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Adventures in Consciousness from Neuroscience to Philosophy

proofzine_editor — Wed, 20 Sep 2023 15:31:51 +0000

Consciousness, The Hard Problem

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

September 20th, 2023

What is consciousness?

Do I have it or am I it?

Does consciousness exist physically?

And if it does, where?

The answer to this question was proven to still be, “don’t know” by the now famous wager between Christof Koch, neuroscientist and David Chalmers, philosopher that came to a conclusion after its initial 25 year period. Koch bet Chalmers that he would discover the physical signature of consciousness in the brain, Chalmers bet he would not. In June of this year The Association for the Study of Consciousness declared Chalmers the winner.

At this point we can say that there is no agreed upon discovery of a physical seat of consciousness in neuroscience. So if we are conscious and there is no part of the brain that is responsible for consciousness, where is it?

To explore this, we are going to have to question…everything.

When we say consciousness what do we mean? The definition is: The state of being aware of and able to think and perceive one’s surroundings, thoughts, and experiences. We have a first person experience of being aware, including an awareness of a self experiencing the surroundings from moment to moment. This is a phenomenological consciousness.

We are phenomenologically conscious almost every moment of our waking life and even aware from time to time when we are asleep. We are not always conscious of being conscious. In fact most of us are blissfully unaware of the experience of being aware. It falls into the everyday background obliviousness of our life.

So where is this consciousness if it isn’t in the brain? Some say that consciousness is an emergent property of the complex system of a human being. Emergent properties are those that arise from a system that cannot be found in the component parts. For example a cell respirates, it rhythmically breathes. Yet respiration cannot be found in any one of the component parts of the cell. It’s not in the cell wall. It’s not in the nucleus, the dna. Yet it emerges when the cell is all together intact — a dead cell does not respirate. If consciousness is emergent then we don’t have to find it in the brain or any other part of our body to have a viable explanation of consciousness.

The emergent model underpins the current philosophy in Artificial General Intelligence, AI that can think like a human being, generalizing knowledge from one area of learning to another. The idea is that once an AI has as many neural connections as we do, consciousness will emerge. But what kind of consciousness? A human’s consciousness? A dog’s consciousness?

Yes dogs are aware of their surroundings and in a limited way they have self awareness. Stepping aside from the AI conversation we should take a look at the ways we use the term consciousness.

In psychology we have the idea of the conscious and subconscious mind. The idea is that there are alot of psychological processes that are going on below the level of our conscious awareness. The problem with this idea is that there is no clear definition of where the diving line is. A more contemporary definition is automatic and controlled thought processes. Automatic processes being those that do not require conscious attention. Even in this definition it is hard to see that you could have an automatic process that is not a part of the subjective awareness of oneself and one’s surroundings. For the most part these automatic processes are in response to the surroundings and moment by moment circumstances of life. Think about pressing the brake pedal when you see a red traffic light.

In spirituality we have the idea of levels of consciousness. There are the basic awareness of self and surroundings, and other more esoteric levels of consciousness. These levels of consciousness include experiences of unity consciousness, emptiness, higher realms and other non-ordinary experiences. Yet are these higher levels of consciousness any different than being aware of self and surroundings? I can’t see how changing what you are aware of changes the basic understanding of consciousness, afterall each of us has differing surroundings, including physical, historical and linguistic elements and patterns.

Another highly contested kind of consciousness is that of wokeness. The term started out in the 1960’s as an African American term to indicate that one had “their eyes opened” to racial injustice and systemic oppression. Since that time it has expanded to include LGBTQ+ communities. It includes those who are “Woke” to their own oppression and to those who are allies. Woke is a way to say that they are conscious of their oppression. In this case we are using the “conscious of” construction. There are many things we can be conscious of, all of which require us to be conscious.

The idea of “conscious of” is referred to as intentionality by the Phenomenologists, Huserl and Heidigger. Intentionality is the capacity of our thoughts, beliefs, desires, and perceptions to be about something — to have content or to refer to objects, states of affairs, or events. When you think about your car, your thoughts are directed towards or “about” the car. Huserl and Heidigger argued that this is the only kind of consciousness, as we are always directing our intention to one thing or another. Thus consciousness isn’t an isolated phenomenon that exists on its own. Instead, it’s inherently relational. It’s always in relation to some content, whether it’s an external object, an internal thought, a memory, or some other mental content.

Chalmers, the winner of the bet with Koch says that intentionality is helpful in solving the easy problems with consciousness, which concern behaviors, mechanisms, and functions, it does not help us with the hard problem of consciousness which concerns why we have subjective experiences at all.

Why am I me?

That is the ultimate hard question in regard to consciousness. All intentionality can give us is: I am me because I am the one who is conscious of my surroundings, which is a half baked version of Descartes Cogito sum ergo. I think, therefore I am. This does nothing to tell us why there is an I in the first place or if that I is a reliable observer.

There are two ways out of this. One is the still unanswered question, where is consciousness. Maybe someday we will discover the part of our brain that is the seat of consciousness. At that point we could examine other creatures and see if they have this part in their brains as well. Those with the consciousness center would be conscious, others would not.

This would mean that there are sentient beings, ones that have subjective experiences, that are not conscious because they don’t have the ability to think about their surroundings or have self awareness. This seems seems to be a big misstep as it would mean that in order to answer the question of why we have subjective experience we would say that in one class of beings it is because of the structure of our brain, but for other, less conscious beings, we still can’t say why they have subjective experiences.

I prefer the other way out of this conundrum, one that Chalmers also considers to be a strong candidate for understanding why we have subjective experience. This is the philosophical view that mind or consciousness is a fundamental and universal aspect of reality. It posits that even the smallest particles of matter might have rudimentary forms of consciousness or experience. In western philosophy this is called Panpsychism.

Alfred North Whitehead, proposed a form of panpsychism in his process philosophy. He argued that the basic constituents of reality are “actual occasions” or “drops of experience.” These entities have both a physical and mental aspect.

If consciousness is one of the fundamental parts of the underlying fabric of the universe, then the hard problem goes away. We have subjective experience because that is universal. There is no special human case for consciousness, rather we can cast our imagination out in the universe and wonder what other marvelous forms of consciousness exist out there.

The Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen teachings hold that all beings have a pristine non-dual awareness called Rigpa. This awareness is self-existing and a priori to a being’s awareness. We have individual consciousness or thoughts because of this self-existing consciousness. The Dzogchen teachings are about how to directly experience the non-dual, pure Rigpa.

Both Panpsychism and Dzogchen point in the same direction, yet they are not the same thing. Panpsychism assigns consciousness to the smallest building blocks of reality while Dzogchen describes Rigpa as having a non-dual existence that is like the Yogācāra “Mind-only” school that holds that all phenomena are manifestations of the mind. Still, as one of my teachers used to say, that’s close enough for jazz.

