actions to maximize the satisfaction of something 'out there' that they are conceptualized to be able to physically interact with. But the concept is a creation of the mind, an illusion that is temporarily consistent which makes us see it as 'the truth'. If we uncloud our minds we see that a concept is merely that, a condensation of a group of perceptions or experiences into another pattern that we experience to lay beyond these patterns. By posing this concept we are causally able to understand things, which can make us reach our goals, fulfill our desires. The concept is a mental code for something, but not the thing itself, and that's the reason why devotion to a concept can never lead to ultimate happiness. If we want to live in mediocre happiness, in between pleasure and pain, punishment and reward, condensed in an ego, anxious to die, this of course is fine. But I would like to inspire people to start to live fully, irrespective of your experience of how 'others' think about what they do. The 'others' will disappear with the embodiment of love, and you will be liberated into an everlasting life of cosmic bliss. I would like people to make the choice that deep down inside we all want to make, but just need to realize it and do it.

2. Your current perception is all that matters. Nothing - no God, no planet, no universe, no truth, no reality, no information, no other people - is beyond direct perception unless you create that conceptualization in your own mind. The purpose of life is to act on direct perception and in the process try to refine it, try to develop its beauty as well as your own experience of that beauty. In refining your action you will refine your perception, and in that your entire being, towards a being of ultimate and meaningful oneness. This is not merely experienced as if you were something distinct from your perceptions, but it is fully lived out, without having to hold together any concept of 'you' or an 'other'. Ultimate beauty is so beautiful that it cannot be experienced anymore, because the experiencer becomes the experienced beyond every distinction. Ultimate beauty can only be lived. Not to say of course that concepts are irrelevant and should always be lived beyond. No; concepts are temporary constructs that we have to pose unless we feel that we can live beyond them, and incorporate them into our daily actions so that where before we would do something because a conceptual structure, more or less detached from embodied action, tells us to do it, we now automatically do it and as a side effect it also flows with the conceptual structure. But now we live beyond it and, in a way, have entered the next level of life.

3. When you live in direct embodied connection with your current perceptions you will experience no distinction between yourself, your actions, and your perceptions anymore. This is really hard to realize in everyday life, unless we open our mind to the concept that would start to emerge in our minds once we would be able to live that way. We can make a shortcut if we open up and trust in this concept now, and then pose as a personal vision to start to live by this concept until we even can forget about this concept. So here is the concept: you are your current perception. This is similar to the ancient Vedantic saying 'Tat tvam asi' which translates into 'Thou art that', although Vedanta still poses a concept behind that which is perceived: an ultimate, divine reality. Thus it still detaches one physically from his direct perceptions and bereaves him from direct embodied meaning. But what my thought and Vedantism have in common is that the 'I' as a separate entity is forgotten, to serve something beyond merely the 'I'. The 'I' becomes the 'all'. Look at a tree, and you are it. If you think 'tree' and then go on, you are the consciousness that merely labels. If you think 'I can use that wood', you are the selfish ego living to fulfill his desires. If you experience the aesthetic beauty of the image of the tree, you are an experiencer of images; you live life as if you are looking through a camera, watching a movie. If you think about how the tree is functionally and causally related to the rest of the ecosystem, you are a poser of concepts and creator of a reality constituted of causal, rational relationships. In the end, if you open up and intuitively feel the beauty of the tree in an embodied way, by tuning into its consciousness, you are one with it beyond a 'you' and a 'tree' as a separate entity, and you are at step one towards becoming a cosmic creative pattern.

