325 — Is Value Real? The Oracle of Open AI, Avatar and the Field of Value: A Memory of Two Futures
A Note to the Reader
This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [January 1, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.
Edited by Margie Torres and Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday in One Mountain:
Join Dr. Marc Gafni and the entire community in an evolutionary celebration this and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
We need global resonance with each other
Welcome, everyone! Happy New Year! Happy New Year 2023!
Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! Knowing we are welcome is the beginning of a magnificent 2023!
By the Dharma, we mean the New Story of Value, rooted in First Principles and First Values, which is the most potent response to the meta-crisis.
The most potent response to this moment in time, in which we are poised between utopia and dystopia — the most potent response is to tell a New Story.
— not a made-up story,
— not a contrived story,
— a story rooted in First Principles and First Values, embedded in a plotline,
— a storyline of value that begins to become a universal grammar of value.
Without that — we can’t move.
With that — we have our Archimedean lever, our fulcrum, through which we can move the world.
Remember, friends, every challenge in this moment of the meta-crisis is a global challenge. I am working — together with Claire — on doing a beautiful clip on this, which will be for the Unique Self Institute and for the Center. Here is the the essence of it — and this sets our intention for 2023 — our collective intention, our global intention. Today, we are going to be setting personal intentions for 2023. But here it is…
Every challenge is a global challenge — number one.
To meet a global challenge, we need global coordination.
To have a global coordination, we need to resonate with each other.
It is musical. We need global resonance with each other.
To have a sense of global resonance, we need a sense of intimacy with each other. Intimacy is resonance.
- We resonate with each other.
- We can dance together.
- We can be in music together.
- We need intimacy.
But there is a global intimacy disorder, which is the root cause for all of the generator functions of existential risk.
How do we overcome the global intimacy disorder?
The way we always do.
Global intimacy disorders are always rooted in a collapse of value — a failure to articulate a shared story of value rooted in shared First Principles and First Values.
— in order to heal the global intimacy disorder in response to the meta-crisis
— in order to generate global resonance, to generate global coordination
— in order to be able to respond to global challenges —
We need a shared global Story of Value: First Principles and First Values. Evolving First Principles and First Values, embedded in a shared Story of Value.
That is what we are about here. That is the core and the heart of the revolution.
Our uniqueness connects us to the whole
Imagine 2023, week 325, as we are going to begin to unfold this next step.
Imagine — understand we are in the Renaissance, but —
The Renaissance now is more critical than it was, even then…
We are at this time between worlds.
We are at this time between stories.
We don’t get to retreat to our personal traumas and to our personal pains.
We’ve got to, at some point, get bored with our own suffering — even as we move to heal and transform it — to become omni-considerate for the sake of the whole.
To know that without the transformation of the whole, and without my participation in the transformation of the whole, I will actually collapse. I will crumble in corruption, because I have turned away from the whole. At the same time, it is my personal transformation precisely that transforms the whole.
That is where we are…
We are at this moment in which Homo sapiens — the vision of humanity that took us through to this point in time — is now giving way.
- It is time for the crossing.
- It is time to cross over to the other side.
- It is time for the mystery schools of the Renaissance to be born anew, to inform Reality, to articulate together a New Story of Value.
It is time to cross over to the other side. Homo sapiens needs to become Homo amor. Amore: the Love Story of Kosmos.
Not a made-up love story, not a contrived pollyann-ish love story, but the actual knowing —
— that Reality is Eros — all the way down and all the way up the evolutionary chain.
— that Reality is not merely a fact, Reality is a story; it is not an ordinary story — it is a love story.
— that love is real, that love means something.
That is what we are going to talk about today. We are going to talk about — on this New Year as we set our intention — we are going to set our intention in both a collective and global way as Homo amor, human beings that realize that we are irreducibly unique incarnations of the Love Intelligence and Love Beauty of All-That-Is —
with a gift to give,
a poem to write,
a song to sing,
a way of being,
laughing,
loving in the world,
that is ours and irreducibly, uniquely ours alone,
even as we are part of the whole.
Our Uniqueness connects us to the whole. We are all the same — all of us are the same — and we are all unique at the same time.
That is a First Principle and First Value — We are all unique. We are all the same.
Here is another First Principle and First Value — Opposites are joined at the hip. Paradox.
So are we ready? Are we ready? Are we ready?
Let’s find each other, like we never have before.
Are we ready?
Are we ready to play a larger game?
Are we ready to play a larger game here in 2023?
Are we ready to participate, directly, personally through our transformation —
which is the transformation of the whole?
Are we ready to move from being Homo sapiens to Homo amor?
Are we ready to find our energy again?
— to reach down deep inside into the heart of that tiredness, into the heart of that anxiety, and to trust that Reality is holding me, even as Reality is trusting me to hold Reality and to give my unique gift?
Are we ready?
Are we ready to play a larger game?
Are we ready to participate in the evolution of love?
When we started this One Mountain Many Paths, this Evolutionary Church, this unfolding together — with Barbara Marx Hubbard, my dear beloved — we came together to be a revolution together.
That is what we are. We are a revolution together.
Each of us is holding, in this Unique Self Symphony, a piece of the revolution.
I am going to share something personal just for one second, then we are going to dive in.
Welcome, everyone! I spent this last week — as Kerstin Zohar knows because it is in her inbox — I spent this last week working on a new 25,000-word essay, which is something I have needed to do for a couple of years, on Uniqueness…
- This is key for the Unique Self Institute.
- This is key for the Outrageous Love Project.
- It is key for the Phenomenology of Eros.
These are all key projects in the Great Library, the Great Library that we are downloading into culture, with Goddess’ grace, over the next 10 years, as this Da Vinci-Ficino Renaissance response to the meta-crisis.
