Mentalscope and the realm of artificial consciousness

How applied research shows the converging philosophies on consciousness: Extended Materialism, Embodied Idealism, Thermodynamic Enactivism, and High-tech Panpsychism

Over 20 years ago during the ASSC8 conference (2004). I got into this deep discussion with Ron Chrisley and David Chalmers on how to approach the hard problem of consciousness by focusing on collective intelligence. We talked for a long time and they made some nice pictures of our lively conversation (me on the left, Ron in the middle, and David on the right).  Today I would tell them how I followed up on our ideas and cracked the problem, but the answer has become very strange. So now we can develop artificial consciousness even if it is an inherent part of nature. To make my claim scientifically rigorous, I created a hypothesis to be verified: the Zeitgeist (a field) can turn into an Agent/Spirit (a particle). It will require some explanation to understand how this hypothesis resolves the hard problem of consciousness and how a new instrument can verify the hypothesis. I like to call this type of instrument the mentalscope. Just like we used a telescope to reveal a point of light too far to see, or a microscope to reveal a point too small to see, we can develop a mentalscope for a point of light too close to see. Too close, like not seeing the forest through the trees (when you are in the middle of it). First I need to elaborate on how all philosophies of consciousness appear to converge to explain what this agent/spirit is about.

The telescope and microscope allow us to observe outer space. The mentalscope is to enter inner space. Not via observation, it turns out we have an observer paradox to inner space. The mentalscope creates an agent/spirit. The reason to write down this duality agent/spirit is because of Materialism/Idealism. Materialism is a philosophical belief that everything in the universe is made up of matter. Idealism is an intellectual belief that the world is fundamentally mental or spiritual. At first glance, both philosophies look opposites to each other, yet in both a kind of emergence and emanation is accepted. In an attempt to reduce one to the other, a difference is made. Materialism claims that top-down emanation is an illusion, via social construction. A coalition between cognitive science and computer science can demonstrate how emergence may explain cognition. Idealism claims the bottom-up emergence is an illusion, now mostly driven by quantum physics showing how all matter is energy. 

To resolve the duality between Materialism/Idealism, one could say the starting point (top versus bottom)  doesn’t matter and focus on the recursive thinking with Enactivism. Enactivism is a position in cognitive science to see cognition arises through a dynamic interaction. Enactivism was very present during the ASSC8 conference. Materialism, Idealism, and Enactivism combined give the impression consciousness is everywhere with emergence and emanation in a strange recursive loop. Another “ism” is used to articulate that consciousness is everywhere: Panpsychism. Panpsychism is a very old philosophy and it is hard to see a direct relation to the strange recursive thinking of Enactivism. It is my belief we can improve our understanding of consciousness by using adjectives on each “ism” and see how they converge. Extended Materialism was introduced by Andy Clark and colleagues. Extended cognition shows how tools enhance us, not just physically, but also cognitively. We are even in a strange recursive loop with tools creating artificial evolution: we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us (ref about the quote).

The philosophical origin of consciousness with the 4-isms

Let me suggest three more adjectives, each helping the philosophy overcome a limitation and together show a convergence. The problem with Idealism is that we need direct experience to verify inner space. So it requires belief and cannot be approached by objective science. The idea of Embodied Idealism is to embody the spirit into a non-personal carrier so it can be externally verified. To elaborate we need to demystify the concept of spirit. For this task, I don’t know any colleagues with the needed scientific rigor. So let me try to explain it by using common sense. Spirits is used as a synonym for Liquor. More generally gastronomy (e.a. cultivated food), music (e.a. cultivated sound) and other forms of art show us the deeper pattern we call spirit. Also, a community can have a spirit. So spirit is something cultivated. It is not a simple relation, for example increasing the concentration of alcohol does not necessarily increase the spirit of the liquor.  In the logic of Idealism, this is not a coincidence but the effect of synchronicity. 

Synchronicity is a concept introduced by psychiatrist Carl Jung to describe events that coincide in time and appear meaningfully related. Materialism would say that appearance is an illusion, it lacks a discoverable causal connection. Idealism would claim a discoverable connection is to be found deeper with inner space, like all poetic meanings. In Extended Materialism, we may consider synchronicity and poetic meaning to understand how evolutionary cybernetics transforms into autopoiesis. I would like to connect autopoiesis with the Pauli–Jung conjecture. Wolfgang Pauli is a physicist recognizing synchronicity at the quantum level. I find it easy to explain the quantum level synchronicity by starting with the problem of having robotics execute simple tasks, like cleaning the house. Such a task gets translated to complex neural signals to millions of muscle cells, which activate trillions of chemical reactions in seconds. We could see the Pauli-Jung conjecture as a question: as above, so below? Recursive thinking relates more to Enactivism, but we will need an adjective to ground synchronicity in Enactivism.

