Dear friends,

This article will be different from my usual fare.

For one thing, I’ll be disclosing a bit more personal information than I’m normally willing to share. The reason I’m doing it now is because I think it serves a purpose in the process of understanding. There are certain bridges that need to be built, across deep ravines that were dug long ago. I think the deepest divide — that between art and science — is also the most important bridge to cross.

Another difference is the format. In trying to enter a conversation with two extraordinary men, I have transcribed their words as diligently as possible. But even with the assistance of fancy tools, I’m sure I’ve made a few mistakes. Likewise, if I have mischaracterized any of their opinions or ideas, the fault is mine. Whenever quoting them, I have therefore provided links to the precise times in the video when the statements are made.

Finally, this is one of my longest articles to date. That’s partly because I struggle with finding the language to explain or translate certain concepts. The visual artist in me longs to project a picture directly out of my mind’s eye and shout, “Do you see it?” But we were raised in a kind of New Babel, and so even our internal pictures aren’t typically resolved well enough to make strong connections. Honest and rigorous attempts at translation are therefore required. I will try my best.

Thanks in advance for reading this article, and for putting up with my nonsense in general over the years. Like the rest of you, I’m only a student, learning at my own pace.

— Mark

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Meet “Mark Bisone”

3. Blind Marksmen, Teleporting Queens, and Other Stupid Geniuses

4. Superbiology in the Hyperspatial Domain

5. Tiers in Reign

6. The Body Count

7. The Game of Flesh

8. All the King’s Horses

9. Receivers, Transceivers, and the Golem Dilemma

10. Bug Report

11. Final Thoughts

1. Introduction

I recently listened to a conversation between Drs.

I have referenced the work of both gentlemen in the past, and I won’t do either of them the disservice of trying to summarize their pioneering ideas and projects here. Suffice it to say, they are both extraordinary individuals, gifted with great intellectual powers. These powers have led to rewards, in the form of money, accolades, and high status within their domains. And rightly so: they are rarities among rarities, by any measuring stick.

The conversation itself is 1:10 in length. I realize that’s a significant time investment, in our era of ephemeral hot-takes. But, for anyone interested in biology, metaphysics, ontology, or the nature of intelligence, it will be time well spent.1 This is about as densely packed an hour of inquiry as you’re likely to find, featuring two beautiful minds straining to catch a glimpse of eternal truths.

First, I would like to praise these men.

I mentioned at the top that I have written about them before. That’s not entirely true in the case of Dr. McGilchrist (at least, not in any article that I’ve actually published; many drafts lurk in my cobwebbed digital cabinets). When I have referred to his theories, it’s usually only briefly and tangentially. At the same time, his ideas have informed a lot of my writing work as a background process, ever since friends of mine introduced me to them. I would call his book The Master and His Emissary required reading for anyone interested in… well, in anything at all, frankly. I have yet to read The Matter with Things, but I’m sure I’ll reach the same conclusion when I do.2

I have written in more depth about Dr. Levin. In fact, my rough appraisal of his bioinformatic work remains one of my most successful articles to date (according to my own, relatively meagre metrics of success).3 I also heavily referred to his work in my (far less successful) meditation on non-local memory and its native indestructability.

In revisiting both essays, I realized I was unfair to Dr. Levin in the first example. I was angry at the time, and broke one of the cardinal rules I set for myself in this blog: “Don’t write angry.” But even in that article, I recognized the staggering import of his findings. Michael Levin took a wrecking ball to what had become a dogmatic, ossified, and absurdly deterministic understanding of the role that genes play in determining structure. In particular, he smashed down the edifice of what I like to refer to as “player-piano” gene theory.

This wrongheaded theory — and the neo-Darwinian synthesis that spouted all around it — has gripped hold of far too many powerful minds and institutions, threatening to twist the general public’s understanding of causality backwards. For example, I’ve been in marketing meetings with clients who yammer on about “genetic blueprints” and “selfish genes”, as though these concepts represented some kind of revealed gospel truth. You’ll run across versions of this toxic metatheory in basically every enterprise, forcing you to relitigate the entire case from first principles to people who were trained to think in slogans. It’s exhausting, frankly.

But it’s also been exhaustingly expensive, when it comes to genuine scientific inquiry and progress. Research into gene-editing and related techniques has been soaking up the lion’s share of grant money and other funding conduits throughout my lifetime, clogging the path for better ideas and applications. The opportunity costs alone have been mindboggling.

As I’ve mentioned before, most “accomplishments” in these fields seem to boil down to weapons development, enhanced surveillance tools, and/or business novelties. But even relatively sane genetic engineering projects appear to travel down a long and costly rabbit hole, only for their most cherished premises to be swept aside, simply by approaching the problem of structure from a higher angle.

(McGilchrist, starting at 12:21)

I think of a couple of examples – and they may well be drawn from your work – that I use in The Matter With Things. One well-known one is if you take “eyes gene” out of drosophila (common fruit fly), obviously, the offspring have no eyes. And if you breed the eyeless flies their offspring have no eyes. But after fourteen generations without the gene, they have the eyes!

So, something very powerful is going on, very rapidly, that says, “No. Eyes need to be had.” And Simon Conway Morris suggests that eyes have been evolved I think he says fourteen different times in the history of evolution. It's an extraordinary thing that they evolved at all, because there it's such a complex thing and lots of things have to come together. But the idea that this could have happened separately in different lineages fourteen times is extraordinary, and suggests that there is definitely something about having an eye that is that is quite important.

In other words, the so-called “eye gene” is absent from these animals, but the eye develops anyway. The genetic engineer did not play God as he surmised; he merely wounded the creature in question so deeply that it took fourteen generations to heal the damage. In any case: “eye gene” does not cause “eyes.” Player Piano genetics crumbles to dust. Q.E.D.

Ordinarily, this would be science functioning as it should. We learn from failure, including the failure of old, beloved theories to accurately describe reality. But because our sciences have been corrupted by the current state of publish-or-perish incentives, conflicts of interest, captured peer review, the replication crisis, fragile egos, and other gremlins that haunt the institutional networks, there is immense pressure to double and triple down on errors. Call it a systematized version of the Sunk Cost fallacy.

(from The Tao of Robotron)

The history of the physical sciences is littered with game-changing leaps, which serve to upend or blow apart all prior theories in the strain. No scientist wants to face up to the possibility that he’s wasted his professional life chasing clouds and phantoms. So, he must journey through the stages of grief like the rest of us dopes. Sometimes this journey is particularly long and arduous. A scientist might go to his grave insisting that the sun revolves around the Earth; that a planet called Vulcan effects Mercury’s orbit; that little green men dug Martian canals; that the universe is standing still, as some guy named Einstein once proclaimed.

When it comes to the origin of structure, genetic engineers declared a premature victory, and planted their flag in the shoals near the river’s mouth. Dr. Levin called their bluff, and has consequently threatened to expose the whole rotting edifice to sunlight. The implications for biomedicine and healing techniques are immense. More importantly, his work has illuminated the artist’s key observation about consciousness being at least somewhat disincarnate and structure-independent, rather than an emergent property born of a particular arrangement.

For this tremendous contribution to the volume of human understanding, I sincerely thank Dr. Levin. If we were to ever meet, I would extend an apology for my previous unkind words, and ask for his forgiveness. Artists are temperamental creatures, which can serve to cloud our judgment in the moment. However, that is no excuse for rudeness. I am sorry.

It’s also no excuse because I’m not what you’d call a pure artist, if there even is such a thing. I like to joke that I’m “half-scientist on my father’s side,” and there’s some truth to that. But I’ve also mentioned in other writings that “artist” is less a category than a tendency, which some people express more regularly and/or with greater range and effectiveness than others. Some people notice fine details in their environment that others miss, as subtle as the smile on Mona Lisa, and figure out a way to demonstrate those for others. We apply the formal label in recognition of that effort and result.

But, like Dr. Levin, I am also a software engineer, and have worked professionally in both creative and technical fields. Because of this work, I have been labeled a polymath in the past by colleagues and friends. That said, I don’t rank my technical abilities anywhere near those of Dr. Levin. And in the cross-disciplinary terrain of psychology, psychiatry, neurology and philosophy that Dr. McGilchrist occupies, I don’t rank myself at all. Why would I ever think I’d have something of value to contribute?

The answer’s partly due to something else that artists do with some regularity: we see the future. Not with perfect clarity or timing. You might say that we sometimes “remember the future,” in much the same way that we recall distant memories of our childhoods. It isn’t a superpower, per se. In fact, it’s more often like a curse, as Cassandra and her descendants might attest.

It’s also obtainable by other methods. The fact that these two formidable minds are now conversing was perhaps a foreseeable outcome via traditional predictive models. Though their disciplines seem outwardly distant from each other — McGilchrist the psychiatrist/philosopher versus Levin the biologist/engineer— they intersect and overlap in significant ways. Someone else could have easily reached the same conclusion.

But that wasn’t the whole of my prediction. I not only knew they would eventually find each other, but foresaw with high precision the kinds of conversations they would have when they did. For example, heading into the video blind, I could easily see the direction this particular discussion would be heading, what Dr. Levin would say when it arrived at a certain crossroads, and how his response would momentarily short-circuit Dr. McGilchrist’s parallel line of thought.

(beginning at 34:59 (emphasis mine))

McGilchrist: To come back to the machines thing. it seems to me that if these forms exist — and there seems to be very little way of accounting for things unless one accepts that something of this kind is the case — if they do have values and direction and purpose, then why would they not, for good or ill, get instantiated in machines? Why would it be unreasonable to suppose that a highly complex AI did not actually itself express certain values and directions. And, as you say, we might get some surprises, because we don't know exactly what we're doing there? I mean, it's not a reason to to sort of be a Luddite, but it is a reason to be quite careful to be aware of what it is we don't know. I mean if effectively that is the most important thing for any scientist to be aware of is what it is he doesn't know, not just what he does know.

