On Keeping Consciousness Relevant

Why not to go with the flow but choose process instead

If the rallying cry for the 20^th century was that God is dead, ‘the human is dead’ seems well on course to be the top contender for the 21^st.  I am not too invested in defending what we think a human is today. If we take outgrowing species-centrism as necessary (as I do), I can’t be too wedded to what we have now.

The current idea of what a human is, seems to be dying anyway. Nothing new, we’ve been there many times before, and for good reason. It is our own curiousity that forces us to keep adding to Freud’s famous list of insults to human narcissism.

First, Copernicus discovered we were not the centre of the universe. Ouch. Then Darwin came along with the theory of evolution. His biological insult and took away the idea that we’re the pinnacle of creation, God’s no less. That one hurt a bit.

Freud himself showed we were no rational beings in control, but under the sway of unconscious drives and impulses - the psychological insult. And as society becomes more complex, the sociological insult really needed to be added. Niklas Luhmann, the German sociologist argued that society just steers itself as an autopoietic system. Sorry people, no one is really in control.

The fifth, which is unfolding now, can perhaps be called the cognitive insult. This is a two-part insult, of which one is benign, the other dangerous. One opens up the possibility space, where the other shrinks it. The latter comes from AI and computation in general which were slowly, but now suddenly territorialising our world - inner and outer.

We find ourselves increasingly embedded in sprawling technological assemblages, in which a growing number of sensors take measurements of the world and our bodies and feed their raw data into the decision-making machines. The data in turn is used to shape our behaviour towards increasing predictability (which means profitability and efficiency) and so we are ensnared in perception-decision-action (PDA) cycles that are not of our own making.

Technology also becomes smaller and continues to ingress computational power and personal screens deeper into our being, blurring the boundaries between Self, Other and World. You don’t have to be well versed in 4E cognitive science to have an Embodied understanding of another E of Extended. How do you feel the moment you realise you forgot your phone at home? Exactly, as if a part of you is missing.

The smartphone is a new limb, only physical in part, but really a cognitive extension which reaches not only out, but is an open, two-way street: from our mind to world, and world to mind. We are natural born cyborgs as Andy Clark already noted. It seems like a law of nature that cognition wants to connect with other cognitive agents, regardless if they’re human or technological, conscious or not.

The influence of the cognitive nonconscious on our culture and individual consciousness is the topic of study by N. Katherine Hayles, a professor working at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities:

“A massive shift is underway in our intellectual and cultural formations. Many different streams of thought are contributing, coming from diverse intellectual traditions, holding various kinds of commitments, and employing divergent methodologies. The differences notwithstanding, they agree on a central tenet: the importance of nonconscious cognition, its pervasiveness and computational potential, and its ability to pose new kinds of challenges not just to rationality but to consciousness in general, including the experience of selfhood, the power of reason, and the evolutionary costs and systemic blindnesses of consciousness.”^⁠1

It’s fair to assume that human decision-making, in the totality of the expanding planetary cognitive ecology is a shrinking volume and therefor the relevance of our consciousness, in terms of casual efficacy, is in decline, already before machines surpass us in intelligence.

Increasingly our subjectivity, decision-making and actions are shaped and mediated by cognitive assemblages, which determine most our information diet. Where technology was once an extension and amplifier of human agency, now humans are becoming an extension of technological agency in return, as its focus has shifted towards prediction. It’s purpose to optimise the supercomputer owner’s bottom line, or to assimilate us into certain political projects.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin of the Center for Humane Technology warn in the AI Dilemma that we have a shrinking time window in which we can still shape the outcomes of AI deployment, before our systems renders human agency near-obsolete. They also make the point that with the invention of new technology, we also find ourselves confronted with a new class of responsibilities.

The task of keeping consciousness relevant I see as one pressing emergent responsibility, because everything else we do depends on that point of departure being sound. When it comes to deploying technology, AI specifically, we not only need to make the right choices, but fight to even have a choice.