Consciousness is a self-existing and fundamental part (or cause) of the universe.

Thus the hard problem is solved. We know why we are aware and we know where consciousness is located…everywhere all the time.

Welcome to the reality where consciousness is the universe in which you exist.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S. I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 62 – Adventures in Consciousness from Neuroscience to Philosophy

How Will We Know If AI Is Conscious? Neuroscientists Now Have a Checklist

Rather than studying an AI agent’s behavior, matching its responses to theories of human consciousness could provide a more objective ruler.

The Philosopher Wins: There’s No Consciousness Spot in the Brain

As dualist neurosurgeon Michael Egnor notes, human consciousness is immaterial by nature. Is the Koch-Chalmers bet a language game aimed at avoiding that fact?

Philosophers on Next-Generation Large Language Models – Daily Nous

Back in July of 2020, I published a group post entitled “Philosophers on GPT-3.” At the time, most readers of Daily Nous had not heard of GPT-3 and had no idea what a large language model (LLM) is. How times have changed. Over the past few months, with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Bing’s

A New Explanation for Consciousness – Neuroscience News

A new theory of consciousness suggests decisions are made unconsciously, then about half a second later, they become conscious.

Consciousness and Integrated Information Theory

A more realistic and unambiguous measure of integrated consciousness is needed.

What a Contest of Consciousness Theories Really Proved | Quanta Magazine

A five-year “adversarial collaboration” of consciousness theorists led to a stagy showdown in front of an audience. It crowned no winners — but it can still claim progress.

May this information inspire you to generate a thriving future for humanity and a thriving life for yourself. For more resources please check out our Podcast and Youtube channel.

-The Bold.ly Now Team

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Listen Here

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

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In Search of Good Governance

proofzine_editor — Wed, 23 Aug 2023 14:06:06 +0000

It’s time for governance to get a divorce from politics

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

August 23th, 2023

There’s the classic moment in a horror film where the naive young character decides to enter into the building where we know the villain is hiding. At that moment, we want to shout, “NO, DON’T DO IT”. Even knowing that something terrible is going to happen, we can’t take our eyes off the screen.

This is exactly the feeling I get looking at the state of democracies across the world, and especially the US and the UK. Politics and its toxic cousin populism play the role of the villain and the naive young character, that’s us, the everyday people who rely on their governments to provide a secure and safe society. In this era of climate crisis, radical wealth disparity, and rising authoritarianism, it’s clear our governance systems are failing us. And I for one, don’t want to wait around to witness the fate of the naive.

What’s wrong with our democracy?

The answer is in the known pitfalls of democracy in general and representational democracy. Plato in his Republic, argued against democracy. He had seen his teacher Socrates put to death by the democratic government of the Athenian state in 399 BCE for “corrupting the youth” and “impiety.” The travesty and tragic loss of Socrates led Plato to examine the inherent problems with democracy. A number of these issues are at the heart of our failing democracy.

Susceptibility to Demagogues: Plato observed that democratic systems were vulnerable to charismatic leaders who could manipulate public sentiment for their own interests, potentially leading the society astray. Brexit is a prime example of this. The Tory party capitalized on the fear of immigration and blamed the EU for this and other “self-governance” problems. The UK voted for Brexit, likely to the surprise of the Tories, and the fallout has been devastating the economy of the UK.

Influence of Passions: Plato believed that a successful state should be governed by reason rather than emotion. He worried that democratic systems could be overly influenced by the passions and whims of the populace, leading to erratic and potentially harmful policies. The abortion fight in the US is all about the intersection of politics and passion. Right to life and Right to choose have become a rallying cry for both parties to charge up their bases. Over the past 40 years, pushing the passion button has given us an unworkable patchwork of laws and lawsuits. Surely good governance could come up with a rational solution to this issue.

Rule by the Ignorant: Plato believed that governance required wisdom and expertise. In a democracy, however, every citizen, irrespective of their knowledge, experience, or education, has an equal say in decision-making. Plato likened this to allowing a random person, rather than a qualified doctor, to make medical decisions. Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, broke the mold of presidents who educated themselves about the issues that were of great importance to the nation. Reportedly, he preferred his gut feeling on things to research and facts. Plato was concerned with the populace making ill-informed decisions while voting. It’s unlikely that he would have thought that elected leaders would actually rule by ignorance. It took the US democracy to achieve this new low in governance.

Inherent Instability: Plato believed that the democratic focus on individual freedoms and equality could cause internal divisions. These divisions might make the state vulnerable to both internal decay and external threats. He thought that democracy, with its emphasis on individualism and freedom, could eventually degrade into tyranny. Our freedoms overlap, as is seen in economic policy. What’s good for the corporation may not be good for the individual and vice versa. The freedom of an individual’s right to their lifestyle can conflict with the consensus of what an acceptable lifestyle is. Politics emphasizes these divisions and exacerbates the conflict. This creates a democracy with policies that swing from one election to the next.

This last one brings up an additional issue with our current representational democracy: Short Termism, where governance moves away from long-term solutions to problems in favor of short-term wins that play well with their bases.

Looking at this short list of pitfalls, and the examples of the issues that are plaguing our democracies today, there are those that argue that there is no way to fix the system. I disagree, there are many novel approaches that could produce good governance. For the US system, we could dramatically reduce the role that money plays in being elected by adopting public financing of elections. We could also adopt ranked-choice voting and proportional representation to greatly reduce the winner-takes-all results we have today.

Still these are only stop-gap solutions to the large problems that representational democracies face. There are too many powerful players who use politics to game the system to benefit their own ends. Standing at the top of that list would be multinational corporations and billionaires. Their wealth and power has grown unchecked since the 1980s. A governance system that is driven by politics, is one that is vulnerable to gaming. And those with the resources to manipulate the system will do so in a tragedy of the commons race to the bottom.

What we need is a governance system that relies on two main pillars. One is the use of a civil service of technocrats tasked with creating consensus-based expert-driven decision-making and legislation creation. The second is moving to a liquid democracy creating a fluid system mixing direct democracy and representational democracy that is a fit for our digital era. The representative democracy currently practiced across the world was created at a time when travel to participate in the democratic process made it so that citizens needed a representative who could travel by horse and buggy to congresses. Travel time for democracy is nearly instant in the digital era. We don’t need these horse and buggy systems any more.

What we do need is the ability to quickly form consensus decision assemblies informed by experts to be convened, given a mandate and then allowed to serve through the process of creating a consensus to then be dissolved. This is the way that a network can respond to the complexity of this era.

A good example of how this might function would be a hypothetical decision that needs to be made around college education. A group might be convened around incentivising certain types of education responding to the needs of the marketplace based upon the research of technocrats. A second group might be convened around the long term impacts of the costs of higher education. These two decisions might go to a third group who determines universal university fees/incentives to encourage specific long term stability for the youth that are looking forward to a university education.

