Kaleidoscopic Transformation and the Six Renaissances

Section Two

Kaleidoscopic Transformation: Perpetually Changing Patterns Over Time

The human experience, from a certain perspective, may appear to us as a constantly changing panorama of familiar repeated forms.  Our human environment is alive with complex patterns which repeat over time. In the book, From Gaia to Geometry, I go into detail on geometry, science and mathematics demonstrating the nature of these changing patterns.

The development of our own human intelligence involves a process of changing, growing, & learning to recognize increasingly sophisticated patterns over time.

As humans we are living processes: destined to become recognizers of patterns and builders of increasingly sophisticated systems, each system, in turn, composed of intricate patterns and processes.

Knowledge becomes a relentless process, one which drives us to explore, discover, learn, interpret, reach plateaus, understand, then use tools to stretch our limited human capacity.

History reveals itself as a process consisting of patterns, formations which both repeat over time and which change dynamically, undergoing deformation into something new.

Once we become accustomed to this, we see this kaleidoscopic transformation of simpler patterns into more complex arrangements of patterns - leading to constant change in scientific and philosophical dimensions.

These patterns are present across the entire spectrum of our biological, psychological, historical, philosophical, scientific, cultural and technological systems. These complexities resolve into a deeper understanding of systems theory and into a framework which requires moving towards a comprehension of systems within systems.

Within such a context, former knowledge of thermodynamics and systemic processes transform relentlessly into ever more complex interrelated processes & patterns. Science itself reveals a set of interrelated patterns, revealed by Thomas Kuhn to be constantly changing into more complex interrelated recognizable patterns - each representing a new scientific paradigm, paradigms which remain for a time, before transformation into a subsequent paradigm.

The Quantum Kaleidoscopic Scientific Paradigm

We begin to arrive at the perhaps dizzying sensation that we exist in a kaleidoscopic universe, a many-dimensional kaleidoscopic universe which never holds still, which never exists as a singular entity. Instead, a universe which is composed of many sets of superimposed patterns.

Perceiving the recognition that we evolve continually, never ceasing to change, within a universe which also never ceases to change. Constantly evolving and evolving on many different scales, in many different dimensions, in what resolves into an awareness we are not educated to accept.

One fundamental requirement for becoming humans who may participate in the 21st Century renaissance is that we take on the responsibility of educating ourselves and others to be capable of such advanced comprehension.

Could we humans be the universe’s own way of coming to consciously know itself? We simply do not know, but nothing keeps us from imagining. This very state of not knowing, drives us relentlessly towards a goal of coming to comprehend. We humans have been destined to become explorers, innovators, creative masterminds, and seekers after truth. Our evolutionary process advances along with our creative tool making and innovative technology.

And this kaleidoscopic, all-encompassing idea, this complexity and its demands, often occurs to each of us as simple human beings, who may quite simply desire to be comfortable, loved, and respected and appreciated.

How can we expect to live lives as a healthy, peaceful, loving, compassionate person when such a stage is set with so many unresolvable complexities & paradoxes? Especially when our culture seems locked down to summarily reject any such over complicated narratives.

Chaos, Disorder & Friction: Elements of Evolution

Inevitably, the task of breaking the current scientific paradigm seems to fall to disruptors, individuals who seem to enjoy the chaos and friction of discovery and uncomfortable stretches.

Even the nature of the evolutionary process itself seems to paradoxically resist change while simultaneously epitomizing change.

We may scarcely have the time & energy to recognize the paradoxical forces within our own psyche - let alone time & energy to enjoy the stretch required to learn, grow and optimize our creativity.

However, we may find far more meaning in our lives by taking time to notice the repetitive, often paradoxical, patterns which appear in nature. Noticing the patterns within our art, music, literature, science, culture and family life, and planted deeply within our own inimitable nature.

We can enjoy this stretch with fellow human beings - recognizing that everyone comes to such an understanding in their own personal and unique way, not forcing our knowledge on anyone, recognizing the underlying set of processes and patterns as a vast and unknowable deep time. A deep time so vast and incomprehensible, we can scarcely imagine it, yet it adds to our human meaning. A comprehension gained through mutual understanding & respect.

With others we can gain a sense of allowing, of unfolding: cultivating a passion for compassion which in turn reveals a path of quiet, gentle and peaceful mercy. A recognition that we are guided by a process so vast, so incomprehensible, so intelligent, we cannot properly imagine it, let alone measure it. A recognition that we are meant to come to trust a process we do not completely understand.

Humans:  built of paradoxes, engineered to master the stretch, uncomfortable, but also an unconditional part of human evolution.

A Renaissance is Anything but Peaceful & Orderly

Why would human history follow these patterns of chaos and disorder and friction, alternating with times of relative prosperity and peace? Is there a pattern in human history and evolution which is part of a larger process we simply do not understand?

Times of great stress which, when we are in them, appear to destroy so much human meaning and progress. History reveals broad patterns which are difficult to appreciate or understand as we go through them. Becoming aware of these patterns, helps us contend with the chaos and guides us to find meaning.

When viewed from a broader perspective we can perceive patterns in history, even in evolution, which appear to be reflected in patterns observed throughout nature.