One of the pieces missing has been a history of Uniqueness — to show that Uniqueness is not a made-up idea, but like all of the First Values and First Principles, Uniqueness is real.
I spent the week trying to write this out. It will be an Appendix, I think, in one of The Universe: A Love Story books. I finished the essay.
I came to this moment — I just want to share it with you, to take some of you, if you’d like, into the inside — I came to this moment, as I needed to send that essay to a top scientist to fill in some pieces, I didn’t have that person on staff. I said, wow! We desperately need staff — a science person and an economics person. There are three or four critical pieces we are missing in this Da Vinci Great Library. Imagine the Medicis sitting with Da Vinci and Ficino in Florence — trying to see who do we need to gather…
Open your hearts
I am madly privileged to be with you, madly privileged to be alive.
And am I too excited? No, I’m not excited enough.
If you face the Apocalypse, you know that we are poised between utopia and dystopia:
- this could be the best of times, but only if we intervene, only if we stage a global intervention, or
- this could be the worst of times — that is where the trajectory will naturally go.
We are going to step in.
We are going to show up.
We are going to wake up.
We are going to grow up.
We are going to take our seat at the table, even as we celebrate.
We are not going to go to bitterness.
We are not going to become Doomers.
We are not going to step away.
I was dreaming about this last night — one of the most dangerous things in the world, and I woke Kristina up at 1am just to share this. I’m not sure she was happy being woken up at 1am, but she received it graciously and beautifully. —
One of the things that happens today is: when we can’t assimilate, we can’t swallow all that is happening, we don’t quite know how to do sensemaking, it is too large, either we get paralyzed in anxiety or we, in one way or the other, turn away.
We turn away to our own trauma.
We turn away to our own healing.
That is important, that is legitimate — but we do it in a way, which turns away.
It is too big for us; we don’t know what to do.
It is too much; the gap between our ability to feel the pain and heal the pain is too great. In that gap, we close our hearts.
I want to invite everyone to open their hearts — open my heart; open your heart.
Here is how we open our hearts:
We realize it is not for us to do the whole thing. It is for us to step in and to play our Unique Self instrument in the Unique Self Symphony.
Every single person who is listening, there is a few hundred of us who get together every week to to be in One Mountain — we are the heart of the revolution, whether you are here in-person or you are here in the replay.
I encourage you to be in both, to be with us in-person and to listen again to the replay so we can go deeper. Whoever you are — wherever you are in this — you have a gift to give, and you have got to sharpen your skills.
Krista Josepha went this week to do a gorgeous seminar on writing — to sharpen her writing skills so she can tell the story of the Dharma in her gorgeous, unique way.
She said, I am missing that skill in order to be the fullest Unique Self I can be at this moment in time.
Whatever it means to you,
whether it is writing a check,
whether it is writing an Outrageous Love Letter,
whether it is writing,
literally in-scripting on the very heart of the Divine,
your mad commitment to step up and play your instrument — that is where joy happens:
Joy happens in one way and one way only — I am living my life; sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down. Joy comes from the unique currency of my life.
I can’t get Joy living someone else’s life.
I can’t get Joy when my life is unfulfilled,
The only fear of death is an unlived life.
Wow!
So, are we ready, friends? Oh my God, are we ready?
Remembering David Ray Griffin
I want to dedicate this One Mountain to a person I would like to call a dear friend. I actually don’t have the right to call this person a dear friend, they weren’t a dear friend. It was a person I made contact with at the end of his life — he wrote a final book, which I shared with you all a year ago, on death, that I promised to incorporate into a book I am completing now, on death and our response to death.
His name was David Ray Griffin — he just died a couple of days ago.
We had a beautiful correspondence at the end of his life.
David was the single greatest, Whiteheadian scholar in the world — the single greatest scholar of Whitehead in the world. The man had more integrity in his thumb than almost any scholar I have read. He is one of the very few people that I trust… The formulation of the sentences, the care in his sentences, the footnotes in his sentences — massively Integris.
I wrote him — and asked him — and shared with him a little bit about CosmoErotic Humanism, because a few people had written me in the last year and said: we think that some of the things you are saying in CosmoErotic Humanism, there seem to be similar strains in Whitehead. Are you reading Whitehead? — I don’t read Whitehead.
Unlike in the University — when someone says in the University: wow, someone said something similar to you, you get devastated because your ego is crushed. When you are trying to formulate a New Story of Value, and you hear that someone said something similar to you, or was stumbling in the same direction, you are overjoyed.
I was overjoyed to hear that Whitehead, although he hadn’t formulated it the way we had, but he was overlapping in certain key intuitions — that have been moving through me for a few decades.
I wrote David. I shared with him the basic vision, in a couple of emails, of CosmoErotic Humanism. I said —
Is Whitehead onboard? You are the greatest scholar of Whitehead in the world.
And he said, oh my God! Whitehead is on board!
That is my language, not his. But he said, yes, absolutely! You are in the complete right direction;
Whitehead is totally onboard all the way. I was just thrilled — David Ray Griffin, just an incredible man.
I am going to tell you something hard for a second, friends.
David Ray Griffin, when 9/11 happened, he stopped — stopped everything and turned towards 9/11 and wrote a series of books, utterly non-conspiratorial.
I want you to get that — non-conspiratorial at all, but extremely grounded.
He literally left his academic career, stopped writing — he had written 20 important books that a very small group of people had read, but critical people. I read him super carefully, my friend Ken Wilber read him super carefully, my student and colleague partner Zak read him super carefully. He is a very, very important thinker.
David turned and began to write about 9/11 — he published a series of books, which were rigorous, careful — the opposite of what is called conspiratorial thinking, he was very careful to avoid unhinged and ungrounded claims, which often appear in the conspiracy theory literature — in which he established, I think, beyond a shadow of a doubt, if you read the books, that whatever happened on 9/11, it is not what the public story was…
— It was the beginning of this gap that took place.