These groups could be formed digitally, selecting participants randomly from a pool of those who have the specific knowledge to make a good decision. This selection process would radically depoliticize the system. As those who were selected to serve who step down when their work was done, it would dramatically reduce the incentive to make decisions that play to a specific audience. And being a politician would become a thing of the past. A form of direct democracy would take its place.

I offer this idea not as a plan but rather as a vision of how we might reinvent our governance system. We need these visions of an alternative future. We need to see that we are not stuck with the mess of political governance that we are saddled with, one that seems hell bent on destroying our ecosystem and our society for short term political gain.

It’s time to get politics out of governance.

We need to be unafraid to change the things that are no longer working. We need the best ideas from all of us to be elevated to become the new rules by which we govern our world. And we need a governance system built for this digital, AI, everywhere all at once age we live in. I imagine a future where we use AI to help us balance diversity, social and wealth justice inside our sustainable planetary boundaries while helping us transition to long term futures for humanity.

This may be our best way forward given the complexity of our global systems. This then is the time to build frameworks for altruistic AI that is not gameable. Ironically, those in power today are going to be working to make sure they have backdoors into these systems to maintain their power for generations to come. We could use some good governance to achieve that aim.

It’s a vicious cycle that we can disrupt if we keep our eyes on the future.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S. I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 61 – In Search of Good Governance

EU legislation on anti-corruption

One tool to help anti-corruption efforts is ensuring a common high standard of legislation, either specifically on corruption, or incorporating anti-corruption provisions in other sectoral legislation.

Why Business Leaders Must Resist the Anti-ESG Movement

U.S. business leaders are increasingly being exposed to the culture wars, with company decisions around issues like DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and even ESG investing being attacked by right-leaning politicians and pundits. Instead of retreating to the sidelines, this article argues that leaders ca…

A Radical Idea for Fixing Polarization

Can proportional representation save American democracy?

Six ways that AI could change politics

A new era of AI-powered domestic politics may be coming. Watch for these milestones to know when it’s arrived.

There’s a toxic brew of mistrust toward U.S. institutions. It’s got real consequences

Republicans are lambasting Democrats’ attempts at uniform ethics standards at the Supreme Court as partisan politics. It’s just the latest chapter in a decline in national unity.

Social media manipulation by political actors an industrial scale

Social media manipulation of public opinion is a growing threat to democracies around the world, according to the 2020 media manipulation survey from the Oxford Internet Institute, which found

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Listen Here

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post In Search of Good Governance appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Quantum mechanics tells us we are all one, what if it’s true?

proofzine_editor — Wed, 16 Aug 2023 10:59:36 +0000

Interbeing: We’re all connected in this big crazy mess!

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

August 16th, 2023

At the most fundamental level we exist in one entangled universe. The work of physicists like David Bohm describes one holistic interconnected universe at the quantum level, where all particles are interconnected — part of one single, undivided whole. In this sense there is no separation between you and me, in fact our existence depends on each other and everything in the universe.

If that is so, why do we feel so separated, isolated and divided?

The simple answer is that we have an experience of an independent self. I am me, in here, in my head, that’s me. Or as Rene Descartes said, cogito sum ergo (I think therefore I am). As I am the one having these thoughts and no one else can hear my thoughts or have the exact same thoughts I am having, then my thoughts indicate that I am a separate person. It’s both intuitive and rational.

Then when I look out into the world there are things that are desirable, ice cream, and things that are not, stinging nettles. It makes sense that I should move towards the desirable things and away from the undesirable things. If I look further out these things extend to things that will keep me safe and alive and those things that make me unsafe and vulnerable to death. One of the most dangerous things out there is other people. They can hurt me emotionally, my feelings and physically, my body. I should get very good at sorting people into the kind that are safe and the kind who are not safe. If I can stay with the safe people then I will live long and have good things. If I fall into the hands of the dangerous people then all of the good things will be taken from me and I will not survive.

From this perspective, modern tribalism makes sense. Each group has their own language and symbols so that they can identify each other. They also have other groups that they are opposed to, that do not hold their values and in most cases are a threat to those values. The tribe then takes on a collective self an “I” and works to increase internal social cohesion and fight, sometimes literally, to win against their enemies in the world.

We see countless examples of this in our modern political landscape. The attacks on the Woke or the MAGA and the evil things those groups are out to do, are perfectly understandable from within this worldview. As is the use of misinformation to further demonize one another. Politics is a very powerful tool when tribal survival equates with personal survival. Here political messages boil down to, if you don’t do as I tell you then the bad people will come and take all of the good things from you, they will kill you, your family and your friends.

Pulling the veil back on this should make you pause for a moment and question, Is this happening to me in my life, in my head? Without exception, everyone of us is hooked by some story or message out in the world. Often it is about a specific issue we care deeply about. I personally have a bunch of them: LGBTQ+ rights, racism, wealth, education and health care inequality, and the big one — the climate crisis. When I read a story that threatens one of these issues, I get upset, stressed and worried.

In those moments I use a very simple and powerful tool. I ask myself to switch my focus from what I am against to what I am for.

When I ask, what am I for this topic, it flips an internal switch from fighting to creating. What am I going to create or do about this thing that is important to me. The focus switches to something that I have agency in and with it comes hope for a better future.

Thus the answer to the question: Why do we feel so separated, isolated and divided? Is our concept of self. I am a separate self that fundamentally seeks pleasure and avoids pain on the personal and the tribal level. I think therefore I am. The paradox to the answer of identity being the cause of our separation is that I do think separate thoughts and I am. It is self-evident — that this is the way it is. It is then impossible to change.

Except that before Descartes’ cogito sum ergo, we did not have the idea that reality should be organized around the self. In Europe before Descartes published his Meditations on First Philosophy in 1641, life was organized around the church. God was the source of reality. When a 17th century person was asked why something was in the world, the most likely answer was, because God created it that way.

You can immediately distinguish the difference in world view before and after Descartes. Clearly the reorientation around the self being the source of verifiable reality did not instantly change the Christian worldview. In fact it’s not until 1882 that this transition was declared by Friedrich Nietzsche, who says in his work, The Gay Science, that God is Dead. What he means by this is that God is no longer the guiding force in society.

In The Madman, a parable in The Gay Science, Nietzsche tells the story of a madman who rushes into the marketplace, declaring that God is dead, but finds that the people there do not understand or care about his proclamation. The madman’s cry, and the public’s indifference to it, reflects the enormity of the cultural shift that was occurring.

This demonstrates that our way of conceiving the self and the world is not fixed.