Levin: Exactly. And it's funny. Both ends of in my experience — both ends of the opinion spectrum — are finding it very hard to appreciate that point, because you have the the people who actually make the things and they say to me, “Well, I build these AIs. I know what they do. It's just linear algebra.” I said, “Well, you're just biochemistry aren't you?” You can make them, but if you know you don't know what they do, if you don't know what bubble sword is doing, then then you sure as heck don't know what what this thing is doing.

And then there's the opposite side. I had the organicists who are extremely interested in a very sharp distinction between these things. I gave I gave a talk to a group that was in the kind of Indic philosophy-traditions, and they thought that that some of these things that I was saying would be right up their alley in terms of these ingressions that basically come to haunt physical bodies. And so they were they were adamant that no kind of AI could have any of this, because it was as they called the dead matter. And I said, “Well first of all, I don't think there is any dead matter. There are, you know, lazy observers. But I'm not sure there is any actually dead matter.

But also, given the overall worldview that you have this non-physical mind that is somehow embodied in the physical, who are you to say that if you build a beautiful, synthetic embodiment, that some mind — it might not be remotely close to a human mind, it might be — in fact it’ll probably be from some very weird untapped region of the space of Minds — who are you to say that this thing is not allowed to come and animate this novel embodiment? I mean, you know, on what basis? But they they were just completely adamant about that that wasn't going to happen.

McGilchrist: I mean I think one can't be adamant about anything in this area one has to keep a relatively open mind and be aware of what that that means. So um… but… yeah. It is an interesting point. Um… anyway…

I only include some of Dr. McGilchrist’s filler tokens — the ums and ahs — to illustrate the hiccup I envisioned happening when Dr. Levin issued his challenge: “Who are you to say X is a bad idea?” That question sits at the root of all ethical inquiry. If you claim X is bad, you are required to do some additional work. I agree with that; too many people confuse traditions with axiomatic truths, and a lazy ethics benefits absolutely no one. Chesterton’s fence might have been built for a very good reason, but also a very bad one, or for no reason at all. In other words, X may or may not be a bad idea, but just saying so doesn’t make it so.

Here, X refers to the concept of attracting complex, non-human minds to manmade structures. I have many thoughts about that prospect, including the potential for unintended consequences, and I’d bet that Dr. McGilchrist has many of the same. But when we are put on the spot, and pressed for answers in the moment, language often fails us. We deeply feel that something might be amiss, but we also fear we might judge an idea too fast and too harshly. Gut instincts are useful, but they can also lead us astray when we’re confronted with new ideas. And we are curious men, after all. So the moment becomes paralytic, like Medusa batted an eyelash in our direction.

How could I foresee this exchange in advance? By that I mean not only the general outlines of it, but many of the narrower details, right down to some of the wording?

If we are to take their ideas about panpsychism seriously — which I do — the obvious answer is that I was more than just a passive participant in the conversation. Even though it took place outside our spheres of direct observation, you, I and all conscious entities throughout the universe were participating in it, along some mysterious substrate of mind. Were we to combine panpsychism with a John Wheeler-esque model of participation, that makes a lot of sense. The intensity of our contributions will vary widely, in accordance with a whole slew of factors, but we are nevertheless all having our say in the realm of Being, whether or not we know it at the Time. What we hear and say along that mindspace could range from ghostly whispers to megaphonic shouts.

Do those implicit conversations affect the more explicit ones? And, if so, to what degree? I don’t know. Regardless of the answer, the explicit ones are seemingly important to the structure of reality. Otherwise, why would we bother having those at all?

In fact, why we would be bother being at all, let alone embodying in material forms?

That appears to be the question on the table. What follows is my best guess, delivered from the artist’s perspective.

2. Meet “Mark Bisone”

Since I might now be participating in this conversation in a more explicit way — and because Dr. McGilchrist was kind enough to suggest he might read this essay4 — I thought I’d briefly introduce myself.

I am a multimedia creative and technology professional. My educational background is diverse, but spotty. You might say that I’m not formally trained in anything. For instance, I am what you might call a “self-taught” programmer, with a caveat. The dirty little secret is that almost all commercial programmers worth a damn were never formally trained. We are mutant hybrids, half-autodidact and half-thief. We steal, and then we learn from what we steal. If we’re doing it right, others will steal from us and learn as well. Either way, we live and die on our ability to quickly adapt to new market trends and fluctuations (for good and for ill).

I have never been employed in academia, unless you count one summer gig as a Teaching Assistant, decades ago. Apart from that, I have spent my entire professional career in the private sector, plying my sundry trades for large corporations and individual clients.

But I jest.

Even though I’m no academic, I hold great respect and admiration for many people who pursued that course through life. Strangely — even to this day — I continually find myself entangled in situations with academics and scholars, at both the personal and professional levels.

Anyway, as a belated party to this bold, academic conversation, I’ll try to limit my CV to a handful of bullet points, which might give some total stranger a taste of my life and career:

• At age seventeen, I was awarded a full scholarship to one of the oldest and most prestigious art schools in the United States.

• Over the course of the past quarter century, I have performed just about every conceivable lead and subsidiary role in the spheres of digital technology and commercial art, including but not limited to:

  • systems administration

  • quality assurance engineering

  • UX/UI design

  • enterprise software development

  • conceptual art

  • architectural design

  • game design

  • 2-D and 3-D modeling/animation

  • sound engineering

  • video production/post-production

  • gallery curation

  • film direction

  • art direction

  • brand direction

  • A-partridge-in-a-pair-tree direction

  • I also used to wash dishes, flip burgers, sling cappuccinos, and deliver groceries, just in case you have an opening in one of these burgeoning fields.

• I was an alpha tester for Friendster: the grandaddy of Facebook and other social mediums.

• I worked on what was, at the time, the most expensive website ever developed, funded by a world renowned scientist’s widow.

• I have served as Best Man at four weddings.

• I once reanimated a dog with mouth-to-snout resuscitation.

• I once watched a World Cup semifinals game while drinking beers with David Bowie.

That last bullet puts the rest to shame, frankly. Not because I was starstruck (though I obviously was; when Ziggy Stardust asks you to recommend a good beer, the mind stutters). What made it so unique for me was the string of improbable, uncanny events that led to that narrative moment. It’s the sort of episode that gets you thinking about determinism and chaos, accident and fate, and chains of causality more generally. Not with any clarity, mind you. Not back then.

As for the professional bits, that was quite the ride. At the height of my market demand, I found myself being flown to distant cities, put up in luxury accommodations, meeting in auditoriums, engineering bays, cocktail lounges, and hotel rooms with major players in their respective industries. During these meetings, I would often hear my name casually dropped into a totally absurd problem space:

“A perpetual motion machine powered by the milk of human kindness, you say?

“Put Mark on it.”

I never once said, “Are you crazy? I can’t do that shit!” They treated me like the Magic Man, and so I dressed the part and acted like one. Looking back, it all seems rather silly. But I didn’t come from much, so at the time it was intoxicating.

That said, I gained many useful insights over that period of my life, particularly when it comes to the way human beings react in high pressure situations. When the clock is running down to zero, and many jobs and futures hinge on meeting that brutal deadline, you get a glimpse of a person’s true character. You see them at their best and worst, both morally and intellectually. These are cherished lessons, more valuable than any course I took in school.

Flash forward roughly a decade, and I’m somehow back to being broke in middle age. That is the result of many factors. Not least of those is the depraved zeitgeist of narrowminded conformity that’s been thrust upon us. I found more and more that I needed to watch what I said, had to tiptoe through ever more clustered social and political minefields to maintain steady employment.

There were other major factors at play, of course. The Covid Years and the attendant lunacies of its policy mavens played havoc on businesses more generally, and my own city and industries were hardly immune. Teams were downsized, budgets were slashed, projects were cancelled or indefinitely delayed. By the Spring of 2021, myself, my colleagues, and many longtime clients found our prospects quickly shriveling into husks. Everyone was calling each other for work that didn’t exist, or doing freelance work on spec for clients who never paid out what they promised.

And, of course, the lion’s share of the blame belongs to me. Poor decisions that I made, bad bets that I placed, unrealistic expectations, missed opportunities, distractions, laziness, and all the rest of it. That’s why I ask for paid subscriptions or donations, but understand if readers do not pay. This past half-decade in particular has been rough on a lot of us, like some chthonic albatross that sank all boats and drowned all sailors.

I am also a very flawed man more generally. For instance, the list above omits all of my moral and intellectual failings, run-ins with the law, and times when I hurt people who did not deserve it. In a recent piece, Dr. McGilchrist wrote, “I am a shamefully poor Christian, but in my own way I think I can say devoted.” These words resonated with me (although, in my case, even the devotion part is suspect).

Through all of my career twists and turns, I have never been a paid writer (unless you count a short stint as a “sales writer”, which I don’t). What prompted me to begin writing The Cat Was Never Found in the Fall of 2022 involves one final bullet point, omitted from the résumé above. I hope you’ll allow for a bit of suspense here; before I can reveal that project and my role in it, I need to engage with other parts of this conversation. Suffice it to say, it was an experience that so radically altered my understanding of reality, it threatened to consume my every waking thought. But that would be untenable: I’ve got bills to pay, after all.

I write under the pseudonym “Mark Bisone” not only to safeguard my dwindling professional relationships and prospects, but to protect my family, friends and associates from all the parasocial shrapnel of our disintegrating world. We live in dangerous times, where art, science, and free expression have become hunted animals. To honestly seek truth and reveal your findings is to expose yourself to all manner of psychotic predators and their unwitting factotums.

I instead decided to begin an anonymous, semi-public investigation on the side, via the medium of this Substack blog. I suspect I have my Emissary to thank for that decision, since at that point it had apparently been chased back into its original role — "scared straight”, so to speak. Once the natural order was restored, I could let my investigation sprawl in whichever direction the Master advised, while allowing his consul to keep everything in focus and on target.

Neither of those entities comprise me, of course, either individually or in tandem. If we take the panpsychist argument seriously — which, again, I do — we could refer to the left-hemispheric Emissary and right-hemispheric Master as intelligent units of consciousness in their own right. In fact, long before notions of “left-brained” and “right-brained” entered the popular lexicon, and even before the neurological sciences began in earnest, artists have perceived them this way. The only real dispute has seemed to be whether the relationship between these intelligent beings is symmetrical or chiral.

