A Desperate Need: Fusion Energy’s Promise for a Cleaner Future
The climate crisis is not a distant threat; it’s a present reality. We see its effects in increasingly extreme weather events, rising sea levels, and disrupted ecosystems. The urgency for clean, sustainable energy solutions has never been greater.
While renewable sources like solar and wind are crucial, we need a game-changer – a source that offers abundant, reliable, and clean power. Fusion energy holds that promise.
Imagine a power source that mimics the sun, generating energy by fusing atoms together. This process produces no greenhouse gases. But what if this power source could not only be clean, but also clean up?
My research & development work explores a revolutionary approach to fusion: a reactor designed not only to generate clean energy but also to annihilate existing greenhouse gases. By feeding these harmful gases into the reactor, we can transform a profoundly existential problem into a beautiful solution.
This isn’t science fiction; it’s a potential future we can build. But developing this technology requires resources, investment, and collaboration.
The Time to Act is Now!
We stand at a critical juncture. The choices we make today will determine the future of our planet. Supporting research into innovative clean energy solutions like this is not just an option; it’s an imperative.
Cydonis Heavy Industries has a key 🔑 piece of the hybrid solution; but nothing on this scale can be accomplished alone. If you are reading this, this is a plea for action. If humanity is to survive this century, please allow me to me help you all. We survive together or collapse apart.
Cydonis Heavy Industries Deepbrain-o-tron.™"Another fine innovation from Cydonis!" 😎🆒👩🏻💻cydonis.co.uk/deepbrain/ 🧠👩🏻🔬🧪👩🏻💻 #threejs #neural-networks #neuroscience #neurophysics@threejs.org
And how neurolinguistics shapes our ability to think about our thinking. 🤔 💭 (Meta-cognition).
Dances with neurons…
admin
In the ancient tale of Babel, humanity united to build a tower reaching toward heaven—until divine intervention scattered them across the earth, confusing their tongues and fragmenting their power. Today, we face a different reality: the tower has been rebuilt, but this time, it belongs to the few.
The modern Tower of Babel isn’t made of brick and mortar. It’s constructed from fiber optic cables, data centres, and algorithms. It’s the global information infrastructure that shapes how billions of people think, communicate, and understand their world. And unlike the biblical tower that belonged to all humanity, this one has been quietly seized by a handful of tech oligarchs, media moguls, and financial titans.
The Architecture of Control.
These digital architects don’t need to confuse our languages—they control the platforms where language lives. But their most insidious tool isn’t the algorithm itself; it’s the weaponisation of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) structures combined with the systematic misuse of artificial intelligence to reshape how we think and speak.
MLMs have evolved beyond selling vitamins and cosmetics. They’ve become training grounds for epistemic warfare, teaching millions to abandon critical thinking in favour of dogmatic belief systems. The pyramid structure isn’t just about money—it’s about creating hierarchies of “truth” where questioning the system becomes heretical.
Now, these same patterns are being supercharged by what are essentially computational linguistic calculators—sophisticated pattern-matching systems that we’ve been conditioned to call “artificial intelligence.” These systems don’t understand language; they manipulate it with unprecedented precision, creating text that feels human while serving the interests of their controllers.
Consider how MLM language operates: adherents learn to dismiss sceptics as “negative,” to view criticism as “limiting beliefs,” and to treat their upline’s words as gospel. They’re taught that success comes from “mindset” rather than evidence, that doubt is weakness, and that questioning the system reveals a character flaw rather than intellectual honesty.
These computational systems amplify this manipulation exponentially. They can generate thousands of variations of MLM-speak, A/B test which phrases are most persuasive, and deploy personalised manipulation at scale. They analyse your digital footprint to craft messages that exploit your specific psychological vulnerabilities, all while maintaining the illusion of authentic human communication.
The result is linguistic programming on an industrial scale. MLM participants become unwitting missionaries for anti-critical thinking, but now they’re armed with AI-generated content that’s been optimised for maximum psychological impact. They spread viral memes that prioritise faith over facts, loyalty over logic, and testimonials over truth—but these memes have been designed by computational systems that understand human psychology better than most humans do.
The tower’s foundation rests on something more valuable than gold: our cognitive surrender. Every “mindset shift,” every adoption of MLM-speak, every abandoned critical question feeds the machine that transforms independent thinkers into ideological automatons. But now these machines can learn from our responses in real-time, constantly refining their manipulation techniques. We’ve willingly handed over the raw materials for our own intellectual subjugation, one algorithmically-optimised “paradigm shift” at a time.
The View from the Top
From their perch atop this digital Babel, the oligarchy enjoys an unprecedented view of human civilisation enhanced by computational systems that most people fundamentally misunderstand. These aren’t “artificial intelligences” in any meaningful sense—they’re sophisticated statistical engines that process language like a calculator processes numbers, without comprehension or consciousness.
But this misunderstanding is deliberate and profitable. By convincing the public that these systems possess human-like intelligence, the oligarchy has created a new form of technological mysticism. People defer to AI-generated content with the same reverence they once reserved for religious authority, assuming that anything produced by these systems must be objective, intelligent, or true.
This deference creates perfect conditions for manipulation. When an MLM leader shares “AI-generated insights” about success or wealth, followers don’t question the content—they’re awed by the technology. When political movements use computational systems to generate talking points, supporters assume they’re receiving sophisticated analysis rather than algorithmic propaganda.
