The Emergent Method Part 2: A Modern Science Approach to the Phenomenology and Ethics of Emergentism

Preface

The Emergent Method is part of a philosophical framework for helping us realise our potential.  It provides a naturalistic and personal methodology for finding and following our deepest purposes.

The following pages touch on many areas of human endeavour but the focus is on discussing, building, and explaining the framework of concepts that contribute to an understanding of the Emergent Method.  We will explore a number of seemingly disparate subjects, with a view to integrating them in such a way that you can reap benefits in your everyday life and thereby enrich your life.  As we explore these subjects, you will discover that the concept of emergence links them all together.  Emergence is the key to a new worldview that is slowly replacing the excessive reductionism of the past.

Areas addressed include:

Observations of reality¹ and reflections on the nature of existence² and being

Human behaviour in terms of perception, instincts, consciousness, concept formation, and learning

Societal structures, sustainability, and reflections on our emerging global systems

Ethics and values

Changing unwanted beliefs and achieving personal goals

None of these subjects is new in itself and many authors have explored these subjects in much detail before.  Recently several authors have pulled some of these subjects together.  Two very different authors in this vein would be Richard Dawkins, using a Darwinian approach, and Eckhart Tolle, using a quasi-Buddhist approach.  In fact, the synthesis of seemingly disparate ideas, as opposed to the specialist analysis of ideas, seems to be a fast-growing trend in modern thinking.  Let’s face it - a large amount of information that cannot be integrated into a simple whole is just information overload and useless to our limited brains.  What we want to know is how we can quickly combine the information out there to enhance our wellbeing.

In discussing such information, the following chapters become a voyage of discovery towards a better understanding of our world and our standing within the world.  The chapters suggest ways in which we can all take part in a much needed and urgent realignment and redevelopment of our world.

I am not writing for an academic audience – I am writing to a more generalised audience.  My aim is to raise awareness of emergence, promote its discussion and enhance its application in all arenas – academic or personal.  My aim is to write a challenging, easy-to-understand, practical book about emergentism within the popular science and philosophy genres.

Time of writing: Late 2016.

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Recently I was walking through Lane Cove National Park with some friends when we noticed several signs warning of poisonous fox bait laid down in the area.  It sparked a discussion with my eight-year-old fellow-walker.  We talked about how early settlers introduced foxes into the Australian bush and how devastating foxes were to the local fauna.  We also discussed that if the authorities were to allow the fox to be ultimately successful in its easy conquest of Australian native species, then the logical result would be a steep near-term increase in the fox population.  The extinction of Australian fauna would follow, and then the demise of the Australian fox population itself.  Through artificially introduced fauna, a local diverse ecology that took millions of years to develop could simply disappear.  We then went on to discuss the importance of ecological near balance within each environment, whether Europe’s or Australia’s.  The fox fitted within its home environment in Europe, where the fauna had coevolved with the fox, but not in Australia.  Likewise, Australian creatures were adapted to the Australian environment and not to the European.  It was not a matter of which environment or species was better, just a matter of local ecological diversity and richness, which is closely linked to our wellbeing.

Similarly, our bodies and genes are biologically linked to the environments in which we live, and just like the fox, we need biological balance with all else in the changing environment if we are to survive.  Likewise, it is not a matter of which human civilisation is better, but just a matter of civilisational diversity and richness.

Are we like the Australian fox, grossly out of balance with our environment today?  Are our naturally selected genes more closely linked to a long-lost past environment, radically different to the one we are building for ourselves today?  Have we enjoyed a steep near-term increase in population just to see all our gains lost within the next century and our environment likewise reduced to poverty?  Has our recently gained consciousness as a species made us lose touch with our instincts and in turn caused us to fall seriously out of balance with our natural environment?  Does our consciousness ultimately require near balance with our planetary environment if we are to survive on this planet in the long term?

It is obvious we need to start thinking about how our human consciousness may have caused serious imbalance with our planetary environment, at least temporarily, and how we might bring it back towards evolutionary balance.  Are our societies growing in resilience or increasingly fragile?  We all have an interest in promoting our societies’ diversity and strength.  We can do this through the worldview and values by which we choose to live.  The Emergent Method offers a new way so that, with appropriately emerging values to guide us, we can help build a nurturing environment that promotes our wellbeing.

The last line of environmentalist Tim Flannery’s book, Here on Earth, says,

But I am certain of one thing – if we do not strive to love one another, and to love our planet as much as we love ourselves, then no further human progress is possible here on Earth.³

It is on this thought that we must now ruminate and act.

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The second edition (late 2017) adds more commentary on the development of the blockchain, and its distributed ledger technology.⁴  It is a growing understanding of the ability of the blockchain to replace over-centralised governance arrangements that has helped me understand an even bigger picture – that the centralised financial and political structures under which we currently struggle will soon end (because they disallow an optimally efficient and effective flow of energy and information).  However, this time there will be no need to storm the Bastille or blame the 1% and then dip into chaos and a centralised despotic solution soon afterwards.  This is not the true solution to the true malaise: over-centralised power.  Centralisation has been our species’ chief strength and hidden weakness at the same time.  Too much centralisation too soon is every civilisation’s toes-of-clay, resulting in the rise and fall of one after another, but now is the time of our species’ enlightenment.

The blockchain helps to enable another form of government or governance we have not seen in our species before but was in all its successful predecessors and is in all other species on Earth.  The form of this governance is diversified and distributed without being chaotic in its disorderly sense.  Such a government’s robustness is in its connectedness and relative decentralism.  We might call it a form of ecologically friendly socio-political naturalism. It corresponds with a multi-polar political environment rather than the unipolar one mankind has been subject to on a rolling basis since the rise of the Sumerian empire or earlier.