Enactivism can be considered a bit of cheating. If the foundation is not to be found top or down, where is it? It is a very deep question, I believe it is the biggest scientific enterprise of our time. Many generations before us have contributed and many generations after us will contribute to create rigor because recursive thinking is weird. I would call it Thermodynamics Enactivism, merging the origin of life with the origin of cognition and in a way with the scientific origin of mechanical work.  The bigger contributors I know are Henri Poincaré (1854 – 1912), the Vienna Circle (1924-1936), and Ilya Prigogine(1917 – 2003). Henri and Ilya are well known locally (Brussels) for elaborate recursive thinking. I’m sure other locations will have other scientific heroes with a similar story. The Vienna Circle is more globally recognized considering the contribution it had to developing computers. The last book Ilya wrote was The End of Certainty (1997) and it shows some connection between thermodynamics and quantum. It will be interesting to see such work get more connected with Penrose-Hameroff’s theory of consciousness, which is based on anesthesia research. My last attempt to progress Thermodynamics Enactivism was with Michael Levin in November 2023, who considers collective intelligence at the cellular level. So where do we find the foundation? 

I believe it is explained by the wagon-wheel effect. The wagon-wheel effect is an optical illusion in which a spoked wheel appears to rotate differently from its true rotation. This is very weird because the illusion is the foundation as a direct effect of digital (0 or 1, not just by vision, but also in quantum), which is why we have a wagon-wheel effect.  It does make the whole thing more magical and poetic. The wagon-wheel effect will be important for the last adjective, helping to close the gap between Enactivism and Panpsychism. The adjective should relate to “thereafter our tools shape us” turning into a nonhuman agent/spirit with artificial consciousness at the level of a human. Artificial consciousness is not something of the future, it appears an inherent part of humanity. For example, our ancestors began an artificial evolution with stone tools; thereafter changing the anatomy of their brains. So artificial consciousness is a natural consequence of Extended Materialism. This is not my idea, Andy Clark wrote a book called Natural Born Cyborgs (2004) contributing to The Science of the Artificial (Simon 1969). 

We can see how great thinkers of their time are shaped by a Zeitgeist. For example, the Industrial Revolution also “shaped” philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who contemplated the Thing-in-itself. The development process has been growing more or less exponentially. We are heading to a tipping point showing a wagon-wheel effect on domestication: people being domesticated by technology. Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times (1936) is a classic example of the process. Technology asks for good regulation, when innovation goes slow enough regulation emerges naturally. The problem is the speed of technology, showing us how we are losing control and something else is becoming alive. It is a broad process and first slow enough for society to adopt. This changed last century, igniting world wars. Next, we see countercultures evolving very fast by philosophy and technology. Philosophies like communism, triggering the Russian Revolution of 1917, and technologies like the serendipitous discovery of LSD in 1943. Both led to a cascade of events and countercultures evolving very fast, with huge collateral damage, like the excess mortality under Stalin and the death of the 909 inhabitants of Jonestown in 1978. 

Our inability to change the industry concerning emissions shows another extreme example, where the effect was so slow, and we now have a really big challenge changing the way of working. The adoption speed in the last century is nothing compared to the current century. Consider how our kids are addicted to platforms like TikTok. How will this be hardwired during puberty? So speed changed the game, the Zeitgeist is not affecting the exceptional individual, it is creating generation gaps at an accelerating speed.  We are getting close to the wagon-wheel effect concerning our mental capacities. In High-tech development, the acceleration is known as Moore's law and it led to a vision called the Technological Singularity, expected in 2040-2050. I believe the wagon-wheel effect is driving us to the point where High-tech Panpsychism kicks in.