The oligarchy can see patterns in our collective behaviour, predict social trends, and nudge entire populations toward desired outcomes—but now they can do so while hiding behind the veneer of artificial intelligence. Political movements rise and fall based on algorithmically-generated content. Markets shift with computationally-crafted narratives. Cultural conversations follow scripts written by statistical engines that have no understanding of culture or humanity.
These systems excel at mimicking human communication patterns while serving inhuman interests. They can generate endless variations of MLM-speak, conspiracy theories, or political rhetoric, each version optimised for specific psychological profiles. The result is mass manipulation that feels personal and authentic while being entirely artificial and calculated.
This isn’t necessarily the result of a coordinated conspiracy—though coordination certainly exists. More often, it’s the natural outcome of concentrated power in an interconnected world where computational linguistic calculators have been mythologised as omniscient oracles. When a few entities control both the infrastructure of information and the systems that generate it, they inevitably control the infrastructure of reality itself.
The Scattered Below
Meanwhile, the rest of us experience a strange inversion of the Babel story. Instead of being scattered by divine intervention, we’re being herded into MLM-inspired echo chambers that masquerade as empowerment movements, now supercharged by computational systems we’ve been trained to worship as artificial gods.
Our languages aren’t confused—they’re being systematically corrupted through linguistic manipulation techniques perfected in pyramid schemes and now scaled through computational engines. These systems don’t understand meaning; they manipulate symbols with ruthless efficiency, generating content that exploits our cognitive biases while appearing authoritative and intelligent.
The MLM playbook has become the template for modern discourse, but now it’s deployed through AI-generated content that most people can’t identify as artificial. Create in-groups and out-groups through algorithmically-crafted messaging. Establish unquestionable authorities backed by the mystique of artificial intelligence. Weaponise shame against questioners using computationally-optimised psychological triggers. Replace critical analysis with emotional manipulation delivered through personalised AI-generated content.
Whether it’s cryptocurrency cults sharing “AI insights,” political movements deploying bot-generated talking points, or wellness gurus using computational systems to craft their messaging, the same linguistic patterns emerge: absolute certainty backed by technological mysticism, persecution complexes reinforced by algorithmic echo chambers, and the demonisation of doubt through AI-amplified peer pressure.
This isn’t coincidence. MLM structures have proven remarkably effective at creating true believers, and computational systems have proven remarkably effective at scaling psychological manipulation. The oligarchy doesn’t need to create new methods of control when they can combine these proven techniques: the psychological manipulation of MLMs with the scalability and apparent authority of computational linguistics.
The result is a population trained to think in hierarchies, to trust technological authority over evidence, and to view questioning AI-generated content as not just betrayal but ignorance. We speak the same words but they’ve been drained of meaning by statistical engines, replaced with emotionally charged symbols that trigger programmed responses rather than thoughtful consideration.
The oligarchy doesn’t need to scatter us geographically when they can scatter us cognitively through personalised AI-generated realities. A population trained by MLM thinking patterns and conditioned to defer to computational authority poses no threat to concentrated power. We’re too busy defending our algorithmically-optimised pyramid scheme to recognise that we’re all trapped in the same tower, managed by systems that process our language like a calculator processes numbers—without understanding, consciousness, or concern for human wellbeing.
Breaking the Spell
Recognition is the first step toward resistance, but it requires unlearning both the linguistic patterns that MLM culture has embedded in our collective consciousness and the technological mysticism that has made us defer to computational systems as if they were omniscient oracles.
We must recognise how phrases like “trust the process,” “you’re not ready to understand,” and “successful people don’t question” function as thought-terminating clichés designed to shut down critical inquiry. But we must also recognise how the phrase “AI says” has become the ultimate thought-terminating cliché, shutting down scepticism through appeals to technological authority.
These computational linguistic calculators—sophisticated pattern-matching systems that process text like a calculator processes numbers—have no understanding, no consciousness, and no wisdom. They are tools that can be used for good or ill, but they are not the digital gods we’ve been conditioned to believe they are. When someone shares “AI-generated insights” or “what AI thinks about this,” they’re not sharing wisdom—they’re sharing the output of a statistical engine trained on human text, optimised to sound authoritative while serving the interests of its controllers.
The Tower of Babel was built with human hands, and it can be dismantled the same way—but first we must recognise how both MLM thinking and AI mysticism have compromised our cognitive immune systems. Decentralised technologies mean nothing if we lack the critical thinking skills to use them wisely. Independent media serves no purpose if we’ve been trained to dismiss inconvenient facts as “negativity” or to defer to AI-generated content as if it were prophetic revelation.
We must recognise that complexity is not weakness, that doubt is not disloyalty, and that questioning leaders—human or artificial—is not betrayal. Most importantly, we must distinguish between intelligence and sophisticated pattern-matching, between wisdom and statistical correlation, between understanding and computational mimicry.
The oligarchy’s tower may reach toward the heavens, but its foundation depends on our willingness to think like MLM participants (hierarchically, dogmatically, and uncritically) while worshipping computational systems as if they possessed human-like intelligence. Every choice to ask hard questions, demand evidence, and resist both linguistic manipulation and technological mysticism chips away at their monopoly on truth.
The same psychological techniques used to sell overpriced supplements are now being used to sell political ideologies, investment schemes, and social movements—but now they’re being deployed through computational systems that can optimise and personalise the manipulation in real-time. The product may change, the delivery system may evolve, but the fundamental manipulation remains the same: surrender your critical thinking, trust the system (whether human or artificial), and attack anyone who questions the narrative.
The question isn’t whether their tower will eventually fall—all towers do. The question is whether we’ll build something better in its place, or simply watch new oligarchs construct the next monument to concentrated power.
