PROLOGUE

Being and Becoming

“We’ll live in the double helix of our children and their descendants forever.” -The teal lion

The Sun is overrated. There is nothing special about the Sun. There are billions and billions of other stars just like it. Its internal nuclear fusion engine converts matter into energy until its fuel is spent, just like all other stars. It will become a red giant engulfing earth, and finally an everlasting white dwarf. What is unique about the Sun is us; the fact that in its third orbiting planet, nature attained consciousness.

​What are we before our birth? A genetic probability. Just that? Yes, and we will continue to be until our number is up and our existence is realized, which does not just depend on us as individuals. We are beholden to the survival of our species. What is the beyond before our birth like? Fair. We all have the same chance of becoming emperors or paupers, beautiful or ugly, geniuses or borderline; in short, the genetic roulette has no bias or limit in time or space, unless as a species we cross into extinction. And after our death? A genetic probability. We are the concrete appearance of an abstract probability.

We live a very ephemeral material existence, nevertheless, if you are reading these notes, you are one of the lucky ones, you won the genetic lottery. The pressure of our biological clock and of life’s daily struggles prevent most of us to reflect on the power of abstract reality, that distinct marker of our being. These teal lion conversations are a personal reflection on the significance of the human brain, on evolution, culture and technology, on our relationship with time and the logic of change, and on the ultimate survival of our own species.

Our brain is both rational and empathic; personal and communal; opposed to but also an integral part of nature, a truly dialectical entity. It processes the raw sensory information into abstract concepts that can be clustered, segregated, shaped, transformed, and synthesized in order to predict the near future and to plan our response with a purpose in mind.

Time is in our frame of reference like a locomotive pulling a train, the “has been” and the “being” are pulled forward by the “will be”. The logic of change is thus the never-ending movement from certainty to probable and back to certainty where causality is the vector and randomness is the direction.

The dynamics of change moves from the accumulation of incremental changes to a new emergent reality, that is, from quantitative modifications to a qualitative transformation of the original system. The fusion of oxygen and hydrogen, two distinct elements, results in the appearance of the water molecule, a new reality.

A seed is no longer a seed the moment the bud is born, so is the bud the moment the blossom springs into life, and the blossom itself is no longer the moment the fruit becomes a reality. In Hegelian terms, the bud negates the seed to assert itself, so does the blossom with the bud and the fruit with the blossom. The cycle of life is fleeting, a continuous movement of being and becoming, a perennial affirmation and negation of reality.

Beauty is meant to be consumed and appreciated vicariously, that is, in the mind that contemplates it. This dependence on the other’s conceptual reality in opposition to our own makes abstract beauty a critical marker in the transformation of homo to sapiens and the dawn of culture. In the aesthetics of human evolution, the teal lion points out that awareness of the other’s existential reality changed the trajectory of our species’ adaptive capabilities from genetics to culture; a transformative new reality. This qualitative change in our evolutionary timescale sets us in a path of ever more control of nature and society, a precious gift that can also become our demise.

The humanoid upright walking posture freed the hands to create tools for their protection and sustenance that enhanced their ability to control their local environment. The evolutionary journey of the free hand to do ever more sophisticated work is the road map followed by the developing human brain. Tools’ development requires purpose, purpose requires anticipating a future use, and a future tense requires abstract reasoning.

The use of ever improving tools in the production process enhanced the productivity of the labor employed, thus creating sustainable recurring surpluses which over time became available to be exchanged in markets. The market clearance price is the concrete appearance of abstract labor at a particular time and place. Suppliers place market bids to fulfill an open demand and consumers purchase the bids they consider best fits. That is, a market price measures the monetary value of a best fit market bid at a specific time and place.

Best fit bids will attain the highest profit rates available while less optimal bids will fetch a lower or even negative profit rates. Bids, when successful, add value to the original invested inputs, thus enhancing capital accumulation which in turn further improves labor productivity, and so on.

Property rights are the legal linchpin at the core of all market bids. The concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands increases its availability; which, in turn, puts downward pressure on its rate of return, causing volatility in financial markets.

Why market bids? Market bids are the most efficient allocation of scarce resources when information is not fully available to plot a maximizing resource utilization curve of the means of production. In a world where information from all economic agents is readily available and actionable, market bids will become inefficient and will wither away.

Now that our labor productivity is reaching the abundance threshold, that is, the absence of scarcity, recurrent crisis of overproduction keeps us in the scarcity gravitational pull. This fundamental contradiction is the core conflict defining our epoch.

Markets’ influence will diminish as scarcity is conquered for an ever-increasing number of commodities. We can foresee a future where the supplying of humanity’s needs becomes a resource accounting and distribution algorithm on an artificial intelligence subroutine program. Free of want, humanity will walk a new historical path, and finally united, it will raise its gaze at the stars with renewed impetus.

DECONSTRUCTING ABSTRACT THOUGHT

Abstract Reasoning: A virtual approximation of reality

“Awareness of the future is what makes us humans.” -The teal lion

How do we know the universe?

The physical world precedes the birth of our species and the evolution of our conscience. We obtain information from our environment through our senses and our daily interactions, and then we cluster and process that information in order to act upon it and bend it to our will.

In other words, we create our own virtual reality, right?

Yes, our mind transforms the raw sensory information into abstract concepts which it can cluster, segregate, shape, transform, and synthesize in order to be able to predict the near future and to plan our response with a specific purpose in mind.

I see now, we are agents of change.

How do we know how close we are to the truth?

The predictive power of said truth on future events.

Is truth temporary?

Yes, always. The epistemological process ends with a new truth that will replace the previous paradigm if its predictive power is greater, and so on…

Does our virtual reality have a life of its own?

Yes, it has its own life and its own means of expression. The concept of a lion brings a lion to mind but is independent of the living being. In its abstract form, it can be a caricature, it can be colored purple, it can have feelings, and it can even speak.

And its own means of expression?