— It is when the information ecology really began to break down.
— There was enough information in the public space that indicated that the public story was inaccurate.
Yet, all mainstream sources of information stuck to the public story; anyone who deviated from the public story was essentially thrown off of television possibilities. It is a big deal. That is one of the places the information ecology broke down.
David had the courage — it is why I am talking about it now: it took enormous courage.
One of the most sober, serious scholars in the world. This is a man of enormous courage, enormous depth, enormous goodness. I have tears in my eyes thinking about him now.
One of the sadnesses of my life is that we didn’t get to become good friends.
— We exchanged a number of emails. He wasn’t able, at that time, to talk on the phone, because he had an advanced illness. —
I want to dedicate today to David Ray Griffin — your work stands in the world.
Everything that I do and we do is, in some sense, informed by you, informed by you in the sense that you lived in the world, that you walk before us, that we are holding hands together. David Ray Griffin, who has passed from this world into the next world; who is fully alive in the next dimension of Reality, is with us today.
Marc: Oh my God, wow! Tom Ronen Goddard, Happy New Year, brother! I turn to you with mad delight to resonate the code. Take us inside. Oh, my God.
Tom: Thank you, beloved Marc. It’s a delight to be here with all of you this New Year’s Day.
Evolutionary Love Code
Evolutionary Love is not merely an emotion. It is a perception. The
Evolutionary Lover sees with God's eyes. Because Love is a
perception at its core – a perception that generates emotion -
there is great hope in love. The Universe sees and the Universe
sees love. The Universe feels and the Universe feels love. Seeing
generates feeling, and feeling generates seeing. But we must
start with perception because perception can be trained through
practice. Personal human love is a Unique Self Perception.
Personal self-love is a Perception of one's own Unique Self.
However, one cannot be an evolutionary lover with these forms
of perception alone. Evolutionary Love requires a perception of
the entire evolutionary process and our place within it.Reality speaks in stories
Friends, we are going to be starting Avatar now.
We are going to spend the rest of this week, probably the two following weeks on Avatar. The reason we are going to spend time on it is, because it is a beautiful way to start the year, because Avatar is going to be with us in culture for the next decade, because it started in 2009 and it is going to be going to 2030.
It is a key moment in culture to track and understand, just like we have done with Dune, Don’t Look Up, with Star Wars, and will do with many other movies. It is a way of reading texts of culture; a movie is a text of culture.
- We are going to look at this particular text of culture.
- We are going to look at it from several different doors.
- We are not going to be interested in the classical review possibilities that you can see online.
- We want to read between the lines.
Our claim is not, in any sense, that the understanding that we will develop here was held by the filmmakers. We are not looking for the intent of the filmmakers.
As I have mentioned to some of you before, I once spent a wonderful, deep evening, into the night, with Lana Wachowski at her home, then in Chicago. We were looking at a movie that he had then made, V for Vendetta, which was a little bit after she had made The Matrix.
We spent the evening, deep into the night, talking about what V for Vendetta meant and then, talking about the trajectory, the understanding of The Matrix films. I made it very clear to Lana (she was madly delighted), that the fact that she actually wrote the movie with her sister doesn’t mean that she has a better interpretation of the movie than me. That is critical. The piece of art stands; culture often speaks through an artist, or through a group of artists, without their conscious participation in that speaking.
She, Culture, Reality has many voices.
We are making no claim here, friends, about the intent of the movie makers.
We are speaking to culture, how culture seizes on a movie, as a way to speak into culture.
(And, parenthesis: be very careful in discerning — about what movies you watch. Movies are an energetic field: What energy do you take into your body? What subtle energy? What vision?)
Movies, at their best, are stories.
Stories are key dimensions of culture.
God loves stories.
Reality speaks in the language of mathematics.
Reality speaks in the language of story.
Story is a core construct of Reality.
In fact, one of the First Principles and First Values of Reality is story itself.
Story is a First Principle and First Value.
In the Unique Self Institute, we talk about your Unique Self story. One of the core projects that I am insanely excited about, which is not yet online, that I have been working on with Dr. Kincaid for a number of years, is the realization that every person is an Outrageous Love Story — that your story is an Outrageous Love Story.
All of these pieces, with the grace of She, will come together — as the New Story of Value enters into the world.
So a movie is a story, and a story is of course a structure of Reality, and a story needs to be read carefully, and you have to listen to it deeply.
The Oracle of Open AI
We are going to start in a strange way…
Tom, Dr. Tom Ronen Goddard, sent me two clips this morning. One was from Lensa. Lensa is a major image AI that has actually blown the world out in the last short period of time. Lensa is the number one selling app in the Apple App Store. It is about using AI to create an image. I am not going to spend today talking about Lensa.
There we go, Tom. He’s looking good, isn’t he?
Not bad. Not bad.
So, Lensa can create an image. It is very beautiful. It can be very gorgeous — because, I think, that I know Tom well — we did Holy of Holies for many years.. We have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours of deep airtime over more than a decade, so I think I know Tom a little bit. Of course, he is a mystery, and I bow before the mystery of his uniqueness, but I think that that picture captures something in Tom that an ordinary picture doesn’t capture. It captures some of Tom’s vision and some of his nobility — it managed to do something with Tom — to bring out something in his image that was beautiful.
Tragically, however, the capacity of Lensa to accentuate something beautiful, something unique that the ordinary camera doesn’t capture is equally balanced and perhaps even tragically outweighed by its ability to create fakes, to create distortions, to create fakes that are almost impossible to identify — to distort Reality.