In each case, we can visualize our own whole units of consciousness as persisting in some middle position between Emissary and Master, either at the irreducibly small point of contact (the touching fingers), or fully characterized as the face we see in the mirror. That face is also chiral, though we tend not to see it that way, with the angel or demon holding sway at any time.

Before my perception-altering experience, I would have been hard pressed to choose between these models. Afterwards, I’ve come to realize that we don’t need to choose. Our minds simultaneously inhabit the irreducible contact points and the extrapolated characters, as viewed from different angles of perception.

But maybe I’m getting out over my skis here. While I’m obviously no neurologist or psychologist, I’m also no art historian or theologian. In fact, though I wouldn’t compare my achievements to his own, I sense my writing work is much more akin to Dr. Levin’s laboratory experiments. If there’s a running theme throughout my articles, it might boil down to the following question:

“What moves stuff?”

Anyway, that’s a brief summary of my approximate map position when I started listening to Drs. Levin and McGilchrist’s Youtube conversation. And participating in it too, I realized, across whichever phantom ley lines connect all irreducible dots.

Because this dialogue (trialogue? infinitilogue?) was so wide-ranging, I won’t dare try to engage it point-by-point. Instead, I’ll pick out a few topics, and try to determine where I agree and disagree. I’m finding it’s mostly the former, happily, and that where I disagree it isn’t with any malice. I just get the sense the artist’s vantage is missing from certain models and key decision nodes. I also think I have an answer to Dr. Levin’s question above, which he might find worthy of consideration moving forward.

If either man were ever to read this essay, I would beg for their patience and jolly good humor; my process — insomuch as it exists — seems to be very different from their own. I find the territory they are mutually exploring to be exciting, profound, enlightening, and gorgeously complex. But I also spot a few dragons and sirens, lurking near the edges of this evolving map. As we know, such monsters can be great teachers, so long as we can find good solutions to their uncanny problems.

Regardless, thank you both for inviting us to come along on your epic voyage, and for potentially joining me on this odd little detour.

3. Blind Marksmen, Teleporting Queens, and Other Stupid Geniuses

If you watched or listened to the video, suppose for the moment that my analysis is correct: we are all participants in this discussion to some degree.

While we can’t respond or interject, or in any way disrupt the flow of their dialogue in linear spacetime, our consciousnesses aren’t fully constrained within that spacetime flow. They are at least partially non-local, and what straddles the line between local and non-local domains touches every other entity, either directly or by proxy. They may even be touching future and past instances of all conscious entities, reinforcing an informational webbing that binds them within formal reality. From this position, we can perhaps see and even act “out of order” to some extent, effecting the past (or all pasts) as well the future (or all futures) when we do.

The next question for me becomes: “What was my own contribution to this meeting of the minds, in my capacity as artist/engineer?” Is the nature of my implicit contribution also the reason for my foresight? And, if so, what is the mechanism of this and other seemingly psychic predictions?

The short answer is this: I am a creative genius.

To some, that might sound like a boast. It is absolutely not a boast. In fact, there are at least four reasons I can think of which prove it isn’t.

First: if I am a creative genius, I am probably not a particularly gifted or powerful one (especially if the contents of my bank account are any indication).

Second: I qualify as a creative genius not by my own definition, but by theirs.

(Dr. Levin, beginning at 14:46)

I think there's something interesting going on and I wonder what you think about this. If you look at at the very bottom of the level you have, let's say, photons that, with least action principles, they find their solution 100% of the time. They don't need complicated internal machinery to calculate “Which path should I take?” They just kind of effortlessly do it, right? They're in that flow state, so to speak, all the time.

Then you have creatures you who are like, “Well I'm solving some sort of problem methodically plotting across that space first. I do this and then, what does this mean? Okay well maybe.” And it's a lot of effort, and you're sort of very carefully crawling along that space.

And then you have the people who are creative geniuses, they're back to that initial state. They don't need the step-by-step thing. They say, “Oh, I can see it, it's obvious. I'm already there.”

This is just about as good a description of the artist’s process — which is not a process, actually — as I have ever heard or read. We just get there without any intermediate procedures. The solution merely presents itself (or reaches back towards the investigator, perhaps). When that happens, a theory or prediction not only proves true in the broad sense, but in its narrower details.

That may have implications for psi and parapsychology, but those fields aren’t in my wheelhouse either. I don’t know how any of it works, mechanically. As far as I can tell, it’s not some magical “power” that artists can summon forth at will. We can (and I did) speculate about resonance waves and attractors, or devise metaphors like “spiritual antennae” and such. It might be related to stochastic noise-filtering, which I’ve been exploring in my unfinished “Spook Central” series. Or, we might merely say something like, “That’s how God made us,” and be done with it. But no matter the language model we deploy, the phenomenon seems to be so widely evidenced that most people accept it as part of observable reality.

Anyway, as I watched their conversation play out, my reaction was mostly quiet contemplation, during which I felt a curious sense of relief. It unspooled exactly as I envisioned, flowing to the places it inevitably (from my perspective) must. I use the word “relief” here instead of something like “satisfaction”, because there is nothing egoically satisfying about being correct about predictions of this nature. This is metaphysics, after all, not the blackjack table.

I suspect the feeling of relief pertains to McGilchrist’s model of left-hemispheric work, in which the organ strains to divide and reduce the whole into units that are suitable for reconfiguration. The Lego structure is pulled apart, so that it can be assembled into a new (and, hopefully, more beautiful) shape.

(Dr. McGilchrist, starting at 20:32)

So, I think everybody — the scientists, the artists, the sages — say that there is an important period of fallowness in which one is not striving too hard. But on the other hand you have to put yourself in the way of it happening.

And so it may be necessary to do as Wordsworth described. That you have to strive, you have to read, you have to think, you have to approach the problem. And you know you won't get it while you're doing that, but you won't get it unless you've done that. And then you drop it and then the answer comes.

Now why that should be, it seems to me the the most logical way to think about that is that the the right hemisphere has extremely wide ranging connective paths, and it has a greater facility for making distant connections than the left hemisphere. And when the more one engages the left hemisphere, the more these connections become tightened down, almost concentrically, into an area where you're focusing your attention. So that it may be that what's happening is that you need to sort of do that, and Let It Go. It might even be like exercises one can do physically in order to relax, which are to tense one's muscles and then actively let go of the tension.

This also sounds right. It’s what every LLM that has spidered through The Cat Was Never Found seems to have missed: “This crazy cat is clawing and grinding his way through a series of procedural language models, so that he might then kick back, relax, and allow the truth to flood into that negative space.”

When the details of a complex phenomenon unfold more or less as you’ve foreseen them unfolding, it seems as if the Master has taken the reins, and can simply apprehend the whole shape without breaking a sweat. But, as McGilchrist notes, you will first sometimes need to grunt and sweat and strain, thinking procedurally about the problem until you’ve reached your wit’s end. You need to somehow be “certain” that you’ve tried your best to solve the problem using the Emissary’s toolkit. You grind and grind and grind. Then, when some unknown granularity is obtained, you stop grinding.

Eureka!

In my experience, the phenomenon is more obvious when a concrete, measurable result is desired, such as hunting down a nasty runtime bug, or designing an elegant function. But it also happens when you attend to less objectively measurable problems. Your painting is wrong, wrong, irreparably wrong! So wrong, you consider ripping it to shreds. Instead, you go out drinking, get in a bar fight, stumble home, burn a grilled cheese sandwich, pass out on the kitchen floor. Then you wake up the next morning; eyes bloodshot, head pounding. A few strokes are applied, and the painting is finished and perfect. You sign it.

Years later, it’s up for auction at Sotheby’s for an ungodly sum, likely for the purpose of laundering a rich man’s money. Years after that, it’s painstakingly copied by some starving Hungarian forger, for sale by shadowy cartels. By this point in the observable timeline, you yourself are likely dead, and may no longer care about such crimes and misdemeanors. Besides, the counterfeiter will never get those strokes exactly right, because he didn’t grind the way you did.

So the process seems to be a) work yourself into a frenzy, bang your head against every wall, abuse and torture every neuron half-to-death, then b) turn your attention to something else entirely. After that, you’re on Easy Street, pal! The solution and the problem just magically geolocate each other across the blasted hellscape of your procedural mind war.

That’s not going to happen for everyone, obviously. Some people will go on grinding the material into useless dust, or abandon the project before they’ve properly exhausted themselves. From what I’ve seen, the reason they’ll do that isn’t highly correlated to any defect in intelligence or character. They might be individuals with staggeringly high IQs, and who even seem to have created the proper vacuum. But the solution still eludes them, for some unknown reason.

For example, at one point McGilchrist and Levin propose Albert Einstein as an example of a creative genius, who could solve the problem directly instead of via procedural reduction. I have heard some compelling evidence5 that he actually couldn’t, largely based on his seeming allergy to citation. The implication is that Einstein may have subconsciously borrowed (or even consciously stole) some of his published work from peers, which he later explained as the product of sudden insight (i.e. right-hemispheric function).

The reason he could potentially get away with doing that is because creative genius is widely acknowledged as objectively real, even if not precisely mapped or understood. Einstein could therefore know that Einsteins existed, but still be no Einstein himself.6

Is that what happened? I don’t know. I do know that accusations of this nature don’t begin and end with Einstein. For example, I’ve also heard compelling evidence that Tesla was no Tesla, and Ford was no Ford. Meanwhile, the notion of Thomas Edison as a genius has taken such a sustained beating over the years, its remaining defenders could probably be counted on one hand. That’s not to say that none of these men were “smart.” They were all obviously all very highly intelligent, if only by the proceduralist’s standard.