Yes, the human brain has evolved the capacity to establish logical benchmarks to identify and place a given phenomenon in space and time, as well as aesthetic patterns and mathematical and linguistic symbols to communicate it.

Is our present beholden to our past?

Yes and no. The past is accounting, a reality already lived and saved. The present, on the other hand, is a living staging area of the future and at the same time an entry into the ledger of the past. Our senses are always locking into the present the successful experiences of the past and the open possibilities of the near future; our virtual reality is thus, a forward-looking certainty.

I see, the past is accounting, the present is certain, and the future is probable, from almost certain to randomness.

Are animals aware of the future?

No. Animals live in an ever-recurring present, that’s why the architectural marvels of ants and bees are an exact copy of their last today.

Does awareness of the future define consciousness?

Yes. When there is no tomorrow, there is no consciousness, today’s actions have meaning in so far as they are projected into the future. Awareness of the future is what makes us humans.

Time is like a locomotive pulling a train, the “has been” and the “being” are pulled forward by the “will be”.

How does our virtual reality account for change?

Change, in its abstract form, is the dynamic interplay of opposite probabilities defining a given reality.

The accumulation of realized events over time makes ever more probable the transformation of discrete changes into a new quality, a change in the essence of reality.

The logic of change is the never-ending movement from certainty to probable and back to certainty.

What about the past?

The past is just memory accounting on how things actually happened, a summation of certainties which when combined with the certain present adds predictability to the probable future.

What is the most predictable outcome?

Recursive systems that recreate themselves across different spatial scales over and over in an ongoing feedback loop are the most predictable outcome, the almost certain probability of our virtual reality.

In recursive systems our virtual lion will always be a lion and not a tiger, as long as in each virtual iteration its fractal function remains stable.

Are neuron trees fractal?

Yes, as they are able to identify what is stable and what might not be going forward.

In the “Mandelbrot set”, the fractal function does not deviate when iterated, nevertheless, once a mutation is introduced to the original design that compromises the function stability, a change dynamic takes effect until a new stable function is established, and thus a new reality is born.

And natural selection?

Systems driven by recursion replicate successful designs with minimal effort, a most efficient outcome. Our universe, from galaxies, to coast lines, thunder bolts to snowflakes, seashells to leaves, and the design of our lungs and circulatory system, is fractal in nature. Life stumbles on the recursive base case by natural selection.

Fractal thinking?

Yes, our mind is able to pick novelty out of a visual field by zooming in and out to the exact level of detail and editing away all non-essentials. Our ability to attain the right level of abstraction is consistent with the high predictability of recursive systems.

How do random events become part of our virtual reality?

Random events are a fact of nature, they are change agents that when given a sufficient time scale, iteration after iteration, the highly improbable becomes probable, and at some point, certain.

Why things are the way they are now?

Causality (cause and effect) drives how nature works, its inner dynamics, the almost certain projection of the probable future; randomness is the least probable to the almost none. So, causality is the vector, and randomness is the direction.

Can you give me examples?

Yes. The evolutionary history of our planet would have been similar to that of Mars if the Earth and the Moon were not a binary planetary system that provided stability to the Earth’s rotational movement underpinning the retention of its atmosphere.

Similarly, a couple of major events changed the direction of the development of life on Earth and the evolution and ascendency of the human brain.

First, the cataclysmic disappearance of the big reptilians, a random event, opened the evolutionary door for the warm-blooded mammalians to step in.

Next, the incremental receding of the original African jungle habitat and the expansion of the African savannah as a result of climate change provided a causal avenue for the development of the human brain, from subsistence accounting to abstract reasoning.

The humanoid upright walking posture freed the hands to create tools for their protection and sustenance that enhanced their ability to control their local environment. The evolutionary journey of the free hand to do ever more sophisticated work is the road map followed by the developing human brain.

Tools’ development requires purpose, purpose requires anticipating a future use, and a future tense requires abstract reasoning.

Abstract Beauty or the Aesthetics of Human Evolution

“Acknowledging the other’s existential reality opened the doors to our own consciousness and to our humanity.” - The teal lion

The visual pathways in the brain lead to areas populated by neurons that “mirror”, that is, imitate the behavior of others, as though the observer was actually acting. Mirroring acknowledges a mind other than our own.

Mirroring another’s acts opened the door for empathy, imitation, and learning, the foundations of cultural evolution.

The human brain developed visual properties that originally specialized in promoting the survival of our species, such as grouping, isolating, deconstructing (peak shift), integrating, magnification (accentuation), minimization (attenuation), regularity, chaos, symmetry, and asymmetry.

These virtual spectrums display myriads of possibilities associated with the cultural concept of beauty. Furthermore, it also acts as a reinforcing loop enhancing the development of the visual pathways that sustain their architecture.

What is beauty?

Beauty is a cultural selection process aimed to reinforce those “mirror” pathways leading to self-awareness and introspection. Beauty is meant to be consumed and appreciated vicariously. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that is, in the mind that contemplates it.

This dependence on the other conceptual reality in opposition to our own makes abstract beauty a critical marker in the transformation of homo to sapiens and the dawn of culture.

Is nature neutral when it comes to beauty?

Yes. Nature has no concept of beauty, nevertheless, our virtual reality does.

Let’s start with grouping; the brain’s ability to paste together patterns and to fill in the blanks to discern fully developed contours.

Our brain is able to group patterns of similar brown squares scattered among the dissimilar greenish foliage to conceptually reconstruct a lion on the prowl. This economy of processing to quickly solve a visual puzzle with less than perfect information was highly successful as a critical survival skill in the African savannah.

Economy of processing?

Yes. Grouping and deconstructing are readily used in our virtual reality to move from probability to certainty, a very successful survival skill.

Patterns of colors that provide a similar sense of integration and oneness are a well-known aesthetic principle.

In Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the different tones of brown, yellow, green, as well as the red and blue accents are integrated in such a sensually pleasing manner as to make the whole canvas a powerful image of life, energy and vitality.