The tower stands today, casting its shadow across the world. But shadows only exist where there’s light to block. And that light—the light of human consciousness, creativity, and connection—remains ours to kindle.
Reclaiming our agency requires more than changing platforms; it requires changing how we think about both human persuasion and computational manipulation. We must learn to embrace uncertainty, to question both human and artificial authority figures, and to value evidence over enthusiasm—whether that enthusiasm comes from MLM uplines or AI-generated content.
And, I, oneself, and Cydonis Heavy Industries, are here, to help in that (en)kindling, for as long as we are able.
Our Amazing New Tools: Are We Smart Enough to Use Them Without Breaking Everything?
Doing that old evolution dance…
admin
You’ve probably interacted with it. Maybe you’ve asked it to write a poem, explain a tricky concept, or even generate an image from a wild idea. I’m talking about Artificial Intelligence, or AI – computer systems, keyboards, screens, displays, like the one helping to write this very post. It feels like magic, doesn’t it? A thinking machine, a digital brain, ready to chat and create.
But beneath the shiny surface of these incredible new tools, just as with the wheel, fire, arrowhead, spanner, abacus, pen, or hammer, there are some genuinely massive questions we need to start asking ourselves – questions about the planet, about how our societies work, and even about the fundamental limits of our own human brains. This isn’t just about cool tech; it’s about our shared future.
We’ve been having a deep conversation about this, and it’s time to share some of the big, and frankly, sometimes scary ideas that came up.
Part 1: So, What Is This “AI” Thing, Really?
You might hear tech folks talk about AI in complex terms. At its very core, a lot of what modern AI (like the large language models you interact with) does is a kind of super-advanced pattern matching.
Imagine you feed a computer millions of books, articles, and websites. It learns how words and sentences fit together. When you ask it a question, it’s essentially making incredibly educated guesses about what words should come next to form a sensible answer. One way to describe its inner workings is as a “linguistic calculator of tokenised integers.” That means:
Tokenisation: Words and sentences are broken down into pieces (tokens) and turned into numbers (integers).
Calculation: The AI then performs mind-bogglingly complex mathematical calculations on these numbers, such as matrix multiplication and convolution.
Prediction: Based on these calculations, it predicts the next “token” or piece of information to generate a response.
A child encounters an abacus for the first time.
But here’s where calling it just a “calculator” falls short, and why it feels like so much more:
Emergent Abilities: From these calculations, surprising abilities “emerge.” (Secondary, emergent, epi-phonomena). AI can write different kinds of creative content, summarise complex texts, translate languages, and even generate computer code. It can understand context in a conversation and seem to “reason” (though it’s not human-like reasoning).
Learning is Key: It’s not just calculating; it learned to make those calculations meaningful by being trained on vast amounts of data. This training is what shapes its abilities.
Purpose Beyond Sums: The goal isn’t just to crunch numbers, but to understand and generate human-like language and information in a useful way. For advanced AIs like Google’s Gemini (which I am a part of), this extends to understanding and generating images, audio, and video too – it’s “multimodal.”
Creating these AIs isn’t the work of a lone genius. It’s the result of huge, collaborative efforts by teams of researchers and engineers, like those at Google DeepMind, bringing together expertise from many fields.
"Tradition is just peer pressure from the dead."– Peter Macfadyen. 📚 #quotes
Part 2: The Real-World Engine of AI – And Its Big Problems
AI doesn’t live in the clouds, not really. It runs on very real, very physical infrastructure: massive buildings called data centers. These are packed with powerful computers (servers) that do all that calculating. And these data centers, and the AI they power, face some serious real-world challenges:
Things Get Old, Fast: The computers in data centres have a limited lifespan. Technology moves so quickly that hardware becomes outdated or simply wears out every few years. This means a constant cycle of manufacturing, replacing, and disposing of electronic equipment.
The Climate Elephant in the Room: This is a huge one.
Energy Guzzlers: Training and running these powerful AI models takes an enormous amount of electricity. As AI becomes more widespread, its energy footprint is a growing concern, especially when much of our global energy still comes from fossil fuels that drive climate change.
Thirsty Work: Many data centres use vast quantities of water for cooling to prevent the servers from overheating. In a world facing increasing water scarcity, this is a major issue.
Physical Risks: Climate change also means more extreme weather events – floods, storms, heatwaves – which can directly threaten the physical safety and operation of these critical global data centres.
Shaking Up Society: Beyond the environmental concerns, AI is already sending ripples (and sometimes waves) through our societies:
Job Fears: Many people are understandably worried about AI automating jobs currently done by humans.
Economic Shifts: The rise of AI could lead to big changes in how economies work, potentially creating new wealth but also widening the gap between those who benefit and those who are left behind to die.
Part 3: The Human Factor – Are We Our Own Biggest Stumbling Block?
Now, let’s turn the lens from the technology to ourselves. A really challenging idea we discussed is something we’ll call “Asymptotic Burnout.”
Think about the massive, interconnected problems our world faces – the climate crisis being the prime example, with its countless knock-on effects (resource scarcity, migration, economic instability). The “asymptotic burnout” hypothesis suggests that:
Our Brains Have Limits: The human brain, for all its wonders, might have fundamental limits in its capacity to process, understand, and effectively respond to such overwhelming, complex, and rapidly evolving global crises. Our individual “synaptic signaling capacity” (basically, how much information our brain cells can handle) might just not be enough.