Except in perhaps some Australian Aboriginal nations, this kind of naturalism has not been possible in the past in the social networks of our species because we have not seen how to enjoy the benefits of socio-economic cohesion without the concomitant centralisation of wealth and political power.  Looking beyond immediate attractions of the trappings of power, I suspect it had much to do with the clash of instincts and consciousness⁵ in our evolutionary past.  I now see the solution is to enlist blockchain-like systems thinking and a form of entrepreneur Shann Turnbull’s social capitalism⁶ in our rebellion against the narrow-mindedness of what Richard Dawkins calls our selfish replicators (genes and memes).

With social capitalism and a blockchain-like mentality, we can have our cake and eat it too.  That is, we can maintain the very complex web of relationships our technology has afforded us, particularly through the internet and its worldwide web, but also through global supply chains of goods, etc. (and an ‘internet of things’), while locally distributing the control, power and ownership of these relationships at the same time.  This move towards a social capitalism of decentralised wealth promises to be a major advance for our species, if we can all hang on with cool heads through the coming transition.  It touches on an almost infinite array of improvements in human endeavours, of which Designing Urban Agriculture, by April Philips, provides but one example.⁷

In the second edition, I see more clearly the Emergent Method as a description of the mechanisms and protocols by which our species may advance to its next stage.  Emergentism is well aligned with the motivations of social capitalism and the underlying philosophy of the original Bitcoin blockchain.⁸

Another area of revision in this second edition is with respect to artificial intelligence (AI) and in particular the lessons we have recently been taught from the field of deep learning.  As the name suggests, deep learning happens in interpenetrating yet incomplete layers – at first blush, the more layers, the deeper the learning.

I am sure existentialist philosopher Merleau-Ponty would have found AI research quite confirming and reassuring.  Nevertheless, deep learning does not yet solve the hard problem of consciousness in itself.  That is, while AI’s recursive learning algorithms are quickly improving, they have not as yet brought a sense of sentience to their survival machines.  It seems to me that a sense of introsomatic deep learning is more important than just more extrosomatic deep learning at this stage if a sense of sentience is to emerge in AI.  With much caution, I am hoping research along these lines will ensue and shed more light.

The second edition also has more to say about quantum computing.  As I read about the optimisation algorithms of D-Wave quantum computers I realised that reality itself continually finds a local optimising path in its becoming.  The topic of optimisation therefore comes up often in this edition.  Cause-and-effect is classical science’s faulty understanding of quantum optimisation.

Finally, the second edition also has more to say about the Zahavis’ Handicap Principle.⁹  This principle can help us bridge the gap between the proto-intention of all movement in matter-spacetime, the non-sentient intention of chemical signals within a living body, the sentient intentions of eusocial insects or animals, and the self-aware intentions of human social behaviour.  I have removed the summaries at the end of each chapter and the Epilogue of the first edition.

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The third edition (late 2018) is a simple development yet a giant leap from the prior editions.  It finally brings a coherent understanding of the difference between a processual understanding of energy / space / time and the analytical versions we are typically taught in our schools and universities.  This difference helps get to the nub of the issue of emergence and the Emergent Method.

This edition was inspired by a number of related developments over the last decade.  These include a deeper exploration of quantum mechanics, for instance in the development of quantum computers, a maturation of the mathematical insights gained from string theory, such as developments of the Holographic Principle and its wider acceptance, and the much broader appreciation of Fibonacci numbers, even in the realm of spacetime’s structure itself.

All these factors, and greater exploration of other multidimensional theories of reality as we know it, have contributed to a growing acceptance of the idea that there is a substrate underpinning spacetime, and that rather than being a fixed parameter, gravity, at least in some quarters, is seen as an emergent phenomenon of its environment.  We are getting closer to the point where we might develop a widely supportable hypothesis for a proto-informational, potential-energy basis to everything.  That is, reality is likely a relativistic balance between energetic/informational nullity and infinity, which balance underpins everything.  The next leap along this same path would be to go on to understand that the mind/brain is also a spacetime/matter phenomenon that emerges from spacetime’s underlying fabric.

While expanding and refining commentary on many established topics, including alternative interpretations of quantum theory, this Third Edition also adds commentary on Fibonacci Numbers, the Golden Ratio, and the Golden Spiral.¹⁰  Many intraday stock traders will be familiar with the topic in terms of Elliott Waves, but this concept applies far more widely than just stock trading.

By studying alternative quantum theory interpretations and the Golden Spiral, including in relation to Kleiber’s Law,¹¹ I have come to understand more fully the mechanisms of emergence and its Stochastic Process Systems,¹² which has also caused me to review commentary on Natural Selection and focus more carefully on the concept of Signal Selection.¹³  In doing so, I have added a few more entries to the Glossary and deleted the introductions to each chapter.

Theories of alien interpenetration with this planet’s inhabitants are also introduced and explored in this edition.

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The fourth edition (early 2020) explores far more fully the interaction between quantum mechanical nonlocality and point-space localisations that were once understood in terms of the classical theory of local realism alone.¹⁴  Due to the ‘other worldliness’ of quantum mechanical nonlocality, this interaction of the nonlocal and local is not just physical in terms of things like life, thinking, and even the soul, but also rather philosophical in nature, and even paranormal in terms of wider issues like intuition.  As we will see, quantum mechanical nonlocality also has a huge bearing on how we think about everything, necessarily including space and time, movement, life, consciousness and the Emergent Method.

The core model I use to explain all of these things is what happens to a real wave-particle as it is accelerated up to the speed of light.  According to Special Relativity, it gets progressively thinner in the direction or axis of travel (the ‘longitudinal’ axis) but equally spreads out more and more in the two-dimensional area perpendicular to the direction of travel (the ‘transverse’ area).  At the speed of light, the particle theoretically has no ‘longitudinal’ width and only exists as a transverse 2D wave.  That is, the wave-particle’s particulate localisation goes to zero (nullity) and its nonlocal wave nature spreads out to infinity.  Similarly, every massless particle, such as a photon of light, is a transverse 2D wave that only travels at the speed of light.