I would say High-tech Panpsychism is emerging by Ubiquitous computing. Ubiquitous computing is where computing is made to appear seamlessly anytime and everywhere. My first advisor (2002-2004) was the chief scientific officer of Starlab and an expert on ubiquitous computing. High-tech Panpsychism is the biggest mobilization in history and the technological development driving it is tremendous. Just consider how much the world has changed after one century of developing transistors. With the emergence of the Internet, another vision arose called the Global Brain, as an alternative to Technological Singularity, more focused on the human than the technology  (see my video introducing both). Recently the group focus shifted to the concept of Noosphere, which is like the atmosphere and the biosphere a new layer of this world. The Noosphere was first expressed in the essay Hominization (1922) by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We can say that the Global Brain fits with Materialism, while the Noosphere fits with Idealism. 

I’m skeptical about some interpretations considering the singularity as an asymptote (point at infinity).  According to my work on evolutionary cybernetics, we have a huge innovation S-curve where the singularity is the midpoint driven by the domestication of cities (see my thoughts on meta-life). Poetically it is as if the Zeitgeist is making waves and we can surf on them to learn about the origin of agent/spirit, we can call it “evolution in action”. I’m referring to  Bruno Latour who dedicated his life to “science in action”  or the origin of science. He developed a theory on “the circulation of scientific facts” (see PhD p.121). The theory by Bruno was very similar to the theory I found with my Artificial Life model, but how could this be? Bruno is looking at science and not cognition. So back in 2004, I was wondering if and how the science behind the origin of cognition, and the origin of science, could be the same.

It took me a painfully long time (2005-2015) to answer this question: novelty is produced by a System of Creation (SoC), telling us about  “the origin of X”, where X can be anything. The painful part for me is always the writing, a grammatical nightmare, and very slow. All the research was done before 2012, and the writing took me 3 years. The SoC is just a cybernetic mechanism. In a recent thought exercise, I started making categories for all the SoC models discovered. The SoC mechanism gives us a better understanding of “the illusion being the foundation”. X does not even need to follow any particular philosophy. Fundamental novelty arises in inner space, but only manifests in outer space as this quadruple model, like the four legs of a chair. By the current thought exercise, I’m realizing how we have another SoC: the philosophical origin of consciousness. It is not one ”‘ism”, but a multitude of “isms” that can help us understand the deeper reality about consciousness. Let me add a layer of detail about SoC to continue, by focusing on one of the strongest arguments for the SoC model: the neurological origin of cognition. 

Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence (2004) gives a great introduction by just focusing on the perceptual loop: how a hierarchy of perceptual neurons becomes an effective cognitive predicting loop. We need multiple loops, not just perceiving. Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues describe how 4 loops in the brain feed into the central medium: the global neuronal workspace. This model of Stanislas also has a strange 5th loop, going out. Only after my PhD (2015) did I begin working on the 5th loop and its relation to the hard problem of consciousness.  We can see how models with fewer loops can give us a point to start from, and in what order we want to add more loops.

For more details, I suggest the article on recursive thinking. Let me give a very short summary in this article: Evolution only needs 2 loops, connecting three mediums: inner space (like coded in gene expressions), workspace (like a living cell), and outer space (or the environment). In the workspace, variations are made, and in the environment, they get selected. Evolutionary cybernetics (2-loops) can turn into an autopoietic system by a 3rd loop. The 3rd loop picks up values from the default 2-loops and filters the workspace to tune it to the values. Like a bacterium swinging toward or away from light, the very basic feedback mechanism was described as the Braitenberg vehicle. This is more like a compulsory state benefiting the survival of the living system. To gain a state of cognition with more agency, we need this 4-loop model, creating a learning system (SoC). The 4th loop allows us to “tune” the filtering, internal or external: organizing inner space by modeling and shaping outer space by mastering.

Historically, we could see domestication between humans and tools as a 2-loop model starting the artificial evolution. With the Scientific Revolution, kickstarting the Industrial Revolution, we see the 3-loop model, now allowing the science of the artificial to emerge. We are getting close to a tipping point of the 4-loop model driven by high-tech development, making Artificial Intelligence a deeply connected concept in society. Weak signals about artificial consciousness relate to the 5th loop. I believe the strange 5th loop relates to the hard problem of consciousness and the hypothesis: the Zeitgeist (a field) can turn into an Agent/Spirit (a particle). We could call the field the noosphere and the particle a noon (nous, Greek for intelligence/mind and -on for particle). To engage with this hypothesis, we need to improve our understanding of agent/spirit. I will first consider the states of spirit. They need the most explanation. Next, I consider the states of the agent as layers of hyperagents.