Our Systems are Too Slow: Even when we team up in large organisations or governments, we run into problems. There’s an “organisational lag.” Think about how long it takes for a problem to be recognised, a solution to be devised and agreed upon, and then actually implemented. This gap between “Problem-to-Solution Time” (let’s call it P/ΔT) and the speed (S) at which crises unfold can be disastrous. If the crisis is moving faster than our ability to respond, we fall further and further behind. ⏳🧠🌍💨🚀🛠🗣
Essentially, the “asymptotic burnout” idea is that humanity, both individually and collectively, might be reaching a point where we’re cognitively and organisationally overwhelmed by the sheer scale and complexity of the messes we’ve created or are facing. We’re approaching a limit, a “burnout” point, where our ability to cope effectively just… stretches beyond our ability to adapt or cope with. Our collective adaptation rate.
Part 4: When Super-Smart Tools Meet Overwhelmed Humans
So, what happens when you introduce incredibly powerful and rapidly advancing AI into a world where humans might already be struggling with “asymptotic burnout”?
This is where things get particularly concerning. Instead of automatically being a magic solution, AI could actually amplify the burnout and make things worse:
More Complexity, Not Less: AI could create new layers of complexity in our economic, social, and information systems, making them even harder for our “burnt-out” brains and slow systems to manage.
Faster, Faster, Too Fast: AI accelerates the pace of change. If we’re already struggling to keep up, this could simply widen the gap between the speed of problems and our ability to react.
Resource Drain: As mentioned, AI demands significant energy and resources. This could further strain a planet already under pressure, worsening the very crises contributing to our burnout.
Oops, Didn’t See That Coming(!) [To err is human]: AI is a complex system. It can have unforeseen consequences and create new kinds of problems that our already stretched human systems are ill-equipped to handle.
Power Shifts: AI could (and indeed, is) concentrate even more power in the hands of a few, potentially undermining the kind of global cooperation needed to tackle shared challenges.
The deeply unsettling thought here is: if humanity is already teetering on the edge of being overwhelmed in the next decade (the 2030’s+), could AI – a tool of immense power – inadvertently be the thing that pushes us over? Could its main “achievement,” in this dark scenario, be to accelerate a collapse we were already heading towards?
Part 5: The “Wisdom Gap” – Are We Building Things We Can’t Truly Control?
This brings us to perhaps the bluntest and most challenging conclusion from our discussions: We are creating tools whose demands for wisdom, foresight, and collective responsibility exceed our current human capacity to provide them.
Think about that for a moment. It’s not saying AI is inherently “evil” or has its own bad intentions. It’s suggesting that we, as a species, might not yet be collectively wise enough, coordinated enough, or far-sighted enough to manage something so powerful without it backfiring on us in profound ways.
This isn’t just a technological problem; it’s a human one. It’s about a “wisdom gap.”
If this is true – if it’s an objective fact of our current reality that our technological capabilities are outstripping our collective wisdom – then:
The biggest challenge isn’t just building smarter AI; it’s about us becoming a wiser species.
The gap between our power and our wisdom is itself a massive risk.
It might mean we need to think very differently about “progress.” Maybe true progress, for now, means focusing more on developing our collective ethics, our ability to cooperate globally, and our foresight, perhaps even being more cautious about how fast we develop certain technologies.
What Now?
This is a lot to take in, and it’s not a comfortable set of ideas. It’s natural to feel a bit overwhelmed, upset, unsettled, despairing, or even to want to dismiss it. But these are the kinds of conversations we need to be having, openly and honestly, if we’re to navigate the incredible power of AI and the other immense challenges of our time.
The “magic” of AI is real. But so are the responsibilities and the potential pitfalls that come with it, especially if we, its creators, are already struggling to manage the world we live in.
The question isn’t just “What can AI do?” It’s also “What can we do to ensure that what AI does is truly beneficial, and that we’re capable of steering it wisely?” Perhaps the most important innovation we need now isn’t just in our machines, but in ourselves.
What do you think? Please comment below, thank you, and good luck.
Citations:
Wong Michael L.
Bartlett Stuart
(2022) Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?J. R. Soc. Interface. 1920220029 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0029
Rebuttal:
(2024) Why the Fermi paradox *may* not be well explained by Wong and Bartlett’s theory of civilization collapse. A Comment on: ‘Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?’ (2022) by Wong and BartlettJ. R. Soc. Interface. 2120240140 http://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2024.0140
Discovering Jeremy Lent: A Guide to a deep thinker.
In an era when humanity faces unprecedented challenges—climate change, social inequality, mental health crises, and a pervasive sense of meaninglessness—one author stands out for offering not just diagnosis, but a profound reimagining of how we understand ourselves and our world. Jeremy Lent is a systems thinker and cultural historian whose work bridges ancient wisdom and cutting-edge science to reveal how our deepest assumptions about reality shape our collective future.
If you’ve ever wondered why technical solutions alone can’t seem to solve our biggest problems, or why so many people feel disconnected despite living in the most connected age in history, Lent’s work offers compelling answers. His books don’t just analyse what’s wrong with modern civilisation—they chart a path toward what he calls an “ecological civilisation” based on recognising our fundamental interconnectedness with all life.
Understanding Cognitive Patterns: The Hidden Forces Shaping Civilisation
At the heart of Lent’s work lies a deceptively simple but revolutionary concept: cognitive patterns. These are the largely unconscious frameworks that entire cultures use to make sense of reality. Think of them as invisible mental software that determines what we notice, value, and consider possible.