I am not going to talk this week about the problem of deep fake images and the problem of Lensa creating realities that are inaccurate, and that cannot be discerned by the naked eye. Let’s be aware of it.
There is a second form of AI — I went and asked the second form of AI this week, which is the GPT-3 program. GPT-3 is a particular module of AI at the leading-edge of AI that has made a number of breakthroughs in the past several years — in this past several months, actually.
GPT-3, like Lensa, is an image program. It became a public program. You can now register for this Open AI — I registered for it, actually Suzette very graciously registered me for it.
I want to stay completely focused, everyone. I want to read with you the question, I asked it. The question was — Is value real? Now, let’s go carefully. This is what the AI said ( I am going to ask everyone not to read the value quote yet — just hold for a second before you read).
“Value is a subjective concept that refers to the worth or importance that an individual or group places on something. It is not a tangible, physical thing, but rather a concept that exists in the mind and is influenced by cultural, social, and personal factors. Different people may place different values on the same thing, and the same person may place different values on different things at different times. Value is often used to make decisions about what to pursue, what to invest in, and how to allocate resources. It is an important concept in many fields, including economics, philosophy, and psychology.”
Here is the problem:
OpenAI is making a claim — it is an oracular claim.
This will become a form of Oracle. This was what Google intended to be.
This OpenAI is now out-stripping Google exponentially.
I am sure Google will close the gap with its own version.
The point is, whether it is this OpenAI, GPT-3 program or it becomes a GP-32, however it works, OpenAI, Google, or some other program, what we are doing is —
We are developing the notion of an Oracle, which means you will turn to the Oracle, instead of exercising your own capacity for discernment.
If you think that is an overstatement, just think, when was the last time you used a map — to map reality? We are taking a trip — you needed to use a map — when was the last time you used a map?
A long time ago, my friends. — Why? Because, what you do is, you use GPS.
And GPS — you plug in the coordinates of where you are going; you essentially stop using a map. I know there are a couple of righteous women here, who still use maps, we bow to you. Overall, the entire world has stopped using maps.
The reason the world has stopped using maps is because we defer to the GPS.
Literally, billions of people in the world are using GPS.
The reason that GPS is so dangerous is that by using GPS I (we) literally dislocate from the terrain of my (our) life. The navigational portion of our brain atrophies — our ability to locate ourselves, to be autonomous, to be self-sufficient, to know where we are actually falls apart.
It is a very, very big deal.
There is an elemental human beauty.
There is also an elemental human laziness that has to be transmuted and overcome.
When an application comes that is very easy to use, that promises instant convenience, we are willing, like the Indians were, to sell Manhattan for a few trinkets.
This is such a big deal. We dislocated an entire generation based on GPS.
Now, stay close…
What is going to happen, in a relatively short order of time is: OpenAI will become like a GPS, not for a location in physical terrain — for a location, what in Hebrew, we call makom: the place. By place, we mean emotional, existential, psychological, spiritual terrain.
Imagine, for a second, that you are going out with someone. You have been going out with them for three years. You are not quite sure if you should marry them. What you will do is — you won’t be able to avoid the temptation — you will ask an OpenAI program. Of course, there will be higher level programs that you have to subscribe to — they will be OpenAI.
You will say — Should Jill marry Tom or not? The machine intelligence that we have today is exponentially more powerful than the machine intelligence that defeated Garry Kasparov in the Deep Blue games, 25 years ago — 100 games to none. The level of AI and machine intelligence is unimaginable. What it is doing is, it is gathering all of what is called your digital exhaust, in other terms, the bread crumbs of your life. In other terms, it is called Reality mining.
All three of those are formal terms used in the literature for gathering everything about you, then making a determination about what the best thing is for you to do.
When I say everything about you — I don’t mean which pornographic sites you visited. That is what everyone is afraid of — that is the least interesting thing to AI. Not uninteresting, but the least interesting.
What it gathers is your patterns…
— how you respond viscerally to different prompts?
— how long your finger hovers on a mouse on your Macintosh?
— how long you’re holding the mouse on a PC before you click?
— what is the pattern of letters that you use in order to type?
— how long do you hover on each letter?
Essentially, what machine intelligence does is — it uses this vast computational power, which is dissociated from feeling tones. AI is a structure that bypasses feeling at its core. A human being is made up by feeling. In other words –
- We are made up by gluons and quarks — the most elemental particles.
- Then, we have protons, neutrons, and electrons.
- Then, we have atoms.
- Then, we have molecules.
- Then, we have macromolecules.
- Then, we have cells.
- Then, we have multicellular cells.
- Then, we go up to organelles.
- Then, we go up to organisms.
All those structures of human being are filled with pulsing and throbbing feeling tones — that all lives in us. We are informed by the needs, the desires, the pulsing and throbbing of all of Reality that lives in us.
We live in an Intimate Universe — the Intimate Universe lives in us.
What AI does, friends — AI bypasses the Intimate Universe for raw, unimaginable computational power that seeks to detect general patterns.
Enough of those patterns can begin to develop a pseudo-unique profile on you —
- what your inclinations are…
- what your inhibitions are…
- when you are sad…
- when you are happy…
- what the ostensible trajectory of your life may or may not be…
So when Jill wants to know whether to marry Tom — there is no way on God’s earth, on Goddess’ earth, that she is going to be able to resist the temptation to ask AI, whether she should marry Tom. — That is an Oracle, my friends.
Does everyone get that? That is an Oracle.
We are going to start asking this OpenAI about everything.
- Where should I live?
- How should I resolve this particular argument with my partner?
- Should I stay or should I go?
- How should I engage my life?
This is going to be much more powerful than the new tarot. A very, very narrow sliver of the population with some connection to certain kind of occult traditions has any idea what the new tarot means.