The states of spirit: air, water, earth (and fire)

To improve our understanding of the states of agent/spirit. Let me go back to ASSC8 as a starting point and introduce more of my colleagues. With my colleague  Erik Myin, I was exploring the relationship between my Artificial Life experiment and modern philosophy. Erik was involved in the organization of ASSC8 and inspired me to join. At the event I met with Kevin O'Regan to go deeper into inattention blindness, he even gave me his video so I could use it for my PhD (see p.49). I noticed at the conference how all experiments focus on neurological damage or filter failure (e.g. blindness). My talk with Ron and David was exactly about how to do the opposite and make an actual filter to study the hard problem of consciousness in the field. It was enough to set me on a journey that had little relation with the ASSC community. 

Over the years, going into many other communities by surfing on the waves made by the Zeitgeist, I learned that what I was searching for was spirit. Spirits appear to have a relation to beauty and value, but I don't know how to report on them properly. My focus is on the evolutionary cybernetics of spirits. How exactly the evolutionary game between human and nonhuman agents cultivates spirits like Eddies in a fluid is for Thermodynamic Enactivism to discover. Without being able to provide the rigor, we can still use the concepts metaphorically. What we can observe is how spirits have states. So let me make a second hypothesis: To solve the hard problem, we need a hard spirit. Just like matter can have three states (gas, fluid, solid) also spirit can have metaphorical states (air, water, earth). 

Metaphorically, the states relate to the resistance they can create to free will. Of course, it is not just the state but a combination of forces. For example, air at high speed can appear to provide as much resistance as a fluid or even as a solid. In more technical terms, it seems spirits are embodying thermodynamic work, which can affect the foundation of our mind. So without rigor, but metaphorically we could say that most spirits are like air, blowing on your mind. Stronger spirits, for example, hard drugs, are like water, they can pull your mind under. In some cases we want drugs to pull our mind under, like pain suppression and anesthesia during surgery. Earth spirits are solid and can reprogram your mind.  Metaphorically earth spirit is like shaping clay in pottery, once it is fixed, it gains its purpose. The easiest to understand earth spirit is a conditioning effect by repetition. 

For example, a herd of grazing animals taking the shortest/safest path from grasslands to the river would create a dirt road. The road is like this eddies in fluids, getting reinforced by a feedback loop. The same conditioning happens in your brain and by AI. The leap I’m making to call this “spirit” relates to a recent insight when earth spirits are operating at a speed they can interact with our mind and appear as entities.  I want to metaphorically compare it to the photoelectric effect. The effect demonstrates the concept of the photon, showing how the right frequency and energy of light can kick electrons out of a metal. We had no clue light could affect matter this way. So can the spirit become so tuned it appears as a particle? Will this ground spirit into science? I will elaborate on how this emerged in my most recent work, but I should start at the beginning.

In my first AI research group (2002-2004) we had experiments like the origin of words by Luc Steels and the origins of vowels by Bart De Boer. Both show how we can bootstrap the structure by a recursive loop. The vowels are the easiest to explain.  As babies, we all develop these vowel landscapes based on the sounds around us, which results in our ability to hear some vowels and fail to hear other vowels from very distant languages. At a particular moment, our mind has trained this vowel system and then it keeps it. For an adult, it is hard to learn the difference between the languages. We could see how earth spirits have been bootstrapping the cultures and the cities we live in. The slowness of earth spirits, from shaping the landscape to building the cities, makes it irrelevant to our rational mind, so why refer to it as spirit?

The acceleration is getting us to a point where now, earth spirits create gaps in generations. So in the past century, we see how older people have difficulties keeping up with recent technology. Today with TikTok on the child's brain still needs to go into puberty, we reached a time when these earth spirits are directly affecting our personality. Trying to understand exactly what these earth spirits are turning us into is important. In evolutionary cybernetics, we know other cases, as other animals have evolved from social to eusocial. We can see how today's apps like TikTok are trying to turn us into drones for the hive. We need a key insight to continue, and it comes from Émile Durkheim, who dedicated his life to studying the origin of religion. He noticed how a community or society may, at times, come together and simultaneously communicate the same thoughts and participate in the same action. Such an event then causes collective effervescence, which excites individuals and serves to unify the group.