Was Mary Shelley intelligent by that same standard? I doubt it. From what I can tell, the genius of Frankenstein wasn’t born out of procedure (it wasn’t born out of absinth, either, although I’d wager she used that tool quite a bit during her grind). In fact, her immortal horror masterpiece is a mess. But it’s also a special kind of mess, inhering and reiterating itself in accordance with the monster’s own fractured, mismatched anatomy. She didn’t need to know about anything about history, biology, ontology, or the philosophies and sciences more generally. Shelley was an artist, a creative genius. A queen who warped to checkmate in one move.

That’s ultimately the reason Frankenstein survived and thrived, and why it evolved so many new forms with their own integral complexities and fractal children. She was apprehending a truth directly, which allowed her to peer deeply into the future and poeticize it. In that future, she saw how a false “whole” reconstructed from disparate parts could lead to great horror and ruin. When critics question her authorship of Frankenstein, they will typically cite supposed gaps or defects in her education, or the lack of any future masterpieces in her oeuvre. But they’re missing the bigger picture: if they are so desperate to disparage her achievement, they could just say something like, “She was merely the vessel, for a story that wanted to be told.”

This flows into the third reason not to boast about creative genius:

What’s there to boast about?

After all, if I am one, it has little to do with my own efforts. It did not come from me, any more than the sophisticated tool I'm using to carve this sentence sprouting from my fingertips. Furthermore, it’s not something we can practice. There is no Iron Church where we can build up our creative muscles, no magical vitamins or steroids we can gobble down. I imagine a non-creative genius could take all the ayahuasca in Peru, and still never obtain the same results. Or worse, some alien pattern might flow into that dug-out vacuum which strongly resembles a truth but is, in reality, something antithetical and hostile to it.

And this last possibility pertains to a fourth reason that creative genius is nothing to brag about. I will try to explain it in depth later on, when I revisit the peculiar project that radically changed my assumptions about the nature of minds, physicality, and evil. For now, suffice it to say that what might seem like a blessing in the abstract can look more like a curse in the actual, and that there’s a very good reason so many artists will turn to excessive drinking, drugging and other forms of self-harm.

But first: We must grind.

The problem is chewed into smaller elements, of a size and shape that our right-hemisphere is equipped to work with. And in that grinding process, we marshal forces that are not our selves, but are familiar to our selves.

Or perhaps “marshal” isn’t the right word. As intelligent, conscious entities, we berate and cajole, blackmail and bribe, barter and sweettalk them into collaborating with our plans. In other words, we do everything we can to persuade these other conscious entities to help us achieve our goals. But the same might be said of other forms of intelligent entities, which try to persuade us to help them achieve their own. These are usually other people, but they could also be lower animal minds, persuading us to pet or feed them.

A question we might ask ourselves here: Could there also be higher minds than humans, trying to persuade us into alignment with their own projects?

(starting at 10:01)

Levin: And so, we're working on some things to look at. What does that synchronicity — another way you to put it, this Library Angel phenomenon — actually look like? You're working on some problem, you're walking through a library, this book falls down. Oh look, there's the [solution].

So what does that look like all the way down? What does that look like on the molecular level? What could we could we say, in that there are ways in which the the solution to your problem — or your binding partner in the case of chemistry, or some other things in AI — are attracting you as much as you're searching for them? These are very early days, but that's that's some stuff we're working on.

McGilchrist: That's fascinating, and for me expresses a very important point about existence, full stop. Which is that everything — everything — is relational. The idea that there are just these things, and then either we find they have relations or we make the relations between them, is again this very reductive view that I associate with… the way the left hemisphere works. Whereas I think the idea that things are in a kind of partnership — in other words, that there is “interdependence”, to use this rather wonderful word which is the title of Kriti Sharma’s book on the relationship between an organism and its environment — not that they just interact serially.

The organism affects the environment, the environment affects the organism, but they literally cocreate one another. So they're coming into being together. Now you could apply that view to the idea of the solution arriving much faster you think. Reaching out to the problem [when] the problem is really a manifestation of a potential solution, and the solution is the manifestation of a potential problem, and they come together. It is extraordinary how these things do do appear

There’s a thorny domain problem here. When we perceive a smaller organism’s environment, it is bound by one or more functional walls, beyond which it cannot survive (or at least, not for long). If it’s a cell, that wall might be an animal’s body. If it’s an animal, it might be one or the other side of the firmament (e.g. the ocean depths for most terrestrials, the land for most aquatics).

These boundaries aren’t necessarily static or unscalable (e.g. the Van Allen radiation belts), but what they seem to share in common is that they limit awareness upwards/outwards in the chain of observation. It may be that a cell is minimally aware of other cells and even organs in its domain, but unaware of the animal domain that binds it. At the very least, we’d expect a cell with such awareness to be a “creative genius” of its class.

To stick with the panpsychist view, let’s imagine ourselves and other living creatures as cells in some sort of “body” (operational manifold). That larger domain must also consist of boundaries in various states of stability and strength, but perhaps completely incomprehensible to most of its inhabitants.

If we can observe, analyze and interact with smaller domains within and around us, why couldn’t the inhabitants of larger bounded domains do the same? What if the “Library Angel” is not a mere metaphor, but rather a genuine attempt to describe such interactions?

4. Superbiology in the Hyperspatial Domain

But before we look upwards — or outwards — we should consolidate just who or what we might be looking for. One way to do this would be to analyze the phenomenon downstream in the order of intellect within a coherent body, as Dr. Levin has done with his work. In this model, a cell might be convinced to align itself with the organ’s goals, and the organ might align its goals with those of the larger organism. All of these conscious units might be said to be acting intelligently, if not always optimally from the larger organism’s high perspective. If alignment becomes suboptimal, that more intelligent agent might intervene. The monkey scratches its itchy armpits, the tiger licks its wound, the human pays a visit to the doctor, etc.

These nouns — monkey, tiger, human — are the mind-extrapolated characters that we most often treat as the topmost agents in the structure of Being. Panpsychist biology isn't a synecdoche that deforms common sense; the tiger's lung may possess some form of intelligence, but it isn’t on par with the intellect of the tiger. Likewise, the tiger's intellect isn’t on par with the human version. We could perhaps find the world’s smartest tiger and match him against a brain damaged human, but anyone with an ounce of common sense would see through the trick.

When assembling a new language model, I don’t think we can abandon common sense without paying a steep price. It’s the same with words like You and I. They are present in every language, even if only through the language of behavior. We draw sharp category distinctions between You, I, We, and They, without having to think about it. It’s the same when species are concerned. A monkey is not a tiger is not a man, requiring no more proof than our common senses. If someone tries to redraw or erase those boundaries, we know they're up to some funny business.

We have other categories that appear in every language, linked to mind-extrapolated characters that are a bit more controversial. The species they belong to are said to operate at a higher level of intellect and complexity than even the most intelligent human agents. While practically all prior generations of mankind accepted our lower position in the mindspace as a plain fact of existence, even the mention of such beings — or even of a hierarchy of being whatsoever — seems to offend our modern sensibilities.

That group includes most modern religious sensibilities, by the way. After all, have we not been given dominion over the Earth? If we are the Children of God, how could other creatures ever surpass us in complexity of intellect? Nevertheless, these beings and cross-breeds make appearances throughout religious texts and mythological traditions.

If such creatures exist above us in the order of intelligence, we should assume they’d be even be more persuasive in alignment of being than we humans are. While humans can be geniuses at instrumentalizing material in secondary fashion (e.g. tools and techniques), we cannot typically alter structure with our thoughts alone. But if we hypothesize a being who exceeds our mental powers in the same way that a man exceeds a tiger, or even as a tiger exceeds one of its own tracheal cells, we might expect a level of material influence that would appear strictly magical to us. It might even be the case that embodiment is more directly designed and implemented by this species, allowing for bodies so novel and plastic that Dr. Levin’s experiments with planarians and tadpoles would look mundane by comparison.

This version of superbiology is similar to the gods and monsters of many pantheistic traditions. The god simulates and instrumentalizes existing patterns, either as a 1:1 representation or in chimeric fashion, but retains qualia of experiential mind that are recognizably human (or superhuman). When Zeus assumes the shape of a white bull to woo Europa, the field of Zeus’s mind isn’t altered, and he retains his powers for directly shaping matter forms. Likewise, the Lernaean Hydra isn’t merely some sad freak born of genetic damage. It is a high-functioning and dangerous faun, well-adapted to its environment and boasting extreme regenerative powers. All that was required was a potentiality for such form, and a mind suitable to instrumentalize it.

In that light, the various shapeshifters, chimeras and other supernatural beings that haunt all artworks would meet the standards of biological organism, but also surpass our own organic limitations. “I think, therefore I am,” becomes a statement about structural form. “Today, I think I am an insect. Tomorrow, a white bull. The next day, a sea serpent. The next day, a swan.”

In this light, minds that can think faster, deeper, more expansively, and more nimbly than our own might constitute a decent definition of the gods, angels, demons, and other supernatural beings that have populated our stories for at least as long as we’ve been telling them. And because matter is downstream of consciousness, we might expect that their latitude of structural transformation options would be wider than ours — and possibly much, much wider, akin to the difference between an animal and an integrated local cell.

Note that the superbiological domain isn’t necessarily the highest, either. Within this higher — or, at least, more distant — taxonomy, they would constitute a greater level of fractal complexity, while still recognizably rooted in the same Source pattern. But their bodies would still seem quite alien to ours. The similarities might not be much more than the bodies of bronchioalveolar cells are similar to the lung it serves, or a lung’s body similar to the animal it serves. The superbiologic doesn’t even need to conform to a pre-existing form in our environmental framework, which is probably why some accounts appear to struggle mightily with physical details.

As I looked at the living creatures, I saw wheels on the ground, one alongside each of the four living creatures. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went. As for their rings, they were so high that they were dreadful; and their rings were full of eyes round about them four.

Ezekiel 1: 15-18 (KJV)

Their experience of being, situational awareness, sensory detail, memory capacity, and range of action will likely all be more complex and alien as well. With sufficient complexity, we’d have to consider the possibility that their perception of spacetime is extremely different, too.

