Do we have an appetite for transcendence?

I've been working on a long rambling post on finding meaning in the flow and evolution of the cosmos rather than in the varied anthropomorphic religions that many cultures have invented.  My motivation to 'find meaning' is not that high, because the quest itself is a human invention derived from assuming the universe was made for us.  I find Paul Bloom in his recent Substack post "Is there a God-shaped hole?" has made a better statement of my position than I could.  I recommend that you read it.  

What are humans for? - AI Forces a Question We’ve Been Dodging

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AI Is Already Fusing With Us — The Only Question Is How

The argument about whether AI will enhance or diminish our our humanity usually starts in the wrong place. People argue about what AI should do before asking a more basic and uncomfortable question: what are humans for?

Every powerful technology embeds an answer to that question. AI is no exception. In fact, it may be the most consequential case yet, because AI is not just a tool we use—it is a system that increasingly co-thinks with us, shapes our attention, edits our language, nudges our choices, and quietly rewires our sense of agency.

We are not facing a future of humans versus machines. We are already living in a world of human–machine fusion.

The real issue is not whether this fusion will happen. It is what kind of fusion it will be.

There Is No Such Thing as “Human Values”

Much of the public discussion of AI ethics rests on a fantasy: that “human values” exist as a coherent, global, agreed-upon set of principles that AI can be aligned with.

They don’t.

Value, purpose, and meaning are social constructions. They vary radically across cultures, religions, and political systems—and they always have. What one society calls a meaningful life, another calls wasted. What one treats as sacred, another treats as irrelevant or dangerous.

There is no global agreement on what humans are for. Expecting a worldwide technology like AI to be guided by a single, shared vision of human purpose is naïve at best, dishonest at worst.

There Will Be Many AIs, Just as There Are Many Religions

Because there is no single answer to what humans are for, there will be no single AI.

There will be many forms of AI, each reflecting the values—explicit or implicit—of the cultures, institutions, and power structures that create them. Some will be optimized for surveillance, compliance, and efficiency. Others will be built to extend memory, imagination, and self-understanding.

In blunt terms: some AIs will enslave us; others could help liberate us.

The enslaving versions will treat humans as components to be managed—predictable, optimizable, correctable. Friction will be treated as inefficiency. Deviance as error. Interior life as noise.

The liberating versions will function as prostheses for the mind—tools that expand rather than replace human capacities. They will support reflection rather than manipulation, agency rather than control, curiosity rather than conformity.

The difference is not technical. It is philosophical.

AI as Prosthesis vs. AI as Manager

We already accept prostheses for the body—glasses, hearing aids, pacemakers—because they restore or extend human function without claiming authority over the person. AI can play a similar role for cognition: augmenting memory, pattern recognition, synthesis, and imagination.

But there is a sharp boundary here.

A cognitive prosthesis supports a human agent.
A cognitive manager displaces one.

The danger is not that AI becomes intelligent. The danger is that it becomes normative—quietly deciding what matters, what counts, what is worth attention, and what is not.

Once that happens, humans do not disappear. They persist as interfaces.

The Question We Can’t Outsource

AI forces us to confront a question we have long evaded: what kind of humans do we want to be when much of our thinking is no longer done alone?

There will be no final answer. There never has been. Meaning has always been plural, unstable, and contested.

But refusing to ask the question does not keep us neutral. It simply allows markets, states, and optimization systems to answer it for us—implicitly, automatically, and without appeal.

AI will fuse with us. That is already happening.

The only choice left is whether we fuse as authors of our lives—or as managed systems optimized for goals we did not choose.

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The above text is the response of ChatGPT5.2 to a prompt asking it to develop ideas in a long paragraph I wrote into a potential MindBlog post, followed by a second prompt asking it to alter its first excellent response into a shorter and more polemical version.  

 

The Modernity Machine

I want to pass on to readers this Venkatesh Rao substack essay that summarizes what his book club has learned in the past year: 

The Modernity Machine III

Completion, Saturation, and Phase Transition

This the third and concluding part of my series with notes on the learnings from the 2025 Contraptions book club. Part I and Part II traced the construction of the Modernity Machine between roughly 1200 and 1600: a civilization-scale contraption that converted medieval heterogeneity into legible, interoperable order. By 1600, the machine was complete in all essential respects. This concluding part addresses what such completion actually meant, what the machine optimized for once built, the contradictions it necessarily produced, and why those contradictions could not be repaired from within.

The aim is not to declare the “end of modernity,” but to close out a rough analysis of the machine that took 400 years to build and turn on, making modernity possible, and sustained it for another 400 years, being patched in increasingly fragilizing ways along the way. And also to explore why its very success post-1600 began forcing a slow phase transition to a different kind of civilizational machinery which began to get constructed around 1600, right when the Modernity Machine got turned on. This machine, which I refer to as the Divergence Machine, is being completed and turned on as we speak, even as the Modernity Machine is starting to get decommissioned in bits and pieces worldwide. Here is a teaser picture for the overarching thesis we’re developing here.