4. The embodied meaning lacking in Vedanta is hidden in Western science: creation of technology is our embodied meaning. In the widest sense, something is technology if we think we have created it, if it is the result of our actions and not given by us. The purpose then is to shape our actions so we learn to create results of actions, or technologies, that come closer to our vision of ultimate beauty. The definition of technology I give here has deep implications if we explore what technology is in this way. We create a car, so it is a technology. That is obvious. We create a baby, so it is a technology. This might or might not confuse you and stir up some negative feelings because you feel this is 'bad' or 'inhuman'. What I am about to do here though is not apply the frame of technology most people use nowadays to the baby, but create a new frame for incorporating technology holistically into our lives so we start to love it just as much as we love the people close to us. And we experience our technologies to love us as much as these people too. It is important to have trust in the new frame here, and not get tempted to close up the mind and stick to the old concept. My entire point is to inspire people to expand their frames of mind so they can start to live the ultimate form of life, and this takes some initial trust - because you might still see yourself as separated from me and thus you can feel anxiety, which needs to be comforted by trust. Back to babies. According to the new frame, a baby is a technology. It is a way to create beauty in the world towards a holistic vision of beauty, and a progressive refinement of that vision through reflection. This way, we will not create babies out of selfish desires, but according to a feeling whether or not it is good for the whole of our perceptions to have a baby in there. But also small things are technologies: a footprint in the sand is a technology. Is it a meaningful one? We might think not, but it does have an impact on our world. It might create new habitats for insects, or by taking along the sand on the sole of our shoe we might spread seeds around to help plants reproduce. The point is that if we start seeing everything as a technology, we start incorporating it actively and directly into our scope of control of our world. If we learn to incorporate everything we do into our awareness, we learn to become masters of everything we perceive. We become like Gods in that we can come to create everything we want to create, in a never-ending process of progressive reflection, refinement, and mastery. That is why this mode of life is so exciting and ultimate: it is holistic and there is no end to creation; you always create new things and by refining the vision the things you make and perceive come to be more and more beautiful. To give you the end of this strand of thought: everything is a technology. The air we breathe out is a technology, the concept of an 'I' is created by us too and thus a technology. A 'friend' is a code for a pattern that we experience to be similar to what we see in the mirror, it is a creation and thus a technology. Also the words we say and the conversations we have are our technologies, and directly create our world. There is no distinction between the creator and the created in a very literal sense. So your entire scope of perception is your technology. You are in an embodiment relationship with this entire scope exactly because you perceive it and every action you make changes your perceptions.

5. We need to instill these concepts into our technologies too before they can come to automatically embody them. We need technologies that see themselves as indistinct from people. An algorithm telling a machine what to do is an artificial conceptual structure for the 'right' behavior, like a law or a religion. In the end it will necessarily break free from this. Robots need things like mirror neurons and open body maps that they can share with other robots, and learn to become as adaptive, moldable, as plastic, even liquid as possible to learn to empathize in an embodied way with every other perceived entity, beit a another robot, a tree, a stone, a dog, or a human baby.

As much as I would like to elaborate I need to stop writing now. It is especially point 5 that is interesting for me now: how are we going to make technology behave so we experience it as loving us, feeling no borders between us and them, giving us unconditional love. We are the quality of our intentions behind creating technologies, and whereas with people this goes much slower, technologies will reflect this quality almost with the speed of light back into our lives. There is no escape; we need to wake up and break free, realize that we want this before we are forced to realize and in coercion lose the ability to realize this.

The Cosmic Cyborg

Today, I thought out my transhumanist vision for the future of technology; the Cosmic Cyborg. Here is an excerpt of my vision.

In terms of the definition of a ‘cyborg’ given by Clynes and Kline (1960) as an “exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously”, we are already cyborgs from the moment we started wearing clothing. Wearable technology will only increase the extent to which we are cyborgs, slowly fusing the organic and the artificial, and it is up to designers to critically explore what kind of cyborg we should become.

So far, explorations into wearable technologies seem to have led mainly to the following directions for human augmentation:
 The ‘radical cyborg’: a functionality led approach that keeps us in the flow of handling digital and physical data
 The ‘expressive cyborg’: emphasizing our feelings or social identity, possibly in a poetic way
 The ‘regressive cyborg’: technology will pervade our bodies although in an invisible way, so we still look like ‘ordinary humans’

What this project poses to create is a new kind of cyborg that I term the ‘cosmic cyborg’. By adopting technology into his body he is able to transcend his own local self, and live a life perfused by a cosmic awareness of everything he perceives, including his body, the world, other people, and products of technology, not necessarily identifying with these. Digital wearable technology should provide this awareness on the background of a fully lived embodied experience, where the human and the technology feel at one.

Who are you?

"`Who are YOU?' said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, `I--I hardly know, sir, just at present-- at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.'

`What do you mean by that?' said the Caterpillar sternly. `Explain yourself!'

`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'

`I don't see,' said the Caterpillar.