But AI, which is making the claim of true gnosis, true knowledge — oh my God — is claiming authority. Whoa! What does that mean?
The claim made by AI is —
- I am going to integrate all information.
- I will tell you what is true.
- I will tell you what is not true.
- I will tell you what is real.
- I will tell you what’s not real.
Reality will be mediated through this oracular structure that is owned privately —
that has an entire set of agendas that are invisible and will be a tool — to borrow Alex Pentland’s phrase from the MIT Media Lab — a tool of control, a tool of manipulation, of unimaginable power.
Because this AI, at least from a computational perspective, knows you — but not know you erotically, not know you carnally — knows you in a way that is able to press your buttons, to know when you are vulnerable, to know what your patterns are…Wow!
Ask AI: is value real?
Okay, with that in mind, let’s take a look. So, I asked this AI — Is value real? Here is what OpenAI writes, a couple of days ago.
“Value is a subjective concept, meaning it’s not objective, that refers to the worth or importance that an individual or group places on something. It’s not a tangible, physical thing, but rather a concept that exists in the mind and is influenced by cultural, social and personal factors. Different people may place different values on the same thing. And the same person may place different values on different things at different times.”
Now friends, let’s hold there for a second. Is that right or wrong? It is exactly right and exactly wrong.
Value is subjective — in the sense that it moves through an individual. But, the assumption here, and the way subjective is being used here — it is not real. It is based on the worth or importance that an individual or a group places on something — meaning it is culturally constructed. Culture can only create constructions.
It is not tangible — that is true, or physical — that is true.
It is a concept that exists in the mind — meaning, it is not objective.
It is influenced by cultural, social, and personal factors. — that is true; it is influenced by them, but it is also beyond them. That is nowhere apparent.
There is no shared Field of value — that is for sure.
Different people may place different values on the same thing. And the same person may place different values and different things at different times.
Now that sentence by itself is true, but only partial. It is also completely false, in the sense that it leaves out the notion of a Field of value, within that shared Field of Value. Within a universal grammar of value, we can have radical diversity — a universal grammar of value is a context for our diversity.
Of course, value is mediated through our subjectivity — our subjectivity itself, meaning our inner personhood, is part of the Field of Value. We are value personified. We are Unique. We are also the same. Meaning, we also participate in a shared Field of Value.
I asked it one more time, and this is what it said the second time. Here’s the second question, I asked again — Is value real? And this time, it got a little clearer. — Value is a subjective concept… — so far, the same as the one before — … that refers to the importance or worth that someone attaches to something.
You’ve got to understand. If value is only the importance or worth that someone attaches to something — well, if Hitler attaches value to some things, so that is value.
And what is the distinction between that which Hitler values and that which we value here at One Mountain? Value has got to be something much more than the subjective importance that someone attaches to something. And here, the mask drops. Look at the next sentence:
Value is not an objective property of a thing.
Meaning, I want to get this clear, everybody, value is not real. That is what OpenAI has told us — value is not real.
It’s rather a judgment or evaluation made by a person.
Now, is there an evaluative process to discern value? Of course there is, but I am evaluating something that is real then. Next sentence:
Different people can have different values and assign different levels of value to the same thing.
This is the heart not only of neoliberalism — this is a postmodern heart.
This is a postmodern moment.
It is also a strong, conservative moment that makes the flip, opposite view.
We participate in an objective Field of Value
The failure to articulate a Field of Value is not a neoliberal problem.
It is not just a postmodern neoliberal problem.
It is a postmodern conservative problem.
It is a premodern conservative problem.
Let us understand what we mean by that — stay close, everybody.
What the classical conservative move is, there is a tradition. That tradition is Christian, or a particular form of Sunni or Shiite, or a particular form of Orthodox, or a particular form of Tibetan Buddhism.
We are going to tell you what value is. Value is what we say it is — what the Church claims value to be whether that is Newt Gingrich, whether that is Karl Rove, whether that is George Bush.
Value is within a very particular parameter. There is not a shared Field of Value that everyone has equal access to. Rather: value is Christian — or, in Iran, value is Islamic. Anyone out of my particular read of the Field of Value has no value, is devalued, and therefore can be oppressed, manipulated, deceived, or killed. That is the neoconservative Field of Value — number one.
The neoliberal Field of Value — I don’t like the word neoliberal, but I am going to use it,
I appreciate it — let’s call it the postmodern. It is more of a postmodern moment. I don’t want to get stuck in the liberal-conservative thing — it is a postmodern moment.
The postmodern moment says, value is not real. Period. The postmodern moment is rebelling against the conservative moment which says, value is only my value. It rebels by saying, there is no value. Value is simply not real.
That is a very big deal — because both the conservative moment and the postmodern moment — both the postmodern conservative and the postmodern liberal, the premodern and postmodern conservative, as well as the postmodern liberal are all saying there is no shared Field of Value. That is the big deal, does everyone get this? That is the key. There has got to be a shared Field of Value in which I participate.
This is absolutely critical. The way AI is using the word subjective means — not real, not objective, but my radical subjectivity is inaccurate. I am not merely subjective. I am both subjective and objective.
That is the nature of Reality. We are validating this, in this great New Story of Value — that we are doing in CosmoErotic Humanism.
This is really, really key.
I am not just subjective. I am subjective and objective.
Meaning — I am unique and the same.
Meaning — we all participate in an objective Field of Value or a real Field of Value.
We participate in it, both objectively and subjectively.
Meaning —
- the reason we can have a communicative action, as Habermas calls it,
- the reason we can have a conversation,
- we can say the word good,
- we can have a general sense of what each other are talking about, or
- we can say the word true,
- we can say the word beautiful —
— is because we participate in a shared field of meaning. Otherwise, we couldn’t have a conversation at all.