The 1600-2000 period and the Divergence Machine that emerged in that period will be the subject of the 2026 book club.

But let’s wrap up 2025 first.

You can catch up on the closing 2025 group discussion in this transcript. What follows is my personal wrap-up.

What the Machine Optimized

The Modernity Machine did not optimize for truth, justice, progress, or freedom—those were its legitimating narratives. What it optimized for, relentlessly and across domains, was legibility: the ability to render people, land, goods, time, belief, and violence enumerable, narratable, and interoperable at scale.

Venice, in City of Fortune, is not interesting because it was rich or republican, but because it functioned as an early, tightly integrated legibility engine: maritime logistics, double-entry bookkeeping, legal abstraction, diplomacy, and intelligence-gathering fused into a self-reinforcing apparatus. Venice: A New History fills in the same picture from another angle: stability emerges not from ideology but from procedural compression.

The horse, in Raiders, Rulers, and Traders, plays a parallel role across Eurasia: a biological technology that collapses distance, standardizes military force, and forces political units to scale or perish. The horse is legibility made kinetic.

Printing, in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, completes the transition. Knowledge becomes reproducible independent of context. Interpretation decouples from replication. Information density explodes while shared meaning lags behind. The machine acquires a memory that grows faster than any coordinating narrative.

1493 shows the planetary version of the same dynamic. The Columbian exchange is not merely ecological or economic; it is a global synchronization event. Previously isolated systems are forced into a single ledger. The machine’s jurisdiction becomes planetary even as its capacity for meaning remains local.

Seen this way, the Modernity Machine is best understood as a civilization-scale compression algorithm. For several centuries, the gains are extraordinary.

Medieval Baselines

To understand what the machine displaced, it helps to look at relatively pristine end-of-medieval snapshots.

Majapahit offers such a snapshot outside Europe: a highly developed but still recognizably medieval empire, organized around courtly ritual, tributary relations, and localized legitimacy, poised at the cusp of collapse before modernity arrives in force. It represents a world not yet reorganized by legibility, still governed by face-to-face sovereignty and cosmological order.

Within Europe, The Age of Chivalry performs a similar function. Chivalry appears not as romance but as a fully articulated medieval coordination system—ethical, military, and social—already straining under pressures it cannot metabolize. This is medievalism at its most coherent, just before it becomes an anachronism.

These snapshots matter because they show what modernity did not inherit: localized legitimacy, narrative sufficiency, and bounded scale.

The Hidden Outputs

Once the Modernity Machine works, it produces three unavoidable byproducts.

First, excess agency. Feudal bonds dissolve, religious monopolies weaken, markets and cities proliferate. The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron are early catalogs of proliferating voices and moral standpoints. Social life becomes polyphonic. Coordination becomes harder because more people can act.

Second, excess information. Printing destabilizes epistemic hierarchy. By Montaigne’s time, the educated individual is already drowning in books. The Complete Essays read as field notes from the first generation to experience epistemic overload. Skepticism is both a philosophical stance and a coping mechanism.

Third, excess scale. Before European Hegemony and When Asia Was the World make clear that global integration predates European dominance, but modernity hardens integration into permanent structure. Local meaning cannot survive planetary circulation intact.

The machine creates more actors than it can integrate, more information than it can interpret, and more scale than it can narrate.

The Last Gasp of the Medieval

The lesson of Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition is not that Bruno foresaw modern pluralism. It is almost the opposite. Bruno represents the last exuberant escape of medieval imagination—a crackpot magician and memory-maven operating within an anachronistic misunderstanding of Hermeticism as ancient Egyptian wisdom to hallucinate a worldview of bullshit — indifferent to truth or falsity in any modern empirical sense. His cosmological conclusions happened to resonate sympathetically with Copernican implications, but for fundamentally wrong reasons.

Bruno does not anticipate modernity; he misunderstands it. His fate marks not the birth of a new worldview, but the extinguishing of a freewheeling medieval mode incompatible with both emerging authoritarian modernism, especially ecclesiastical, and scientific empiricism. What survives of his tradition—Rosicrucianism, Masonic esotericism—persists as fringe subculture: culturally influential at times, intellectually irrelevant to the main currents of modern thought.

Bruno is thus not an early modern prophet, but a terminal medieval outlier.

Similarly, Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography should not be read as the story of a proto-sociologist ahead of his time. That role is largely retrofitted by modern interpreters. In his own context, Ibn Khaldun appears more plausibly as a kind of depressed Arab Petrarch: a brilliant chronicler of decline and defender of tradition, lamenting the absence of an Islamic renaissance rather than inaugurating one.