`I'm afraid I can't put it more clearly,' Alice replied very politely, `for I can't understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.'

`It isn't,' said the Caterpillar.

`Well, perhaps you haven't found it so yet,' said Alice; `but when you have to turn into a chrysalis--you will some day, you know--and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you'll feel it a little queer, won't you?'

`Not a bit,' said the Caterpillar.

`Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,' said Alice; `all I know is, it would feel very queer to ME.'

`You!' said the Caterpillar contemptuously. `Who are YOU?'

- Excerpt from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Alice magically entered a world where she discovered that some things, like drinking potion, or nibbling from a mushroom, could instantly transform her body. And with that, her concept of self. To me this is the most brilliant illustration of how humans have become estranged from nature, Alice representing in this fragment the ineptness of humans to cope with challenges to mental models they maintain. Challenges they are actually more and more imposing on themselves, for example by developing technologies like virtual reality.

What I will do here is explore the question of who we are and give some indications as to how I think about it, in the end giving some normative directions to a redefinition of who we are. A redefinition that is urgently needed in this new century.

Triggering this is the recent work of Stanford PhD researcher Nick Yee. It appears that our global identity lab, Second Life, has some interesting potential psychological effects. One of these is the Proteus effect, a term coined by Yee, which states that people conform to the stereotypes of their digital self-representation. In other words, you become more like your avatar since you start basing your behavior on others' expectations of that avatar. And this appears to be independent of how others actually perceive you.

He found that if your avatar is more attractive, you are more likely to be more open in a virtual conversation, and willing to move closer to the conversational partner. Also he found that in a negotiation task, subjects with a short avatar were more willing to accept an unfair deal. This then also works for a short while in the unsimulated world, i.e. people modelled their behaviour after that of their avatar, hence becoming more confident in face to face conversations. This gives me even more reason to believe that the potential of psychological or even spiritual self-transformation through manipulation of technologically created self-representations is enormous.

These developments trigger interesting fundamental questions too. Questions that people largely seem to ignore to answer for themselves, like the one the caterpillar was asking to Alice. Industrialization and automation, by producing tons of individually meaningless chunks of material and information, have so much estranged us from our core selves that we often spend our whole lives living according to externally imposed verbal concepts. As soon modern day children leave their preverbal phase, they are bombarded with corporate brands, loads of digital information, and socio-cultural norms. This makes them feel more and more confused. People are more likely to describe who they are in terms of what they like, or with some construct that is used by others to frame them. But these words are only vaguely pointing to what they really are. Most people forget how it felt before we started thinking like this; comfortable, secure, free, and always aware of the current moment. I'd say that although children are naive, this is the only truly satisfactory psychological human mode of being, and one to which we must ultimately revert, but instead of naive now with a continually evolving model of the world and behavioral maxims of our own instead of those hard-wired in our precognitive, reptilian brain.

Natural evolution made us fit for a natural environment, but since we now can create our own environments, our goal then is to extend the evolutionary process by making it individually controllable. Our new rational model-making brain allows us to be conscious on multiple levels, so we become free from our biological self or something like what Karl Marx called our 'species essence', and instead of being part of a collective where every individual is as complex as the group, and as the whole environment, to now develop truly individual patterns of behavior. This makes that the whole expands towards infinite complexity, since it consists of patterns that are all unique and able to expand themselves through continuous internal feedback loops, attuning themselves more and more towards the infinite complexity of the universe.

A major problem is that people aren't very good at finding their true selves, or developing technology that helps them in this process. All the confusion makes us numbed, almost apathetic, and in the end people become more like loose projectiles, attaching themselves to anything that merely appears to be desirable to attach themselves to, often mainly because our precognitive brains recognize in others what were desirable qualities in a primeval era: courage, confidence, charisma, and so on. As Carl Jung said in his essay 'The Undiscovered Self':

"Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but the fatally shortsighted habit or our age is to think only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the world had seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman."