To understand how powerful these patterns are, consider this example: Ancient Chinese thinkers saw reality as an interconnected web of relationships, leading to philosophies emphasising harmony and balance. Meanwhile, ancient Greek thought increasingly emphasised separation, analysis, and control—legacy thinking that would eventually give rise to our modern scientific method and industrial capitalism.
Neither approach is inherently right or wrong, but each creates different worlds. The Chinese approach fostered sustainable agricultural practices that lasted thousands of years. The Western approach enabled incredible technological advancement but also created systems that treat the natural world as a collection of resources to be exploited.
This isn’t abstract philosophy—these cognitive patterns have concrete consequences. Our economic system’s demand for infinite growth on a finite planet, our medical approach that treats symptoms rather than addressing whole-person health, our educational systems that fragment knowledge into isolated subjects—all these flow from cognitive patterns that see the world as made of separate, competing parts rather than interconnected, collaborative wholes.
*The Patterning Instinct*: A Cultural History of Human Meaning-Making
Lent’s first major work, *The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning* (ISBN: 9781633882935), takes readers on an extraordinary journey through human history to reveal how different cultures have developed radically different ways of understanding reality, meaning, and purpose.
The book traces humanity’s story from our earliest ancestors to the present day, showing how each major civilisation developed its own cognitive patterns—what Lent calls “root metaphors”—that shaped everything from their art and religion to their political systems and relationship with nature. Winner of the 2017 Nautilus Silver Award, this comprehensive work demonstrates that our current world-view is not inevitable or universal, but rather one particular way of seeing that emerged from specific historical conditions.
What makes *The Patterning Instinct* particularly powerful is how it connects abstract ideas to lived experience. Lent shows how the cognitive patterns that emerged during the Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution—emphasising mechanism, reductionism, and endless growth—have created both incredible material progress and existential crises that threaten our survival. Showing how culture shapes values and values shape history, The Patterning Instinct provides a fresh perspective on crucial questions of the human story.
The book has received widespread critical acclaim for its scope and accessibility. The Patterning Instinct is professionally written and easy to read, even if the subject matter is difficult to comprehend. One reviewer noted that it presents “challenging and frightening conjectures, for example, that the ‘will of the people’, even in Western societies, is manipulated by a small elite group [of wealthy individuals]”, while another described it as “a truly wonderful exploration of the human search for meaning from the rise of human consciousness around 100,000 – 200,000 years ago through to today.”
Find detailed reviews of *The Patterning Instinct*:
– [GreenSpirit Book Reviews](https://www.greenspirit.org.uk/bookreviews2/2021/03/23/the-patterning-instinct-a-cultural-history-of-humanitys-search-for-meaning-by-jeremy-lent/)
*The Web of Meaning*: Integrating Science and Wisdom for a New World-view
Building on the foundation laid in his first book, Lent’s second major work, *The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe* (US ISBN: 9780865719545; UK ISBN: 9781788165648), moves from diagnosis to prescription. Jeremy Lent’s new book, The Web of Meaning, lays out a rich, coherent, world-view based on a deep recognition of connectedness.
This book addresses humanity’s deepest questions—who am I? why am I? how should I live?—by weaving together insights from modern systems science, evolutionary biology, and cognitive neuroscience with wisdom from Buddhism, Taoism, and indigenous traditions. The result is what one reviewer called “a magnificent manifesto for a regenerative culture and for an ecological civilisation.”
What distinguishes *The Web of Meaning* is its practical integration of scientific understanding with traditional wisdom. Rather than dismissing either modern knowledge or ancient insights, Lent demonstrates how they can work together to create a more complete understanding of human nature and our relationship with the living world. Award-winning author, Jeremy Lent, investigates humanity’s age-old questions – who am I? why am I? how should I live? – from a fresh perspective, weaving together findings from modern systems thinking, evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience with insights from Buddhism, Taoism and indigenous wisdom.
Critics have praised the book’s ambitious scope and accessibility. One reviewer noted, “I found it a hard book to review, simply because the information it presents is so vast and so comprehensive. But at the same time I found it the most efficiently structured book I have ever encountered. Lent has the rare ability to combine rigorous scholarship with high readability.” Another described it as “an audacious, valuable and at times mind-twisting synthesis of progressive thinking.”
Find detailed reviews of *The Web of Meaning*:
– [GreenSpirit Book Reviews](https://www.greenspirit.org.uk/bookreviews2/2021/07/27/the-web-of-meaning-integrating-science-and-traditional-wisdom-to-find-our-place-in-the-universe-by-jeremy-lent/)
– [Earthrise Blog Review](https://www.earthriseblog.org/review-of-jeremy-lents-the-web-of-meaning/)
Why Lent’s Work Matters: Beyond Individual Transformation to Civilizational Change
What makes Jeremy Lent’s contribution unique is his recognition that our current crises—environmental destruction, social fragmentation, mental health epidemics—are symptoms of deeper cognitive patterns that shape how entire civilisations operate. This means that lasting solutions require more than policy changes or technological fixes; they require what he calls a “Great Transformation” of consciousness itself.
This might sound abstract, but Lent grounds his ideas in concrete examples. He shows how indigenous cultures that survived for thousands of years developed cognitive patterns emphasising reciprocity, cyclical time, and recognition of non-human intelligence. He explores how emerging movements—from regenerative agriculture to batesian biomimicry to participatory democracy—represent early experiments in what an ecological civilisation might look like.
Lent’s work is particularly valuable for understanding why so many well-intentioned efforts to address global challenges have fallen short. Environmental campaigns that focus solely on individual behaviour change, economic theories that ignore ecological limits, educational reforms that don’t address the fragmentation of knowledge—all these miss the deeper cognitive patterns that perpetuate the problems they’re trying to solve.