The opposite of grouping is isolation; our brain is able to zoom on the individual image by focusing on its borders. It discards the fuzzy original contour by sharpening the lines separating the tree from the forest, the same way a sketch provides an accurate portrait of the contours of a particular object.

The brain moves from the generic grouping to the individual sketching in a seamless efficient process. Furthermore, sketching is critical to image modular deconstructing since the now clearly defined borders can be manipulated to magnify a small set of properties that capture the essence of the isolated object in a few strokes.

These accentuated features move the identification process from the realm of probability to that of certainty. Peak shifts, as they are known in neuroscience, are the image fingerprints. Henri Matisse’s “Blue Nude” uses peak shifts to portrait the intrinsic beauty of the human female body with a few strokes (cutouts) of blue paint.

Peak shifts are a very sophisticated abstraction. When were we able to process it?

The artists responsible for the beautiful Chauvet Cave paintings used peak shifted sketches to leave a vivid portrait of the essence of life as humans experienced it 30,000 years ago. Lions, mammoths, bison, rhinos, and other animals are deconstructed and sketched using their image fingerprints with such precision as that used by Picasso in his “Don Quixote” drawing, where the painter, in an economy of strokes, is able to evoke the essence of the novel’s fictional characters; the slightly deranged knightly figure and that of his squire Sancho, in the middle of an empty field full of allegorical windmills.

Boundary accentuation and boundary attenuation are dialectical visual opposites moving our visual perspective from panoramic to zooming and back effortlessly. Our mind is able to pick novelty out of a visual field by zooming in and out to the exact level of detail and editing away all non-essentials. Similarly, symmetry is a desirable feature of boundary accentuation and individuality while asymmetry is a preferred feature of boundary attenuation.

Impressionism is the conscious elimination of boundaries focusing instead on scene content and scene detail. Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” is an example of the premeditated blurring of individual boundaries through the use of a color palette to accentuate the whole. Accentuation of boundaries is also a powerful seductive visual image; Raphael’s painting “La Fornarina” is a beautiful example of the “belle donne”, where there is an emphasis on the accentuation of female forms.

The Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst uses chiaroscuro (light-shadow) contrasting to accentuate the female figure on his rendering of “The Matchmaker”, a magnificent piece. The Spanish painter Diego Velázquez captures in a few masterful strokes the keen individual gaze of his enslaved assistant Juan de Pareja, a feat of beauty that rendered the portrait one for the ages.

Our visual preference for scene orderliness and predictability contrasts with the strong suspicion we hold for unexplained coincidences, such a dichotomy promotes an unstable balance between regularity and chaos.

So, imagination is essential to our humanity, right?

Yes. The virtual manipulation of natural image properties such as light, dimensions, colors, volumes, figures, distances, perspectives, and so on, has given us classics, chiaroscuros, cubists, impressionists, surrealists, abstract, and figurative painters among others.

The aesthetic of human evolution, that fantastic feat of imagination, was forged in the primeval cauldron of genetic adaptation through the natural selection of “mirror” neurons.

Acknowledging the other’s existential reality opened the doors to our group consciousness and to our humanity, thus changing the trajectory of our species’ evolution from genetics to culture. This qualitative change in our evolutionary timescale set us in a path of ever more control of nature and society, a precious gift that can also become our demise.

Abstract labor and the market clearance price

“Price is the concrete appearance of abstract labor at a particular time and place.” -The teal lion

Nature is blind to value.

One trout in the river has absolutely no economic value, one trout in the fisherman’s basket has a price in the local fish market because now it has both value in use and value in exchange.

The trout in the fisherman’s basket has value in use when the fisherman chooses to consume it. The work done in such a closed producer-consumer loop has no value in exchange and thus no relative valuation is required.

The trout in the fisherman’s basket has both value in use and value in exchange when the fisherman decides to bring it to the local fish market for others to consume it, a surplus good for sale, a commodity.

I see, only surplus goods for sale must have a relative valuation in order to be exchanged, right? Yes. Commodities are goods that are produced solely to be exchanged, and thus are subject to relative valuation. How will it work in real life?

If the fisherman decides to exchange its surplus production for, let’s say, venison with the hunter, then a relative valuation is in order.

How do the fisherman and the hunter agree on an exchange rate?

They must consider the relative abundance of the natural resources to be exchanged and the relative ability of both fisherman and hunter to meet market demand.

The fisherman and hunter are both producers and consumers of each other’s surplus goods and as such very familiar with the local market economic markers to be considered in order to establish the relative exchange rate.

How does concrete labor become abstract labor?

Work that’s done in an open producer-consumer loop becomes abstract labor the moment the market bidding process starts to establish an exchange rate between consumers and suppliers based on value equivalency; the equal exchange of applied labor. Value equivalency occurs at the market clearance price.

What is capital?

Capital goods embody labor done in the past and saved for use in the future as a labor-saving tool. Capital goods when applied to the production process enhance the productivity of labor. Capital goods can be bought and sold as a commodity, a right, a stock, or even an option.

How is value equivalency measured?

Through the use of universal equivalents. Value was initially measured using known local goods as universal equivalents, e.g., cows, cocoa, shells, or others.

These original equivalents tended to be cumbersome to divide and transport and soon were replaced by precious metals, such as gold and silver for their value density, divisibility and high portability.

All commodity-based universal value equivalents are concrete measures of value by their very nature, including currency based on the gold standard. Paper money based on the gold standard is just a printed paper representation of gold as the universal equivalent.

Fiat money, currency detached from the gold standard, is an abstract representation of value. Fiat money displaced all commodity based universal equivalents as a best fit measure of economic value to close the universal equivalent historical cycle.

How did markets become global?

The use of ever improving tools in the production process enhanced the productivity of the labor employed, thus creating sustainable recurring surpluses that over time became available to be exchanged in markets.