For example, we don’t measure the lifespan of a paramecium in calendar years, but in number of asexual fissions. A much more complex mind, with an embodiment that isn’t subject to the same forces of entropic decay, might likewise measure our species existence by a different metric. For example, their units of measurement might be something akin to opportunities, decision nodes, or even the “narrative beats” of our life stories. We should at least consider the possibility.

Given our limitations, how would we even begin to assess and describe encounters with such higher minds? What do we risk in trying to model them accurately, and what happens when we make mistakes?

(excerpt from

There’s an interesting lesson here. Namely that we can’t understand our betters, our true betters. Their utterances, their actions are a mystery to us, or, since we can’t even grasp that, they seem wrong, pitiful, weak, aggressive, even repulsive.

From all this follows a peculiar conundrum: if we want to advance, how can we learn from those wiser than us if we can’t recognize them, and their words and actions seem erratic or even sinful to us? This is why various esoteric and mainstream religious traditions operate with harsh discipleship and discipline: as an adept, you make a gamble, a leap of faith, and submit to a spiritual master, guru, priest or religious hierarchy completely and unquestioningly. You suspend your critical mind, in recognition that you have no way of understanding a higher mind, and therefore no basis for criticism. To advance, you must trust and pay with giving up parts of your egoic instincts and drives. You willingly submit to authority in the hope that you will learn something down the road that you can’t learn by yourself because your thinking — your whole being — is screwed up, low in development as it is.

Needless to say, this is dangerous business. Abuses of this sort of relationship are legion; countless fake or corrupted religions, cults, mystery schools and so on attest to that. Then again, if the stakes are high, so is the potential reward; there’s nothing free in this universe.

Luc is (maybe) speaking strictly of human minds here. But I think the potential rewards and pitfalls are largely the same; if you’re dealing with a mind so powerful that it doesn’t require a specific embodiment to transact with you, than you better have a well developed trust heuristic.

It might even be able to assemble novel embodiments on the fly, shapeshift at will, as part of a strategy to transact with less complex holons in a language they can understand. For all we know, we even assist them in the design of such novel bodies, via the expectations that we cobble together from the general information space of stories and art.

An analogy might be found in our tabletop simulations and video games, in which players can radically change the shape of their avatars by imagining a new one (typically with assistance from one or more human artists). Organic formation becomes something like a strategic costume change in this model, governed by the creative geniuses of a superspecies who can skip the procedural steps and processes of gradual evolution, the way human creatives can skip straight to the solution in a problem space.

Artists have always observed that such higher order minds and superbiological creatures exist. But they have also observed that these beings, while more powerful than ourselves, don’t constitute the top of the hierarchy either. They still experience events located within some semblance of narrative order, and their ability to transact is still limited by some form of energy scarcity and other rules. We just don’t always agree on what those rules are. Cue holy war.

Or cue implacable skepticism, these days. When such beings are said to transact with humans, the default assumption now is that the human reporter unconsciously imagined or hallucinated the transaction, or that he consciously made the whole thing up, to gain some kind of advantage. I think that’s a valid way to approach this sort of claim; we would need to assume such direct transactions are rare. Otherwise there’d not only be no reason to question such accounts, but to report them at all: “You saw a squirrel in the woods, you say? That makes sense; lots of squirrels live there. Who cares?”

However, to insist that these transactions never occur strikes me as a dangerous form of hubris, and perhaps a failure mode of the Emissary’s method. If we study the accounts with an open mind, their rarity might instead suggest something recognizable and potentially alarming about the nature of this species. For instance, it might call to mind the chameleon or octopus, activating camouflage to hide from beings who mean them harm. But it might also call to mind the tiger’s stripes, the leopard’s spots, the polar bear’s snow-white murder suit. If we are below this species in the hierarchy of complex being, might we also constitute their favorite prey?

If such superbiological beings can transact with us in observable spacetime, we might guess expenditures of energy are required. But if energy is equivalent to information, it’s possible that the metabolic process of superbiologics occurs at a level that precedes matter conversion.

If not biological material, what form of energy might such a superbiological animal feed on?

But before we broach that treacherous subject, let’s consider the idea of a hierarchical structure of being in more depth, and what it might mean to hold “dominion” over less complex forms of intelligence.

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5. Tiers in Reign

Near the outset, Drs. McGilchrist and Levin settle on a version of the panpsychism model: nested layers of consciousness, which persist and interact at every level of complexity/simplicity.

Within this frame, even vanishingly small particles possess intelligence. They have an experience of being, and pursue goals via available mediums and energy resources. The simpler agents are nested within domains that are strongly influenced by more complex ones. Both kinds of agent are holons: units that are parts but also wholes. Each holon can be observed intelligently operating in its environment by tweaking the resolution.

The minimalist version of this theory might merely claim that consciousness is far more widely distributed throughout living matter than it appears to be. The maximalist version might be summarized as: “Why stop at ‘living’ matter?”

But it’s actually very difficult to summarize the panpsychist position(s) described in the video, and I certainly don’t want to put words in their mouths.

(starting at 2:23)

McGilchrist: You seem to say that intelligence goes all the way down in everything, not just in life, is that right? I mean the whole cosmos is is imbued with a kind of intelligence. I think that's fair. And so would you say you're a pan psychist?

Levin: I am, with a little bit of a twist in that I think the typical panpsychist position — which is one thing that gets critiqued a lot for — is this idea that the consciousness or the mind of the collective has to be in some way a “sum of” or “creative.” So there's some sort of addition problem. I think that's not a thing. I think the parts have it, and the whole has it, and it's not an addition problem.

McGilchrist: Oh, thank goodness you said that, because a lot of people have said to me — I think in a way I'm a panpsychist, you know — “But what about the combination problem? And I said, “Well, it's only a combination problem if you think about it in the wrong way. If you think about it as a having to be the sum of a whole lot of different parts.” But, in fact, it's something that, as you say, is both in the whole and in the parts. Is pregnant with, if you like to put it that way, some some kind of mind, some kind of intelligence, which I think is also characterized by goal directedness. And that by that I certainly don't mean that there is a determinist outcome, but there is nonetheless direction, and direction doesn't doesn't close down possibility at all. But it seems to me that we now have to give up the idea that was given up by physicists some time ago, the idea that really everything is just random and has no sense of order or direction to it.

Levin: Yeah, I think this combination problem comes from two underlying motivations. One is that I think people really want to… for example, codified in IIT (Integrated Information Theory), they want there to be only one mind in anything. So, if you have a system, you know the parts — if it's made of Parts — show us the kind of mind it has, and we can forget about what the parts are doing. I think that's a problem. I like a continuous heterarchy of overlapping minds. And the even more pervasive thing is that we’re going to somehow make minds from scratch. I think if we avoid those two things, then I don’t think we have a combination problem.

Depending on certain priors, panpsychism could be said to overlap with Carl Jung’s collective conscious, Giulio Tononi’s integrated information theory, John Wheeler’s participatory anthropic principle,

That’s a wild bunch! Many of these language models have been at odds for centuries. In the case of art and science, we could even say they’ve been locked in a Cold War, with each group vying for the ear of the king (not to mention access to the royal purse).

But all of these models seem to share some common properties. One property I haven’t heard mentioned very often is their tendency to generate axioms: just-so statements and self-evident truths that somehow enter into the common parlance. I see this tendency as instructive: some truth claims just seem find to purchase in everyday speech without a need for propaganda or other sales tools.

Panpsychism is interesting in that its axioms seem to allow greater latitude for reproduceable experiment than the rest — or, at least, for certain scales of holonic activity, they seem to allow that. Assuming intelligence in a given particle or group of particles offers us the opportunity to set up games with clearly defined rules.

I think the model of panpsychism Levin and McGilchrist settle on conforms pretty well to reason, even excluding egregores, gestalt entities, hiveminds and similar network beings. In fact, you might say that it circumvents those kinds of notional entities (e.g. A bee and a beehive are separate intelligences that cooperate in spacetime. It may be the case that you can’t observe the hive’s mind absent the embodied bees, but that doesn’t mean the former doesn’t exist).

What they describe is an anti-deterministic model, but also somehow an anti-stochastic one. The game is neither marbles nor craps, in other words. Perhaps it’s something more like Cosmic Yahtzee: unpredicted results are chosen and configured according to a given agent’s goals. The difference is that our Yahtzee dice are conscious agents too, who are playing their own games while they — to some degree — cooperate with ours.

In this model, each physical component of our bodies could conceivably be deemed intelligent and conscious, no matter how small or simple its matter form. But, as the doctors agree, all of their tiny wills don’t somehow “add up” to some grander Big Will, from which the “illusion” of consciousness emerges. The best we could say is that these simpler beings tend to collaborate on local projects, if only in a limited, contingent and unstable fashion.

During these collaborations, feedback is continually exchanged; we talk to them, and they talk back. Much of these conversations are lost in translation, due to the varying degrees of complexity and awareness. The broken arm may communicate pain in a language we understand (“Ow!), but the broken cell that has turned cancerous could sound like total gibberish to the human mind. Perhaps the desire to communicate more clearly with our misaligned holons is how medicine was born, as well as forms of meditation, prayer and spiritual healing.

That also stands to reason. For instance, a man fights his own body quite often: in gyms, in hospital beds, on battlefields of love and war. Misunderstandings happen, and disputes break out. This model of being isn’t so distant from Aristotle’s zoon logon atherton, in which the passions of the body will come into conflict with reason. If we agree that consciousness is inherent in every holon, than we can resolve the mind/body problem with a shrug. There’s no need for complex analogies or metaphors. We are simply greater minds that struggle to maintain cohesion and alignment among lesser minds.

When the man wins these contests though manifested actions, we generate axioms and sayings. We could perhaps say something like, “He beat cancer,” in that particular intramural contest. We might also say things like, “He hacked his biology,” or, “Mind over matter.”

If the contest goes the other way, we also generate sayings. When ill-advised sex is the topic, we could say “He was thinking with his other head.” and mean it literally. If the subject is biomedical, we might then say, “The mind was willing, but the flesh was weak,” or “His body failed him.” We can even go much further than that, when describing the war of greater and lesser minds. For example, in diagnosing my late father, a close M.D. friend of mine said: “His body betrayed him.”