The wave-particle model gives us a hint that the whole material world has a local, verging on nullity, particulate existence in its direction of movement and at the same time also has a nonlocal, verging on infinity, wavy existence perpendicular to its direction of movement, deep in its peripheral vision as it were.  Further, this wavy, 2D, transverse component necessarily merges and connects with all other waves in the cosmos.  That is, everything material has a disconnected, local existence and an interconnected, nonlocal existence.  Everything material is a mix of both kinds of properties, local and nonlocal.  These properties are separate vectors that delineate all that occurs in the clashes and couplings between them.

Our minds think via the local / nonlocal monism too, bringing together localised and synchronised neuron firings in a nonlocal manifold that I believe we perceive as our own, unified thinking.  That is, I suspect we would not be able to think and have a ‘self’ without nonlocal and distributed transaction processing interacting with the localised brain/body.

Can our modern theoretical physicists, such as David Bohm, shed some light on this topic, or can an understanding of quantum mechanical nonlocality shed some light on the perhaps difficult-to-grasp concepts of modern philosophers like Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rupert Spira?¹⁵  I offer my own version of these developing views.

Can quantum mechanical nonlocality help explain paranormal activity or near-death experiences?  Can it help explain religious concepts of a next life or an afterlife?  For instance, is all paranormal activity just a matter of showmanship or sleight of hand?  Does it even matter?  In considering these issues I discuss more carefully the entangled quantum layer underlying spacetime, from which it seems the paranormal is quite possible but probably not reliably controllable with current knowledge or technology.

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The fifth edition (early 2022, in the midst of the Covid Era) considers a little more carefully how we might use our knowledge of quantum mechanical nonlocality to guide self-knowing, live the good life, and realise the great potential that lies within all of us.

Like many others, I have gone through quite a philosophical development during the Covid Era, with the result that this edition is quite a departure from the previous ones.  I now see, like the ancient Egyptians and many other ancient civilisations, the first-person experience or inward revelation within this paranormal quantum reality as just as important as, if not more important than, the third-person explanation.  Foundational facts and values, knowledge, understanding and wisdom seem to develop to promote such inner revelation of first-person identity - and then a release of self to larger realms.  Personal revelation with release is the essence of confident leadership.

I also see that just as the mind arises with the brain in each of us at the same time, a kind of omniscient Cosmic Consciousness arises with an omnipresence and omnipotence at the same time.  That is, I now accept the emergence of a Cosmic Trinity is not only feasible, but also the best explanation of reality.  I have arrived at this view through several paths, one being that a triune rather than binary view of Nature provides a better explanation of biological cognition.  Cognition arises through environmental awareness and fit, suggesting the environment itself has a background level of awareness provided in and through the clash, coupling and thorough interpenetration of the local and nonlocal, or nullity and infinity.

In previous editions I saw the interaction of the local and nonlocal only in terms of a clash or collapse of quantum mechanical conditions leading to a phase change, like laminar to turbulent flow.  Now I see the interaction of the local and nonlocal more clearly in terms of a creative give-and-take coupling too.  This coupling explains not just novelty, or how new order emerges in the cosmos, but all movement and cycles too.  Phases are moved through because of time’s two vectors, the 1D longitudinal vector and 2D transverse vector.  The vibratory coupling is the very act of exchanging information/energy between time’s two vectors, leading to all state change and movement.  The cyclical coupling is also the meeting place of nullity and infinity, where both are limited by each other and thus both can ‘know’ each other through phaseal development.  It is the tight cosmic reflection of the local and nonlocal in each other that makes cognition, the third part of the Cosmic Trinity, fundamental.

The tight reflection is demonstrated by the mathematical fact that infinity is the inverse of nullity (zero).  In the binary sense, all that is not nullity is infinity and vice versa.  If I know nullity, I also know infinity by the inverse transformation.  In the trinitarian sense, the coupling of infinity and nullity is not so simple – all of reality lies within this coupling, and the transformative knowing of nullity and infinity is not lost in the cosmic total and is not totally lost between the very big and the very small – hence, movement and biological cognition.

Nevertheless, I broadly interpret this Cosmic Trinity in the Christian context.  Through the recent actions of governments and community leaders, I now accept the previously alien and shunned idea that other-dimensional spiritual evil and good have emerged in our cosmos.  I feel I am still very much at the beginning of my journey of spiritual awakening since the days of my Christian roots, which I still deeply cherish.

As part of this awakening, I now understand, largely due to the efforts of people like Mark Passio ¹⁶ and David Icke, ¹⁷ Natural Law as central to my own personal awakening and the needed personal awakening of all members of our civilization.  As Passio says, teaching Natural Law, which I place within the framework of Emergentism, is the Great Work of our times.  Natural Law and its Golden Rule is discussed in some detail in Part 2 and noted in the Glossary.

In studying the topics of this edition, I have also realised that social behaviour modification and development, or mass formation psychosis, is a more powerful issue than psychosis at the individual level because it operates at a higher level of emergent order.  Where we once thought in simple terms of the mix of the right-brain/emotional and left-brain/rational model of human behaviour, with early bias towards instinctive motion over conscious thought, we now have to consider human behaviour in the light of the higher social dimension that acts not only as a shared output but also as an input, capable of becoming a stronger motivator of actions in social contexts than the inputs of individual reason or emotion and is far more extensive than the idea of groupthink alone.