Market places were initially very limited geographically and insignificant vis-a-vis the bulk of economic activities for thousands of years. They grew in size and influence with the growth of agriculture and commodity production until they displaced all pre-capitalist economic activities and became universal. Labor and capital are also freely exchanged in global markets as commodities.

What does a concrete market price measure?

The market clearance price is the concrete appearance of applied abstract labor at a particular time and place. Suppliers place market bids to fulfill an open demand and consumers purchase the bids they consider best fits.

Consumers and producers settle on a price that covers a specific combination of applied labor (capital and labor power) and a profit rate.

That is, a market price measures the monetary value of a best fit market bid at a specific time and place.

Best fit bids will attain the highest profit rates available while less optimal bids will fetch a lower or even negative profit rates. Bids, when successful, add value to the original invested inputs, thus enhancing capital accumulation, which in turn further improves labor productivity, and so on.

The core dynamics of a market economy places applied labor efficiency on steroids flooding global markets with ever improved and less costly commodities.

Why market bids?

Market bids are the most efficient allocation of scarce resources when information is not fully available to plot a maximizing resource utilization curve of the means of production. Property rights are the legal linchpin at the core of all market bids. The dynamics of capital lead to capital concentrating on fewer and fewer hands, increasing its supply; which, in turn, puts downward pressure on the rate of return and exacerbates the intensity of the biddings. In a world where information from all economic agents is readily available and actionable, market bids will become inefficient and will wither away.

What is a crisis of overproduction?

The daily fight to overcome scarcity has defined our existence up to now, humanity has toiled to provide for its most fundamental needs with ever more powerful tools. Our productive capacity today is able to reach the abundance threshold and cover the total demand for an increasing number of commodities.

However, in a market economy overproduction occurs when suppliers overrun the effective demand, that is, the demand of those consumers willing and able to pay the market price.

When a market enters an overproduction crisis, producers are sent a strong signal to drastically reduce output, even though whole populations remain unprovided.

A sabotage of the abundance threshold?

Yes, a market crisis of overproduction is a legal sabotage of society’s productive capacity; the result of an economy based on profits.

Now that our labor productivity is reaching the abundance threshold, that is, the absence of scarcity, recurrent crisis of overproduction keeps us in the scarcity gravitational pull. This fundamental contradiction is the core conflict defining our epoch.

Where is capitalism headed?

The impact of robotics and artificial intelligence on the growth of applied labor productivity will be a qualitative change in the productive capacity of humanity. However, the massive displacement of labor will have a restrictive effect on effective demand. In other words, the closer we get to the threshold of abundance, the more restrictive the effective demand will be, and therefore the greater the frequency of crises of overproduction.

The enormous inequality in the distribution of wealth is directly related to the instability of financial markets and social anxiety. Significant taxes on wealth will reduce their concentration and provide revenue to maximize investments in public goods, in the promotion of education, human welfare and development, and in environmental protection.

Markets’ influence will diminish as scarcity is conquered for an ever-increasing number of commodities.

We can foresee a future where the supplying of humanity’s needs becomes a resource accounting and distribution algorithm on an artificial intelligence subroutine program.

Free of want, humanity will walk a new historical path and, finally united, it will raise its gaze at the stars with renewed impetus.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXISTENCE

Time and the Logic of Change

“Nature’s adaptive randomness is time consuming; human adaptive creativity is time busting.” -The teal lion

In the beginning there was matter and antimatter, electrons and positrons. Millionths of a second latter quarks aggregated to create protons and neutrons, and within minutes they combined to usher on nuclei.

Einstein’s formula tells us that it takes a huge amount of energy to create a small amount of matter, thus the bang required to create the known universe must have been really big.

Three hundred and eighty thousand years after its birth, the universe expanded and cooled enough for conditions to be ripe for the formation of stable atomic bonds to create the known universe more than fourteen billion years ago.

Hydrogen, the first natural complex system was born. The hydrogen atom was ready to do what natural systems do, engage their environment.

In the core of stars, hydrogen atoms fused at high temperatures and under massive pressures to create helium, a highly stable atom. These two elements make up 99.9 percent of the known matter in the universe. System’s complexity increased as heavier elements were forged deep in the first stars and the periodic table of the elements began to be filled. Organized matter became a reality.

What are these complex systems?

Complex systems are open, adaptive material entities that populate the universe. They are everywhere, from simple elements to molecules to galaxies, from physical systems to cultural ones, from unicellular animals to humans.

Do they have a functional structure?

Yes. Complex systems consist of inflow, stocks (main body), outflow and feedback loops. What are their core functions?

Connectivity and adaptability are the core functionalities of complex systems.

How does it work?

System’s stock, its main frame, process incoming flows, capture their energy, and out process what is left as waste. They are also in charge of system stability by acting as shock absorbers when its change dynamics is detrimental to its survival.

How does it know that?

System’s feedback loops.

These feedback loops relay final outcome information that enhances system’s response to the local environment in terms of connectivity and adaptive capabilities.

How are adaptive capabilities developed?

The interplay of forces at the margin drives connectivity and the availability of novel adaptive solutions to evergreen challenges posed by the local environment.

Complex systems’ diversity begets robustness by providing a higher number of most probable solutions to nature’s riddles and societal needs.

Can you provide an example of this interplay?

Oxygen’s balancing energy loop on the lookout to fill the two empty spots available in its outer electron orbit to attain valance neutrality, attracted and fused with two hydrogen atoms to usher into existence the water molecule with its emergent wetness quality, a precursor of life.

What are emergent qualities?

Emergent qualities are the appearance of a new, qualitatively different reality. They are a self-organized phenomenon of complex systems, such as wetness in water, the division of labor in society, or consciousness in homo sapiens.

How does a new reality show up?

The dynamics of change moves from the accumulation of incremental changes to a new emergent reality, that is, from quantitative modifications to a qualitative transformation of the original system. The fusion of oxygen and hydrogen, two distinct elements, results in the appearance of the water molecule, a new reality.