Let’s move into our minds and our hearts. Let’s feel this.
It is shocking and it is beautiful.
Let’s feel this deeply, together.
Everyone in the world can have a conversation about the good.
Even if we disagree, in a thousand ways, we still vaguely know what we are talking about because we participate in the same Field.
We need to realize — we participate in an objective Field of Value.
By objective, I mean, not that it is not evolving — it is evolving value.
By objective, I mean real.
Our subjectivity — meaning our irreducible uniqueness — participates in a larger Field of the Real.
My Unique Self is not my separate self. My separate self is just me thinking what I think.
That is how OpenAI defines the self.
OpenAI’s self is a separate self.
It is what I value against what you value.
It’s Hobbes’ state of war — no one participates in a shared Field of Value.
Therefore, my subjectivity is all I have. — Wrong! Exactly wrong!
We know that it is wrong in the interior sciences.
We know that it is wrong in the exterior sciences.
I participate in a shared Field.
There is a shared Field of consciousness and every great interior science spoke to our capacity to access that shared Field.
Albert Einstein, speaking for exteriors, talked about separation as being an optical delusion of consciousness. He was speaking to the truth that there is a shared Field of exteriors.
Reality is interiors and exteriors all the way up and all the way down the evolutionary chain. We participate, friends, together. Brothers, sisters, we participate together in a shared Field of Value.
From the perspective of that shared value we can articulate a universal grammar of value as a context for our diversity.
- Our subjectivity doesn’t get erased.
- It doesn’t get obliterated.
- It doesn’t get obfuscated.
- We are not separate selves.
- We are Unique Selves.
What is the difference between a separate self and a Unique Self?
The difference is what comes in the middle. After separate self, there is what we call the Field of Value or True Self, or The Tao. The total number of True Selves in the world is One.
— True Self is The Tao.
— True Self is the singular that has no plural.
— True Self is the Field of consciousness.
— True Self is sunyata.
— True Self is Atman is Brahman.
— True Self is Adonai hu Elohim.
— True Self is the Great Spirit.
— True Self is the Great One.
— True Self is the Implicate Order.
True Self is the Field of Value in which we all participate and all have direct access.
In True Self or in the Field of Value, we understand, friends, that that which unites us is so much greater than that which divides us.
From that place of a grammar of value, we can create a shared intimacy.
If there is no grammar of value, then there is no shared intimacy.
AI told us that a shared story of value is impossible
How did we begin today?
We began by talking about a meta-crisis, meaning — we are facing existential risk to our very existence, extinction — and a risk to our humanity; the death of our humanity; of being human as we understand being human.
Every one of the challenges — the existential risks, the catastrophic risks — are global. These are global challenges.
We said, you can only respond to a global challenge through global coordination.
We can only elicit global coordination through global resonance.
We have to resonate with each other — we have to be in the music together.
We can only create global resonance if we have global intimacy.
Global intimacy means we have some sense of a shared identity — language.
We can talk to each other. We can only have intimacy — like in a couple, like in a group, in an organization, like in a movement, like in a global world, which is now a village — if we have a shared story of value. There is no more local — the local is global and the global is local.
Without a shared story of value, we cannot heal the global intimacy disorder, which is the root cause of the generator functions for existential risk.
The generator functions for existential risk are —
- win-lose metrics;
- rivalrous conflict based on win-lose metrics,
- the ultimate failure of intimacy,
- complicated systems,
- fragile systems, in which the different parts don’t know what each other are doing — it breaks down.
- a failure of intimacy.
The root cause of generator functions of existential risk is this global intimacy disorder, which can only be healed by a shared story of value.
Only a shared story of value can create global intimacy,
which can create global resonance,
which can create the possibility for global coordination,
which can respond to global challenges.
But friends, what AI just told us is — that is impossible. Does everyone get that? How many people get what we just saw?
AI just told us this is impossible, because there is no shared Field of Value.
Value is what one person decides at one moment is valuable.
They change their mind the next moment.
It is all pure subjectivity.
It is subjectivity without any objective field.
AI told us, we cannot solve existential risk. That is what OpenAI just declared to the world — it seeded that into Reality. Oh, my God!
What OpenAI has done is — is disqualified Reality.
There is no more quality. It is devalued. It has taken value out of Reality.
Ask AI: is love real?
We are going to take this another 10 minutes, but it is critical. I can’t even imagine anything that is more important. If you have something more important, of course, do it.
If someone is waiting for you — complete honoring, whatever is happening in your home and every place.
This is so critical. We have got to get this together.
I asked AI another question — Is love real?
Wow, let’s take a look.
“Love is a complex mix of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person. It can also include deep romantic or sexual attraction. Love is an important part of many people’s lives and can play a role in relationships, friendships, and families. While the exact definition of love may vary from person to person, it is a real emotion that people experience and can have a significant impact on their lives.”
Let’s take a look at what AI said — the answer should be, Yes! But it is not.
“Love is a complex mix of emotions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with strong feelings of affection, protectiveness, warmth, and respect for another person.”
Now, is that true? Well, yes. But, is that all love is?
It is a “complex mix of emotions, behaviors, beliefs” — all of which are subjective.
There is some truth in that, but it doesn’t yet tell us what we asked — Is love real?
Then, it goes on to describe love — it avoids the question.
AI says, It can also include deep romantic or sexual attraction. It can.
Love is an important part of many people’s lives — that is true, and can play a role in relationships, friendships, and families. Well, that is terrific.
While the exact definition of love may vary from person to person — meaning, there is no shared understanding of love. There is no universal grammar of value. We are not even saying there are four major understandings of love.
Whatever love is, it varies from person to person. If what love means varies completely from person to person, then love means nothing.