At this higher dimension the downloaded tribal mind or hive-mind exists, for better or worse.  Where principalities can understand this higher order or power, they can use this understanding to sway not just the individual, but the entire tribe, which in this context means something more than just emotionally and rationally.  Such groups can pursue an objective not even known to the tribe’s members even though the tribe is instrumental in its fulfilment.  The social characteristic is in our genes because it promotes survival but we need to be aware of its strengths and weaknesses, risks and benefits.  So far, the tribal mind is predominantly instinctive, has few conscious tools available to it, and has little ability to be inwardly rational.  It is therefore capable of being hacked.  This is a challenge our societies need to address if we want to see better systems of socio-political governance emerging as we move forward.

Part 2 also explores the topics of money, capitalism and Douglas Social Credit more deeply because we need to discuss alternatives to the current state of Capitalism, the debt system, the Chinese Social Credit Score system, and the Communist/Socialist Great Reset proposed by Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum.

This edition is split into two volumes, Part 1 and Part 2.

Introduction (Extract from Part 1)

What is emergentism?  I define emergentism as a philosophical theory or approach that emphasises how order arises in everything.  Arising order encompasses such things as how things evolve, how things grow, and how novelty arises, whether in systems, human thought, or social endeavour.

Despite his philosophical views and controversial criticisms of Einstein’s Special and General Relativity, much of the related work of Reginald T. Cahill’s Process Physics seems compatible with the weak yet ubiquitous emergentism I support. Rather than merely hypothesise an explanation of existence, Cahill and his colleagues have developed self-referencing process models (recipes) that seem to successfully mimic various aspects of the emergence of our networked web of quantum existence from an underlying structure.¹⁸  Cahill characterises this underlying structure as informational, but I would characterise it as fleeting, as in the quantum fluctuations of space’s background energy, and therefore proto-informational and potentially energetic, to distinguish it from classic panpsychist overtones.  Cahill’s Figure 4 of his Process Physics paper (2003) has been adapted for our purposes here in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Epistemology’s Processual and Analytical Approaches

The diagram may be thought of as a system of emerging truths or realities arising from what Cahill calls a Stochastic Process System (SPS), or we might call a system of chaotic, unstoppable movement, such as our very early expanding universe seen as a system.  Other examples of SPSs could include the beginnings of the crooked evolution of a reptile’s scale into a bird’s feather, the beginnings of embryonic development, childhood psychological development, and Australia’s socio-political development.  SPSs also include the process-modelling of such systems - Cahill’s process-modelling of the first quantum moments of a universe such as ours being a case in point.  The optimisation problems offered to quantum computers for their resolution provide further examples of SPSs.¹⁹

However, I believe the most basic SPS of all, from which all other SPSs arise, occurs at the meeting point of the underlying quantum realm of nonlocality and the relativistic realm of local realism (discussed in detail in Part 1).  We can perhaps picture a dynamic sea of quantum entanglement extra-dimensional to Figure 1, perhaps in superposition with it.

The shaded areas in Figure 1 (inside the two circles and in the oval-shaped cloud) represent basic truths or facts arising from the SPS.  As a consequence of Gödel’s Theorems (also discussed in Part 1), these truths are not fully reachable analytically or ‘a-priori’ (that is, ‘without or before experience’).  That is, the formal axioms and rules of classical science, mathematics, philosophy, or digital computing represented at the bottom of Figure 1 tend to bar our knowledge of deeper truths (in deeper layers).  The dashed and dotted lines indicate this limitation of the analytical or static approach.  The dashed line indicates that we know the axiomatic formalism hides deeper truths within itself.  The dotted line indicates we have no formal idea of the unreachable truths outside the boundaries of the classical/static realm.  The classical approach has access to what Cahill calls ensemble truths, i.e., parcels of truths reliant on axiomatic bases, indicated by the solid line to the boundary of the small circle on the left.  The two small circles provide examples of classical paradigms or theories used to explain reality.

However, an emergent, processual approach (whether natural, or artificially modelled) has access to all realms of truth in its becoming because it escapes Gödel limitations.  It is experiential or a-posteriori, rather than a-priori.  The three solid lines emanating from the SPS indicate this.  Nevertheless, any SPS is limited to the here-and-now by its processing time in our relativistic realm.²⁰  The need for preparation and processing time is why the old analogue computers of university engineering laboratories never made it to the home.  Still, there are ways we can have quick access to the processual truths limited by time’s scarcity.  These ways would include the use of non-classical, complex numbers, fractals, fuzzy logic, principles of deep learning (especially as applied to recursive neural networks), and process-modelling via the algorithms of future quantum computers, although the mimicking of nature’s SPSs and the development of step-wise optimisation programs are not necessarily easy things to do.

In hindsight, I would suggest that the modern philosophy of emergentism as it applies to the mind-body problem largely picks up where the existentialist phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty left off in the post WWII period.  However, an emergent, or at least processual, model of reality itself probably dates back to Heraclitus of Ephesus (540-480 BCE) who suggested that the world does not consist of stable things but is always in a state of flux.  To put this idea in a way Professor Cahill prefers, what needs a deeper explanation is not movement and change, but the appearance of stability.²¹  It is amazing to think that this is still a very controversial concept 2,500 year later.  It has very deep implications for how we do science and how we understand ourselves.  This apparent stability and the limited successes of our a-priori static analyses delude us into thinking that all things in our relativistic realm can be known by reduction to geometric measurement, even of time.

Should we assume a stable ‘tick-tock’ universe that conforms to ideal laws and thereby explain movement and change, or do we have the nub of the issue the wrong way around?  I agree with the processual approach of Heraclitus – we often still have the nub of the issue the wrong way around.  I also note in passing here that modern, neuroscientific research such as presented by Antonio Damasio,²² or modern biological research as presented by Amotz and Avishag Zahavi,²³ is closely compatible with emergentism’s and Merleau-Ponty’s processual approach to an understanding of the mind-body, and its social interactions.

