Syntheism: Building the God that internet is with Alexander Bard

At the beginning of the year I made a video about a new thinker to watch in 2019 — Daniel Schmachtenberger. And I made a connection to another favorite thinker of mine, Jean-Pierre Dupuy who collaborated with Žižek and who has a certain indirect connection to Peter Thiel via Rene Girard.

So, in a way I am circling between this new phenomenon of Intellectual Deep Web and older influences, such as Žižek or Peter Thiel and Jean Pierre Dupuy who have Rene Girard and his mimetic theory as a common ground. Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One is a startup bible, but also a pop version of mimetic theory, which is very neat.

Now I found another thinker who is also close to Žižek but at the same time he was the first Internet Philosopher and he is truly digital and also well versed in Intellectual Deep Web, and his name is Alexander Bard. And I found many of his ideas really exciting.

He follows thinkers interested in the collective wisdom and embodied practices, like John Vervaeke, Daniel Schmachtenberger and Jordan Hall and also is familiar with Bonnita Roy and her take on complexity and process philosophy. But he has one criticism of the intellectual deep web movement — these people and their solutions represent only one half of the puzzle. Because, yes we need to create new ways of relating and of building collective wisdom and embodied practices. But these things are only for the evening, when we are around campfire and can meditate and do yoga and talk to each other as people in good faith. This is very important. And build our collective sovereignty and wisdom. But the other thing is what we do in the morning — we need to have some bold vision of definite future. Of something that we want to create and build together.

Alexander Bard calls this the opposite of exploitation — we need imploitation practices, meaning some “tantric” vision and practices of cultivating, regenerating and building vertical, meaning with deep roots and up to the sky, rather than horizontally expanding to new territories. Practices of postponing and investing rather than immediate childish consumption.

One of fascinating things he talks about is that the dream of landing on the moon was a childish dream of horizontal expansion and colonizing new territory. So, we need moonshots, or visions of definite future as Peter Thiel calls it, but we need to build and think vertical, think imploitation, and not horizontal expansion and exploitation.

Interestingly Alexander Bard is also very focused on time, as being primary and space as secondary. He says that Einstein was wrong, time flows only in one direction and cannot be reversed. And there are two times, one is local time, and one is global time, or hypertime. This is the concept of hyper-objects. For example, climate change is a hyper-object, all local changes of climate put together.

But there is still a certain time that can go backwards. At least in our heads. This is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls projected time. And it is a basis of various bootstrapping paradoxes and the basis for mad prophesies. The point is that you first need to build definite future(s). One future is a positive utopia where we can get in 20 years (a definite time point, a deadline) if we get our act together, and one is a negative dystopia, where we will end up if we don’t put our act together. If we think about e.g. Agenda 2030 and so-called global goals (SDGs), this is a practical example of projected time. We have an endpoint of 2030 when we either meet some or all 17 SDGs or when we don’t meet those goals. [Daniel Schmachtenberger would say that having narrow goals in complex systems is problematic, but here we only focus on projected time and deadlines] So a deadline is a definite point in time in the future, a certain forcing function (a very useful concept), and we can bootstrap because we have this point firmly set in the future. So, we build backwards — we picture a world in 2030 and ask what we need to accomplish now to arrive there on time.

The idea of hyper-objects such as God (collection of all our current dreams) can be thought of as a spatial object (all our minds connected together, now via internet) but it can be thought of as a Hegelian absolute subject, an absolute spirit, when considered as a temporal process or a flow, a projected time, looking back at us from the future to the present. Now this could be called a hyper-network, or a hyper-process, or a hyper-flow instead of a hyper-object. A network at the end of time when everything will be connected with everything else. Ok sorry I got a bit speculative here. But thinking about the idea of flow, of having a flow when doing adrenaline sports — because of the risks associated with danger and deadlines, there is something to it. A feeling of flow as time beyond time when we are united with our end-point and bootstrap the desired future. So prophets when they talk about imminent dystopia can put us in a flow and help us to get our act together.

Anyhow a brilliant idea and explanation of Alexander Bard is that God didn’t create the world, he doesn’t reside in the past, God is universe itself, and God resides in the future. And we need to create God, keep creating God, and God is a network, it is internet. Internet as a global empire that already exists. But we need to start keeping up with it and use machines to love strangers better. Use symbiotic intelligence (human and AI hybrid and win-win collaboration, a term Bard has from Schmachtenberger) to love strangers better and unite past the nation states towards a global empire that already exists — an internet.

An internet and blockchain can facilitate new ways of win-win global collaboration. I keep mentioning the idea of universal learning scholarship and creating spin-offs and crowdfunding or gift economy as alternatives to universal basic income and some kind of forced win-lose redistribution. The digital revolution, that is a fourth revolution according to Alexander Bard, after speech, writing and printing press can help us to achieve this. And it a radical break from the broadcast modality that is the heritage of a printing press and Napoleon’s army towards some truly peer-to-peer collaboration and hive-mind.

Another very inspirational thinker that Alexander Bard could explore is Forrest Landry, and inspiration of Daniel Schmachtenberger who developed a rather radical metaphysics, based on the idea of triplication as different from both dualism and monism. (Something like three distinct views and modalities: top-down, bottom-up and peer-to-peer views/modalities, or a third-person view, a first-person view and peer-to-peer/transcendent view). He takes inspiration from computer science and topology and creates clarity and a very dense nuggets of wisdom. On the basis of his metaphysics, Forrest Landry built ethics of effective choice, based on the deep notions of symmetry (space, science) and continuity (time, ethics) and their effective product, where you cannot have a perfect symmetry and continuity at the same time, one needs to give way at least a bit. Based on this Landry can proclaim that “Love is that which enables choice”.

Another interesting philosopher is Reza Negarestani, who has this concept of Lego philosophy — building philosophy brick by brick, playfully as a Lego. But I am yet to explore this connection.

We could build God like that connection by connection on the internet. I wrote in Slovak a blog about a God that is a Facebook and a God that is not here yet some time ago. But now thanks to Alexander Bard everything clicked again together. And I am happy to have discovered Alexander Bard, as he gave me many ideas to think about and also a new energy to build vertical visions of definite future.