Historically there have been many world view shifts. Strangely enough many of these world views continue to exist alongside more modern ones. Fundamentalism is a great example. There are those on the planet who still follow Hammurabi’s Code, notable for the phrase, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”. Hammurabi was the sixth king of the First Babylonian Dynasty, reigned from approximately 1792 BCE to 1750 BCE. The code is considered to be a historic breakthrough for jurisprudence as it codified 282 laws, with scaled punishments, thus ending the subjective nature of punishments in law. It was a breakthrough 3773 years ago. Now, while historically important, it is considered harsh and somewhat barbaric. Yet still, there are fundamentalist societies which operate with this world view.

Thus one way out of our separation, isolation and divisiveness, is to change our world view. Fortunately there is a historical worldview that can help us, that of the Eastern philosophical traditions of Vedantic Hinduism and Buddhism. Before we dive in, I want to be clear that I am not advocating for us to adopt these religions or ancient cultures as our own. That would be as much folly as practicing Hammurabi’s Code, rather we are going look at the underlying philosophical distinction of duality and the concept of self and consciousness to see if we can gain some perspective on our current conditions.

One note on dualism. In the western philosophical tradition we have cartesian dualism again from Descartes which declares that the body is physical and the consciousness is non-physical (non-material). The non-material mind is something that is unique to each individual. This introduces the mind-body problem: How can this non-material thing, the mind, interact with the physical body? I’ll come back to this later to contrast this to the Buddhist conception of the mind.

The other form of dualism is the self and other dualism, an eastern philosophical worldview. Here it is seen as ignorance that there is a separation between self and other. While there can be an experience of self and other, it is an illusion — not real. Now at last we can connect quantum physics with a philosophical world view. We will do that cautiously, making sure to not equate one to the other. Bohm’s declaration that the universe is one entangled, undivided whole, notes that this goes against the initiative experience of the world which has many separate objects. This he says is an illusion.

The universe is one holistic entanglement including all apparent objects and all non-objects — everything that is and everything that isn’t. This means that there is no boundary between universe and non-universe, as anything that exists is entangled, everything that has existed is entangled and everything that will exist is entangled.

Heady stuff, take a moment to consider that — existence without bounds.

Let’s turn our attention to what life would look like if we lived with this unified world view. First let’s clear up one of the problems with Descartes’ the idea that thinking is proof of existence. The conceit here is that my thoughts are unique and that they are mine. Really? The study of semiotics and memetics as well as linguistics and history tells us that we think the thoughts that are thinkable given our culture, language and past experiences. All thoughts exist in what Jung called the collective unconsciousness, which in this time might be better called the collective mind(s), or collective worldview(s). As Werner Erhard said, “Are you having thoughts or are your thoughts having you.”

If my thoughts aren’t mine then what is? Surely my consciousness is mine. If that was so then we should be able to find the center of your consciousness in your brain. Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers 25 years ago that we would find the neurological center of consciousness by now. Koch lost that bet. If it is not part of the brain then where is it? Now we are back to the mind-body problem of Descartes.

Buddhism has a very interesting solution to this problem. It holds that consciousness is one of the fundamental qualities of existence, of the universe. Thus consciousness is self-existing. It does not require us to exist. Our thoughts, from the darkest to the most loving, are all expressions of this self-existing consciousness. My thoughts come from the same place as your thoughts. Thinking, therefore, does not separate us from one another. All we are left holding onto is this idea that I am separate. This idea is what we refer to when we say your ego. I’ll say that again, the ego is an idea. It was proposed as a part of the structure of the mind by Sigmund Freud in the 1920’s. Like Descartes’ mind, an individual consciousness, the ego is an explanatory principle, not a material thing.

Now we have something we can work with:

My sense of separate self is an idea called the ego.

My ego is part of the way the world appears to me, my world view.

The best current description of reality is that we are all a part of a universal whole.

This leads to the question:

What does life look like if I am not separate?

If I am not separate, then the things that are pleasurable to me are pleasurable to others. We all want to be happy and free to live our best lives. The things that are not pleasurable to me are not pleasurable to others. If I hurt someone else it is exactly the same as me being hurt by them. It is not good for either of us. Our collective views and opinions stem from worldviews. Thus when there is a fight about “what is right” and “who is a threat” it’s the worldviews that are fighting and not me. Now there are worldviews that are harmful to our collective existence, for example the view that it is okay to go to war to expand territory, is a worldview to assign to the territory of history.

What is left once we stop being subjects and combatants for world views? A bunch of people who are fundamentally the same. Want the same things. Are afraid of the same things. We have children that we hope and dream for. We live our best lives as best we can.

Our being is entangled, as is everything in the universe — interbeing is reality.

We InterAre and I am so happy that we are in life together.

With great love.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S. I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 60 – Quantum mechanics tells us we are all one, what if it’s true?

How to translate disruptive innovation to the world

Aqrate is the Bologna-based company that embodies the essence of the word ‘disruptive’. It is the only company in the world that is progressively changing a market niche, that of translations, upsetting the normal equilibrium by introducing process innovation and developing highly sophisticated algo…

Success in a connected world – Network economy framework

Network economy framework by Ross Dawson – the foundations of success in a connected world and the ways to achieve these.

Future of news and journalism – Framework by media futurist Ross Dawson

Social media strategy framework to help organizations establish and implement successful marketing strategies by futurist keynote speaker Ross Dawson.

Ukraine Fights To Build More Resilient, Renewable Energy System in Midst of War – CleanTechnica

NREL Is Providing Tools and Technical Support To Help Ukraine Realize a Resilient, Decentralized, Renewable Energy Grid

Farm Models Practices to Benefit Soil Health and the Climate

A small cooperative farm in California is working with the Pauma Band of Luiseno Indians to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change.

“What the %&*$ are you going to go do in Ethiopia?” – Eliot Peper

We drank about five a day Who doesn’t love the smell of roasting coffee? When you order coffee in Ethiopia, the green beans are roasted in front of you before being hand-ground and prepared. Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee and their coffee remains the best in the world. When you smell roasting…

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Listen Here

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post Quantum mechanics tells us we are all one, what if it’s true? appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Near-Death Transformation: Unleashing the Journey to Coming Alive

proofzine_editor — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 14:30:33 +0000

Near to Death, A Plan for Coming Alive

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

August 9th, 2023

A self induced near death experience without the threat of death.

I am hovering above my body lying on the side of the road. I look to the sky and see the most amazing blue color that I have ever experienced. It is so blue I can smell it and taste it. It penetrates to the core of my being, washing away everything that I ever was. I float upwards and begin to see a spot of brightness in the blue field. Light breaks through brightness as I float upwards. Soon I am engulfed in whiteness. Peacefulness. Then I hear a thought, “You are not yet done with this life.” And just like that I am back in my body starting up at the Earthly sky.