The deep mutuality we share with technology and the dynamics of our co-evolution in the ecosystem of cognition, needs to be consciously managed^⁠2 towards sympoiesis, rather than technology becoming autopoietic, serving its own goals and persistence, locking human Perception-Decision-Action loops in cycles of reciprocal narrowing^⁠ - shrinking our search and possibility spaces.³

Elsewhere I wrote on solipsism and the production of subjectivity resulting from self-referential loops, and the inability to see through the world we create. In that essay, I identified sources and drivers of inertia and how our current structure of consciousness and the social imaginary it produces is upheld by deep seated assumptions, cultural practices, systems, technology and shape of mind that are not in touch with reality.

Change is clearly needed, but the worst case scenario is looming: the inability to organise incoming information about the state of the world and reach any decision on how to act at all. We may be locked in perpetual infotaxis, stuck halfway between Perception and Decision, if our information ecology becomes too polluted with disinformation. This is a real, short term risk of AI and a serious threat to democracy.

Computational media and the the war on consciousness

Media is the cauldron where much of culture, technology and consciousness converge. I see this arena as the frontline in the effort to keep consciousness relevant. Media makes the greatest demand on our attention, its protensive^⁠4 potential is highest and where many of our aspirations are born. It shapes our collective salience landscape, our trust-based systems, like democracy, need high quality information to function well. Media are an interface for participating in and organising our collective sensorium. It is the mirror in which we see ourselves and use to tell the story of who we are.

But media aren’t what they used to be. Theorist Mark Hansen unpacks the radically different nature of current and future media in Feed Forward, on 21^st Century Media, making sense of its impact through the lens of Whitehead’s process philosophy. Hansen shows that the microtemporalities that technology has at its disposal in feeding us information, lies below the subconscious threshold of 300 milliseconds; roughly the rate at which we ‘refresh’ our perception of the world according to neuroscience.

Between 300-400 milliseconds is the frame rate at which our bodymind serves up new content to consciousness, producing the illusion of a continuous flow of experience.^⁠5  As such, computational media have a selection advantage determining which new information enters us and makes it into consciousness.

Sitting on the tube in London I regularly witness people entrained in exactly this temporal regime, running their perception-decision-action loops in about a third of a second, fast-thumbing though TikTok or Instagram, briefly lingering on or rapidly dismissing whatever the algorithm serves up. The technological and human perception-decision-action loops have linked and are synchronised. But it’s the platform that chooses, not the thumb.

Because of this temporal dynamic, the quality of the PDA-loop is changing. Wikipedia defines perception as ‘the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment.’ Hansen describes an effect that may result from our minds becoming seamlessly integrated into information flows through cognitive assemblages: we risk losing perception as a higher-order function, he says, to being merely locked into a flow of sensation.

In military doctrine there is a piece of strategy known as ‘getting inside the enemy’s OODA loop’. If your cycle of Observe-Orient-Decide-Act is faster than your opponent’s, you have them on the back foot, stuck in perpetual reactivity. Initiative - and agency - is lost.

Present day media’s distributed topology and the seamless embedding of minds into the temporal regimes of cognitive assemblages demand a radical rethinking of subjectivity towards a post-dual interpretation. There are no longer clear subject-object boundaries present, or if there are, they’re getting more permeable, fuzzy and fluid.

Hansen: ‘[…] subjectivity must be conceptualized as intrinsic to the sensory affordances that inhere in today’s networks and media environments. In our interactions with twenty-first-century atmospheric media, we can no longer conceive of ourselves as separate and quasi-autonomous subjects, facing off against distinct media objects; rather, we are ourselves composed as subjects through the operation of a host of multi-scalar processes, some of which seem more “embodied” (like neural processing), and others more “enworlded” (like rhythmic synchronization with material events). In today’s media environments, that is, subjectivity is neither set off against a (media) object world, nor different in kind from the microprocesses that inform it.’