So, dialectics is the logic of evolution, the logic of change. Right?

Yes. A seed is no longer a seed the moment the bud is born, so is the bud the moment the blossom springs into life, and the blossom itself is no longer the moment the fruit becomes a reality.

In Hegelian terms, the bud negates the seed to assert itself, so does the blossom with the bud and the fruit with the blossom.

The cycle of life is fleeting, a continuous movement of being and becoming, a perennial affirmation and negation of reality.

It took billions of years for life to first appear on Earth as microbes some 3.7 billion years ago. Bacteria that used the Sun’s energy evolved 2.4 billion years ago; multicellular life some 800 million years ago; plants 470 million years ago; and land animal at least 420 million years ago.

Mammals evolved in the shadows of the dinosaurs 210 million years ago; primates first appeared in fossil records some 55 million years ago; homo habilis evolved in Africa 2 million years ago, and finally; homo sapiens did so 300 thousand years ago.

A biological system’s dominant feedback loop determines its progression, that is, its birth, growth, maturity and final demise.

Nature, by selecting the fittest, encourages biological changes that sustain adaptation to the local environment and the species’ survival.

Is sexual reproduction a change agent?

Yes. Sexual reproduction draws upon the genetic stock of a whole species to present novel adaptive alternatives at the margin. Survival rests on the species’ ability to connect and adapt promptly to its local environment.

Why does natural selection require such a long timeframe?

When adaptive capabilities depend on ramdon variations and time is not an issue, the possibilities are endless. Nature’s adaptive randomness is time consuming.

How about cultural creative systems?

Cultural systems, on the other hand, are driven by the creativity of our minds through technological innovations. Viable innovations are the product of humanity’s collective brain ability to connect and adapt.

Can you expand on the subject?

Fire, its management and utilization, was the first innovation that changed the course of human history some 1.7 million years ago. Nevertheless, it took hundreds of thousands of years before the introduction of agriculture and animal husbandry impacted human society in a similar manner by providing the material conditions for the development of writing and the dawn of civilization.

The printing press that made knowledge accessible on a mass scale for the first time came thousands of years afterwards. The steam engine that propelled the industrial revolution needed only hundreds of years. And the telegraph that made communications on a global scale a reality took just decades, as did electricity; an epoch defining innovation.

How about the latest innovations?

The scientific revolution and the economic utilization of modern applied science have accelerated the pace of sophisticated emergent technologies. Massive public investments in basic science and cutting-edge technology have provided the momentum required to successfully imbed in the global economic cycle such a transformative leap forward.

Nuclear fission gave us nuclear power; the application of quantum mechanics gave us lasers, electron microscopes, magnetic resonance imaging devices and the components used in computer hardware. Genetics’ advances have given us for the first time the ability to edit life’s operating manual. Information technologies provide us with ever faster processing speed and growing storage capabilities.

These recurrent quantitative changes have brought us today to a new quality; nuclear fusion, genetic editing, and artificial intelligence. These three transformative emergent innovations will alter human society in a profound way.

Nuclear fusion and genetic editing are scientific breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences respectively; artificial intelligence (AI) is an emergent quality of advances in information technologies.

What is natural intelligence?

Natural intelligence is our virtual reality, our consciousness always interacting with the local environment and the universe. Our brain has a limited storage and computing capacity prone to information overloads that will diminish both our concentration and contemplation abilities, a negative drawback; thus, moving information storage and computing capacity to peripheral technologies is of the essence.

What is artificial intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence uses language to codify and store huge quantities of historical knowledge that it can then retrieve with ever faster processing speeds to respond to our virtual queries. AI is an extension of our brain, a highly sophisticated tool at our disposal.

What is AI’s emergent quality?

AI has the ability to quickly access vast amounts of historical knowledge, search for all available options, and provide best fit solutions to our queries; a valuable emergent technology.

Can AI adapt to the universe as our brain does?

No. AI’s adaptive capabilities are limited to its data base, its past. AI is blind to random events that are not yet in its data base. AI does not have a sense of the other. A codified data base is unable “to mirror” another.

How about innovations in productive capacity?

Exchange, the trade of goods between groups, draws upon the history of comparative advantages to promote the global division of labor. Robotics and artificial intelligence-controlled processes will shoot labor productivity up to levels unheard of. Atomic fusion will make energy clean, plentiful, and cheap. Finally, gene-editing will enhance carbon-free food production, wipe out hunger, and eliminate human suffering as we know it, making life longer lasting and way more pleasurable.

Are we at an inflection point?

Yes. These feedback loops are at the core of humanity’s creative palette that sustains and pushes forward ever shrinking timeframes that are now churning emergent technological innovations at a breakneck speed.

Human adaptive creativity is time busting.

The limits of consciousness

“Preserving life is the only condition that is inherent to humanity.” -The teal lion

The Sun is overrated. What is unique about the Sun is us; the fact that in its third orbiting planet, nature attained consciousness.

It took some time to do so though…

Yes, billions of years.

We are newborns, aren’t we?

Of course, and suckling mother nature for our survival.

What are we before our birth?

A genetic probability.

Just that?

Yes, and we will continue to be until our number is up and our existence is realized, which does not just depend on us as individuals. We are beholden to the survival of our species.

What is the beyond before our birth like?

Fair. We all have the same chance of becoming emperors or paupers, beautiful or ugly, geniuses or borderline; in short, the genetic roulette has no bias or limit in time or space, unless as a species we cross into extinction.

And after our death?

A genetic probability. We are the concrete appearance of an abstract probability.

Why don’t we care about the beyond before our birth?

Because we are as yet not aware of our existence. God feeds on our existential insecurities.

What is life?

We can say that life is the opposite of the inert, an additional degree of complexity of nature, the basic formula of which is the periodic table of the elements.

Life has its own operating manual. Living entities compute the inherited codified genetic information during their life cycle and pass it on to the next generation.

And conscious life?