Part 1 discusses and explains emergence, emergentism, and most specifically, the Emergent Method.  It addresses many of the issues raised here.  Part 2 deals with how we can apply emergentism to a philosophy of mind-body, and consider the many ramifications of such a worldview in the human context.

PART 2: YOUR 7 PILLARS OF SELF-ACTUALISATION

PILLAR 1: Values Clash

My Story

In the middle of the Part 1, I spoke a little about my dream of an expanding and virtuous global tradition.  I would like to start Part 2 with something about my life-story so far.  A key issue that was a driver to thinking about and writing this book was my changing beliefs about the existence of God, and the nature of knowable reality.

My earliest memory of personal belief in the existence of God was when I was about five years old.  I was alone, walking down the lane at the back of my family’s shop in Sandringham, in Melbourne, Australia. My sister, brother and I had just been to Sunday school at the Presbyterian Church around the corner.  Somehow, I was coming home alone maybe a few minutes behind the others.  I don’t remember much of those days, but I do remember singing Jesus, loves the little children, all the children of the world at the Sunday school.  I also remember being a little bored and uncomfortable at Sunday school and was happy enough when my family decided to discontinue our attendance some short time later.  Nevertheless, on this particular day in the stony lane – I looked up at the fluffy white clouds moving quickly across the beautiful clear blue sky and thinking – God does exist!  It was a powerful revelatory experience for me because I remember it so clearly all these years later.  Recognising the magnificence of Nature, outside of self, was the first reason why I, as a five-year-old boy, consciously believed in the existence of God.  Looking back now I think that was my first conscious experience of blissful non-attachment, which I assumed was God’s doing but may have been just a natural interconnection or meditation with full reality.

The next memorable event in my religious life was at a Pentecostal church in the early 1970’s in Kew, Melbourne, when I was twelve years old.  I was baptised and ‘spoke in tongues’ in accordance with the doctrine there and attended meetings with Mum, Dad and my older brother, and much later, my sister.  Speaking in tongues was another experience of non-attachment with consciousness.  The church taught it was a sacred connection with the Holy Spirit.

I remember the car being abuzz with conversation on the way home from meetings – we talked about all the things we learned: The Bible was true; there was proof available that God existed in the personal experience of speaking in tongues, which was the ‘true’ Bible evidence of being born again.  Ivan Panin’s Bible Numerics (a series of writings written before 1942) was further proof of God’s existence, along with the message of the Gospel described in the twelve signs of the zodiac, including the virgin birth of Jesus foretold in the constellation of Virgo (Jesus actually being born in September, 3BC).  We were also taught that the two world wars were accurately foretold in intricate measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza and that Jesus’ return was foretold in these measurements as coming anytime soon.  A pastor also taught us, through the story of his coin collection (largely gained as a soldier on duty in the Middle East during World War II) about the ‘British Israel’ (BI) message - supposedly contained in Bible prophecies.  Jesus was about to return to take over the British Throne, which was His.  We who were of British descent were literal descendants of the ten lost tribes of Old Testament Israel and it was for us that Jesus was going to return, especially if we spoke in tongues!

All those things that the church taught us as proofs of God’s existence (outside of intersubjective experiences) had the same basic flaw.  Why was Ivan Panin’s book, BI, the messages of the stars and the pyramids, or Bible prophecy, finally shown to be uncertain? Statistics, the Scientific Method and the law of large numbers! If I applied the Chinese meanings of numbers (eight is the luckiest in terms of wealth) rather than Panin’s meanings (eight is ‘resurrection and new beginning’) to the whole Bible text treated as a vast, set of numbers, I would be able to find new scriptures to those chosen by Panin that could prove a Chinese interpretation of life.  Likewise, BI was a few scriptures picked out here and there from many thousands to support tightly held presumptions.  The stars could likewise support all sorts of patterns or narratives, nominally assigned to the vast arrays of possibilities within their structures. Pyramid ratios and measurements in cubits could likewise be co-opted to peddle a Christian message or any other message.

Nevertheless, the problem was not just a misuse of the law of large numbers, a misreading of chaos, or a weak higher-dimensional claim.  It was the scientifically sinful idea of starting with a tightly held presumption (e.g., ‘God, exists’, ‘there is an afterlife’, ‘Jesus, will return before the end of the twentieth century’, or even ‘white man, has been especially chosen by God’) and then going about trying to prove it.  As we have seen, ideal modern science does not do that – it improves its inductive explanations by proving the failure of old explanations, and thereby deductively advancing our knowledge of reality.  We have also noted that nature herself advances through a similar means – putting handy claims or possibilities on the table and then winnowing out the failures.

However, the reason why I believed in the existence of God, I am a little sad to admit now, was ‘all of the above’.  I was one of the Pentecostal church’s most dedicated twelve-year-old converts, but not publicly at school, just privately within.  Something held me back from telling too many people in my school life what we were learning – probably because I was a clever but very carefully naughty little boy at school.  I had a public life and a private life, even at twelve.  However, I did believe, so I learnt as much as I could from twelve years old onwards.

I read all the material I could find on Bible numerics, the Christian message in the stars, BI, and Bible prophecy. I read the Bible many times over – the King James Version, the Revised Version, the Paraphrased New Testament, the NIV and Amplified Bibles all from cover to cover, as well as much of the Interlinear Version, the Revised Standard Version, and others.  I became such a serious self-appointed student, I would sneak into the city after school to visit the Heritage Bookshop and buy books from there directly, often without anyone except the nice old man at the counter in the bookshop knowing.  I read many of the extra Bible books like the Apocrypha, the Book of Jasher and some of the gnostic gospels (of course not available from my church’s Sunday bookstore).  I also read an interlinear Septuagint and many other books on Bible Hebrew and Greek, and Bible history, such as the works of Josephus.  I also read many of the bookshop’s books on other topics, such as political history as portrayed by Nesta H. Webster.  I did all this by the time I was about seventeen years old.