Now that’s an interesting way to put it, don’t you think? “Betrayed.”

If the nested theory of consciousness is accurate, then we might expect the higher — the stronger, more complex, more beautiful — intelligence would always dominate the lower nested intelligences within range. That might even be the case if we posited not just one Russian nesting doll, but an infinitely interlinked heterarchical network of such dolls. We would still find higher and lower intelligences, with the expectation that the higher forms would prevail in any conflict. We certainly wouldn’t expect those lower entities to ever “betray” us, since their continued ability to pursue goals relies on the coherence of whichever higher intelligences are located within the operational manifold.

By operational manifold, I mean a “body” or “creature” in the most obvious cases. But many forms of operational ranges extend well beyond those superficial boundaries, even if we leave aside modern technologies, like the kind that allows me to communicate to you both invisibly and pseudo-instantaneously. The manifold doesn’t stop at the edge of skin, or even at the range of voice or scent. It is a multi-radiative, dynamic shapeshifter, at least partially phenomenological in content. In some sense, that makes a body immeasurable, given the vast volume and rate of information transactions, and the incalculable angles from which we could observe them. And if the body is fundamentally immeasurable, what hope do we have in measuring the mind? How can we perceive a hierarchy of something we can’t even quantify?

At this point in the grinding process, most minds will give up on the so-called “mind/body problem” altogether. They’ll shrug, “Who knows?” and go play pickleball. But suppose you paid these pickleballers a little cash for a five-second experiment. You sat them down in a plain white room, flashed them pictures of the ranked and unranked holarchies above, then asked them which one looked to be more stable. What do you expect they would be more likely to say?

While I didn’t know what they were called, I realize now that I’ve seen diagrammed holarchies for many years now, typically in the form of company org charts. The newer diagrams tend to be unranked: irregular blobs that overlap and intermingle in ways that look superficially “organic” and potentially functional, but which also never quite seem to work that way in practice. It’s as though the pyramidal shape is a horror movie bogeyman, who faddish new hyper-individualistic and/or communitarian minds are desperately trying — and failing — to escape. The ranked, pyramidal version reasserts itself, no matter what kinds of exotic new maps we try to draw.

Structurally speaking, a ranked holarchy might also be called “hierarchical holarchy.” While that seems like a contradiction in terms, most biological models describe exactly that. There are higher and lower tiers of holons within the manifold. The experience, awareness, modes and options of lower-ranked holons are simpler and more constrained then the higher ones, to the extent that many of the lowest appear to be mindless slaves, even under close inspection.

What I’d like to do now is show you how an artist sees a holarchy.

What we see is a kingdom.

By “artist” I mean every artist, including people who generally don’t see themselves as one of those. For example, I’ve said before that everyone who reads a work of fiction is an artist, because they must build the other half of the creative bridge in their imaginations. That’s why all the most successful and enduring artworks of “individual” geniuses are actually the result of collaboration. There is no Tolkien without readers to carve Mount Doom, no C.S. Lewis without readers who complete the bridge to Narnia.

I mention these two enduring artists in particular, because they vividly see the same picture that I see, and that so many artists continue to see in every age. This picture seems archaic, childish, naive, and even somehow sinister, when situated within our current nest of political assumptions and sensibilities. After all, the notion of kings and queens seems antithetical to the Western culture of free will, self-determination, and the liberation of the individual. I was raised in a nation that was born from rebellion to the crown, and was taught that all monarchies and aristocracies were the blood enemies of the the good, the beautiful, and the true.

And yet, the Kingdom Signal never seems to vanish. It doesn’t even seem to decay, despite all the acid thrown on it by sociologists, political philosophers and other post-Enlightenment critics. No matter how deep the corpse is buried, artists in each new generation dig it back up, dust it off, and sell it for a hundred million bucks to cheering audiences worldwide.

Of course, I wouldn’t call “Game of Thrones” a positive advertisement for feudal kingdoms as a political system. Instead of following the time-honored formula of good and bad hierarchies, the author slathered every corner of his fictional world in gray mud. But, strangely enough, he also never finished his story, and odds are that he never will. He was trying to defeat the pyramidal bogeyman, too, and replace it with something like a bloody tesseract composed of pirate kings and assassins. A Herculean task, given that the pyramid just might be the closest thing to a diagram of reality most human minds can visualize.

That’s not to say that George R.R. Martin’s version doesn’t ask important questions. Hierarchical order may tell reality’s story at the deepest object level, but that doesn’t tell us much useful information about its instantiations in spacetime. Most importantly, it includes no moral content: there can be evil hierarchies as well as good ones.

This insight runs deeper than any surviving religious framework today. It is present in the epic of Gilgamesh, for example, who must transform from a wicked king into a good one. The forms of his wickedness are familiar to our modern minds. He is an oppressive, exploitative tyrant, who allows his personal appetites to overwhelm his reason and virtue. The terrorized people of Uruk are subsquently robbed, raped and murdered on a whim. Gilgamesh must undergo a spiritual transformation and reckoning with Death before he can return to Uruk and rule righteously.

That’s why the artist’s Good Kingdom is also somehow a free place, inhabited by a free people. The rankings there are fairly stable, but not set in stone. A king might favor Sir Knee today, the Duke of Arm tomorrow, the Prince of Respiration the next. This model only becomes a contradiction if we define reality as a deterministic machine, in which all preferences and choices are illusions. This mechanized vision of reality is the likely source from which of all forms of tyranny are ultimate derived, reiterated fractally at all scales. The Wicked King abuses, terrorizes, tortures, and starves his subjects into submission, restraining them from experiencing any form of individual agency or pleasure. When it happens on the cellular level, we might call it a disease. When it happens in a nation, we call it evil.

Meanwhile the Good King is wise enough to afford his subjects the freedom to explore and grow. He exercises his kingly judgment only when conflicts arise that are otherwise irresolvable, or will lead to bad results of some kind. “Yes, you may ask her for a kiss. No, you may not drag her into the bushes and rape her.” A balance is maintained between freedom and ethics, aligned with the telos of eudaimonia. In that sense, he is not just the ruler of a kingdom, but the father of his nation; he genuinely loves his people, and they genuinely love him back. The reciprocal bonds of love form a positive feedback loop, which produces a dividend of energy and advancing complexity. That’s why people who take good care of their bodies look so beautiful.

Artists often simplify kingdoms to Good or Wicked, but the model isn’t binary. There are many different kinds of kingdoms and kings, all of them subject to dynamic change. But before I describe this model further in the artist’s tongue, here is what I believe to be Dr. Levin’s (partial) description in his own:

(Levin, beginning at 22:08)

I think it's particularly interesting uh down at the lower levels, where we can say you've got you've got particles and molecules that are not confused about what to do. They they don't make mistake. The chemistry just does what it does, and it chooses the lowest path every single time, and it's great. Then you have a paramecium that is now in the same bind as we are. It has to make decisions rapidly with limited information. It can misperceive, it can make mistakes, all kinds of things that layer in between. What happens? How do you get to that level?

Because we can see, in these very simple life forms, all the molecular events happening and even some of the things that we're doing in between. We found the learning capacities in molecular networks. And so, what I'm really interested in is is formulating a notion of this of “search”, of striving of navigation in the molecular networks because we have to have pictures of it all the way down. And I think it will be very simple.

But I don't think it's crazy to think about problem solving… we know that happens in cells. I don't think it's crazy to think about it in molecular networks and all of the things that we think of as creative. The creative search for problems, and preparing yourself to, I don't know, be in resonance with this download of information that is trying to get to you. I think there's a molecular story to tell about this.

I think it’s fair to say Levin is describing conscious agents here, and the various latitudes within which they may express their agency. Some of those latitudes of available modes and options might be so narrow that their decision trees seem non-existent. At most resolutions, their actions will instead look like product of pure deterministic forces (e.g. chain-reactive marbles, blindly colliding in the wind), which is the meta-error that led to so much confusion over the last few centuries. But Levin suggests that when we perceive certain agents through the right kind of “lens” — not merely a microscope, but an array of tools and language frameworks that can capture the transition from potential to actual — we will find agents and agency in literally everything we aim it at.

One interesting question is this: is the agency inherent in the observed entity itself? Does the animate particle make its own choice? Or did we make the choice, and the non-agent merely floated down a path we subtly carved for it with our minds? In other words, do we, in the quantum mechanical sense, somehow lend our own agency to non-agents by looking at them, and making predictions about how they’ll move? I’m not sure that question is even answerable in scientific language (which is not the same as calling it unanswerable).

Dr. Levin is operating on the premise that the intelligent behavior is innate to the holon, with enough separation from the human observer to qualify as an independent agent and will. He believes there’s a story to be told about molecular agents, including ones that were not — for whatever reason — drawn into alignment with living biological systems. I think there’s a story there, too, but with the caveat that not all stories are good ones. Even the good stories can be tricky; a story that starts out good could end very badly, so we should take great care in how we tell them. After all, we can and do tell stories all the time that appear to provide Big Answers to Big Questions, at every scale and depth of resolution. Fables and parables, novels and epics, jokes and narrative songs.

One type of story is a fairytale, which Professors Tolkien and Lewis used to describe their own immortal works of genius. That seems to be the most resonant format, reiterating itself in every age no matter what local name it goes by. It includes agents that are similar in many respects to human beings, but alien enough that we perceive them as supernatural (or even “unnatural”).

If these fairy stories include a political structure, it is almost always pyramidal in shape. Authority flows downward from the apex — the throne — to ranks of agents who increase in number, but decrease in power and latitude of action.

In that spirit, let me tell you a fairy tale.

The Middle Kingdom

Once upon a time, there was a kingdom that stretched as far as the eye could see. Much farther than that, actually: no one subject could possibly ever see or travel all the way across it. And so, a given subject might live his entire life without knowing some other subject exists.