As I mentioned above, the familiar boundaries of Self, Other and World are shifting, extending and becoming permeable and are sometimes fading. The E of extended I see as having a vertical and a horizontal dimension in our cognitive ecology. The horizontal dimension is the human-technological sensor network covering the planet, gathering and distributing its data all over for algorhitms to process. The vertical is the deep continuity of our multi-scale cognitive architecture, through which run many cognitive non-conscious processes involved in selecting and constructing the contents of consciousness.

It is this vertical, pre-conscious depth dimension in our cognitive architecture that the new media target, not consciousness itself. Hansen:

‘As I see it, twenty-first-century media catalyze a shift in the economy of experience itself, a shift from a media system that addresses humans first and foremost to a system that registers the environmentality of the world itself, prior to, and without any necessary relation with, human affairs. On this score, what I am calling the “data propagation of sensibility”—the fact that the act of accessing sensibility itself produces new data of sensibility—is the source for nothing less than a fundamental media-driven transformation in human experience itself. The self-propagating, self-escalating increase in non-perceptual sensible data generated by twenty-first-century media profoundly affects the economy of experience, such that our (human) experience becomes increasingly conditioned and impacted by processes that we have no direct experience of, no direct mode of access to, and no potential awareness of.”

Hansen’s gesture towards the depth ontology, including quantum decoherence in his analysis, leads us to the second part of the cognitive insult.

Mind everywhere
The second, the benign part, is being delivered by biologists like Michael Levin,^⁠6 who argue convincingly that cognition is not a ‘brain-first’ phenomenon, but that cognition and creative processes of assembly, learning and problem solving go all the way down to the molecular level. (And likely way further down, as I believe is reasonable to assume).

To your average panpsychist, this is nothing new. But the sciences are increasingly backing up what was once a mere philosophical and spiritual view.^⁠7 Levin is part of a movement of paradigm-shifting scientists that are doing away with epistemic constraints that keep us locked into outdated and harmful views.

They teach us that the ages old distinction between life and matter is false and the segmentation of sciences like chemistry, biology, physics and psychology are arbitrary, as deeper unifying principles are discovered.

Levin describes life as the capacity of certain systems to scale up basal cognitive processes and integrate them into what can become multi-scale competency architectures; nested and integrated systems that keep complex organisms functioning and resilient. Just not all things, like rocks, get there in their present form. But there are latency, potential and interiority present nonetheless.

The insult is accepting that intelligence, creativity, cognition and consciousness are not the preserve of humans or some ‘higher’ animals, but pervasive and even constitutive of matter. It’s likely we humans lie somewhere, as a unique but not special manifestation, on a deep continuum of a diversity of conscious agents. There likely is a vast diversity of minds present in the universe. And they have goals as we do. We simply can’t see them for what they are with the minds, models and theories we currently have.

It should be easier to admit by now that we’re not really free-willed, rational and autonomous agents in control, the amazing measure of all things. Personally, I don’t mind the post-enlightenment hangover and mostly welcome the decentering project we’ve unconsciously set in motion, as far as it doesn’t undermine our confidence to the point where we throw our hands in the air and leave everything to machines or give up on progress altogether.

Despite, or because of the mounting insults, we seem to double down on our species-centrism, evidenced by the intensification of the species-centric extractive systems we continue to expand. A good deal of hospicing of human ignorance and hubris is still in order, but that unlearning must be done carefully. Much loss of human self-confidence, even self-hate, is on display in the world of critical studies where it’s all about deconstruction and deterritorialisation, but where little creative, benign or beautiful takes the place of what is taken down. We can do better.

Increasing life

What can be the first few steps in the right direction? Aligning with the impulse of reality to increase life, that what seeks connection and wants to self-organise and diversify, is a good heuristic in my view. The protensive impulse that aims at creation can be trusted and aligned with in our design of systems and technology. Experiments in computational materials science, harnessing this elementary drive are happening. Provided it doesn’t seek to accomplish narrow goals coded from the current imaginary and structure of consciousness we have, this is hopeful.