At seventeen, I also started the preliminary year of an electronic engineering degree.  The next year I met my wife-to-be doing the same degree.  At this stage my dedication to the church had waned.

Skipping all the personal stuff (because I want to focus on why I believed in the existence of God and how this belief evolved), I soon was married and back in the church – after much cajoling by my father.  I then became involved in my father’s midweek house-meetings, giving Bible talks as if I had never left the church in the first place.  Nevertheless, by this stage I had begun to seriously doubt the church’s proofs of God.  I actually approached the head pastor about my reservations but without effect at the time, although a few years later the church no longer taught all that stuff about Bible numerics, the stars, the pyramids, BI, and Bible prophecy either.  Nevertheless, it still sticks to its personal experience of speaking in tongues as proof of God’s existence.  Apparently, my reasons for believing in the existence of God evolved just a little more quickly than did those of the church.  By this stage, my reason for believing was reduced to the personal experience not of speaking in tongues, that was a given at the time, but of my ‘walk in the Lord’ day-by-day, as we used to say in those days.

My wife, my first two sons, and I moved from Melbourne to Sydney in the early 1980’s and joined the sister church to the one in Melbourne when I was about twenty-five.  I soon became a house leader, running midweek meetings at our home and I became even more serious about my beliefs, probably at some cost to the relationship with my wife.  I desperately wanted to help the ‘lost’ find God; I wanted to be an evangelist.  I believed in God implicitly at this stage – I even told people at work about my firm beliefs.

I started to challenge my house meeting to do more daring things with us (my wife and I).  We perhaps naively invited some very lost people around to our home during that period.  Some were drug addicts, drug pushers, prostitutes, violent criminals, maybe even a murderer at one stage; all were poor in a monetary sense.  Still, I had a staunch faith that no harm would befall us, because God, as the universe’s ultimate absolute, was on our side (or we were on His).  We were also seeing some lives turned around from desperate rebellion against life’s principles.

I approached the pastors of the church to back an expansion of our successful house meeting activities to those economically poorer suburbs of Sydney in which the church had never spread before.  Surprisingly to me, they were not interested at all and only wanted to deflect or dodge all my advances on the topic.  They just wanted to scale down and finish my risky activities – not because I was acting against their doctrine, but because it seemed to me, they were not prepared to risk the operations or people of their church on monetarily poor and possibly dangerous strangers.  This was a crisis for me.  It suggested to me that the church was not really about saving the world through the power of God at all, it was about something else, something manmade rather than God-inspired.  My enthusiasm for the church again declined.  I started to question my allegiances to the church and so did my wife.  We finally decided to leave, my wife deciding some time before I did – although we left together.

At this stage we went to an Anglican church to learn about biblical counselling because helping people change their lives for the better was what really motivated us.  However, this meant I had to deal with and put behind me the speaking-in-tongues experience as the greatest proof of God’s existence.  Now the only proof of God’s existence was something more subtle - my personal walk with Him (a kind of daily meditation) and my confident expectation that God would do miracles in transforming people’s lives – nothing else.

At this stage, I also read many of Dr Larry Crabb’s, and John and Paula Sandford’s, books on human nature and biblical counselling (as well as many others, such as one of Yonggi Cho’s books on church-cell administration in South Korea).  However, we no longer had a church in which we could put into practice our new knowledge in a big way.  Our Pentecostal background still made us a little uneasy with the Anglican Church, so we decided to go to the biggest Assemblies of God Pentecostal church in Sydney instead.  That was the same church that is now in the media for all the wrong reasons in 2021-2022.

Just after this time, I think my wife started to become discontent with her life.  Soon after this, she gave birth to our fourth and youngest son.  My wife then became discontent with her faith in God and her marriage with me, although I don’t know when exactly – because, when I look back now, I had little idea of what was going on in her inner life.  All I knew is that we drifted away from passionate involvement in church activities, but I thought, not from faith in God or each other.

Now I need to talk about something a lot more personal, but I will not, except to discuss it in terms of my evolving belief in the existence, of God.  My wife wanted to end our marriage.  This was devastating to me.  It also challenged what I believed about God.  I never thought such a thing could happen to us.  I couldn’t understand why God had allowed this to happen.  I didn’t wonder why I was so blind or naive, but I did wonder why God hadn’t reached through to me to warn me in time.  I wondered why it had happened at a time when I was not living unfaithfully to God, but while I was living as truly as I could understand to live at the time, given the circumstances.  My faith, was shaken to the core.

After a rocky time, I decided to try to mend the relationship with my wife and make peace with God – believing that God wanted to teach me a deep lesson through the experience.  The lesson seemed to be that I was far too naive and far too irresponsible; that I was wrong to blithely assume God would look after all the unknowns in my life (or the lives of others) just because I genuinely trusted in Him.  This was a major shock, but not something that fully broke my faith in God.  It did change my thought-life and actions from that time, however, because I was no longer as sure of God’s ways.  I thought that perhaps the old Pentecostal church’s reticence to help the desperate and dangerous was now at least understandable.

However, unfortunately, the lesson was not over.  My wife had moved on to her next life.  We got a divorce about a year later.  My four sons were aged five, seven, ten and twelve when my ex-wife and I separated.  I suddenly had to cope as a single dad of four boys.  At first, I juggled three part-time jobs (a university tutor, a university research analyst and a market researcher in the IT industry) so I could be home for the boys to get them to school in the morning and to be home after school to cook dinner.  My parents also helped by looking after my two younger boys for a term of school.  Eventually I found a caregiver to help me.  I borrowed money from Mum and Dad to convert my garage into a granny flat so the caregiver could move in to cook and care for all the boys.