Like all kingdoms, it is ruled by a king. Our Middle King is the king for all the reasons you might assume. For instance, he is by far the strongest, smartest, fastest, handsomest, funniest, bravest, and wisest man in all the realm. And, like all other kings, he is pressed out from a kingly lineage, which generates monarchs who look similar, but are also never quite the same. Thus, you may apply additional traits to each king as you see fit. Maybe he’s also a snappy dresser, let’s say, or a smooth talker, or a great singer of songs, or spinner of rhymes.

Look! There’s a king who wins slam dunk contests with ease!

And another! Who can recite the collected works of Shakespeare from memory!

And a third! Who can build microscopic anthrobots from human tracheal cells!

A spectacular bunch, to be sure. But if all of these talents weren’t enough, each king is also functionally immortal. This is a consequence of his superposition in spacetime, which allows him to stand in both one place and another simultaneously. Depending on many factors, a king may not realize he is immortal. In fact, most kings in this day and age do not. Our Middle King also doesn’t know it — at least, not for the majority of his reign he doesn't.

But what is a king without his subjects? Some would say he’s just an ordinary man, subsisting in a forest by himself. We could even call him an invisible man, since there’s no one around to see what he does, to appreciate his sundry victories and failures. Lucky for him, his kingdom happens to be overflowing with subjects of all shapes and sizes.

The hierarchy spans from the king himself down to the lowliest serf, with all the tiers of vassals and officers ranged between in order of size, strength, intelligence, beauty and other traits that are measured in comparison to the king. The subjects at each rank owes their fealty directly upwards to a group of vassals who are fewer in number, but also more alike to the king.

Because a typical kingdom grows to a vast size, the number of lords and vassals are likewise staggering, and their interactions are limited by range. For instance, down near the bottom ranks, you’ll find huge masses of simpleminded serfs who aren’t even aware they have a king. The opposite is also true: the king cannot possibly see all of his subjects, and may only be vaguely aware of those anonymous masses in the fields. He can only conceive of them in an abstract way, as data to be analyzed on spreadsheets and charts, or fed into predictive computer models.

Our Middle King is no different. He knows the names of various peasant ranks and their general functions, but his view of them is very low in resolution. That’s good for him, actually, since he has much more important kingdom-wide matters to attend to, such as finance, diplomacy, and war.

In his diplomatic efforts, he forms close knit bonds and bustling trade corridors with other kingdoms, invites them to join in various festivals, tourneys and jubilees. If the bonds they form are suitably strong, the peoples of the allied kingdoms will eventually become nigh indistinguishable from one another. They will forge friendships and joint business ventures, intermarry, and overlap in other ways. At a certain point in this evolution of romance, the subjects will even come to see an attack on that other kingdom as an attack on their own. And so, the subjects will rush to defend that kingdom, even at the cost of their lives. This kind of deep bonding generally requires big investments and time and effort, and can be fraught with missteps and misunderstandings. Therefore it doesn’t happen very often, and good kingdoms will limit the number of such deep diplomatic efforts.

There are enemy kingdoms too, of course, who continually march to war against each other. The wars can range wildly in size and scope. In the worst of them, a kingdom may be invaded, looted, and burned to the ground. There are also kingdoms so foreign and distant that — like kings and serfs — they’re hardly aware the other exists at all. This is also good: an effective king cannot divide his attentions endlessly, or spend all his time worrying about kingdoms he’ll probably never interact with.

Even so, no king seriously disputes that in each of these seen and unseen kingdoms sits a king upon his throne. It’s unknown why they were born with such great powers, including by other kings. But the fact that certain kings can swap theories about the source of their rule seems to provide a hint about why they were deemed fit: they not only have the ability to recognize patterns and name them, but also to deconstruct them in their mighty minds, and reconfigure them for advantage.

Anyway, the Middle Kingdom churns along in this fashion for many decades, its Middle King pursuing high level strategies and charting various courses. There are palace intrigues, factional squabbles, moments of great triumph and bitter defeat. The king grows wiser as a result of all this dramatic action, developing theories about what might be behind it all. Or above it all, in his case.

Eventually, his reign evolves into something of a contradiction. He realizes that the best way to “rule” his people is to afford them the freest exercise of their will, and to focus more on rewarding success than on punishing failure. He comes to see persuasion as superior to coercion in almost every instance, since coercion requires constant micromanagement, whereas a persuaded subject will do a good job of managing himself, allowing the king to focus on higher matters. Most importantly, he comes to understand that both love and violence are reciprocal, and so the former is superior to the latter in most scenarios. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a kiss to a punch in the face?

As a result of all this learning, the Middle King becomes a Good King. He grows to love his people, and they grow to love him back. His allied kingdoms also grow in love for the king, his subjects, and the fruits of all their labors. Those latter increase in complexity and beauty over time, because the vassals are allowed add their own wisdom and willpower to the effort. The Middle Kingdom becomes a Good Kingdom. Life is Good.

Then, one day, the whole thing stops.

The fields lie fallow, the streets are empty, the workshops sit cold and cobwebbed. The castle becomes a ruin, and the Middle King can no longer be found inside it.

The only evidence that the kingdom existed at all can be found in the forests and other deep places, where the lowliest peasants have fled. Unbound from all prior oaths and loyalties, they subsist in the wilderness, waiting for other kingdoms to arise, and for other lords to serve.

The End.

Or is it?

After all, we mentioned up front that our king was functionally immortal. If he no longer resides in the castle, then where has he gone?

That is a good question. But before we can even begin to approach it, we must determine how the kingdom fell in the first place.

First, let’s take a closer look at its subjects. No matter his rank, each vassal serves the king’s will in some capacity. But they do not somehow add-up-to or comprise it in any way. That would be silly! The king is a man, after all, not a hivemind. At best, we could say his subjects are all independent agents who are currently aligned with their king’s will, for reasons of their own. Or, more specifically, each vassal is currently aligned with the nearest lord who they can see and directly transact with (e.g. the various knights, sergeants, guild masters, clergy and such who are most present in their daily lives). At any point, a given vassal or rank of vassals might misalign with a given lord’s will, whether due to choice, accident, or some combination of the two.

These relationships of voluntary and contingent alignment iterate upwards through the ranks, until they reach the king himself. If the number of misaligned subjects reaches a critical mass, then the kingdom falls apart. Dust to dust.

What causes such catastrophic misalignments? Could be a lot of things.

For example, suppose our king abuses too many of his subjects. He overworks them to the point of constant exhaustion, and doesn’t properly feed or reward them for their labor. A Wicked King, in other words, who gradually sews discord and foments revolution. Or, the kingdom might simply go to war with some other kingdom and lose, whereupon it is promptly sacked and burned by its enemies. Or, the whole kingdom could simply get hit by bus one day, when the king absentmindedly orders his subjects to cross the street without looking both ways. Maybe he was too busy looking at his iPhone.

In the case of the Middle Kingdom, the collapse into ruin is more gradual and psychological. As time goes by, its subjects simply get old, grow bored and distracted, lose their focus and resolve. Birth rates begin to plummet, interest in future growth wanes. Everyone begins to feel like they’ve done it all before, that there’s nothing new to see or make. Vassals gradually quit their jobs, guards abandon their posts. Some subjects become anarchs, who go wandering off into deep forests, increasing the stress of labor on those who remain. Near the end of this period of decaying alignments, the king finds himself shouting commands into a void, perhaps from a hospital bed.

When such a fatal misalignment occurs, the king stops being a king. No matter his ultimate fate, he is no longer able to persuade his people or rally them to cause, because they are a people no more.

Does he also stop becoming a man? Maybe, maybe not.

Maybe it depends on how he ruled, and what he learned along the away. His mind has a position anchored outside of linear time, which is what allows him to operate within it. It may be the case that he could continue to operate from this position in some fashion, even if it’s only as a vassal to some higher monarch. But which monarch? And to what end?

But before we can speak of our Middle King’s potential immortality, there’s an important math problem to resolve.

Here’s where I think it gets interesting.

6. The Body Count

Exactly how many “kings” are there in the world?

The short answer is there are perhaps innumerable kings and kingdoms, even at the surface level of observation. At the very least, there are an unimaginable number of them.

For example, even if we were to say that only a human qualifies as a kingdom of being, try imagining 8.2 billion of those. Or imagining 8.2 billion of anything, for that matter! Large numbers fade into abstraction rather quickly, as though even the houses of our minds have a maximum occupancy code. Which they do, lucky for us. Otherwise, we might go totally bonkers.

Now: remove the only-humans limitation, and add all fauna to that number (We call it the “animal kingdom,” after all, as we generate our just-so axioms of truth). Include every creature from the lowliest amoeba to the mightiest elephant in the number. Account for every fish in the sea, too, and bird in the sky, every insect in the earth, every vertebrate or invertebrate with locomotion, seen or unseen.

Don’t stop there. Include all flora as well, right down to each individual blade of grass. Include all algae colonies, and then ponder if you should count each cell. Speaking of which, don’t forget to invite all the mushrooms, yeasts, and molds to your kingdom party (I hear they are fun guys). These are also very difficult to count, since some appear to be Siamese Twins, if not thousand-headed hydras.

Consider each of these organisms to be its own kingdom, ruled by its own king. Many of those will be totally alien to our human version of a kingdom, and unsuitable for any diplomacy but that which connects the dinner menu to our bellies. Others, meanwhile, are so familiar that we might form strong reciprocal alliances with them, like the furry kingdoms of Rover, Mr. Whiskers or Spot.

Now that you have all these kingdoms stuffed inside your mind-palace, with the fire marshal on the way to shut this crazy party down, consider this prospect:

Whatever fantasy number you dreamed up, it is a negligible fraction of the true total. Even if you started making up words — “A jillion bazillion gazillion kingdoms” — you haven’t even scratched the surface.

Why is that?

First, let’s stipulate that every subject of a kingdom — from the highest paladin to the lowliest farmhand — is also a king who rules his own kingdom, which is peopled by his own ranks of lords and vassals. That means every quantum of material to which intelligence attaches: every organ, every cell, every protein, every animate body within a local biological system.