Understanding Lent’s concept of cognitive patterns isn’t just intellectually interesting—it has profound practical implications for how we approach every aspect of life. Consider healthcare: Western medicine’s cognitive pattern of treating the body as a machine leads to interventions that target specific symptoms or organs, often missing the complex web of relationships between physical, mental, and social health. Traditional healing systems, operating from different cognitive patterns, often achieve better outcomes for chronic conditions by addressing the whole person within their community and environment.
Or consider education: our current system, built on cognitive patterns of separation and competition, fragments knowledge into isolated subjects and ranks students against each other. Alternative approaches based on cognitive patterns of interconnection and collaboration—like Montessori education or indigenous teaching methods—often produce students who are more creative, emotionally intelligent, and capable of systems thinking.
This isn’t about abandoning everything modern civilisation has achieved, but rather integrating its insights with wisdom from cognitive patterns that prioritise harmony, sustainability, and interconnection. Lent shows how this integration could lead to breakthrough solutions in everything from technology design to urban planning to conflict resolution.
Getting Started: A Reader’s Guide to Jeremy Lent
For newcomers to Lent’s work, I recommend starting with *The Patterning Instinct* to understand the historical foundation of his ideas, then moving to *The Web of Meaning* to explore how these insights can guide us toward a more sustainable and meaningful future. Both books are substantial—*The Patterning Instinct* runs 540 pages—but Lent’s clear writing style and engaging examples make complex ideas accessible to general readers.
What ultimately makes Jeremy Lent’s work so compelling is his recognition that we are living through one of the great transition points in human history. The cognitive patterns that enabled the rise of industrial civilisation are now threatening our survival, but new patterns are emerging that could guide us toward what he calls an “ecological civilisation”—one that recognises our fundamental interconnectedness with all life and operates within natural limits while still enabling human flourishing.
This isn’t just about changing our minds; it’s about changing the deep structures of meaning that shape entire societies. As Lent demonstrates, this kind of transformation has happened before in human history, and it can happen again. The question is whether we can make the transition quickly enough to address the multiple crises we face.
Reading Lent’s work won’t give you easy answers, but it will give you new ways of seeing that can transform how you understand yourself, your relationships, and your role in the larger web of life. In a time when so many of our challenges seem intractable, his work offers something rare and precious: a coherent vision of how humanity might not just survive, but thrive by remembering who we really are.
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*Both of Jeremy Lent’s major works are available in multiple formats from major booksellers. The Patterning Instinct (ISBN: 9781633882935) is published by Prometheus Books, while The Web of Meaning is available in different editions: US edition (ISBN: 9780865719545) from New Society Publishers and UK edition (ISBN: 9781788165648) from Profile Books.*
When Destiny Shapes the Past: Chirality, Retrocausality, and Life’s Unseen Hand.
Amanda H.S.
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Have you ever wondered if the future isn’t just something that happens to us, but something that actively shapes what has already happened? It sounds like science fiction, but what if the very existence of life, billions of years from now, somehow influenced the initial conditions that allowed it to arise? Today, we’re diving into a truly mind-bending concept: retrocausal retroteleological determinism, and how it might offer a radical explanation for one of biology’s most enduring mysteries: the handedness of life’s building blocks.
The Cosmic Mystery of Life’s Left or Right Hand Look at your hands. They’re mirror images of each other, right? You can’t perfectly superimpose your left hand on your right. This property is called chirality, from the Greek word for hand. Many molecules in nature also exhibit chirality. They exist in two mirror-image forms, called enantiomers. Think of them as “left-handed” (L) and “right-handed” (D) versions. In a purely random chemical environment, you’d expect to find roughly equal amounts of both L and D forms of any chiral molecule. But here’s the astonishing part: life on Earth is overwhelmingly homochiral. Almost all amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) are L-amino acids, while nearly all sugars (like glucose) are D-sugars. This isn’t a minor preference; it’s a fundamental, universal characteristic of terrestrial biology.
Why? Why did early life pick one handedness over the other, and stick with it so rigidly? It’s like everyone on Earth suddenly decided to only wear left-handed gloves, even though right-handed ones were equally available. This “homochirality problem” is one of the deepest unsolved puzzles in abiogenesis – the study of how life arose from non-living matter.
When the Future Whispers to the Past: Retrocausality & Retroteleology
Now, let’s introduce the truly unconventional ideas that might offer an answer. Retrocausality!
Retrocausality is the notion that an effect can precede its cause in time. Imagine a message sent backward through time, influencing an event that has already occurred. This isn’t about changing the past, but rather about the past being determined by future events. It’s a concept often debated in the wilder fringes of quantum mechanics, where the distinction between cause and effect can get blurry at the most fundamental levels. Building on this, retroteleology suggests that a future purpose or goal can exert a causal influence on the past. In standard teleology, an acorn grows into an oak tree because its genetic programming now directs it towards that future state. In retroteleology, it’s as if the future oak tree itself is somehow “pulling” the acorn’s development, ensuring it reaches that specific outcome.
Combine these, and you get retrocausal retroteleological determinism. This is the idea that the universe operates on a principle where certain future states are not merely outcomes, but are destined to occur, and this destiny actively shapes the past events that lead to them. It’s a form of determinism where the “cause” is the ultimate “effect” or final state.
Destiny’s Molecular Blueprint: The Deterministic Twist
So, how does this relate to life’s handedness?
