«Future of consciousness – Unlocking the mind’s potential through neuroscience, philosophy, psychedelics and mysticism.» To my eclectic neuro-wiring, seeing this course description was like offering candy to a kid; within a few seconds, I applied. And after six weeks of inspirational and insightful talks, I haven’t regretted it. A part from psychedelics (which, BTW, were only verbally present 😊), the rest of the themes have a very strong influence on me and the way I go around this that we are connected to,… whatever the this is.
There were many interesting talks from many different areas (philosophy, parapsychology, systemic therapy, sound engineering, coaching, etc.), but two discoveries stuck with me more profoundly.
The first discovery was Bernardo Kastrup and the analytic idealism he teaches. I have missed out on the brave, prolific, and groundbreaking work this philosopher and computer scientist has been doing in two fields that will provide answers that will define Humanity’s future. In other words, can we link our sense of purpose and mission to the development of artificial intelligence?
To describe what matter or physicality means under analytic idealism, Bernardo Kastrup used the airplane dashboard analogy. The dashboard is dissociated from the sky by its aluminum skin. So, all the outside information, like humidity, temperature, wind, direction, speed, and so forth, comes through the sensors.
Those measurements are then presented to the pilot in the form of dial indications on the dashboard, which provides indications about the external state. And it does so with accuracy. Therefore, you have to take the dashboard seriously unless you want to crash the plane.
But the dashboard is not the sky outside. It’s a representation. So, according to analytic idealism, we are like pilots of that airplane, piloting an aircraft without windows. The mistake we make is that we take perception for a matter. What we perceive is the creations on a dashboard.
Hence, under analytic idealism, there is a real world out there that does not depend on us, but we never get to see it directly. There is a dashboard in between. That dashboard is the physical world. You have your own physical world. I have mine. Our dashboards are separate, but they are both modulated by the same set of mental states that actually constitute the external world.
From Plato’s cave onward, we have had many similar interpretations of the division between our senses, perception, and the «real world». What triggered me the most in Bernardo Kastrup’s interpretation were the opening words of the analogy and the «aluminum skin» of the plane.
This is where Maturana and Varela come into play through their notion that our boundaries are biological. We can’t go beyond our biology, but what if we could use AI instead? What if this creation, which is the closest to our cognition in the world that surrounds us, could be used as avatars to step outside the plane? We can’t. Our limits are biological; therefore, we would cease to exist.
Given the astonishing progress that AI is making, this could be the option. It could surely give us an immense amount of experience and information that we would not be able to obtain by our own means.
Given the astonishing progress that AI is making, what guarantee do we have it will not find us, the humans, dispensable? Most of us (me first) already today don’t have a clue how AI works. What we do know is that it does things much, much faster, and better than we do. So, once it starts its own autopoiesis and makes its own version of itself, its own AI, not even the people who are actively involved in designing and making it will know and understand how it works. It will be beyond our cognition, beyond our biological boundaries. It would control the dashboard of our plane. So, who/what might prevent it from crushing the plane after running simple cost-benefit analyses whose bottom line is that humans are no longer needed?
To AI? Or not to AI? That is the question. Not an easy one. ¡AI, caramba!
And there is so much talk! We are interwoven into this web of endless streams of conversations, asking for our participation, opinions, thoughts, and remarks. In that same stream of conversations, where very few question the effects of artificial intelligence on natural stupidity, the breach is widening progressively. The more time we spend in the «Me Space», glued to our smartphones and alienated from the natural web of life, the dumber we become. The more demand we create for AI, the smarter it gets.
And so, Henry David Thoreau’s words, written nearly two centuries ago, come into today’s reality: «Men have become tools of their tools». So, what do we do about it? One solution to the dilemma is strengthening the social capital. In other words, shifting from «Me space» to «We space»
And that is where the second discovery from the course come to light. It was Pamela von Sabljar’s generous invitation to all the course participants. As a thinker, speaker, and facilitator known for her innovative approaches to personal and collective transformation, Pamela von Sabljar made us an ‘offering as a practice of presencing, which requires a similar skill of presence to meditation. We practice a new gravity point in our consciousness, creating intersubjectivity – a shared group awareness.’
During four sessions, the experience was one of stepping out into the unknown, into the ‘intersubjective Field,’ into a space of shared awareness and uncertainty.
It was an experience difficult to describe, not because of the complexity, but because of the need for different dictionaries, grammar, and syntaxes. When the first-person plural feels more natural than the first-person singular, words that we are used to using don’t help comprehension. Silence does.
However, we don’t have the vocabulary of silence. At least not yet. But we do have something to begin with—a composition. I am talking about John Cage’s 4′33″, also called «Silent Piece». The piece consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds in which the performer plays nothing. In the score, with a single word, «Tacet,» the performer is instructed to remain silent and not play his instrument. For four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the instrument is the field of shared awareness.
The composition is not about the performer; it is about the listener’s experience. The sound material of the work consists of the noises that the spectator hears during that time.
We rarely get to experience this within the constant cacophony of mundane seeks for thrill, news, and entertainment. We hear so much that we hear nothing. Most importantly, we don’t hear each other. And by doing so, we don’t hear ourselves.
And that, I hope, is not the future of consciousness. We cannot define consciousness by adding more noise, words, models, frameworks, and terminology. There are better ways to go than adding up. That is where I share Bernardo Kastrup idealism. When breaking up the process of ‘understanding’ of consciousness through how science and philosophy are used to define an entity, he explained that an entity is something that is based on other entities. In other words, you explain something in terms of something else and that in terms of something else. But he warned that we can’t keep on defining or explaining one thing in terms of another forever. Eventually, you close the loop, and you start engaging in circular reasoning.
Until you hit a rock-bottom level where you can no longer explain or define something in terms of another because there isn’t another. It’s the bottom level. And the bottom level is consciousness. It is subjectivity itself. So, you cannot define consciousness in terms of something else because there is nothing else, explained Bernardo Kastrup during his talk.
This reasoning instructs the use of «Tacet.» It instructs listening, not knowing. Present, not past.
In an ideal world, a Universal Moral Authority would summon the entire Humanity, open the score, and instruct: ‘Tacet’. Four minutes and thirty-three seconds of listening. Taking care of the space between us. A unit of understanding with all the senses. The entire Humanity tuned into the Melody of Spheres during 4′33″ would leap so big that we wouldn’t even have to wonder what the future of consciousness is. A time/space of eight billion souls equally different and interrelated by Tacet would pulsate us into a singularity. The bindings between eight billion fragments of Divinity awaken, unfolding the New Story.
And with the Lasting Peace that comes with it, we could step outside the plane without needing AI. Where we go beyond our biology. Into the Present. Into the Ecology of Intersubjectivity, where Mind and Nature evolve together, finding the answer to:
«What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster, the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to you and you to me?» – Gregory Bateson – Mind and Nature
Boris Matijas 
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