Conscious life is a qualitative change of nature. It is the moment in which matter became aware of itself.

Are we special?

Yes and no. Yes, because in our brain, matter negated itself, and became conscious. No, because said qualitative transformation was and is a natural process on our planet, as it can be in others.

What if we’re alone?

In the scale of billions, the improbable becomes certain; it took more than 14 billion years in our case, half the lifespan of our universe. We don’t know how that compares to the average. As far as we know, we may be the most precocious.

Is there life after death?

Yes, through the expansion of our genetic pool. The species is what matters not the individual.

Eve, the first human Mom was an African woman. She claimed an erotic life independent of her ovulation cycle; her sexual fantasies broke the reproductive determinism of the animal kingdom and defined the beginning of our species.

Were we close to extinction then?

Yes. Our species originated in the south of Africa with a very limited genetic pool, nevertheless, thanks to sexual reproduction and mobility, it needed only a few million years to acquire the enormous genetic diversity it has today. Our ancestors attained escape velocity and were able to leave their birth continent to conquer and populate the planet, a feat of survival.

Is life just a recurrent cycle?

Yes and no. The cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, and death is recurrent but not always the same given that the genetic clay can mutate and give rise to quantitative changes that can spawn a new reality.

How do we get to know the universe?

The physical world is independent of our consciousness. Our virtual reality is built by praxis, a process of evergreen approximations.

A virtual reality of our own, right?

Yes. Abstract reality once captured can be manipulated at will.

How do we know how close we are to reality?

Praxis corroborates the predictive power of our virtual reality on future events.

Is our virtual reality temporary?

Yes. The paradigm with the higher predictive power is always chosen.

Is our virtual reality opposed to nature?

Yes. It has a life of its own, it’s handy and personal. Nature is the opposite, rigid and timeless; the universe is stubborn. In the romance languages the moon is a lady to whom poets dedicate romantic overtures, and at the same time, it is an arid, crater-filled satellite.

Are we aware of others like us?

Yes, our brain’s executive function is able to identify a mind out there. Concepts of beauty, imitation, language, and a moral compass are hardwired in our brain structure. The concept of the blank sheet is a myth.

How so?

Our brain is both rational and empathic; personal and communal; opposed to but also an integral part of nature, a truly dialectical entity. Language is innate to the human brain in the same way that web building is innate to a spider brain. It’s architecture and oral expression are universal.

Our brain is born still immature for natural reasons; its development will require more than a million new connections per second during the first five years of life. Furthermore, it will also need a few more years of maturity to discern and judge. Finally, it will take 25 years to reach full maturity.

Are we born free?

Freedom is relative. We don’t choose our parents when we’re born, nor do we choose our family, our nationality, our culture, or our language. We are born into it.

From the very beginning of our life, the process of indoctrination to which we are subjected is brutal and is meant to give us an identity that binds us to the tribe.

How strong are these bindings?

Cultural ties are so strong that they fill large portions of our ego and make up the totality of our super-ego.

Are we manipulated by the tribe from the start?

Yes. Our virtual reality, by its very nature, can be influenced and manipulated. Cultural indoctrination is a claim that our group has special qualities, usually superior, vis-à-vis other groups.

Is group cohesiveness natural?

Yes. It was essential for the survival of our species.

What specifically?

It provides us a group identity and a sense of belonging.

Do we have free will?

Yes, within our cultural indoctrination. We are ever constrained by the impositions of that straitjacket.

And an ingrained fear of the other?

Yes. Tribal indoctrination instills fear of the other as a defensive mechanism of the tribe survival that has made us prone to recurrent orgies of brutality, and destruction.

Does the universe have a purpose?

No, the universe does not have a purpose. The universe just is.

And living beings?

Yes, to propagate the species. Preserving life is the only condition that is inherent to humanity.

And us as individuals?

Yes. Only as individuals we do have goals in life beyond our own survival and therefore free will in their pursuit.

Does living with others limit our free will?

Yes. Social harmony is predicated upon the principle of respect to the right of others.

That is, turning the other cheek?

No. That is avoiding the slap altogether. Our freedom stops at the border of the other’s personal private integrity.

A freedom of the commons?

Yes, a regulated freedom of the commons for all its citizens that affirms life, liberty and the pursue of happiness to all.

And a right to privacy?

Yes. An unregulated personal private space where our individuality and personal integrity are off limits of the commons.

It looks like two opposite moral compasses?

No. The relationship between a regulated commons where our freedoms are limited in order to live in communitarian harmony and a personal private free space where the commons is off limits and we can fully be ourselves is dialectical in nature.

A permanent tension between the commons and the individual?

Yes. The autonomy of both the public and of the private sphere are fundamental social opposites of life in a free society.

We face the universe and our own virtual reality alone and vulnerable. We begin communicating and developing language abilities, imitating and learning established codes of conduct necessary to protect the integrity of life itself. We stand as equals when interacting with our peers as free-standing individual’s worth at being considered in their own right. However, we become part of the tribe when we are faced with the requirements of everyday life, a heavy but unavoidable burden. Ethical principles are intended to protect the integrity of the public sphere.

What is the relationship between politics and the commons?

Politics is the exercise of power within the defined boundaries of the public sphere. Political majorities must not only respect the established boundaries of the commons but must also rule providing avenues for effective dissent, that is, those in power have the ethical imperative to ascertain that power can be legally contested.

I see, any monopoly of power is by definition unethical, right?

Yes. No faction should be trusted with unchecked authority. The legitimate exercise of power must protect human dignity, individual privacy, and the fundamental rights of those temporarily out of power.

Why have we become alienated from society?

Powerlessness. Our ever-growing inability to control the economic and social forces that impact our survival.

The profit motive overrules for the vast majority the predictability of survival. Furthermore, capital systemic, unsustainable growth dynamics stretches to the breaking point the ecological limits of the planet.

Has this alienation become existential?