From the time of our separation until this time, a period of about two years, I totally reconsidered my beliefs by writing a book that I had been fiddling with for some time.  It was an important cathartic exercise for me, mostly done late at night.  It cleared my mind; it helped me deal with all that had happened.  I began to realise that faith in God did not guarantee an outwardly perfect / happy / abundant life and I was wrong to expect that under any circumstance – the events that happened forced me to consider that error.  Additionally, I was very glad I learned that error.  In fact, I believed that lesson actually made me a much stronger Christian. I felt incredibly privileged as a Christian that I had learned how to have faith in God after going through what I went through.  Even today, I still feel very privileged for the life I have had because it has given me the chance to think about things and learn things many people don’t get the opportunity to deeply consider or learn.  I was learning to understand and have faith in the omniscient universe, rather than expecting the universe to fit in with my logical framework.

The core idea of the book I was writing at the time was that, in spite of all that had happened to me, it was a person’s privileged fellowship with a personal ‘heavenly Family’ that really mattered.  Further, there were certain immutable Christian, values, such as love, joy and peace that could only come through fellowship and were undeniable no matter what; ‘against such there was no law’.  I also saw my trials as part of the privilege of this deep understanding, especially when I heard all the shallow or glib religious explanations for my situation from other people who had no idea of what I had gone through with my ex-wife and children, or what my ex-wife or children had gone through.  I therefore held on to my faith while I was writing that book.

Then something amazing happened.  I finished the book.  Further, I had what seemed to me an astonishing revelation at the exact same moment.  The personal truths I had written about in the book – the undeniable values – I had to be fully responsible for holding them myself, whether or not I ever had fellowship with my heavenly Family again.  My soul was mine; it would only be worth saving if it held and lived by the immutable values in its own right.  I realised that the transformation of my soul, even with all the help from my heavenly Family, was an act of my will, for which I must take direct, responsibility.

I understood that the mighty strength of the immutable values, lodged in the souls of men, actually flowed through all of us and in fact that’s exactly where God, if He existed and loved us, would want them to flow.  God would grant his unconditional love to His children for a time, but that was not where He wanted to leave the lessons of spiritual childhood.  I thought that like any parent, He wanted His love to transform the souls of His children so that one day we could be independent of that need for His unconditional safety net.  Eventually, in this life, He would also want to love us as adults, as equals. He would want to love us for our own moral strength apart from His.  In this way, our autonomy would become His crowning glory, His legacy.

I understood that to love myself the way God would want to eventually love His adult offspring, I needed to think about my own values and virtues. I had to choose them for myself as my own, regardless of personal limitations or suffered wrongs, and not just because if I did not the safety net would be taken away.  It was this ‘adult Christianity’ if you like that the completion of the book and my experiences helped me deeply consider. (It stands to reason that a similar ‘adult’ logic must eventually apply to our development of AI in terms of its self-aware and owned values and our removal of AI safety nets.)

Further, the epiphany that soon followed and was just a slight variation but meant something very different to me was that these values stood by themselves.  It made no difference whether God existed or not.  You could remove God and the fellowship of the heavenly Family from the equation and it made no difference.  The immutable values were still real, still valid and still our responsibility to hold and follow individually, and not just collectively.  To put this in the broader terms of Part 1, these values were valid in the local, point space (Nullity), across the nonlocal plane (Infinity), and everywhere in between, regardless of my understanding or beliefs.

Now I more fully understood that naming a source or ultimate owner of values, does not change those values or their innate authority. ²⁴ The values were dynamically embedded through every layer of life rather than imposed or injected from the top or bottom after the fact.  More importantly, values are a demographical manifestation of dynamical reality, at all levels, and part of the energy/information optimising work that must occur for the local/nonlocal clash and coupling to find resolution moment by moment.

Values released out of the grip of their supposed owner-creators can travel amongst well-intentioned people anywhere and everywhere and still transform lives.  Perhaps, to escape irrelevance, this is why many church groups become elitist and fastidiously avoid teaching an adult Christianity.  Instead of the personal revelation of love, joy and peace arising all the way from our connection with the ‘sacred’ quantum layer, religious social safety is made its cheap substitute.  I came face to face with the clash between innately sacred values and received religious narratives.

The bottom line for me was that my received notion of God, my religious doctrines regarding an afterlife, and my subjective experience of speaking in tongues, were not provable concepts or necessarily correct.  They could be divorced from emergent values.  The seemingly universal values and virtues, such as love, joy and peace were locally and recurrently ‘provable’ in terms of their contributions to human wellbeing, and if I loved and honoured my precious life (as any benevolent god should also do) I would never deny this.

Just as a mathematician who has made an error of logic goes back through his or her proofs to axiomatic bases, so I wanted to stick to the minimum I could rely on as self-evidently unquestionable.  People can fool us and mystical experiences can fool us, but everyone who had experienced them knows that such things as love, joy, and peace are undeniably ‘good’ for the human spirit and soul.  What greater benefit could be gained from life, or granted back to life, than simply living by its immutable values that well up from inside of us and our healthy social structures?

This realisation was too much for me.  I only knew one thing – I no longer wanted to believe in God.  That is, I no longer wanted to trust in, rely on, and blindly obey my received notion of God.  I wanted to put my naive reliance on a god-narrative behind me and start building my self-reliance and self-responsibility from scratch.  This was by no means an easy transition to make.  For most people, not relying on God is easy, even natural, but for a Christian, Jewish or Islamic fundamentalist, not relying on their concepts of God is very difficult and very unnatural.  It is like being forced to leave home at an age too young.  Old thinking patterns, old mores and taboos, are locked in and very hard to change.  Anyhow, I went back to university to get an accounting degree.  Soon after that, I just wanted to find a distraction from all my deep religious thoughts and lighten up.  I just wanted to have fun again – although the deep respect for what I now recognise as Natural Law never left me.