What is needed is to understand how to participate with ‘subjectmatter’, a term used to imaginally enter a world in which everything that is has agency, a unified interior and exterior, internal and external relations, potential and latency. Subjectmatter is agentic and teleogenic in nature, self-organises and forms patterns. A task is to find and access the action protocols, the structuring, assembly and energy reality uses to actualise.

Learning how to align and interact is why metaphysical innovation is much needed. My friend, colleague and mentor Bonnitta Roy is currently deep into the weeds of fleshing out these process relationships, mapping out how reality unfolds though action protocols realising the potential and latency enfolded in complex potential states of which the nondual ground of the deep continuity is the raw subjectmatter and origin.

Together we’re developing theory on how the protocols of process can help us understand the telos of our cognitive ecosystems, from the quantum all the way up to the social imaginary and universe. From here we can do better design of our systems, so we increase life rather than defuture it.

Because things often go off the rails when we impose human-made constraints, arising out of delusions that steer the expressive impulses towards realising narrow, species-centric goals. Any cultural system design must aim for (non)-human diversity, infinity as its temporal space and driving open-ended unfolding. Anything less is suicide (before the heat death of the universe).

The big part of getting that right is reimagining ourselves, a task we can’t leave to the machines and why we need a consciousness possessing a sufficient amounts of creative autonomy and moral imagination.

Boundary artistry

The PDA loop I referenced above necessarily involves creation of a self-referent, or self-generative model. In organisms this can gives the sense that we are an agent, a subject taking in information, making decisions and taking actions that differentiate me from the world through a concept of causality either stating: ‘I did this’ or ‘This happened to Me’.

But the segmentation of available information determining where I end and the world begins, resulting in subject and object, cause and effect, is retrospective, arbitrary and dependent on where we draw the boundary. The PDA-loops are action protocols operative in connected systems. Their boundaries connect, overlap operationally within our cells, organs in our bodies and construct our cognitive hierarchy. They are continuous and are responsible for the radically distributed nature of cognition across the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

What this means for the specifics of social ontology and possible inquiry practices I will unpack in subsequent posts, but I want to linger briefly on what I call the practice of ‘sharing a boundary’. Experiencing the enactment and conscious creation of boundaries and their qualities, is vital but unexplored territory.

We need to understand better how information between agents, human and nonhuman, interoperates and induces change, such as belief updating or constructing or dissolving social structures. Boundaries can be imaginally envisioned as holographic screens upon which we code information and exchange information across.^⁠7

What we choose to circumscribe as a separate entity is akin to creating a conscious agent and internalising a relationship. A Self, for example, can be seen as an integrated collective of hierarchically stacked, interoperating and self-organising learning systems, supporting Levin’s claim that all intelligence is collective intelligence.

The boundaries demarcating and assigning identity to the realms of Self, Other and World, vary culturally, but determine the reach of practices for extending social and environmental care for example. As constructs, they can be played around with, changed to form novel ecologies and enabling the extension of our care and identity beyond self, or in-group^⁠8 and species.

When two agents share a boundary, they are in an I-Thou relationship. The experience of intimacy, resonance and empathy are likely and there is a possibility of mutual exchange and belief updating. Without a boundary you are merged, identity dissolves and no connection is possible. When you don’t share your individual boundary, there is no intimacy and information exchange; you are in an I-it relationship, separated. Or worse, depending on distance and permeability, completely isolated.

You may experience a heightened sense of identity and selfhood, but you may be solipsistically locked into your subjectivity, avoiding contact and resisting information that threatens that identity. A screen-mediated life, engaging with social media in particular, amplifies this dynamic towards the latter.