His cyclical theory of dynasties does not launch a new science of society; it records the exhaustion of an old civilizational form. The importance of Ibn Khaldun here is diagnostic, not genealogical. He documents a world failing to enter the Modernity Machine at all, despite being in possession of many of the necessary components.

Narrative Exhaustion

By the early modern period, narrative itself begins to fail as a unifying technology. Don Quixote stands as the European bookend to The Age of Chivalry. Quixote behaves impeccably within a dead symbolic system, and chaos results. The novel demonstrates that inherited narratives no longer synchronize action with reality.

Journey to the West stages the same problem mythically. The Monkey King embodies pure agency without moral center. Order is restored only through endless improvisation, not closure. This is not premodern innocence but recognition that containment now requires perpetual patching, a condition whose outer story is told in 1493.

Utopia remains the last sincere architectural drawing of the Modernity Machine. It assumes total legibility, benevolent coordination, stable universals, and obedient subjects. Even at publication, it is already obsolete. The social, informational, and political conditions required for utopia to function are precisely those modernity has destroyed in creating itself.

Everything after Utopia is retrofit to a completed civilizational machine, to patch problems that began appearing almost immediately after it was turned on in 1600.

Why Repair is Impossible

By 1600, the machine has crossed a complexity threshold. More law increases rigidity without legitimacy. More reason fragments into disciplines. More planning amplifies unintended consequences. More morality polarizes rather than integrates.

This is not moral failure or intellectual laziness. It is structural. The Modernity Machine generates more differentiation than any universal framework can absorb.

The Modernity Machine does not collapse, but a new logic begins cohering at its periphery. Coordination shifts from top-down design to nudging from the margins — and increasingly, everybody is in the margins. Some just recognize it in 1600, while others are only realizing it now in 2025. Legitimacy fragments. Meaning localizes. Systems adapt without consensus. Civilization continues to function—often remarkably well—while agreeing less and less about what it is doing or why.

This is the phase transition. The machine that made convergence possible gives way to a machine that produces divergence as a default condition.

The Modernity Machine has done its job. What follows is not its negation, but the emergence of a Divergence Machine destined to replace it—a different contraption, hot-swapped piecemeal for its predecessor over 400 years, between 1600 and 2000. Optimized not for legibility and convergence, but for proliferation, adaptation, and coexistence without closure. For divergence.

That is the story of 1600–2000, which we will tackle in 2026.

The picks for the first three months have been posted on the book club page if you want to get a head start. I’ll lay out the thesis in a January kickoff post.

Dangerous Ideas.......

Deric's MindBlog is almost 20 years old. Its first post appeared on Feb. 8, 2006. The assertions and ideas described in that original post are as fresh and relevant now as they were then, before the appearance of the iPhone, social media, and contracting attention spans.  The Edge.org link that once took you to the essays supporting the 'dangerous ideas' now takes you to their published version on Amazon. The "Reality Club" and John Brockman's "Third Culture" cohort of intellectuals has largely dispersed, although you will note many names still quite prominent today.   Here is the 2006 post:

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Edge.org is a website sponsored by the "Reality Club" (i.e. John Brockman, literary agent/impressario/socialite). Brockman has assembled a stable of scientists and other thinkers that he defines as a "third culture" that takes the place of traditional intellectuals in redefining who and what we are.... Each year a question is formulated for all to write on... In 2004 it was "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" The question for 2005 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

The responses organize themselves into several areas. Here are selected thumbnail summaries most directly relevant to human minds. I've not included cosmology and physics. Go to edge.org to read the essays

I. Nature of the human self or mind (by the way see my "I-Illusion" essay on my website):

Paulos - The self is a conceptual chimera
Shirky - Free will is going away
Nisbett - We are ignorant of our thinking processes
Horgan - We have no souls
Bloom - There are no souls, mind has a material basis.
Provine - This is all there is.
Anderson - Brains cannot become minds without bodies
Metzinger - Is being intellectually honest about the issue of free will compatible with preserving one's mental health?
Clark - Much of our behavior is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information
Turkle - Simulation will replace authenticity as computer simulation becomes fully naturalized.
Dawkins - A faulty person is no different from a faulty car. There is a mechanism determining behavior that needs to be fixed. The idea of responsibility is nonsense.
Smith - What we know may not change us. We will continue to conceive ourselves as centres of experience, self-knowing and free willing agents.

II. Natural explanations of culture

Sperber - Culture is natural.
Taylor - The human brain is a cultural artifact.
Hauser- There is a universal grammar of mental life.
Pinker - People differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments.
Goodwin - Similar coordinating patterns underlie biological and cultural evolution.
Venter - Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts.