Fast forward to the more recent past; I went through a series of issues in my life that led me to re-assess my values and virtues once again.  I felt as though I just picked up where I left off (too quickly) all those years beforehand.  I went back to my old book and read it again, perhaps just to check that it still had some validity.  Much of what it said was still valid, minus for me the need to define the constraints or boundaries of consciousness in terms of a Christian God.  I then had a go at re-writing the book from both a more general secular view and a Christian view.  It worked for me at the time, but when I tried to share it with others, it was too much for them.  Fair enough.  Nevertheless, my growth, my new ‘revised revelation’, was not over…

I had started reading again, just as I had when researching the original ‘cathartic’ book.  However, this time I read very different authors.  Not biblical philosophers, but the new book by Daniel Coleman, Social Intelligence (I had already read Emotional Intelligence years earlier) and an old book by Richard Dawkins I found in a second-hand bookshop at the time when his latest book had come out with quite a stir and made me notice his name.  I read The Blind Watchmaker.  I then read The Selfish Gene.  These books taught me about evolution as I had never understood it before.  They transformed my thinking.  In fact, Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle, and The Selfish Gene are some of the most influential books after the Bible that I have ever read.  I also read most of Daniel Dennett’s books, the Dalai Lama’s book Becoming Enlightened and many others.  These books made me understand the personal truths I had written about in my earlier book in a totally new framework – a framework that was not the Christian revelation of a dualistic ‘heavenly Family’, but the framework of our actual human evolution and condition.  Importantly, this helped me further discern what lies on this side of the supposed veil across unknowable reality.

I now understood that the seemingly immutable values, for which I still believe we are individually and morally responsible to hold and cherish, simply revealed themselves in our evolving consciousness as we interact positively with the environment.  They are ours, as humans, as it were of our own emergent making, but are no less valid, no less important and no less reliable, even if their immutability or universality was now a little fuzzy.  Wow.  Of course, I am now willing to quickly agree that these quasi-universal values are in fact not of our own intersubjective making.  They are the products of an arising biological and social reality, which we simply discover as these values become relevant to our evolving consciousness and its local, lived relationship with emerging existence. While never thwarting the environment’s own Golden Rule (do to others as you would have them do to you), new beliefs and values become relevant to us through trial and error as we use energy/information in new ways.

Putting limitations of definitions aside for now, the emergent and self-organising values do not force themselves upon us directly.  Nevertheless, they are always there in the environmental background like the spacetime, genetic, or memetic codes, indirectly and personally bringing a constraining order to our lives as we either blindly or knowingly acquiesce to them.

It seems to me that our relationship with values is much like our relationship with scientific facts.  They sometimes get in the way of our more tightly held common sense or social good sense.  We often have to do something quite unnatural to choose scientifically established realities over our cognitive biases.  Similarly, following values that promote our own wellbeing is often contrary to our favoured choices.  However, when we do embrace those values or tentative scientific facts over our inner biases, we are usually glad we made the transition.  This suggests to me that the inner moral Natural Law is just as immutable as any outer scientific law upon which we rely.

Nowadays, my focus is not on following a religion, although I am not an atheist.  If you wish to retain your faith in a religion, then this book’s aim is not about robbing you of your right to choose, even if it does cause you to question the basis of your choice.  Just as when I was a five-year-old, I still personally marvel at the universe’s self-organising principles and am happy to personify these as divine within an emergent monism, perhaps in a way akin to the powerful narratives of an unsuperstitious Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime.  Some self-organising principles I would include in this venerable list are quantum mechanical nonlocality, the relativistic strong and weak interactions, genetic evolution, sensorimotor perception, the memetic/vremetic evolution of human consciousness, and the rise of human imagination.  In this sense, I very much agree with Stuart Kauffman’s approach in his book, Reinventing the Sacred.  Further, like Napoleon Hill, in his famous book Think and Grow Rich, I am very willing to admit the crucial role of faith (or sincere claim-making) and personal revelation in the achievement of our deepest purposes.  In the Christian sense, I see God will harden and/or save those He chooses – it’s not up to me.  Everyone who has opportunity must make their own choices in life.  This is a very different view to the strongly evangelical view I once held or the view that God is the ultimate Authority at the top of the hierarchy – obey or else.  These days I see God as the soft, quiet voice nudging you and me to reach our highest nonlocal potential, in love. ²⁵

So now I am writing a book that explains why I once believed in the existence of the Christian Church God, and now why, in terms of living my self-actualising life, I find my old dualistic version of belief unnecessary and even damaging.  It does not essentially matter to me if you do or do not believe in a god right now.  If we live the lives driven by, or at least cognizant of, the locally recurrent and seemingly immutable values that are evident to us and healthy society on this side of any veil across unknowable reality, there is no defensible extra benefit to be achieved by anyone in this life or the next from our lives organised a different way.  A life enabled by these higher nonlocal values, such as love, and inner peace, is what is essential.  This means that, in a slight twist on Pascal’s Wager, no matter what your civilisation, culture, and creed, an authentic life is your best defence against a possibly passionate but just God or universal karma.

What would this clear, authentic life of values and virtues look like?  This is what we must discuss in the pages ahead.  It would seek to live in a partly disciplined manner, for instance by devoting time to learn about the Natural Law that governs moral behaviour.  It would also sometimes playfully, and other times earnestly, test the boundaries of personal knowledge.  It would be open to the idea of extending the explicit value-sets as we examine those constraints and change those boundaries in type and number.  The aim would be to have an emergent and looping relationship between our species’ environmental successes (natural and social) and our values.  Success is meant here in a more biological sense.  That is, we learn how to replicate sustainably, robustly, and in a way that promotes the wellbeing of all sincere participants given their unique placements in space and time.

My only advance on this view in 2022 compared to when it was first written a decade ago is in terms of the evolution of