Most westerners have removed themselves to a degree from sharing a human-human boundary, culturally through individualism and technologically by living screen-mediated lives. Technology is currently better at creating this interface than humans, who have the power to judge, reject or misunderstand us. Screens and bots are safer to deal with, as they seem to give you what you want and accept whatever you do and say.

But as is now well known, after a decade of smartphones and social media use, the boundary interface is constructed for reasons of extraction: mining attention, increasing screen-time, and inducing hedonic desires to drive consumption. As we know, this is engineered by targeting pre-conscious cognitive systems, locking us in reactivity or the stream of sensation; not perception where information is critically evaluated and organised.

This comes at a great potential cost: It is argued by developmental theorists, that in the evolution of consciousness, metacognition is the next feature to unfold and possibly instrumental for developing what the psychocultural archeologist and mystic Jean Gebser called diaphaneity; the capacity to see through the world, a hallmark of Integral consciousness.

Diaphaneity I interpret here as an enactivist capacity, akin to seeing the workings of your bodymind in action in the construction of reality, particularly self, culture and the social imaginary. But if we’re stuck in the mere flow of sensation, pre-consciously engineered by the technological assemblages serving the capitalist paradigm we have, that may never happen on a meaningful social scale. We risk closing off entry into domains of experience needed to outgrow our current malaise.

We find ourselves at a crucial junction where one path leads to unity, the other to oneness. In Unity you are still part of a whole, but there are boundaries and structure present, diversity, differentiation and individuation, enabling contact and intimacy. It is a world in which we have a ‘place’ in the planetary ecosystem of intelligence and can co-evolve it. In oneness we join the blob and are assimilated into the assemblages, the flow of sensation where the capacities for constructing a stable self, completing PDA-cycles on our own terms with strong perception, setting boundaries and meaningfully exercise agency are lost.

Repurposing spiritual practice
Spiritual practice is an obvious realm to look towards in the efforts to keep consciousness relevant. But it is disappointing to realise that there has hardly been any serious innovation in spirituality since the Axial Age. What we have today is often a watered-down or distorted version of deep insights, now mired in tradition or arcane language and therefor either repulsive or inaccessible. And much has been lost in translation from east to west.

We have a pretty good body of work on the phenomenological territory that various paths offer up, but hardly anything pragmatic following from the metaphysics, offering sound principles for practice design; stuff that actually works, doesn’t take forever and is attuned to an individual’s particular bodymind. Meditating for hundreds of hours, like I did, I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

The teachings of today are annoyingly imprecise, low fidelity and anthropocentric: mostly aimed at helping humans cope with the low-level but chronic forms of unhappiness that for many are a feature of living through late modernity. The goal is not insight into the deep nature of reality or self, but feeling good. Understandable, that’s simply supply and demand, what people ask and pay for and teachers cater to.

But if the goal is to redirect attention outward and repurpose spiritual practice to make progress on challenges posed by the metacrisis, then much of what we have needs to be redeployed under a different view; first of all taken out of the culture of self-optimisation. Taking - Be Here Now - as a command to self and starting point for culture change, means you can’t get There.

What is needed is development of a consciousness that is capable of recognising and aligning with the action protocols that can actualise what is latent in the raw complex potential states, harnessing what wants to happen in service of life, beyond the social prior of species-centrism.

A possible answer is a set of practices developing what I call ‘dispositional realism’; honouring the insight that the embodied intentional stance, ideas, imagination and views we bring to the field of potential is a creative act.

This demands adopting pragmatic views on spiritual matters, such as emptiness, which is generally misunderstood as some passive void, or just absence. Teachers often declare the Self as empty or illusory, a huge mistake of which much of today’s pop-spirituality is guilty. These are grave errors, fuelling spiritual bypassing on a grand scale, breeding passivity and transcendent narcissism, diminishing our care.

The deeper understanding of emptiness is that nothing has independent existence, that the nature of phenomenological reality is fundamentally relational, that there is interaction and co-dependent arising happening. That means what we bring to reality, our disposition, greatly matters.