In Dr. Levin’s opinion, it might mean every molecule, atom, and subatomic particle too, regardless of whether its kingdom is organic. But even if we draw the line at those particles and sub-particles attached to organic “living” matter, the number of kingdoms/bodies/agents goes beyond merely a mind-shattering figure, and approaches the infinite. In fact, it might even be infinite; no sum can account for even smaller reducible agents that may exist, but which we can’t currently observe or measure. A kingdoms within a neutrino, so to speak.

But that’s not all.

Next: let’s stipulate that each king is simultaneously a serf, as per the following holonic agent diagram.

This diagram of mine is admittedly a bit lame. A better picture might show triangular kingdoms stemming from each and every point on the gradient hierarachy (e.g, it’s not only serfs that are kings, but every vassal at every rank a king-serf). We could even go n-dimensional with the structure, with each integral agent sprouting kingdoms in every which direction. But the picture would have turned into a undifferentiated purple polygon long before we got there. There are limits to what we can sensibly model.

What counts as a fully integral agent gets a little fuzzy, of course. As Levin’s work demonstrates, consciousness isn’t nearly as structurally-dependent as it often appears. Our baseline perception of large, animate forms is the common transaction layer, and the basis for all our sense-making and language. We can’t see a body’s individual cells with the naked eye, let alone molecules or atoms. And even when assisted with tools, what we perceive of those bodies is removed from normal action. The average person can be made aware of his skin cancer from a biopsy, and even see it on his skin, but cannot command the cells to stop duplicating.

But even these concepts of “baseline” perception and “normal” action gets fuzzy. For instance, we do have evidence of people narrowly commanding their cells, so to speak, even outside widely observed phenomena like placebo effects. All alignments with intelligences/consciousness might therefore be dependent on our skill as observers, the available tools, the depth of resolution, our ability to describe what we’re seeing, and other known and unknown factors. I suspect that much of what we see of it in our everyday world relies solely on intuition: the solution somehow reaching back across the problem space. This explains why artists often draw the right conclusions centuries or millennia before scientists provide the experimental proofs, as was the case in the now-indisputable existence of dragons.

The complexities of measurement don’t end there. The ruler we use must at least have implicit constraints. How do we determine what constitutes the lowest and the highest? At a certain point, McGilchrist notes (and as Levin seems to agree) that Being must be ultimately grounded in something for any measurements — or any experience of Being at all — to occur.

(McGilchrist, starting at 30:07)

So what is it about? And I think what it is about is this drive towards complexity, towards responsiveness, towards the resonance with whatever the source of energy that grounds everything manifests. There's a resonance between us and it.

I mean, I'm positing that everybody imagines there must be something that grounds being. We may not ever know what it is, and we may have to say, “Well, we just leave it at that.” But whatever that is it doesn't seem to be entirely neutral, because the universe that it has grounded is not just a random set of of things bumping into one another. It has order. It has beauty. It has complexity. And I think these are drives. And I think that what life offers is, if you like, that interdependence I was talking about before, in which there is a kind of dance, for want of a better word, between that ground of being and the living, in which the potential that is stored there that is manifest in this explosive universe, is being realized in certain ways, so that it can can actually bring something about that reflects something back to the origin: the ground of being.

Though it’s a well-established philosophical term, I wonder if a “ground of being” is the best way to put it. It seems to me that the more accurate way to put it is that being is “ceilinged” by something: a final, whole King from which all other holonic kings and kingdoms are descended and extrapolated. Or, if we were to use the analogy of a rivers and tributaries, we could say there being had a “source”: some mighty confluence from which all future forks and sub-rivers originate and flow. The more distant the fork, the more likely its child nodes will mistake it for the ultimate source.

For instance: Human beings are the undisputed kings of the Earth, with an intellectual ability, complexity, and freedom of options that surpasses all other kings and kingdoms. But, in terms of the panpsychist model, isn’t it also likely that we’re simultaneously vassals in other kingdoms? And, if so, are we even aware of which lords we serve? Or are we like the polypeptide chain who folds to serve the Kingdom of the Cell, but is unaware of ever more intelligent, more complex, and more unconstrained kingdoms that exist beyond the cell’s walls, in which the cell serves according to its own aligned will.

Shouldn’t we at least consider that possibility?

It seems to me that scientists of many disciplines are finally starting to reconsider the proposition, after centuries of wandering the dark of the Machine Forest. Some are still toying around with alternative structures, hoping to consign the tiered holarchy to the dustbin alongside the Knights Templar, the King of France, Tsarist Russia, and other political and socioeconomic forms of hierarchy. Many instances of these structures were and are brutally repressive. You might even say most.

Yet, despite the best artists and scientists also being the freest thinkers, it seems their freedom of movement continually leads them back to that implicit hierarchical structure. The ranked order persists, even when it’s obscured by propaganda, stochastic noise and deliberate acts of sabotage. We could say that these anti-hierarchical procedures and agents function as a chiral counterweight; not as strong as the order it conflicts with, but providing enough resistance for it to be productively damaged and grow, the way a muscle grows in the wake of controlled damage.

Even if that’s true, our range of observation remains a problem. Whether we’re looking up to a higher (more singular/whole) kingdom or down to a lower (more plentiful/reducible) one, each observer will reach a tier beyond which they can’t see anything apart from a hazy blur. In a recent chat with

Above the highest gods? The King of Kings.

Beneath the smallest particles? The Heedless Dust.

Who is this King of Kings? What is the Highest Kingdom, in which all others can be called parts as well as wholes? And if this Highest King exists, could it be that he is simultaneously the Lowest Serf? Which kingdom does he rule, and in which does he serve? Given the complexity of his mind and being, could it be the same kingdom?

The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him.

He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?”

Jesus replied, “You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand.”

“No,” said Peter, “you shall never wash my feet.”

Jesus answered, “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

“Then, Lord,” Simon Peter replied, “not just my feet but my hands and my head as well!”

John 13:2-9

This is a funny scene, just as many gospel scenes involving Peter are funny. But it also can serve as a glimpse into what sort of mind both grounds and ceilings Being. Is it an attempt to describe the Alpha-Omega synthesis by analogy? The servant who is also the master?

No matter what our guess is, I think it would be a grave mistake to assume only those bodies visible to our organic senses constitute the Highest Kingdom, or to name some human tyrant the Highest King. Whatever the Prime Mover/Source Mind/High King is, it cannot be just another holon in an infinite holarchy. Or at least, it can’t logically have always been both whole and part. Some form of Ur Event or state change must have occurred, for anything to exist at all.

(McGilchrist, starting at 1:06:06)

I think the point is this: in every creation myth there is the idea of this Founding Being, the Ground of Being, and it needs an Other. First of all, because it is relational. Like all existence, it is relational, so it has to have something to relate to. And also the otherness is creative, so the otherness which seems like resistance or negation of the wholeness and beauty of the original is also the the path from which the manifest latent beauty and complexity can be unpacked, soo it's part of the creative process. It's really a very fine idea

This is probably not what you normally talk about on on podcast, but I'm I came across the extraordinary wisdom of the the Cabala, the Jewish mystical tradition. And in the Lurianic Cabala there is this primal being called Ein Sof, which is the ground of being, and he wants to create as all these beings. And so its first act is negation of itself. So the first act is to withdraw, in order to make space for there to be something other than Ein Sof at all — which is an extraordinarily imaginative idea, that there actually needs to be the negation, in order to be creative.

And then in the space that is now vacant, there are placed these urns which are to be the Sefirot. And the one spark of light comes — or spark of fire I should say — comes out of Ein Sof and falls on the vessels, and shatters most of them. And so that's the second phase of creation called she the shattering of the vessels.

And then there comes this third phase, Tikkun, which is that it's Humanity's job to take back these fragments that now have sparks of divine fire in them, and put them together to make urns that are more beautiful and more special and living — they have Divine Life in them — than the original urns had. So, that again is slightly like again this progression from the left to the right to the left, and the incorporation of this new element that may seem like it's a negation — or a breaking or whatever — makes something even more whole and more beautiful than was before.

This theme of creative destruction/negation is repeated in so many creation myths, it seems we should at least consider it. On the other hand, maybe looking at it that way is just a failure of language, born from certain limitations of our spacetimed, 4-D minds. We are essentially trying to describe Super Events in a non-local domain, which don’t conform to our baseline view of causality.

That might be why we’re constantly developing more technical and poetic jargon: in order to optimize the transaction speed for high level conversations, we use compressed language that unfolds to large and complex architecture in the mind. In fact, I have come to suspect that all of the common structures that we see, use, and build are related to speed — including all the structures of our physical bodies.

But at this point, we might ask, “What about other kinds of bodies?”

We can all agree there are kingdoms of organic flesh. But what of other potential kingdoms? We call them “bodies of water,” for example. What about Kingdoms of Water? Kingdoms of Stone or Nitrogen?

If an intelligent Kingdom of Flesh can cohere, why not a Kingdom of Sand?

Or maybe the better question is this: if Sand Kings and Kingdoms are possible, than why don’t we see them everywhere? Why didn’t they make the leap to self-awareness and control that we did?

Was there some mechanism involved? Or was it the result of a choice made, by a Mind far superior to our own?

I will pause, at roughly this midway point, to ask my readers for a favor.

No, it is not to beg for paid memberships, or “likes” and “comments”, or any of that ephemeral jazz. You may pay or not pay, like as you see fit.

What I ask is this:

If you are currently harboring some grudge in your heart, for someone who has done you a serious wrong, I ask that you take a moment today to try to forgive them. This is not a call to forget the wrong that was done, or to lay down your defenses for future wrongs. I would not ask that of anyone, nor would I counsel it more generally. Pain is education, after all.

But to forgive in your heart isn’t the same as lowering your guard. It is a release from inner chains, and an attempt to see reality from a higher vantage point. Forgiveness does not make you weak. If anything, it functions as a form of armor, and perhaps an active defense against a species of being that feeds on anger and suffering in all of their many forms.

Thank you.

Drive through.