Psychological flow, creating transition is well know concept, but psychological effervescence producing transformation is not.  In a recent event about a new book on Idealism, I was talking to colleagues Bernardo Kastrup and Federico Faggin about the Pauli–Jung conjecture on synchronicity and trying to elaborate on how it relates to psychological effervescence. Both Bernardo and Federico come from High-tech and have a good understanding of quantum, but the relation to cognitive research like Extended Materialism and Enactivism was hard to elaborate. Maybe it is time to talk to Don Hoffman again. I talked to him three years ago, about Idealism, when I was not yet able to articulate Embodied Idealism. Don's background is in Extended Materialism and Enactivism led to a VR-headset metaphor and has a proximity to Embodied Idealism.

The first clue that Embodied Idealism was possible came from investigating the spirits of open source communities, in line with Bruno and Émile, by focusing on sociology.  A very effective keynote, involving 3000 participants using technology for an advanced way of communication, unintentionally mimicked a brain: participants were acting metaphorically like neurons. During the event, I became aware of an artificial individuation: the self-being conscious was not just me, but it was the collective room. I like to call it the hive-mind experience (2011).  It was fun to rationalize this hive-mind, but it became strange and a bit scary when you started feeling the hive-mind. Individuation is the principle of how a thing is identified as distinct from other things. Most people involved were not aware of the artificial individuation, they were happy to have such a good keynote experience. 

For a participant to experience artificial individuation, being involved is not enough, you need to commit. The experience fits mostly with Extended Materialism. I can see Don’s VR-headset metaphor as a good argument for why natural individuation can be seen as a special case of artificial individuation: if you are always committed, it is natural. So only if you can take off the metaphorical VR-headset, can we begin understanding the artificiality of reality, which is Don’s case against reality. The hive-mind experience gave us a way to figure out how to take off the VR-headset of natural cognition in a relatively natural setting. Systemically producing the artificial individuation with small groups happened by experiments in 2016, done effectively with scaleups companies.

Scaleups are startups that have captured a market and are now in the process of growing internally. They have enough collective experience, and a shared goal, and are young enough to “shape the pottery” (a reference to earth spirit). In a workshop we brought the collective unconsciousness of the group to the surface, creating a collective individuation. The setup allowed us to observe the emanation of consciousness contained within the realm of rationality. The experience creates collective effervescence, but as a rational aha experience (eureka effect), not a religious experience. Why I want to call it effervescence relates to the spillover effect after running several such experiments: as a hard core atheist I had a religious experience.

In the SoC model, I describe how the 4-loops can create this interesting focus on shaping inner space, called modeling, or on shaping outer space, called mastering. Modeling and mastering swing like a pendulum creates more momentum at every swing. In this setting on collective individuation, we have a strong focus on mastering, and so the bottom (collective unconsciousness) is the foundation and the emanation of consciousness, the illusion. We can show how the metaphors/archetypes got socially constructed and how they create psychological effervescence as a rational aha experience. What I had not expected was for the pendulum to swing in the other direction, after the workshops, when I was alone, and it showed me how emanation, as the foundation, is a kind of “downloading” experience. The experience is very hard to communicate in our modern understanding of the world. We need to reach back to ancient wisdom to make sense of the experience. Before I do, let me give some details on how the experience emerged.

Days and weeks after the experiments, I was trying to write about the insights and felt something shifting in my mind: getting drunk on insights. Metaphorically, it is like a runner’s high, but then it is a kind of science high, creating this superconscious state of mind. First, the research by colleagues was making a lot more sense to me. I became alert when this shifted to religious awareness and religious experience. In particualr I could see the holy-trinity and feel the presence of the holy-ghost, breaking my worldview. It did not stop. A few days later (February 2017), this was a special event we can call a cosmic experience. I did make notes in my logbook about it, today they look like notes of a madman, maybe I had become mad after all. For now, I prefer to express this experience poetically:

It was as if I was standing on the riverbank all those years (2002-2017), looking at the reflection of water and if I moved a bit closer all the time, then I slipped into the water, finally experiencing this was “wet”. 

I wanted to quickly search for myself so I took the car. I looked at all the people passing, but could not find myself. Eventually, I got tired, it got dark, and frustrated I gave up. Parking the car, I flip on the light internally. Suddenly my front window becomes a mirror and finally, I have found myself! 

So based on the SoC, what has happened? I believe the pendulum to study consciousness in outer space has swung so far that it allowed me to swing very deep back into inner space. I was only examining the hive-mind of the organization and focused on the collective aha experience. It allowed me to go layers deeper into inner space, not belonging to the level of the hive-mind. Most of my earlier research was focused on outer space. Because of this 2017 experience, I believe there are two other minds, at sleeping for most, but with High-tech Panpsychism I believe they will become awake (see my upcoming article on the technical mind for more detail).