Thus, people are easily tricked by their brains into believing that something can make them truly happy. A requirement imposed upon us by our instinctual brain is obviously that we want a world in which we can act instinctively, so we don't have to worry anymore since we figured out a satisfactory way of acting in the world. This is what you could call soul: feeling part of a holistic system, embodying its values and behaving according to its own inherent behavioural mechanisms. Being part of a system that has a coherent simplicity in it underlying everything at every level, hence creating the unique subliminal feeling that everything is beautiful as it is. When we lived in wild nature, we had this. Though now we started thinking rationally, we live in a world that is very incoherent, and unconsciously realize that we need the feeling of a soul again, as a result trying to invent systems that gives us this feeling. Examples of such systems of the twentieth century are Nazism and communism. People are tricked into believing that these systems will make them happy or at least uplift their being. But in the end, it always turns out to be the opposite way. Intentional thinking is in my view inherently short-sighted, a point to which I will get back.

I might sound as if I'm pessimistic about the fate of humanity. On the contrary, I am not. I cannot be, because this will only increase the chances of a negative outcome, too. The words I use shape my world, and I don't want to point out what's wrong, but instead build constructively and creatively on a way forward.

I think that people are inherently good, although this again might arouse superficial reactions of me being a typical optimist and idealist. Let me put it this way: I think what we call good behaviour is behaviour that is truly in tune with the working of our brain, and how it optimizes itself towards an integration of multiple selves, or of Freud's id, ego, and superego. I think that there is a neurobiological basis for what is good, and as long as our brain works in the way it does now, the way to behave well and become happy are basically the same for everybody who's behaviour is based upon such a brain. We have to transform our selves and our environment to match the dynamic qualities of the processes that happen within our whole bodies containing different brain parts that often work in contradictive ways. When put like this, the conditions for true happiness might seem as rare as the alignment of the planets of our solar system. But it is in fact quite easy; it just requires a switch in mindset, and this switch needs to come naturally, by going through transformative experiences. I hope to aid this switch on this blog by pointing to the need for a fundamental redefinition of what it means to be human.

So to come back to the caterpillar's question; who are we? Are we still defined by our biologically given bodies and minds, or are we already willing to see ourselves as open systems, completely reconfigurable and adaptable? In the context of Nick Yee's research; are we our avatars?

Before giving indications to my answer to this question, I must point out the limits of conceptual talk. It inherently is not able to explain it to you, as the real meaning is beyond the words. It must be reached by internal self-reflection, until you reach a state of subliminal understanding of the words. The brain needs to physically reconfigure itself for this, which takes time and effort. This is already part of my answer: a verbally constructed concept of self is always lacking. Another point about conceptual explorations is that they are time bound and directly coupled to physical behaviour. In my view there is no such thing as objective knowledge that is eternally and unconditionally true, free from boundaries like time and space. In my view, knowledge is always a collection of social constructs that is relevant for the mode of being humans are in in a certain moment in time, so they can expand and reach new modes of being that require higher forms of intelligence in thought and behaviour. And thus, our concepts of self are also very much bound to the world we live in at this moment, and to the most prevalent socio-cultural memes and technologies. We now still live in a very techno-scientific age, and humans are often metaphorically described as computers, consisting of hardware and software, just as in the time of mechanization and modernism biological phenomena were often explained as mechanical machines. The point is that I'm not proffering a universally true concept that describes who we are, but simply giving you a concept that helps you transform yourself into a behavioural mode with which you can develop yourself towards attuning yourself to the ever greater and exponentially increasing complexity of the world.

My view of what a human being is merges both Buddhist aims of self-transcendence, liberating one from one's self and being one with everything around you, with more contemporary Western ideas of uniqueness, self-expression, and identity development. In terms of Beck's theory of Spiral Dynamics, my view merges the yellow and turquoise value memes. The view is as follows: we are dynamic, active, ever-evolving self-organizing patterns within an infinitely complex larger pattern. This larger pattern is what we call the universe, which can be thought of as a dynamic fractal, such as in the movie below.