In so many ways, to benefit from a renaissance we must become the renaissance, participating in what it offers, or remain resigned to be one of those left behind

Worth the Stretch: Challenging the Human Imagination

Looking deeper, we begin seeing these broad patterns: waves, spirals, torsional vorticity, branching, a myriad of geometric patterns, and the way these intricate patterns intersect to form new topological formations. We see them in the branching of plants, arteries and nerves, as the beautiful spiral of a nautilus shell, held in the tumbling rivers, glimpsed within the folds of the brain.

Peering even further we set the whole geometric structure into motion and see each manifestation take on even greater complexity within a temporal, moving, constantly changing, framework.

From the largest imaginable formation to the tiniest imaginable formation, each is composed dimensionally of similar threads, similar patterns and similar topological properties over time.

Noting how the smallest scales repeat patterns which are found at the largest scales – small and large scales having different structure and function – yet sharing similar patterns.

Noticing that the universal whole may be greater than the sum of its parts and cannot be broken down as easily, geometrically, topologically, or in terms of time – into component parts.

We simply do not have any proof that the whole came into being at any one time, came into being from some former complex of form or energy, or will ever be reducible to some theory.

Quantum Renaissance - Evolution from Chaos

Paradoxically, a renaissance is almost impossible to recognize when we are in one.

Following our reasoning above, we recognize that it is the uncomfortable stretch which drives a renaissance, therefore a renaissance is not going to feel like a renaissance.

It is going to feel, to those of us within it, as if we are being stretched too thin, suffering the painful friction which accompanies anything truly innovative and worthwhile.

To Grok: Proactive Human Learning

“Grok” means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed-to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science-and it means as little to us as a color means to a blind man.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

The great science fiction writer, Robert Heinlein, invented the verb Grok, as an action word which demands it be taken as a verb and not as a noun.

In Heinlein’s book, Stranger in a Strange Land, to Grok means to come to know something. I read this as an action word meaning to come to know, passionately and in great detail- to take on the proactive process and hard work which means to truly know something.

We might observe here that we as human beings are verbs – living processes. Although we sometimes reduce ourselves to nouns, we cannot contain our beingness within a noun

In my other writings I often refer to human beings in the quantum sense as standing waves. A standing wave represents a process, one which takes on a shape for a particular time. A shape which persists as a shape only within a particular time period.

If indeed we come to see ourselves as standing waves, we may see the universe and all shapes within it as standing waves. Shapes which emerge into being for a time, before resolving into substrate

A Renaissance is happening, following the pattern historical renaissances have followed throughout history. Like the others, this 21st Century Renaissance springs from chaos, disorder, and extreme social Unrest.

Living within a renaissance feels as if we cannot seem to find purchase on solid ground, as if we might be like Alice in Wonderland, or maybe like a Stranger in a Strange Land, trying to grok what is happening.

Chaos, disorder and social unrest seem like the paradoxical opposite of what should form a renaissance. Wouldn’t it make sense for a renaissance to arise from harmony, order and social justice? It might indeed, but history indicates a far different pattern and demonstrates the rise of the renaissance out of a pattern of chaos, disorder and social unrest.

Our popularized modern concept of a renaissance likely has more to do with our arts & crafts and granola festivals – than it does with an actual historical one. Our modern concept has become an idealized renaissance.

A real historical renaissance is maybe the antithesis of a modern arts & crafts & granola festival.

Of What Earthly Use is a Renaissance?

And well we might ask, as it is the further questions and answers which come from this question which may bring the changes we are seeking.

First a renaissance does not celebrate social justice or harmonious egalitarianism, but instead sees the most significant creative innovation rising out of extreme social injustice and chaotic oppression. We see a few very talented artists and innovators, backed by wealthy financiers, develop some of humanity’s finest triumphs. Triumphs which seem to arise out of abject ignorance and incompetence and social inequality.

Historical examples reveal this stark paradox repeatedly across time and geography:

The Six Renaissances

The Upper Paleolithic “Renaissance” (c. 50,000–10,000 BCE)

The first renaissance had no financiers, no patrons and no names. Somewhere between fifty thousand and ten thousand years ago, human beings began painting the walls of caves in Sulawesi, at Chauvet, at Altamira and Lascaux, carving figures from ivory at Hohle Fels, and cutting flutes from bone. A species which had survived by hunting began to survive by meaning. The whole band paid for it with its shared labor and its thin surplus, and the whole species benefited. Yet the same leap which brought us art and music arrived alongside the disappearance of the Neanderthals and the great mammoths, and we still argue over how much of that was our doing. The first renaissance taught us to make symbols. It did not teach us what we owe to those who are not us.

The Islamic Golden Age (c. 750–1258 CE)

In Baghdad, under Harun al-Rashid and al-Ma’mun, the House of Wisdom gathered the learning of Greece, Persia and India and turned it into something new. Al-Khwarizmi gave us algebra, Ibn al-Haytham gave us optics, Ibn Sina gave us a medicine Europe would study for five hundred years, and Ibn Rushd carried Aristotle back to a West which had forgotten him. Caliphs, viziers and merchants paid the bills. Enslaved East Africans drained the salt marshes of southern Iraq until they rose in the Zanj Rebellion, and heavily taxed peasants carried the empire on their backs. The libraries burned when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258. The Golden Age taught us how knowledge is translated and preserved. It did not ask who carries the weight of the scholar’s leisure.