A person’s experience of love is unique, but even my unique experience of love is shared. The First Principle and First Value is not just a First Principle and First Value of Uniqueness. Opposites are joined at the hip in Kosmos — that, itself, is a First Principle and First Value. We are all unique and we are all common.
What we share is our common sense.
What common sense means is — we can do common sensemaking.
We are all Unique. We all share in common — our Uniqueness.
Our Uniqueness in all of us lives together with our common sense.
We don’t just want a seat at the dais, wrote the poet Charles Reznikoff.
We all want a seat at the ordinary table. We are all the same — 99% of our genetic code is the same. We have 1% that is different.
We participate in a shared Field of Value. Love has got to mean something, in some sense, which is enacting, disclosing a shared Field. None of that is available, friends in any sense, shape or form, in OpenAI.
OpenAI refuses to tell us that love is real. In fact, OpenAI tells us that love is not real. Love is merely subjective — varies from person to person. It is an emotion — whatever that means. AI refuses to affirm that love is a value — that love is real, or that value is real. That’s shocking!
Notice what AI has done — AI has hijacked the Real. For it, the Real is that which can be measured, that which can be quantified — measurement and quantification are hijacking the Real.
The Real — imagine the Goddess in prison, The Shekhinah, She, value, Eros Herself — is in prison. Eros has been imprisoned; it has been hijacked.
The contemporary discourse says, the only thing that is Real is the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind — empirical sensory perception and empirical logical perception, which are validated by measurement of a particular kind.
But what is true is not only the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of the Senses — there is the Eye of Consciousness. The Eye of Consciousness has four expressions — four ways of seeing —
- One way is the Eye of the Heart.
- Another way is the Eye of Value,
- Another way is the Eye of Contemplation,
- Another way is the Eye of the Spirit —
These are four names for this Eye of Consciousness that discerns Reality and knows that love is real and that value is real.
It is a moment that Avatar captured in Avatar 1, in a subtle and beautiful way. I want to see that with you; whether they intended exactly to capture it, or didn’t, doesn’t matter. They did. It is a beautiful, subtle moment. I want to honor that moment and unpack that moment, and hold it with you as we move towards closing.
Avatar 1: Pandora is Pandora’s box and the Garden of Eden
Let’s take a look at three scenes in the story of Avatar. It is a wild story. I will talk about it more next week. For now, let’s understand the following:
- There is a planet called Pandora. Pandora is mineral-rich [planet] with a mineral called Unobtainium: that which cannot be obtained. A paradoxical and beautiful name.
- Pandora is Pandora’s box in the myth, but actually Pandora is the Garden of Eden. Pandora houses these beautiful people called the Na’vi. Navi means in Hebrew the prophet or those who speak. The Na’vi are embodied, awake and alive in this wondrous expression in Avatar 1 of the best, of the heart, of gorgeousness that can live in a human being.
- Their technologies are limited, but sophisticated within their own knowing. They do not have evolved senses of the Eye of the Mind — of mathematics and classical modern technology. But, they have deep access —
— to the Field of Being,
— to the Field of Value,
— to the Field of Love,
— to the Field of Joy,
— to the Field of the Real.
As we will see next week, the Na’vi are more subtle and more complex.
There is not easy discernments that we can make here — there is a lot more to say.
For now, I want to hold the utter and wild beauty of the Na’vi.
The representatives of planet Earth have come to Pandora to steal its Unobtainium — to obtain the unobtainable. Grace is a doctor and serious researcher, who is there to study the Na’vi. She is a good person, but she believes that which is real is the measurable.
Yet, she is fascinated by the Na’vi and by the biological reality of an utterly inter-connected Field of knowledge, in which the Na’vi, the human being, is connected to the Field of nature. The human being can —
- hear the voices of the ancestors,
- sing the song of the birds,
- access the past and some of the future,
- live in a wildly ecstatic and yet second simplicity, harmony with the larger field.
It is an idyllic Garden of Eden vision. It is a beautiful vision.
It is incomplete — it needs to be integrated with technology.
And neither Avatar 1 or Avatar 2 has succeeded. They have created this technology — anti-technology world. They haven’t succeeded in creating a larger whole. But, let’s bracket that…
For now, let’s look at the utter beauty of the Na’vi people, which we are going to see, in a glimpse. What we are also going to see is Dr. Grace. She gets shot as she is attempting — towards the end of Avatar 1 — to help the Na’vi.
The Americans (or the planet Earth representatives) are going to destroy the Hometree, which is central to the experience and to the biological neural spiritual networks of the Na’vi. Dr. Grace is arguing to a man named Selfridge, not to let the Marine, Colonel Miles Quaritch, destroy Hometree. In the end, when she goes to help — a little bit later in the movie — she is shot. She is brought by Jake Sully, who is the hero of the movie; he is a human being in an avatar body.
In Avatar, the notion of an avatar is this program developed, in the movie, by planet Earth. To allow human beings to be in avatar bodies, to create a relationship with Pandora — not for peace, but for the appropriate success, from planet Earth’s perspective, of either exploiting all of the resources or extracting all the resources of Pandora, and, ultimately, in Avatar 2 throwing the Pandorans off Pandora, in order to make the New Earth for the dying Earth. That is the subplot.
Let’s take a look. Let’s look really carefully. It is a beautiful, beautiful set of three short clips — we will talk about it for a moment. Take us inside, Avatar 1. Here we go —
Avatar 1: Movie Clip 1: There’s Nothing We Have That They Want
Avatar 1: Movie Clip 2: Grace Transfiguration Ceremony
The feeling tone of reality
What happened there?