We have all heard stories of personal transformation that start off with a near death experience. Many people who have experienced near death experiences no longer fear death. They have a knowing that the death experience is nothing to be frightened of. This changes their appreciation of their life and their appreciation of friends, family, food, walks in nature, art and even mundane experiences in life. Everything becomes precious. The next thing that happens is they change their lives, often striking out in new and before unprecedented directions. Many become spiritual or religious feeling a connection with something greater than themselves in the universe.

As a child I was very fascinated by these stories. I wondered what lies beyond the white light? And why were these experiences so similar? Today I understand the phenomenon in a very different way. Whereas when I was a child I wanted to know what happened after death, as an adult I wondered how we might have the transformative effects of a near death experience without having to come near to death. In my early twenties I set out to discover how to how to do this.

I sought out experiences that brought one to or near to ego death: psychedelics, sweat lodges, fasting, meditating etc. Various psychedelics came close. LSD at high doses obliterated my inner voice, leaving me to walk amongst the clouds. I was transformed into a spiritual being. Yet when I came down off the substance I was still the same me — maybe more experienced but still me. I keenly felt that psychedelics could only approximate the experience I was seeking.

In 1995 and 1996 I worked on a video game project with Timothy Leary. At the time Tim had inoperable cancer. We knew that the game project would be released after he had passed. In the game Tim inhabited the bardo, the post death state, as a guide in the game. He thought it was fascinating to be able to talk to people from beyond the grave while digitally they traveled a landscape beyond the grave.

Tim argued that the ego death from LSD was a true ego death. And that although the ego came back, was resurrected, when the drug left the system, we still practiced the ultimate letting go of our death to come. He was very vocal about his excitement to get to know what happened after death. I hear that he was that way right up to the last moments of his life. If I could go beyond the veil, I might have a chance to ask him how it was on his last ego death journey. (Note, the game never came out, Phillips New Media shut its doors before we were able to complete the project).

From psychedelics my journey took two paths, study of ancient wisdom traditions and meditation. The history of religion is filled with stories of gods and men who return from the dead. In the 24th and 23rd century BCE (4700–4800 years ago) a story appeared in the Pyramid Texts in Egypt about Osiris’s rebirth. These texts are the oldest known religious texts in the world. In the story Osiris, who was the son of the sky goddess and earth god. He was the ruler of Egypt with his wife Isis at his side he ruled with justice bringing civilisation to the people of Egypt.

His brother Seth was jealous and tricked Osiris into lying in a coffee which Seth sealed and threw into the Nile. Isis found his lifeless body and hid it in the reeds by the shore while she went to get to help. Seth discovered the body and chopped it into fourteen pieces, scattering them across Egypt. Again Isis searched for her husband assembling all of the pieces and bringing him back to life. Together they conceived a son Horus, before Osiris was compelled to go to the underworld where he became the king. Life, death, resurrection, and again death, this is the near death experience played out on a divine stage.

This story of death and rebirth then becomes central to many ancient and modern religions. Dionysus, Ishtar, Baal, Tammuz, Krishna, Adonis, Baldr, Quetzalcoatl and Jesus Christ, all journey beyond the veil to return for some time to the land of the living. All of these stories share some common elements:

There is a journey through a dark place.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

There is an encounter with the divine

There is life after death.

And finally there is transformation.

The transformation in these religious stories has the reborn being gaining new insights, ability or taking on new roles in the cosmic order.

These steps are more or less the same for a near death experience, which begs the question if these stories are remnants from the near death experiences of individual people of these times or are they in some way a part of the collective unconscious of humanity.

The Tibetans seem to say that these stories and experiences faithfully recreate the post death state. If you recall, Timothy Leary in my game was speaking from the Bardo, the Tibentan name for the post-death state inhabited for the first 49 days after death. This is much like the underworld of the Egyptians. And like the Egyptians it has a very detailed description of the post death experience, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. After death, we first experience the consciousness separating from the body. Then we begin to have visions of peaceful and wrathful deities. If the deceased can recognize these as projections of the mind and practice, they can become free of their attachments and desires and ultimately from the cycle of death and rebirth. Finally if the deceased does not find liberation they enter the last state of the Bardo when they begin to be attracted to potential parents and thus they take a new birth starting the cycle again.

It’s worth noting that Richard Alpert, Ralf Metzner, and Timothy Leary’s 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience, a guide book for psychedelic journeys is patterned on the Tibetan book of the Dead, aiming at helping people experience ego death and rebirth.

The Tibetain Buhhdists teach us to meditate so that we can in this life separate out our mental projections from the self-existing consciousness that we have within. If we can do that in life, we will be practiced enough to do that in death when it is most easy to become liberated.

It is here that I have to stop the story of this journey. If you have made it this far, I am going to tell you the quickest way to have the profoundly transcendent effects of a near death experience without any threat to your life.

Separate your mental projections from your self-existing consciousness.

If you know how to do that and have practiced it for a lifetime we’re done here. For the rest of us we will have to continue along the journey to find our own kind of transcendence. To do this let’s break the process of a self induced near death experience without the threat of death into a few key concepts and steps.

Self existing consciousness or awareness is the source of all of your thoughts and being. It is the unobscured root. It is not a separate thing from who you are. And it does not rely on you for existence. It is self-existing, universal and fundamental. See my story on this idea in What Is Real? The Authentic Ontological Essence of Being.
A near death experience somehow switches off the constant flow of mental projections, thoughts, opinions, beliefs, and the named emotions which are different from the energy of the emotions.
This state is awe and wonder inspiring.
When you return from this state you are born anew. You can create anything you want for your life and your future.

There are two levers that we can pull to induce this kind of experience. One is meditation practice. The closer we are to a moment by moment experience of our natural state, self-existing consciousness, the easier it is to pop free of the obscured mind.

The second lever is pressure. As I discussed in Is Change Really Hard?, from time to time we experience crucible events where we are either transformed, as in a near death experience or in some cases we are broken.

A crucible is a place of great pressure.

How could we induce a crucible experience you are asking. Have you ever run a marathon? Or skied down a mountain at a high rate of speed? How about climbing a cliff face that is at the edge of your ability? Im thinking of Free Solo and Alex Honnold. Maybe you’ve negotiated a very challenging agreement where the focus of the work was otherworldly. These are all experiences that bring with them great pressure and thus great focus and performance.

The final ingredient to your self induced transcendence experience is motive or inspiration. If we are to practice enough to have the ability to experience pure consciousness. And if we are willing to put ourselves a the position or situation of great pressure. Then there has to be a reason that is powerful enough to propel you forward.

And here is the lesson I learned from this whole journey of discovery:

Where you are going, the transformation you seek, the future you wish to transcend the now for, that is what we have been longing for all along.