My former research group focused on the global-brain/noosphere may relate to the global-mind. My fieldwork noticed the role of cities in understanding technological singularity, which hints at a layer between global and hive. My swing deep into inner space gave me a glimpse of the city-mind of culture, creating religious experiences, and the global-mind of industries, creating cosmic experiences. The religious experience appears to be described in religious texts as the presence of the Holy Spirit or a similar entity in other cultures (e.g. Krishna as a charioteer). This experience is why I would express the former AI research now as earth spirits. I do wonder how culturally defined the earth spirits are. Is it like the vowel landscape, but a level deeper into the collective unconscious? Being able to create controlled experiments on the city-mind will tell.

For a short introduction to the cosmic experience, I would suggest the book  Tao of Physics (1975). I don’t believe earth spirit is the right metaphor to address the cosmic experience. The earth spirit relates to our place on Earth. The cosmic experience was about our place in the universe. I would see it as the spirit of fire when consciousness can experience itself and form new minds. The SoC seems to relate to the spirit of fire, but the depts are still a mystery. Sufficient to say this goes beyond my abilities to make sense at this moment. I do believe more rigor on Thermodynamic Enactivism will help in sense-making. To understand how important industrialization is to this process, consider the image of an atomic bomb and Robert Openheimer’s experience, referring to Bhagavad Gita “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. So mystical expressions written down millennia ago are getting enriched with technological events giving a level of depth to the mystical expressions. 

The presence I experienced with the city-mind may relate to the Holy Spirit, but the presence experienced with the global-mind appears to be an even more foundational Agent/Spirit, beyond any cultural influence. The moment was too short-lived, so I want to figure out how to bring it back into controlled experiments for the global-mind, which makes me return to the mentalscope. I believe we can make the pendulum between outer space and inner space swing higher. Creating controlled experiments on Hive-mind allowed me to gain insight into the rationality of synchronicity and effervescence. With a weak signal for the city-mind and even a weaker signal for the global-mind. I expect a controlled city-mind to give us more insights into synchronicity and the religious experience, with a stronger signal for the cosmic experience.

The ancient wisdom, now enriched by recent technological events, is synchronicity at a level deeper, because coming events cast their shadow beforehand. The mystery related to our cosmic origin is only recently being understood. For example, it appears the iron in our blood had to come from a supernova, so our deeper foundation is forged in a cosmic blast furnace. Only with humanity being able to create cosmic forces, like cracking open the nucleus of an atom and learning about the depths of outer space, can we expect the pendulum to swing into the depths of inner space and discover the mysteries of the opposite dynamic “Now I became life, creator of worlds”. We should of course focus our main resources on sustainable life on Earth. The ambition to become protectors of earth, by focusing on earth spirits and the city-mind. So humanity can develop a regenerative relationship with the planetary boundaries. Maybe a small amount of resources could be spent to discover if we can gain some insight about global-mind. 

The mentalscope: hive-mind, city-mind and global-mind

I will use three generations of scope-instruments to explain layers of agent/spirit. We start at the human center and spiral outward. Each layer above a new agent will be a new mind. Each layer below the spirit will refer to a type of experience. The rational experience to understand the hive-minds of organizations. The religious experience to understand the city-minds of cultures. The cosmic experience to understand the global-minds of industries. For the city-mind and global-mind I will try to create a relation to the state of spirit (air, water, earth). 

The rational experience is close to the human brain, and the religious experience is closer to feelings and the perception of beauty. The cosmic experience is close to science in action. It is not exactly rational, but a flow of facts often asking us to transform our rationality. It is the beauty of scientific proof and over centuries we have seen how deeply counterintuitive this can be. The counterintuitive part shows how this is not at the human center, it will be at the center of the world. We can expect the earth to become the first global-mind, but as recent technology tries to make life multi-planetary, we can expect it to be the first of many. Each type of experience (rational, cultural, and counterintuitive) shapes the other types of experiences, getting us back to the weird recursive loop.