Dispositional realism demands not that we do away with conceptual thinking and mind as problems, as naive spirituality often proclaims, but it actually is an imperative that we have strong and sound theories, weave an ecology of coherent logoi that can inform practice design and shape the outcomes of mining what is latent in the field of potential. As the saying goes: show me the net your using and I’ll tell you the fish you’ll catch.

Current nets - conceptions of non-dualism, time and the structure of reality - need a rethinking, because what they catch is spiritual and cultural inertia. Any logoic design should aim to put energy, possibility and movement into the views we choose for constructing our dispositional consciousness. The Christian teacher Cynthia Bourgeault understand this in her deep probe into the true meaning of the Holy Trinity, which she reframes as a ‘metaphysical motor’, harnessing the creative potential in the move from a dualist view to a triadic one.

In contrast, dualism and symmetrical views on the structure of reality and its unfolding, which are largely deterministic, don’t offer that potential and opening of possibility spaces. Process philosophy may well be the most promising direction progress we have in this direction. Again, it is Bonnitta Roy leading the way here, doing the difficult work of developing the insights of that lineage in service of pragmatic application.

Metaphysics then, is not just some nice mental exercise for metaphiles in philosophy departments, but a verb; a choice to not be the passive recipient of whatever consensus view your consciousness and culture serves up. It is inquiry and means doing the creative work simultaneously within the subjective and objective poles of subjectmatter, aligning with the unfolding of reality and increasing it.

We experience that increase and alignment as flights of imagination and intuition, what feels right and attuned when we are directly in touch with the telos towards increasing life. It shows up as curiousity or insight, even bliss as the love for learning and truth. But also as struggle, a tug between the inertia of the minds and concepts we have, and the birth of true novelty that takes us outside the boundaries we previously drew.

Ok, time to end this ramble with a claim, a big bet if you will. I believe that applying the insights of process metaphysics and action protocols, the practice of aligning with unfolding, and learning boundary craft, may well be the right challenge, that in the process of learning will shape consciousness towards the service of increasing life. Only that aim will keep consciousness relevant and aligned with the telos of reality.

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Notes:

¹ From Cognition Everywhere: the Rise of the Cognitive Nonconscious and the Costs of Consciousness

² Gilbert Simondon coined the term “technophany” to describe a form of mediation allowing technology to be re-integrated into culture.

³ Reciprocal narrowing is a term coined by John Vervaeke, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. It refers to the phenomenon where our bodymind adapts to new experiences and environments by narrowing our cognitive focus to a singular object or goal. Addiction is an example of this.

⁴ A term coined by Bonnitta Roy. Protension replaces Whiteheads concept of prehension, which is the tendency of reality to 'feel' toward other entities and occasions and the move to unfold latency. Protension is a less anthropomorphic alternative than prehension argues Roy. It is akin to Husserl’s Protention: the mind’s tendency to project itself into the future to anticipate and pre-figure

⁵ Experienced meditators can witness this process and perceive the world as if it is flickering in and out of existence. I am not claiming that it in fact does. The discreet versus continuity debate is not settled. It can be phenomenologically true but ontologically false. More here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abhidharma/#EpiPerTheConPro

⁶Levin doesn’t like to use the word consciousness, so I respect his choice of words here and am sticking with cognition.

⁷In its quantum formulation at least, not the classical view. See the work of Chris Fields for a deeper understanding of this distinction.

⁸ In this interpretation, a Bodhisattva is simply a boundary artist - extending their horizon of care to all beings.

⁹ I make a distinction between Consciousness with a capital C, meaning the Consciousness as the basic stuff out of which the universe is made according to many panpsychists. God, Brahman, C.S Peirce’s. Firstness are some alternative ways to describe this ontological artefact. Small c consciousness is reserved for the waking state, our everyday awareness of things and self that disappears in deep sleep. In this article I am mostly speaking of the latter.