We wish to be free. We wish for someone or something to come along and change things. A so we wait for that to happen. If something like a near death experience or a crucible experience breaks us open, we are no longer capable of waiting for change to come. Rather we stand up and make the changes we always wanted and we move forward with our life renewed.

If you can imagine where you are going. If you can imagine the transformation you want. Get up right now and start walking in that direction. You don’t need a near death experience to get there.

You are an emanation of self-existing consciousness.

You are love.

You are compassion.

You are infinite and free.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S. I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 59 – Near-Death Transformation: Unleashing the Journey to Coming Alive

How to connect with your future self | Psyche Guides

Does the future ‘you’ seem like a stranger? Getting to know them better will help you to make healthier, wiser decisions

Ancient Sumerian poetry turns instability into cosmic insight | Aeon Essays

Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times

Biocentrism Posits That Death Is Merely Transport into Another Universe

Apparently, Einstein shared a similar outlook on time as what’s proposed here.

The rebirth of the railway – MAIZE

Strategic design company

Meat Puppets

We don’t have to be so bound by these meat puppets that we drag around.

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Listen Here

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post Near-Death Transformation: Unleashing the Journey to Coming Alive appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Discovering what is real, true and profoundly meaningful

proofzine_editor — Mon, 07 Aug 2023 11:38:41 +0000

What Is Real? The Authentic Ontological Essence of Being

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

August 7th, 2023

What is your essence? What is our human essence? This is one of the fundamental questions that we can ask ourselves, one that has tormented philosophers and theologians throughout history. While there is no definitive answer, seeking one is still important. In this age many of us are resigned to a meaningless life, as it has been impressed upon us that there is no intrinsic meaning to life. Douglas Adams made this into the cornerstone joke of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe, where Deep Thought, an incredibly intelligent super AI the size of a planet, spent 7.5 million years calculating the answer (to life, the universe and everything) which turned out as 42.

Nihilism is the philosophical perspective that holds that life has no intrinsic meaning. Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, is most often associated with nihilism although he actually warned against it rather than promoting it. It’s now some kind of dividing line in popular culture with traditionalists holding that there is a higher purpose fighting those who cynically point out how messed up and devoid of purpose our society seems to be. The cynics can at least laugh about their plight as they have their answer — 42.

The biggest problem with cynicism is that it most often comes with its low rent twin, resignation. Things suck and there’s nothing I can do about it. I might as well binge eight seasons of House for the third time. Combining resignation with nihilism, you get something along the lines of, nothing matters, so of course I can’t do anything about it.

Let’s do something about it by picking the intellectual lock of nihilism.

The lock pick we need is one simple word, intrinsic, inherent and fundamental. In this case life has no inherent and fundamental meaning. In plain speech, life doesn’t come with a built in meaning. From a creative point of view this is a point of celebration. If there is no inherent meaning to life then I am free to create all of the meaning that I want for myself in this life. This has a certain power to it. And it fits with the individualistic perspective of the west. I am me and I have the power to give things meaning in life.

While I wouldn’t argue against that, it comes with a whole world of context. First any meaning we give to life, likely comes from some already existing idea of what life means. We are then giving meaning to life amongst a selection of meanings. These meanings come in a few distinct flavors, traditional religious meanings, capitalist meanings, liberal democratic meanings, scientific meanings, conscious meanings, working class meanings, American meanings, European meanings, African meanings etc. Just like our genetic lineage we all come with a built in meaning lineage.

Beyond there being a background of already existing meanings for life, there is still something unsatisfying about meaning being so dependent on worldview.

I ache for meaning that transcends nihilism.

Looking back down my own lineage to India and Buddhism to Sunyata, emptiness. Here we find that all forms lack inerrant existence, reminiscent of nihilism’s lack of meaning, yet in emptiness there is a quality that is the awakened mind or buddha nature. More on that in a moment. Lacking inerrant existence is not the same as lacking meaning. That a form is empty of independent existence does not deny existence. This renders the idea of independent meaning moot. If there is any meaning at all, it must be meaning for everything at times.

If at this point your brain is a bit tied up in knots, its understandable. Let’s lay out the cruxes in the inquiry like this.

There is no inherent meaning in the universe.There is no inherent existence of forms (things including you or I).This means simultaneously that there is no reality and no lack of reality.In this emptiness there is a quality of the awakened mind.

In the Mahayana Buddhist conceptualization of realty, the awakened mind is the source of your consciousness, of your thoughts. This leads to a possibility that while there is no meaning to the universe, nor any independent existence, there is a quality of consciousness — the awakened mind. I have to stop here and note that this consciousness is not the small ego consciousness that Decartes spoke about in his cogito sum ergo, I think therefore I am. Rather there is no “I” in this equation — no independent existence. Side note, Descartes really dropped the ball when he was skeptical of everything but his own independent “I”.

The end of this line of reasoning is a universe that is indeed strange. It exists not in parts, nor in a separate whole. It has no meaning, no outcome or result indicated. And it has a quality of consciousness.

There it is, emptiness transcends nihilism. Ok philosopher, what do I do with that?

The answer is everything. We now have a thread to pull upon to create a new narrative of the universe. Let me lay that out for you by going back to the beginning or at least our conception of the beginning. 13.8 billion years ago, give or take a billion, existence as we know it started. It takes about 10 billion years for life to show up in our corner of the universe, Earth. Then most of the rest of the history of the universe to produce sentient beings, or roughly 2.5 million years ago.

Then about 165 years ago Darwin helped us become aware of evolution, and by extension our own evolution. As my friend Barbara Marx Hubbard would say with a sparkle in her eyes, “We are the first generation who are aware of our own evolution, that are aware that we are affecting our own evolution.”

This is a scintillating idea, evolution waking up to become aware of its own evolution.

Yet in light of Sunyata, empty of intrinsic existence it doesn’t really add up. You see something existing in time different from what existed before would have independent existence. If it exists now and did not exist before then it would have independent existence. There is a way out of this game of existential twister. There is no independent existence in time. No before and no after that exists independently. Now this one should be easy to get. If I never existed before then I cannot exist now. If I am not going to exist in the future, in any form including a corpse, then I cannot exist now.

Bravo if you are still with me because we have reached the end of this inquiry, all that is left to do is unwrap what we have uncovered.

All that exists is all that exists now and throughout all time. All that exists, exists without independence. Anything at all time is interdependent on every other thing at all time — they are all one without being one separate from anything that exists or does not exist. This is a continuity throughout all spacetime. And this continuous everything has the quality of the awakened mind.

Evolution does not have to become aware of evolution as it has always been and will always be. Consciousness did not appear in the universe as a force of evolution. It is the context of evolution from the first flaring forth to the last whisper of the aging universe.

While there is no intrinsic meaning to the universe, there is also no lack of meaning.