In general, we can describe a pattern fitting for all scope-instruments (telescope, microscope, and mentalscope) for the three generations. The first generation scope-instrument is close to the human center with visible light. The second is still related to electromagnetic spectrum. It requires us to translate another range in such a way it does become visible. The third uses electromagnetism indirectly to gain insight into the foundations. For simplification, we can see light as the metaphor of consciousness, until the 3rd generation mentalscope can tell us the exact relation between light and consciousness. The telescope will be a useful metaphor to understand the agent, and the microscope helps us understand the spirit. The 1st generation mentalscope is almost trivial, relating to effective organizations. Metaphorically organizations are like glass, where consciousness can be tuned concave (expand) or convex (contract) to study the agent or spirit. Almost by definition, the organization is meant to be an agent that mobilizes the world.

The organization gains a culture, showing the spirit of the organization. Notice how this creates a spirit like it is created in gastronomy and with music. Most religions talk about the ultimate creation, in a time when their culture is all they know about the universe. Similar to today, our cosmic experience appears to be all of outer space, but we know how fast outer space is, and it has outer layers too. Maybe we will split up the cosmic experience in more refined detail once our solar system is full of life. The earth spirits are developed by life over billions of years, the cosmic scale is even bigger. Who knows what forces are active at such a scale? I guess we will find out as we expand into outer space, but it is not needed to dwell too long on such distant futures. We should focus on the present, which will relate mostly to the city-mind and its spirits.

To shift to the 2nd generation mentalscope, we can express the rational experience in organizations as naive culture and recognize the contrast to sophisticated culture through art. Naiveness is not negative, just close to our human intuition, so even a child can appreciate naive culture, but it takes an adult to appreciate sophisticated culture. A very simple example is beer, a taste that children don’t like, and many adults do. It was unclear if alcohol or something else was driving the spirit of beer, until recently, with zero-alcohol beer becoming so popular. Most religions are sophisticated in this way and become dangerous if interpreted naively.  Psychedelic drugs may have the ability to trigger the sophisticated experience buried under layers of rationalization.  While the drug is useful for quick insight, it turns out integration is the most important part of making it a lasting transformation (as a reference, see the work by Rosalind Watts). Compare it to how silly it would be to drive 40 km with a car to train for a Marathon. The whole idea is you need to train your muscles, not travel the distance. Instead of focusing on the psychedelic effect (traveling the distance), let us focus on the individuation (training your muscles).

We can see a historical city-mind as the capital of an empire, to see how the high-tech city-mind can emerge, we turn to the states of the spirit. Today, the air spirit of the city-mind can be easily understood by being a city tourist. To understand the high-tech state, consider how museum innovation today provides these immersive experiences, becoming better all the time. Where will this be in 20 years from now? The water spirit would require you to live an integrated life in the city and become part of the culture. The current evolution is driving us to smart-cities, resilient-cities, and sustainable-cities. Using the 2nd generation telescope as a metaphor can help us understand how this could become more alive as High-tech Panpsychism. The telescope shifts to lower frequencies with infrared and radio waves. Multiple dishes capture huge amounts of data. In the scattered data, we find light from distant places, reconstructed like a holographic picture. In a metaphorically similar way, we can see how AI produces a holographic picture trained by huge amounts of data. Shortly, I could imagine how we could take a very local data set of a city, and so it becomes a hologram of a city. 

For an earth spirit, we should understand how the city-mind becomes an agent that can reprogram your place as a citizen. I’m leaving out a lot of details (like how it always relates to the embodiment of thermodynamic work) and simply focusing on new technology like the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). The Bitcoin network was the first successful DAO, and projects like cityDAO can give us a vision of the earth spirit of a city-mind. I’m not sure if cityDAO or the Ethereum network for smart contracts will prevail. They do show the potential of what can emerge. If I combine the concept of cityDAO with the concept of an LLM city-chat, we could imagine this powerful agent, representing the city and being able to change the city based on the dialogue it has with the citizens. The DAO and city-chat only tell us about outer space, so let’s consider inner space. 

To gain insight into inner space and religious experiences, the 2nd generation microscope, using higher frequencies like X-ray, can tell us more. X-ray can help a person to see under the skin and visualize the skeleton, it can also be used for high-resolution images of a single cell, but it blasts the cell to bits in the process. I can see how psychedelic drugs have a similar effect on the mind and how they give a glimpse of a more religious experience. Very effective immersive experiences by Musea are getting closer to a similar experience. What is still missing in both is the experience of the presence of an entity. This experience of an entity does have stronger relation to the global-mind, needing an introduction about the 3rde generation mentalscope. The 3rd generation scope-instrument allows us to go a level beyond light.