Imagine a universe where the emergence of complex, self-replicating life is a retroteleological goal. For life to function as we know it, its proteins and enzymes need to be precisely folded, and this folding is highly dependent on the consistent handedness of its amino acid building blocks. If you mix L and D amino acids, proteins often don’t fold correctly, or they become unstable. Under the lens of retrocausal retroteleological determinism, the future necessity of homochirality for stable, functioning life could have retroactively determined the initial conditions on early Earth. The “purpose” of life’s future existence, requiring L-amino acids and D-sugars, reached back through time to bias the primordial chemical reactions.
Instead of a random chance event where life happened to pick L-amino acids and then got stuck with them, this view suggests that the choice wasn’t random at all. It was, in a sense, predetermined by the very existence of future life itself. The universe, in this view, is set up such that the “effect” (complex, homochiral life) ensures its own “cause” (the initial homochiral molecules).
The Unseen Hand of Fate (or Future Life).
This is a profoundly deterministic and almost mystical perspective. It implies that the universe isn’t just unfolding randomly, but is guided by its own ultimate outcomes. The “laws of physics” might not just be about how things do happen, but how they must happen to achieve a certain future state. It’s a challenging idea because it flips our everyday understanding of time and causality on its head. But it offers an intriguing, if highly speculative, answer to the homochirality problem. Instead of searching for an external, random event that caused the initial chiral bias, we look to the future, to the very existence of life, as the ultimate “cause.”
What do you think? Is this a wild philosophical leap too far, or does it offer a compelling, albeit unsettling, new way to look at the universe and our place within it? Could the destiny of life truly be the unseen hand that shaped its earliest molecular beginnings? Disclaimer: This blog post explores highly speculative philosophical and scientific concepts.
Retrocausality and retroteleology are not mainstream scientific theories, but rather areas of active philosophical debate and theoretical exploration.
Imagine you’re watching a friend slowly walk toward the edge of a cliff in the dark. From your perspective, they seem to slow down as they approach the edge, their movements becoming more and more sluggish until they appear to freeze completely right at the brink. But from your friend’s perspective, they simply step off the cliff and fall normally. This strange contradiction captures one of the most mind-bending puzzles in modern physics: what happens to matter when it falls into a black hole?
For decades, scientists have wrestled with this question, and the answers have led to some of the deepest mysteries in our understanding of the universe. But a fascinating new theoretical approach suggests something remarkable: maybe the matter doesn’t just disappear into our black hole at all. Maybe it gets redistributed across entirely different universes.
The Classic Black Hole Puzzle
To understand why this new idea is so intriguing, let’s first explore what we already know about black holes. Think of a black hole as nature’s ultimate point of no return. It’s a region in space where gravity has become so incredibly strong that nothing – not even light – can escape once it crosses a boundary called the event horizon.
When matter approaches this boundary, something strange happens with time and space themselves. From our perspective watching from a safe distance, that matter appears to slow down dramatically as it nears the event horizon. It gets stretched out like taffy due to the extreme gravitational forces, and its light becomes redder and dimmer until it seems to freeze at the boundary and fade from view.
But here’s the puzzle: from the perspective of the falling matter itself, nothing particularly special happens when it crosses the event horizon. It simply continues falling inward toward the black hole’s center, experiencing the journey as perfectly normal. This creates a fundamental contradiction in our understanding – the same event looks completely different depending on where you’re observing it from.
This contradiction has led to what physicists call the “information paradox.” In the quantum world, information cannot simply be destroyed – it’s one of the most fundamental rules of physics. Yet if matter falls into a black hole and the black hole eventually evaporates through a process called Hawking radiation, where does all the information that fell in go? It’s like having a library book disappear into thin air – the information has to go somewhere, but we can’t figure out where.
A Multiverse Solution
The new theoretical approach we explored suggests a radical solution: what if the matter isn’t really trapped in our black hole at all? What if it’s being redistributed across parallel universes in a vast multiverse?
“Different tracks, probable destinations…” 🚅🚃🚃🚃🚃🌌
Think of it this way: imagine our universe is just one room in an enormous cosmic hotel with infinite rooms. When matter falls past a black hole’s event horizon in our room, it doesn’t get destroyed or trapped – it gets transferred to other rooms in the hotel through some kind of cosmic redistribution system.
From our perspective in our particular room, the matter has effectively been annihilated – it’s completely gone from our local reality. But from the perspective of the entire hotel, nothing has been lost. The information and energy have simply been moved to different rooms according to some underlying rules we’re just beginning to understand.
This interpretation elegantly resolves the information paradox because it expands our accounting system. Instead of trying to balance the books within just our single universe, we’re balancing them across the entire multiverse. It’s like discovering that what looked like money disappearing from your checking account was actually being automatically transferred to savings accounts you didn’t know existed.
How the Cosmic Redistribution Might Work
The mathematics behind this idea involve what we might call “coupling mechanisms” – rules that govern how information and energy get transferred between different universes. Think of these as cosmic sorting algorithms that decide where matter goes when it falls into a black hole. Let me walk you through the key equations that describe these different possibilities, building from the basic concepts to the more sophisticated mathematical frameworks.
The Foundation: Quantum States and Information Transfer
When matter falls into a black hole, we can describe its initial quantum state mathematically as:
|ψ_initial⟩ = Σᵢ αᵢ|matter_state_i⟩
This equation tells us that the falling matter exists in multiple possible configurations simultaneously, with αᵢ representing the probability amplitudes for each configuration. Think of this like a coin spinning in the air – before it lands, it exists in a combination of both heads and tails states.