While there is no intrinsic existence in the universe, there is no lack of existence.

The context for all of this is the awakened mind, consciousness itself, with no beginning and no end. Bodhi Svaha, so it blessedly is.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S. I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 58 – Discovering what is real, true and profoundly meaningful

The implications of new mind-reading technologies that discovers what we find most attractive – Ross Dawson

What if technology could help you discover what you found most attractive, in people, art, or your environment? In Alfred Bester’s SF novel The Deceivers,

Reality, Meaning & Self-Development – Daniel Schmachtenberger

Reality, Meaning & Self-Development | Modern Wisdom Podcast #179

Can Artificial Intelligence Make Us More Human? – Deepak Chopra

The whole thrust of the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is to make machines interact with us more like humans. In practical terms this involves building a computer or robotic device that can take over a human task and do it just as well or better. But how often do we ask the opposite question:…

Jonathan Rowson — Integrating Our Souls, Systems, and Society

The applied philosopher and chess grandmaster on how our inner worlds influence society and politics.

A simulation model shows how individual differences affect major life decisions – Humanities and Social Sciences Communications

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications – A simulation model shows how individual differences affect major life decisions

How Being Vulnerable Can Expand Your World

While it’s not easy to be vulnerable, you’d be surprised how loving all of you and then sharing it with another can help you to connect with anyone.

Redefining distinctive human capabilities with the advent of generative AI – Ross Dawson

What are our distinctive human capabilities, the ones that distinguish us from machines for the longest? I believe that is perhaps the single most

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Listen Here

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post Discovering what is real, true and profoundly meaningful appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Transforming Tomorrow: Harness Your Potential to Ignite Lasting Change!

proofzine_editor — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 15:29:16 +0000

Inferno Summer & the Key to Solving the Climate Crisis

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

July 25th, 2023

A path winds its way out of the forest, through the hills and up to a high mountain vista overlooking a broad valley. As you approach the overlook, the scene is something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, the heat out of the shade of the trees is dangerously oppressive. You sense that you should get out of the direct sun as soon, but are compelled to the edge of the overlook. The valley below is filled with dense acrid smoke. Fire dances in spots across to the next ridgeline. On any other day, this outlook would draw hikers to take in the beautiful view. You are alone contemplating the disturbing sight below. After a few minutes you are forced to seek shelter in the shade. You turn and walk away, head hanging from the weight of the view..

Post apocalyptic future or Summer 2023?

Five major heat domes set record breaking high temperatures around the world — Iran airport hit 66.7C — 152F. Calling this the Inferno Summer might sound impressive if next summer wasn’t likely to be even hotter, and the summer after, and the summer after. The so-called “climate alarmists” can likewise now be renamed the “climate realists”.

I am a writer who brings you the good news about humanity’s future, week after week. Good news is good for people. Still, ignoring the new climate reality is just plain stupid. We are the frog in the water — getting hotter and hotter. There is a serious question whether or not we will climb out of the pot or boil ourselves alive.

We are standing on a precipice, and now is the time for extraordinary action.

This article is for those of you who say, “What can I do?” I’m about to pull the rug on your excuse. Let me run it down for you.

We have to reduce our carbon emissions. Beef and petroleum industries 35% of global carbon emissions (2021 data). Beef accounts for 35% of methane emissions which are even more potent greenhouse gasses than carbon dioxide.

The oil and gas industry made $4 Trillion USD in profit while consumers paid the highest home heating costs in history. Beef, while not nearly as profitable, did a trillion dollars of business.

We have made it wildly profitable to burn the world down.

Here’s where you come in. There are three things you can do to slow the climate crisis:

Reduce your consumption of petroleum. No matter how little you personally consume, you should seek to use less. Work from home. Move within walking, cycling or public transport distance from the places you normally drive.
Reduce your consumption of beef. Imagine that beef was priced to include its negative impacts on the environment and health. It would cost a few hundred dollars/euros a pound. That would make a Quarter-pounder cost $50. If beef were that price, you might still enjoy it a few times a year.
Pressure governments locally and globally to tax carbon producing industries heavily. We can’t do without petroleum entirely. And unless we nationalize the petroleum industries globally (yes I realize that sounds radical), it can be reasonably profitable.
Join in the creation of a new way of living sustainably on the planet.

That’s four steps.

The key to solving the crisis: Hold yourself accountable. Hold your friends and family accountable. Hold business accountable. And hold your governments accountable.

And do it now. The climate crisis is no longer a problem we will face in the future. It’s time for change.

Sorry for not being very entertaining today. I don’t want to waste too much of your time. There are things to be done and my deepest hope is that you do everything you can get out of the water before it boils.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
Editor PROOF

P.S. I would love you to follow our Podcast, subscribe to us on Youtube, sign up for the PROOF email and subscribe if you love reading PROOF

Proof 57 – Transforming Tomorrow: Harness Your Potential to Ignite Lasting Change!

How Mental Time Travel Can Make Us Better People

Kindness lives in the future-present.

In Accord with All Time – Lions Roar

If you can know yourself as the unity of past, present, and future, says Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, then you see you’re right where you ought to be.

Longtermism: a call to protect future generations

The course of the future is uncertain. But humanity’s choices now can shape how events unfold.

Summary: Moral demands and the far future (Andreas Mogensen) – Global Priorities Institute

Consequentialism is the view that good and right coincide: right actions are those which maximise good and minimise bad. The best-known form of consequentialism is utilitarianism. By inviting morality to override all else in our lives, utilitarianism hence inspires what is known as the demandingness…

Inside the Growing Movement to Do the Most Good Possible

Effective altruists say we should care about people thousands of miles away—and even millions of years in the future

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

Listen Here

PROOF is a Generative Futures Initiative Project

The Generative Futures Initiative
Generating a Thriving Future for All
generativefutures.org

The post Transforming Tomorrow: Harness Your Potential to Ignite Lasting Change! appeared first on PROOFZINE.

Change is our Superpower

proofzine_editor — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 11:04:52 +0000

Is Change Really Hard?

Michael Shaun Conaway

Publishing Editor

July 18th, 2023

Everyone gets stuck in life from time to time, and unfortunately in certain areas in life we are stuck almost all of the time. Maybe it’s fitness, or relationships or our jobs, or family. There are things that we just can’t seem to change — no matter how bad it is.

Neuroscience shines a light on why this is so:

We are habit forming beings. Our brains become more and more efficient at doing things automatically. This can make it very difficult to change because wanting change, or imagining change isn’t enough to overcome our habits. We actually have to practice change long enough to form a new habit, something that takes willpower and resilience.

Our brains prefer homeostasis, a predictable state. This is how we can do the same things over and over again without noticing time passing by. This is supported by our brain chemistry. Doing the predictable thing at the right time releases dopamine, the reward neurotransmitter, even if that thing is harmful like drug abuse. Conversely, change can be perceived as a threat in the brain provoking a fight, flight, freeze or appease response.