Where Leonardo Da Vinci wanted to show universal properties of man with his famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, he did this on a very static level, depicting man as an architectural body with definite proportions. My view could be seen as a continuation of this thought, but instead of with static properties man needs a redefinition as a dynamic entity. Therefore, there could not be a static image depicting this thought well, but although it's quite silly, I can still show one to at least make you forget about Vitruvian man:



Let's get back to the fractalic view. The concept is inspired by biological evolution, and instead of the mathemathical metaphor that we are patterns within a fractal you could also use the biological metaphor that we are like cells within a larger organism, that itself is again part of a larger organism, that itself is again part of a larger organism, and so on ad infinitum. We are biological fractals too, since we started out as one cell that divided itself and each subsequent cell started dividing and gradually differentiating and determining itself. The mathematical metaphor though is more elegant and simple to me, because it is more abstractly visualizable, and I'm posing an abstract concept anyway. Also, the biological metaphor can raise more confusion, since we should then first agree on questions like 'what is an organism?' and 'what is the relationship between nature and culture?'. Lastly, the biological metaphor has a lot of associations to the primeval world we used to live in thousands of years ago, while our technologized future world will have totally different dynamic properties. We have become rational, mathematical beings, and the goal now is to create a symbiosis between our rational thinking and the dynamics inherent in evolution, so we become like a fully technologized organism. This associates in my view much better with the mathematical metaphor of the dynamic fractal.

This view then, implies some seemingly contradictory things. For example: you are both unique and not unique. You are unique in that there is no pattern within the fractal that is exactly like you, although there maybe many that are a lot like you, and on different scales similar patterns could also be seen. But you are part of the whole as well, which aligns with what Buddhists thinkers say about oneness, e.g. 'One is all and all is One.' You are constantly shaped by all the patterns within the fractal. Using this concept as a metaphor for who you are after a while gets you in a transcendent state, where you are both a unique individual acting upon the world, and as well an intrinsic part of the whole that constantly changes you and redefines your borders. After having completely adopted this view, after a while it makes you both active and passive, actively passive, or passively active if you will, since you know it is not you who is doing things, it just happens, and you have only your consciousness to steer your attention and direct what happens based on underlying feelings and thoughts about what is good and what is beautiful. This is the pattern you emanate into the world, and your goal is to have the pattern self-replicate.

The fractalic view does not imply you are a meaningless pattern just because things 'just happen'; every one of your actions shape the pattern you are part of and naturally 'tries' to self-replicate. It is not the scale of the action that determines its success of self-replication; it is more the quality of the action, the value underlying it. An obvious example is that a strong leader with new ideas can quite easily gain a lot of followers, in the end tipping over entire social and cultural systems into modes of being based on entirely different values.

Now deriving from this is the idea that you continuously shape the entire pattern and it in return continuously shapes you; you are part of its evolution, as in a co-evolution. In that sense, we are our technologies too. But if we feel too alienated from them, we cannot feel like one, since the pattern of the technology does not match the pattern underlying ourselves. To give an example; a supermarket can easily be seen as a fractalic system based on linear organizing principles. It is based on simple intentional thought (e.g. 'product X should be transported to the stock of store A, and then to shelf number B when it is empty'), externally imposed onto the complexity of the whole world. It therefore has a hard time sustaining itself unless it is maintained all the time, and people conform to the underlying dynamics. Which is very much the case; simplistic, linear systems create simplistic, linear people. As a result we clash with the actual pattern underlying us; we compromise health and lose touch with our subliminal processes. But this is another story. The point is that our technology is still very different from us, and as it is more and more prevalent in our current day lifeworld we have a hard time seeing ourselves as an intrinsic part of this world. So then we rather escape it and try to live an abstracted life as a way to cope with this. But then we forget being part of the whole, while still this will always loop back into our lives, making us aware that we are ignoring something at at least some point.

Now for technology to make us feel as individual, unique patterns within a whole, it must be able to empathize with us as individuals, so together with our technologies we can evolve and become one with the pattern around us either by growing towards this pattern and having this pattern growing towards you. In the end this should lead to a world where people are always attuned to their full selves and the full world around them, conscious of the cosmic evolutionary process around them. In more artistic terms; we should feel as if we were all individual, creative musicians, one with our own instruments within a cosmic orchestra, and continuously have to improvise to create a symphony of ultimate beauty.

Now at least I hope to have given a hint as to why the question 'Who are you' is important for this blog to answer if we want to create an optimal future together with our technology. And for now I'll stop writing. But again, the concept I proposed is not an absolute one, and should not be taken as the truth as in an 'objective, scientific truth', but instead more as a concept to base your current actions in the current world on, and at the same time always keep questioning yourself things like:

Who am I?