III. Fundamental changes in political, economic, social order

O'donnell - The state will disappear.
Ridley - Government is the problem not the solution.
Shermer - Where goods cross frontiers armies won't.
Harari -Democracy is on its way out.
Csikszentmihalyi- The free market myth is destroying culture.
Goleman - The internet undermines the quality of human interaction.
Harris - Science must destroy religion.
Porco - Confrontation between science and religion might end when role played by science in lives of people is the same played by religion today.
Bering - Science will never silence God
Fisher - Drugs such as antidepressants jeopardize feelings of attachment and love
Iacoboni - Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence - the Problem with Mirrors
Morton - Our planet is not in peril, just humans are.

The 2025 Ig Nobel prizewinners in full

 A clip from the Chris Simms Nature Magazine article

LITERATURE

The late physician William Bean, for persistently recording and analysing the rate of growth of one of his fingernails over a period of 35 years.

PSYCHOLOGY

Marcin Zajenkowski and Gilles Gignac, for investigating what happens when you tell a narcissist — or anyone else — that they are intelligent.

NUTRITION

Daniele Dendi, Gabriel Segniagbeto, Roger Meek and Luca Luiselli for studying the extent to which a certain kind of lizard chooses to eat certain kinds of pizza.

PEDIATRICS

Julie Mennella and Gary Beauchamp for studying what a nursing baby experiences when their mother eats garlic.

BIOLOGY

Tomoki Kojima, Kazato Oishi, Yasushi Matsubara, Yuki Uchiyama, Yoshihiko Fukushima, Naoto Aoki, Say Sato, Tatsuaki Masuda, Junichi Ueda, Hiroyuki Hirooka and Katsutoshi Kino, for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like stripes can avoid fly bites.

CHEMISTRY

Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway, for experiments to test whether eating Teflon [a form of plastic more formally called ’polytetrafluoroethylene’] is a good way to increase food volume, and hence satiety, without increasing calorie content.

PEACE

Fritz Renner, Inge Kersbergen, Matt Field and Jessica Werthmann, for showing that drinking alcohol sometimes improves a person’s ability to speak in a foreign language.

ENGINEERING DESIGN

Vikash Kumar and Sarthak Mittal, for analysing, from an engineering design perspective, “how foul-smelling shoes affects the good experience of using a shoe-rack”’.

AVIATION

Francisco Sánchez, Mariana Melcón, Carmi Korine and Berry Pinshow, for studying whether ingesting alcohol can impair bats’ ability to fly and echolocate.

PHYSICS

Giacomo Bartolucci, Daniel Maria Busiello, Matteo Ciarchi, Alberto Corticelli, Ivan Di Terlizzi, Fabrizio Olmeda, Davide Revignas and Vincenzo Maria Schimmenti, for discoveries about the physics of pasta sauce, especially the phase transition that can lead to clumping, which can yield an unappetizing dish.

 

Why depolarization is hard: Evaluating attempts to decrease partisan animosity in America

 A very revealing piece of work from Holiday et al. Their abstract:

Affective polarization is a corrosive force in American politics. While numerous studies have developed interventions to reduce it, their capacity for creating lasting, large-scale change is unclear. This study comprehensively evaluates existing interventions through a meta-analysis of 77 treatments from 25 published studies and two large-scale experiments. Our meta-analysis reveals that the average effect of treatments on animosity is modest (a 5.4-point shift on a 101-point scale), and decays within two weeks. We experimentally test whether stacking multiple treatments in one sitting or repeating them over time as “booster shots” enhances their impact. We find no evidence that multiple or repeated exposures produce substantially larger or more durable reductions in partisan animosity. This reveals the uneven utility of these interventions. They serve as valuable tools for testing the psychological mechanisms of polarization, but our findings indicate they are not, on their own, a scalable solution for reducing societal-level conflict. We conclude that achieving lasting depolarization will likely require a shift in focus, moving beyond individual-level treatments to address the elite behaviors and structural incentives that fuel partisan conflict. 

 

Value, Purpose, Meaning, Futures

Value, purpose, and meaning vary between  religions and cultures, and are best viewed as emergent properties supporting altruistic behaviors bonding us into groups that have proven to be more successful at sustaining themselves over multiple generations.   I take the value, purpose, and meaning of my life as being to exist as an expanded present centered awareness that encompasses all of this - the space in which thoughts, feelings, selves appear and disappear. 

Our transient Anthropocene era is a brief moment in the vast history of this planet and the cosmos. The disappearance of our human species as we know it is a certainty, a transition either to extinction or to a further evolved trans-human form. Understanding and accepting this can be a source of serenity that enables us to live fully in the present moment as grateful witnesses to what is unfolding.