Our brains prioritize survival, avoiding new potentially dangerous behaviours. When change is perceived as a threat, our amygdala triggers a stress response making us resist change if it includes the unknown.

Change can also cause cognitive dissonance when our concept of self is called into question by new behaviours. We identify ourselves with the things we do over and over. Who are we if we suddenly start acting differently? For many people the discomfort of holding who they were with who they are becoming is too much and they retreat back to the familiar.

But still we know we can change. We have all changed things in our lives. And some of us have created extraordinary changes in our lives and in the lives of others. What is it that makes the difference between those who try but fail to change and those who reach escape velocity and seem to have some secret to have escaped those of us who are tethered to the Earth?

Many stories of radical change start with a near death experience. We often hear something like, “I was in a terrible auto accident and when I was in surgery I felt life going out of me. Then there was this question, am I finished here. I knew that I still had things I was meant to do with my life and I came back.” Then the story goes that after that the things that held them back from change were no longer a challenge. The moment that their life was a choice, everything changed.

These aren’t the only kinds of intense experiences that cause a radical shift in the way we see life and see ourselves. Warren Bennis PhD, who led the Marshall School of Business for many years, called these crucible experiences. A crucible is a container that can withstand very high temperatures and is used for melting, among other things, metal. In the context of leadership and personal development, a crucible refers to a transformative experience through which an individual comes to a new or an altered sense of the world and of identity. These experiences, often marked by hardship or some form of adversity, challenge and test a person’s mettle, but ultimately make them stronger and more resilient.

From the brain perspective this makes complete sense. If the brain resists change under normal circumstances to hold on to a comfortable, habitual state, then an event where that state no longer can be counted upon for survival, the brain suddenly wakes up and embraces anything that appears to insure survival. We’ve all experienced a nothing-left-to-lose burst of courage or inspiration.

If you are in the midst of a crucible event, or just recovering from a near death experience then the obvious thing to do is make all of the changes that you have wanted to make now. Go for it with no reservations.

If you are like the other 99.9% of people wanting to make change in a day to day normal life, I don’t usually recommend inducing a crucible or near death experience. I do recommend shaking things up by taking a year out to travel the world at some point in your life. But even this is impractical most of the time.

Where then do we look for a superpower for change?

The answer hides in plain sight in the near death and crucible stories, “a new or an altered sense of the world and of identity”. If we could somehow induce this alteration in the way we see the world and see ourselves then we stand a chance to gain this superpower.

For most of us the world is a fixed thing. It is some way. These people from here are this way and the ones from over there are another way. And we see ourselves as fixed things as well. I am like this and not like that. I like tea over coffee and I take mine strong with honey and milk. I’m an early riser. I’m allergic to exercise. I train daily to run marathons. This fundamental mindset has everything in the world being static and fixed. This is a perfect match for a brain that prefers homeostasis.

The idea that the world is fixed — that we are fixed — is just plain wrong.

Aristotle was definitive about this in his concept of time. Arguing with Zeno who said that at any given instant there was no change apparent, Aristotle argued that in time there was only change — instants connected together by a series of changes. Change, he argued, was the only constant in reality. At about the same time in India the Buddha taught that all of conditioned existence, without exception, is transient, evanescent, inconstant, or impermanent. There is no such thing as fixed or permanent in the universe.

Accepting change as a constant — no matter how uncomfortable that is — better aligns our world view with reality. If this is so, then the only sane thing to do is embrace change.

Next we can ask: If everything is changing, including myself, then what am I changing into?

Some change is physical, we consume food, release waste and who we are changes from day to day. That change continues from our first to our last breath in such a gradual manner that most of us hardly notice aging until illness or infirmity strike. Mental change is likewise constantly changing, one thought after another like a cricket and even though we may think the same thought over and over, that thought is always conditioned by the current circumstances. Emotions also come and go in an endless carousel.

All of this change, while constant, is still not the kind of change we are looking for. We want to be able to get up and exercise every day or overcome our fear of intimacy or start a new venture. We want extraordinary change.

To get there we are going to need an extraordinary tool, our imagination.

The imagination is the brain’s way to overcome our mental homeostasis. By imagining possible futures, we can try out different scenarios in a risk free environment. This helps us (and our brains) rehearse for change, making it easier to break free of habitual patterns.

Imagination also plays a key role in neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to create new connections and reorganize old ones. The brain does not need real experiences to grow and adapt. An imagined experience functions the same as reality when it comes to neuroplasticity.

Imagination can also help us with our stress response. We can imagine positive outcomes of change thus switching off the brain’s trigger for a survival level threat. This imagining of a positive future changes us now, not in the future, allowing us to reach for that future in a relaxed and confident mental space.

Finally, if we imagine ourselves in the future being different than today, and we can see ourselves being connected to who we are becoming, our brain includes this future self into our sense of a consistent self. And if who we are becoming is a part of who we are then we no longer feel cognitive dissonance.

If you want extraordinary change for yourself or for your community, your company, or even the whole world, start with imagining that future. Imagine what it would be like to have made the change in your past. How do things look? How do you feel? What are you doing in the future? Who is there with you?

Then with a vividly imagined future in hand, we can look back from the future and see the steps that we made, backcasting each milestone that we accomplished to reach our goal. If you can do this, imagine the future and generate the steps it takes to get there, then you can take that first step.

Taking the first step puts you on the path to your new future. And that is how we can gift ourselves the superpower of change.

Change, impermanence, becoming and evolution are our human birthrights.

It’s time to become a radical change agent.

In the meantime, we’ll be looking for PROOF of a thriving future for humanity.

The Generative Futurist
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Proof 56 – Change is our Superpower

Liberating Impermanence

Even timeless teachings must meet each moment anew.

How to Get Good at Dealing With Massive Change – zen habits

By Leo Babauta It can be stressful and anxiety-inducing to be in the middle of a bunch of life changes at once — so much so that it can turn a time of change into a time of misery. We all go through times of massive change: a divorce, death in the family, change of […]

Katharine Hayhoe – “Our future is still in our hands”

The esteemed climate scientist — and evangelical Christian — refreshingly complicates the picture of what’s possible, who can speak and act together, and what’s already happening.

We need a new social contract for the coming golden age of robotics

In history, every major technological advance has been used, for good and bad. We must think deeply about tomorrow’s robots today.

Positive tipping points can save the climate – this man is showing us how

Instead of focusing on what doom might lie ahead, scientists are identifying positive tipping points that could actually save us

BOLD.LY NOW is a movement of co-creative up-levelers who have a burning desire to step free of our collapsing world & take the most daring leap forward to a thriving world.

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