Yes. We feel vulnerable when we have no control of our environment and frantically search for an alter-ego that would offer protection, something like an almighty placebo.

Paradise?

Yes, the conceptual underpinning of paradise is the virtual reality of a conflict free, forever harmonious, worry-free abstraction.

And in the real world?

Our social reality is bogged down in fundamental contradictions that keep us on the verge of existential collapse. At a time of exponential creative boom that brings us closer to the threshold of abundance, our economic rules of the game tie us to the ghost of scarcity. Furthermore, in the middle of an ecological crisis that points to the heart of our survival as a species, our rules of the political game tie us to the ghost of hatred. In a moment of existential crisis, we take refuge in the tribe and in the darkest part of our consciousness, a contradiction that bring us to the limits of consciousness.

Rudderless, humanity is navigating powerful forces without a plan nor destination, and we as individuals have been forced back to survival mode. No one is coming to our rescue, we are on our own. The universe is blind to us.

EPILOGUE

An existential crossroad

“We are everything the universe is not, aware; the universe is everything we are not, timeless.” -The teal lion

Are we at an existential crossroad?

Yes. Our species will perish if we commit ecological suicide either by action or by omission. There is not planet B.

Can you elaborate?

Yes. We might perish in a nuclear Armageddon. We are still not out of the woods; the probabilities of a self-inflicted apocalypse are still high.

In addition, we remain oblivious to the fact that the current trajectory of global warming points to a catastrophic denouement; a Venus-type runaway greenhouse effect maelstrom.

What are we to do?

Right now, we must push hard to develop technological options to quickly reduce the current level of carbon in the atmosphere and that of future carbon emissions produced as a result of human activities. Achieving a stable atmospheric equilibrium will require a steady flow of public funding over the coming years in order to provide the space necessary to achieve interplanetary mobility.

How do we attain escape velocity?

We must shatter our existential insecurities and wean ourselves of our solar dependency.

Wean ourself of our solar dependency, how?

Exercising control of nuclear fusion will give us an avenue to exit our solar dependent cocoon.

Really?

Yes. Remember how cowed humanity was before gaining control of fire? Well, that’s how we are now, afraid to challenge the cosmos.

Our solar cocoon was a vital one but one we have outlived. Control of nuclear fusion will end our solar dependency, a new reality.

A transformative technological leap that will provide us a real chance of escaping our birth planet and attain interplanetary, and with time, interstellar mobility. A survival feat beyond the divine.

Is the universe timeless?

We are everything the universe is not, aware. The universe is everything we are not, timeless. Timelessness is relative. For a female Mayfly whose lifespan is five minutes, ours is timeless, thus for us so is the universe. Our universe is young, teeming with energy and full of vitality, nevertheless, everything that has a beginning must have an end.

Order requires energy; thus, as long as the universe is expanding orderly complex systems will populate it. Once the energy of the big bang is spent, entropy, the natural tendency to greater disorder will prevail and the universe, as we know it, will cease to exist. At the very end, it will be full of motionless elementary particles, pitch black, soundless, and cold, just like a colossal sarcophagus.

So, that’s it?

Well, it depends…

It depends on what?

On the total amount of matter. Repulsion forces produced the big bang and the current expansion we are in, attraction (gravitational) forces will do the opposite if enough matter is present in the end to reach a tipping point and initiate a universal contraction, a big crunch.

I see. Never a dull moment.

IE González, Tampa, August 27th, 2023 New expanded edition of the original text.

APPENDIX

Dialectics of Nature

“Life is the drive to persist, to oppose the general entropy of the universe.” -The teal lion

The physical world is impermanent and, at the margins, uncertain.

At the very beginning, the Singularity was no longer. It negated itself the moment the microwave background radiation signaled the unfolding of space-time.

Our universe is a process-centered reality with a past, a present, and a future at any given moment. The past is accounting, the present is certain, and the future is probable, from almost certain to randomness. Change is the dynamics interplay of opposite probabilities defining a given reality.

Reality has agency on the present where competing probable outcomes framed by their physical or biological constrains can either remain the same, change quantitatively, or evolve a new reality, a change in quality.

Organized matter became a reality when the strong nuclear force glued together positrons, quarks, and neutrons to usher in atomic nuclei as the universe cool a bit after its formation. Once positive charged nuclei were present, electromagnetic forces pulled negative charged electrons to their orbits to attain electromagnetic equilibrium, that is, charge neutrality. Hydrogen, the first atomic element, was born.

Clauds of hydrogen atoms quickly formed and filled the primal world. These massive formations grew ever larger, reaching a tipping point and collapsing under their own gravitational pull to give rise to the first generation of stars.

The newly formed stars began their celestial life cycle by turning on their nuclear fusion engines. Hydrogen atoms, their atomic fuel, were smashed into Helium, emitting as a byproduct energy in the form of photons. Millions of suns sprang up. The universe’s lights were now on.

The first generation of stars matured and burned their hydrogen fuel until it was exhausted. In the throes of death, they created in a flurry and dispersed onto the universe, sometimes violently, the remaining natural elements of the periodic table.

Star dust negated itself an became organized matter, an emergent physical reality.

In the stellar cauldron, the strong nuclear force controls all nuclear fusion processes and its corresponding energy emissions; on the other hand, the weak nuclear force uses radioactive nuclear decay to bring into natural equilibrium unusually unstable heavy nuclei.

Furthermore, the electromagnetic force keeps elements on a charge neutral steady state; and its valence algorithm control the combining power of all elements through chemical bond formation. Lastly, the gravitational force tells matter how to move once matter has curved space-time.

These four natural forces, once established, are the grids that support the movement of matter and energy in the universe, its laws of motion.

Physics set; the universe transitioned to chemistry.

Elements combined through chemical bonding in order to attain valence neutrality giving birth to chemical compounds, an emergent new reality. Thus, oxygen and hydrogen, when bonded, ushered in the water molecule (H2O) with its emergent wetness quality, a precursor of life. Similarly, carbon when bonded with hydrogen ushered in the methane molecule (CH4), and when bonded with oxygen the carbon dioxide one (CO2).