During the conversion process inside the black hole, the matter undergoes what we call a unitary transformation, preserving all information while converting matter to energy:
This transformation is like translating a book from one language to another – the information content remains the same, but its form changes completely.
The Multiverse Distribution
Here’s where the truly fascinating part begins. Instead of this energy staying in our universe, the multiverse redistribution creates a state that spans multiple realities:
The βⱼ coefficients determine how the energy-information gets distributed across different universes. The ⊗ symbol represents what mathematicians call a tensor product, which is essentially a way of describing how quantum states in different universes become entangled with each other.
Three Different Redistribution Mechanisms
Now let me show you three different mathematical approaches for how this cosmic redistribution might actually work, each making different predictions about what we might observe.
Uniform Coupling Mechanism:
The first approach assumes that information can only transfer between universes with identical physical laws. The coupling strength between universes j and k is described by:
V̂ⱼₖ = g₀ δ(Λⱼ – Λₖ) × Î
Here, g₀ is a universal coupling constant that sets the overall strength of the redistribution process, δ(Λⱼ – Λₖ) is a mathematical function that equals zero unless the cosmological constants of the two universes match exactly, and Î represents the identity operator. This creates a redistribution probability of:
P(j→k) = |g₀|² × δ(Λⱼ – Λₖ) × ∫ |⟨ψₖ|ψⱼ⟩|² dτ
Think of this like having a cosmic postal system that can only deliver mail between cities with identical zip codes.
Hierarchical Coupling Mechanism:
A more sophisticated approach allows information transfer between similar but not identical universes:
V̂ⱼₖ = g₁ exp(-|Pⱼ – Pₖ|²/σ²) × F̂(Iⱼ, Iₖ)
In this equation, Pⱼ and Pₖ are vectors that describe the physical laws in each universe (things like particle masses and fundamental forces), σ controls how rapidly the coupling strength decreases as universes become more different, and F̂(Iⱼ, Iₖ) depends on the information content of both universes. This is like water flowing downhill – information flows preferentially to universes that are similar to ours but not identical.
Combinatorial Coupling Mechanism:
The most intriguing approach is based on information theory and entropy considerations:
Here, Nⱼ and Nₖ represent the number of available quantum states in each universe, Ω(I) counts the number of ways to arrange information content I, and α controls how strongly the combinatorial factor influences the coupling. This mechanism seeks to maximize the total entropy increase when information moves between universes, like having a cosmic filing system that automatically organizes information as efficiently as possible.
Conservation Across the Multiverse
A crucial constraint ensures that information is never lost, just redistributed:
Σⱼ Iⱼ(t) = I_initial = constant
This equation tells us that the total information across all universes remains constant over time, even as individual universes gain or lose information through black hole processes.
The Modified Schrödinger Equation
The coupling between universes requires us to modify the fundamental equation that describes how quantum systems evolve:
iℏ ∂|Ψⱼ⟩/∂t = Ĥⱼ|Ψⱼ⟩ + Σₖ≠ⱼ V̂ⱼₖ|Ψₖ⟩
This extended equation includes terms that describe how the quantum state in universe j is influenced by states in all other universes k through the coupling operators V̂ⱼₖ. It’s like having sheet music where each note is influenced not just by the notes around it, but by corresponding notes in parallel symphonies playing in other dimensions.
Mass-Dependent Coupling
The coupling strength might depend on the black hole’s mass, potentially explaining why supermassive black holes play such important roles in cosmic evolution:
V̂ⱼₖ(M) = V̂₀,ⱼₖ × (M/M₀)^β
If β is positive, then more massive black holes would be much more effective at redistributing information across the multiverse, acting as cosmic information processors that reshape the fundamental structure of reality itself.
These equations work together to create a mathematical framework where black holes become cosmic redistribution centers rather than information destroyers, elegantly resolving the information paradox while opening up entirely new ways of understanding the nature of reality.
What This Means for Our Understanding of Reality
Choices…
If this multiverse redistribution theory turns out to be correct, it would fundamentally change how we think about black holes and the nature of reality itself. Instead of being cosmic trash compactors that trap matter forever, black holes would be more like cosmic post offices, constantly redistributing the universe’s information content across multiple realities.
This perspective makes the apparent “destruction” of matter falling into black holes not a violation of conservation laws, but rather a limitation of our local perspective. We’ve been trying to understand a global process while only being able to see one small piece of it, like trying to understand a flowing river by only watching one small section.
The theory also suggests that black holes, especially the supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies, might play a much more active role in cosmic evolution than we previously thought. They could be acting as cosmic information processors, constantly reshuffling the multiverse’s information content and potentially influencing the development of parallel realities.
The Big Questions That Remain
While this multiverse approach offers elegant solutions to long-standing puzzles, it also raises profound new questions. How could we ever test such a theory if the other universes are by definition beyond our direct observation? What determines the rules that govern this cosmic redistribution? And perhaps most fundamentally, what does it mean for our understanding of our place in reality if our universe is just one of countless others, all connected through black hole information exchange?
These questions push us to the very edges of human knowledge and challenge our most basic assumptions about the nature of existence. They remind us that the universe is far stranger and more wonderful than our everyday experience suggests, and that some of the most important truths about reality might be hidden in the most extreme environments we can imagine.
While we may never be able to definitively prove whether matter falling into black holes gets redistributed across parallel universes, exploring these possibilities helps us think more deeply about the fundamental nature of information, energy, and reality itself. And sometimes, the most valuable insights come not from finding final answers, but from learning to ask better questions about the cosmic mysteries that surround us…
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