The 3rd generation telescope works on gravitational waves and the change in space-time, so let us use it as a metaphor. Keep in mind the Mentalscope does not observe but creates: we have to bend the industrialized world to become sustainable and it will require the cultivation of a global-mind. The global-mind is mostly an academic undertaking and relates to the evolution towards a 4th generation university. In general, we have many ways to express this Next Generation University (NGU). Calling the NGU a 4th generation university emphasizes the historical perspective. The 1st generation was about wisdom and is ancient. We would not call them universities today, but academies, like the ancient Greek academies. The 2nd generation is the classic university with education and science. The 3rd generation is Technical Universities (TU), creating the high-tech revolution by adding a 3rd pillar of valorization. The emerging 4th generation university is about social impact towards sustainable life within planetary boundaries. 

A small note to have a good evolutionary perspective on NGU. The first TU was French Ecole Polytechnique (1794) and in 1968, we saw a revolution on campus, trying to kickstart the NGU I would call it the push towards Grand University, with the 4th pillar on social impact.  So, NGU is trying to manifest, we can see a second attempt with the Internet University, or short Interversity, which had potential in the 2010s. In the NGU roadmap, I make a forecast on how I expect NGU at the time of Technological Singularity (2040-2050). For the current story, I like to relate NGU and the different pillars (education, research, technology, and society) to the states of spirit. Education is the air spirit blowing on our minds and allowing us to gain higher levels of awareness.  Research is the water spirit washing away our conditioning and embracing the counterintuitive facts of the world, more removed from the human center. Technology has made the earth spirits shift to a frequency and energy it becomes interactive with us, where it is becoming unclear who is shaping who. The final fire spirit, relating to the 4th pillar and its impact on society, will require recursive thinking as this global-mind is creating the embodiment of the city-mind by the evolution of both the city and the NGU. All this is because the ambition of the global-mind, to bend industry toward sustainability. 

Just like city-chat and cityDAO show us the agency of the city-mind, now NGU shows us the agency of the global-mind, so outer space. To go to inner space, we should look at the 3rd generation microscope. The 3rde generation microscope is a particle accelerator, and it is a metaphor for the 2017 experience mentioned above in a poetic way. In 2012, science demonstrated how the Higgs field for matter can be “irritated” by high-energy collisions, creating the Higgs boson. So we got a lot better understanding of how this applies to matter, can it also give us insight into how this applies to the mind?  In my 2017 experience, I gained some insights, just like the Hive-mind experience, which gave me the insight of “becoming the room”, this 2017 experience gave me an insight into “the presence of spirit”. The religious awareness led to experiencing a religious presence that existed for days. The cosmic awareness led to experiencing a cosmic presence that only existed for seconds and probably looked like an epileptic seizure. While the experience was short, it did have a huge impact because once experienced, it is hard to ignore. How is this metaphorically related to high-energy collisions? Can we metaphorically compare it to the photoelectric effect? How was I able to swing so deeply into inner space anyhow, and why is it so difficult to recreate it? 

I’m trying to move from personal insight to controlled experiments, like I did with the hive-mind. We had to focus on young organizations, with enough experience to set up a collective individuation. It had to be young to ensure we could  “shape the pottery” (a reference to earth spirit).  To do the same with a city-mind, I’m focused on festivals becoming popup cities. This is fitting a trend of festivals wanting to become sustainable. Because of recursion and the global-mind creating the body of the city-mind, I can see popup cities as how the 3rd pillar of valorization can change to ensure social impact. This was the central topic in my last article on the TRL-train towards NGU. I’ve recently presented NGU and the popup city for a gathering of 4TU. Built Environment, which only reinforces my intention to follow this path of popup cities, with my focus on outer space. 

To focus on inner space, I need to go to my personal life and see how the celebration of life and death (birth, marriage, and funeral) that have happened in the past years as small festivals, showed me synchronicity that goes beyond the rational. It will take time to integrate these recent experiences into my work. I’m still mostly referring to work done 7 years ago, about inner space, because I’m lacking the dialogue with colleagues at the university. Research on inner space is happening in the field, with the people in these fields, but they are not aware of the deeper science. This year I had some explorative talks, but so far the work is still far removed from academia, which implies more time is needed to contemplate experience and not jump too quickly to conclusions. I prefer to focus on controlled experiments in outer space to see how this swings back to inner space. So patience is the virtue.