Carbon abundance and bonding capabilities made it a precursor of life on Earth. A high valence chemical element, carbon had the ability to make single, double, and triple bonds. Furthermore, carbon could string together long, complex, highly stable compounds able to store and process information. Bonding complexity is path determined (bonding choices) and cumulative in time. Bonding complexity has grown from a handful of pairings, as is the case of the water molecule, to sixty bonding pairings and up, as is the case of highly complex proteins.

Uranium was also an abundant element during the formation of our planet. These heavy elements are prone to radioactive nuclear decay (nuclear fission), a source of highly concentrated energy. This energy, when combined with water, ushered in primeval geysers. The energy output of such radioactive geysers propelled the chemistry of life into existence.

Chemistry transition to biology.

Life is the drive to persist, to oppose the general entropy of the universe.

Cells are the foundation of all living organisms. They are made up of long, complex information driven organic compounds organized inside a tangible material boundary that keeps out the external world. Cells regularly update an evergreen model of the local environment through feedback channels.

Cells as living organism have agency; they are autonomous complex systems organized to process energy efficiently in order to sustain themselves.

Adaptation is pathway determined; it entails choosing successful changes. The natural art of choosing has three components: pattern recognition, judgements, and decision making. This natural process is embedded in all living organisms as an innate quality of its agency, that is, of its biological intelligence.

Movement is a goal oriented spatial displacement designed to reposition the living entity onto a more advantageous setting. Behavior is a pattern of movements executed as an innate response to recurrent local environmental conditions.

Evolution packs causal potential into life. The cycle of life is fleeting, a continuous movement of being and becoming, a perennial affirmation, and negation of reality.

Single cells with no internal specialization (prokaryotic) provided the original cellular blueprint. Prokaryotic bacteria pioneered both the use of enzymes (proteins that speed up chemical reactions) and that of sunlight (photosynthesis) in order to feed itself. These primal cells evolved mitochondria and latter on semi-specialized organelles to enhance energy throughput processing (eukaryotic).

Mitochondria is a bacteria induced adaptation, a symbiotic partnership (horizontal gene transfer) deployed to enhance an eukaryotic cell’s ability to tackle an ecological niche. Chloroplast, the organelle that contains the photosynthetic pigment chlorophyll in plants cells, is also a bacteria induced genetic entanglement. Eukaryotic cells evolved into multicellular organisms with the same genome (fungi, algae).

Plants use chlorophyll and sunlight to photosynthesize glucose and oxygen out of water and carbon dioxide. A symbiotic relationship between fungi and seaweed (algae) made possible the proliferation of plant species on land, a precursor of animal life on the Earth surface.

Fungi release enzymes to break down and absorb soil minerals such as phosphorus that it can exchange for host plants’ organic carbon compounds. Fungi have developed vast roots entanglements (wood wide network) able to transport carbon, minerals and water from areas of abundance to those of scarcity. Fungi have also synthesized powerful mind-altering biochemical substances to gain control of host insects. Fungi can feed, kill, or hallucinate us. Multicellular organism with the same genome further promoted the division of labor and evolved highly specialized functions (tissues, neurons, organs). Life scaled up its structure giving rise to more complex organism that required ever greater efficiency, organization, and control (sexual reproduction, senses, neurons, backbone, brain). These quantitative transformations led to a new quality; sentient life.

The cataclysmic disappearance of the big reptilians, a random event, opened the evolutionary door to the warm-blooded mammalians. An explosion of new life replenished the planet’s former animal exuberance. Climatic changes caused the African jungle to recede and the savanna to expand, enticing an evolutionary line of the big apes to descend from the trees, walk upright, and free their hands. The journey of the free hand to do ever more sophisticated work was the evolutionary roadmap followed by the developing human brain.

Caloric budgeting (calories in/out balance sheet) and body homeostasis regulation take a big chunk of our brain’s capacity just to keep us alive and functioning.

A genetic mutation 10 million years ago gave us the ability to digest certain alcohols. This mutation opened up a whole new caloric reservoir since now we were able to eat the fermented fruit fallen from the trees and scattered on the African savanna, thus enhancing our survival prospects.

In the meantime, female ovulation cycles became fully detached from the mammalians’ sexual heat drive, giving human sexuality agency. Eve’s erotic fantasies gave her both sexual autonomy and a virtual, abstract reality. She was now self-aware.

The universe is dull and silent, colored a cosmic latte. Sounds and colors are a construe of our senses and of our brain on the basis of differences in air pressure or sunlight wave frequency, respectively. They exist as such only in our virtual reality. The universe’s beauty is our abstraction.

Chemical bonds have a symbiotic relationship with the brain through the senses of smell and taste. Sensory cells located in the nose are able to identify chemical bonds and transmit that information to the olfactory centers of the brain where they are classified as odors.

Our sense of taste was always biased in favor of those local flavors that packed the most calories, such as glucose and fats. Tasting is to food what music is to sound, and writing is to language, a learned skill.

Emotions, on the other hand, are culture specific conceptual mappings of defined behaviors; a learned construe use as a short hand for human mood communication.

Beauty is meant to be consumed and appreciated vicariously, that is, in the mind that contemplates it. This dependence on the other’s conceptual reality in opposition to our own makes abstract beauty a critical marker in the transformation of homo to sapiens and the dawn of culture.

Acknowledging the other’s existential reality opened the doors to our group consciousness and to our humanity, thus changing the trajectory of our species’ evolution from genetics to culture.

This qualitative change in our evolutionary timescale set us in a path of ever more control of nature. Tool’s development requires purpose, purpose requires anticipating a future use, and a future tense requires abstract reasoning.

As free agents, humans are able to modify nature’s own constrains through the application of technological tools, enhancing the degrees of freedom available to them at any given time.

Biology transitioned to culture.