Dr. Grace Augustine, who is later shot trying to help the Na’vi, but it is earlier on, and she is talking to Selfridge. She is a scientist, and her sense of the Real — what is ultimately real — is still mediated by the measurable. She is a good and wonderful person, but when she says it is real — it has to be measurable.
Look what she says — she is talking to Selfridge and she says really beautifully — I’m not talking pagan voodoo here. I’m talking about something real.
— That is the question. What I asked AI was — Is value real? Is love real? —
She says, I’m talking about something real. Her next sentence is — about real and measurable in the biology of the forest.
She is this wonderful person, Grace. Yet, she still understands — the mediating prism of late modernity and postmodernity — real is that which is measurable.
Of course, she unpacks what she thinks is real —
“The electrochemical communication between the roots of trees, like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten-to-the-fourth connections with trees around it, and there are ten-to-the-twelfth trees on Pandora. And that’s more connections than the human brain, a global network. And the Na’vi can access it. They can upload and download data, memories, at sites like the one you destroyed.”
At this point, Grace doesn’t quite get it. —
She understands that there is this unimaginable biological supercomputer.
She understands that it is unimaginably significant, but it is real because it is measurable. As she tries to transmit it to Selfridge, she is shot.
She is near death. Both Jake and Grace are now in their avatar bodies, now on Pandora. They bring Grace to what is called the Tree of Souls, which is the center. This is what is so beautiful.
This network is not AI and this network is not only data. This network is not super-computational power that is cut off from the gluons, the quarks, the protons, the neutrons, the electrons, the atoms, the molecules, the macromolecules, the cells, the multicells and the organisms that we talked about.
This network that Grace is accessing is deeply connected to the feeling tone of all of Reality. All of feeling is the network — there is value in the network — there is the full range of the infinite Real in the network.
It is precisely the opposite model of AI, which bypasses the full range of infinite quality and depth of infinite Reality of the Infinity of Intimacy, of the Eros and desire and quality of Kosmos, which is a Field of Value and consciousness.
This network, which the Na’vi participate in — you follow what is happening here?
- The Na’vi can access this network because they are part of it.
- They are not alienated from the Field.
- They are directly participating in the Field of Value itself.
- They have direct gnosis.
- They have direct knowing.
- They have direct carnal knowledge of value itself.
Then there is this enormously beautiful prayer scene.
— It is a subtle scene.
— It is a sophisticated scene.
— It is not a fundamentalist scene.
— It is not a New Age scene, which are equally dangerous — it basically assumes that we control Reality through our amulets, or through our prayers, or through our New Age affirmations.
The woman who represents the Na’vi says — sometimes Eywa heals and sometimes she takes us back into Eywa. There is a deep understanding that death is not the end of Reality; death is a night between two days.
Dr. Grace is too weak; her wounds are too great. As Dr. Grace is being gathered up, as she enters the Tree of Souls — if you remember what she says weakly, with an ironic humor, to Jake — I should take samples.
She is still the biologist as she should be. In her last moment, she says, I’m with her, Jake, she is real. I’m with her, Jake, she is real.
Her sense of the real has been completely transformed —
She sees with the Eye of Heart.
She sees with the Eye of Value.
She sees with the Eye of the Spirit.
She sees with the Eye of Contemplation.
She sees with the Eye of Consciousness.
The Real has opened up to her. She no longer talks about the Real because it is measurable. She talks about the Real, which she lives in and which lives in her, to which she has direct access, and from which all decisions, all direction emerges and flows.
It doesn’t flow from turning to the Oracle of AI, which bypasses the Field of the Real, to give us only a sliver of the Real, that which is accessible through exponential computational power. That sliver of the Real is holy — is important.
AI needs the field of First Principles and First Values
We need AI — AI is here.
As Nick Bostrom writes in his book, Super Intelligence, some years back, AI could have, exponentially positive impact, but AI itself has to be located in the Field of Value.
AI itself has to be animated by First Principles and First Values. If we don’t animate AI itself and download — because we are the people that are programming AI and that is critical.
This AI — this OpenAI — that I shared with you at the beginning of this conversation, which we are about to close now, was programmed. It is why it accessed certain strains of information.
In this case, it accessed a postmodern view of Reality. For example, it did not answer the question: Is value real? — with a classical conservative take: Christian value is real, or religious value is real.
Those dimensions were edited out by the programming itself.
Although AI pretended to be objective — integrating all information, it was not. It was accessing a particular current of information.
AI is programmed. We have to download into AI Evolutionary Love and value.
We have to create the checks to ensure that AI itself becomes a tool and not an immersive environment that causes the death — either of our humanity, or in other scenarios — the death of humanity. Wow!
We can only do that, friends, if we know that ultimately, death is not the end of the story. If we have a lived realization of a wider Field.
I know David Ray Griffin, to whom we dedicate this week’s One Mountain, who has passed — has moved into another Reality. I don’t claim to know the exact contours of that other Reality, but I know that death is not the end of the story.
— I know that I am with her, Jake, and she is real.
It is only when I know that She is real, that I can begin to respond to the meta-crisis — that I can begin to create the most beautiful world that we already know is possible. Thank you, everyone!
Oh, my God! Happy New Year! We just began Avatar.
This was week one of three — we got to touch one set of scenes.
It is the beginning of reading these texts of culture. I am so delighted.
Thank you, everyone, for hanging in and staying.
I am looking at the chat box — I see everyone really stayed — a deep bow to everyone.
I know this is a busy and deep and hard day, so let’s just stay for another two minutes. Thank you so much! Oh my God!
Join weekly Evolutionary Sensemaking with Dr. Marc Gafni every Sunday in One Mountain:
Join Dr. Marc Gafni and the entire community in an evolutionary celebration this and every Sunday in One Mountain, Many Paths. Click here to register for free.
Evolutionary Spirituality | One Mountain Many Paths
