The Light and Life Timeline

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Intelligence is the ability to achieve goals, and all forms of intelligence have something to do with modeling - with trying to create a proxy of some limited section of reality (scope) that our intelligence can then use to inform our forecasting, our choice-making, and our goal-achieving efforts. But models tend to optimize for a narrow set of sense making, not the whole picture, and so they tend to blind us to what’s outside our models.

Wisdom is related to wholes and wholeness while intelligence is related to a usually narrow sense of relevance applied to achieving a usually narrow short-term goal. We need civilizational systems where the intelligence in and of the system is bound by and directed by wisdom.

In other words, the totality of the story (holism) is always more complex than what we say or think about it. There’s something very important and sacred about that fact. Because when we make a model that separates everything out (reductionism) and then improves that model's effectiveness, the chances are high that I’m going to start harming something that I don’t even realize I’m harming because it isn’t in my model.

Taoism’s founder, Lao Tsu, was telling us to keep our sensing of base reality open and not mediated by our models. We don’t want our sensing to be limited to our previous understanding because our previous understanding is always smaller than the evolving Totality of What Is and that evolving Totality of What Is will be telling us how to change our models as we go along.

What I’m optimizing for is not the Whole Thing. This whole process is not helping me be wise. Models that win in the short term can - and so often do - generate long term, broadly horrible outcomes or even extinction or other evolutionary cul de sacs.

If our civilization needs a new year’s resolution, I’d suggest that resolution would involve transforming itself to operate with holoficiency. We would collectively resolve to set things up - especially our decision-making and technologies - so that long-term broadly beneficial goals and principles constrain and guide all our narrow short-term goals and our humanly AND artificially intelligent efforts to achieve them.

That seems to me to be one very powerful - holoficient - resolution that would make the most sense for all of us, given our growing global predicament.

Coheartedly,
Tom

 

 

The Light and Life Timeline is a three page PDF containing the best available model and overview of the gradual planetary process towards full sustainability. It looks at the seven major steps in the process through ten major categories of growth, and presents where we should be in contrast to how far off course we have gotten. The timeline model offers an enhanced understanding through its matrix style layout which allows for the process to be examined in ways that a regular linear timeline doesn't afford.

Preview image only. Press this link to open the full 3 page PDF presentation:  Light Life Time Line.pdf