The Song Dynasty Renaissance (960–1279 CE)

Song China invented much of what the modern world takes for granted. Bi Sheng set movable type four centuries before Gutenberg, Shen Kuo described the magnetic compass, Su Shi and Li Qingzhao wrote poetry still read today, and Zhang Zeduan painted a whole living city along a river at festival time. An emperor, Huizong, was himself a painter, and an examination system opened government, at least in principle, to talent rather than birth. Yet the peasantry paid the taxes, the north was lost to invaders in 1127, and foot-binding spread among the very families who enjoyed the flowering. Song China asked how merit might replace birthright. It did not ask why half its people were bound to stay at home.

The Italian (Florentine) Renaissance (c. 1350–1600)

This is the renaissance everyone means when they say the word. Petrarch, Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Leonardo, Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Raphael and finally Galileo, all brought into being by the money of the Medici, the Sforzas and the popes. Banking families bought beauty and bought themselves into history with it. The wool workers of Florence rose in the Ciompi Revolt and were put down. Savonarola lit the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Inquisition followed, and Renaissance navigation carried Europe to the Americas, where entire peoples paid for its genius. Florence taught us that the individual human being could be the measure of all things. It did not ask which individuals were permitted to measure.

The Harlem Renaissance (c. 1918–1937)

Harlem in the 1920s proved that a renaissance could rise from the people the culture had been built to exclude. Alain Locke named it The New Negro. Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen and Jean Toomer wrote it. Duke Ellington and Bessie Smith played it, and Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage gave it form. White patrons such as Charlotte Osgood Mason and promoters such as Carl Van Vechten opened doors, and often held the keys. Duke Ellington played at the Cotton Club to audiences his own neighbors could not join. Then the Depression arrived, and Harlem’s working families, never lifted by the flowering, were the first to fall. Harlem showed that genius is everywhere. It did not ask why genius still needed someone else’s permission to be heard.

The Flower Child Renaissance (San Francisco, 1950s–1970)

My own generation believed we had found one. Ginsberg read Howl, Ferlinghetti published it and went to trial for it, Kerouac took to the road, Snyder took to the mountains, Kesey took to the bus, and Brautigan went trout fishing in America. Then came the music: the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Santana, and the posters of Wes Wilson, Stanley Mouse and Rick Griffin. Bill Graham, the record companies and the magazines turned it into product. The runaways of the Haight went hungry, Joplin was dead by 1970, and Altamont closed the decade in violence. Joan Didion, standing in the middle of it, saw the center not holding. The Flower Child Renaissance promised that freedom could be bought, sold and broadcast. It did not ask whether a freedom handed to us by those who profit from it is freedom at all.

We see that although renaissances slowly, methodically bring about technological and creative and scientific advances they leave the big questions we are asking untouched.

How Could The 21st Century Renaissance Be Different?

The disorder which creates this 21st Century renaissance arrives with all the expected chaos and disruption. It is extreme & proves to be breaking down individual psyches and institutional systems everywhere, disguised as civilization collapse.

We experience extreme friction in dystopian forms of weaponized capitalism, weaponized technology, and weaponized education, weaponized health care and social networks.

We see a vast majority of humans reject technology, which they have come to see as technology weaponized against them. We see a backlash which takes on a profound desire to return to authenticity & human meaning.

But deep beneath the surface chaos and violence- in the depths where most of us don’t think to look, the tides of change are relentlessly at work.

As I write this, advanced computer tech is being applied to translating speech patterns of other species into understandable content. For the first time in history transforming previously incomprehensible communication patterns into intelligible form.

This works as the electronic wave forms of speech patterns recorded from other species are fed into engineered intelligence which then translates these into comprehensible language. Thus, for the first time in history we have a method to understand what other species are thinking and a way of stretching beyond human limitations in doing science

This is revolutionary because it will bring a recognition that we humans are not the only conscious and intelligent species. As if this were not revolutionary enough, similar tech applied to patterns of human history and civilization will bring even more interesting revelations.

This is inevitable, that as we learn to input waveforms from broad historical & psychosocial patterns we will see broad strokes of human experience & interaction come into sharper focus.

One of the patterns, already revealed by my own independent research, is the power of Socratic-style thinking, language and epistemological reasoning to achieve positive change.  I have achieved this in my own by work by maintaining my independent status. Our independent work product, preserved through smaller groups and with AI agents, will help achieve democratization. Even within institutions, independence and small working groups may improve work products.

Before the present the sheer quality and quantity of this work would have been impossible for someone like me to accomplish. If someone like me can achieve it so can millions of others.

We observe fellow humans attempting to revert to nontechnical ways, as technocrats double down on their own desire to use tech to enhance their own power at the expense of others.

This is exacerbated by the violent social disruptions and while some violence and discontent is to be expected, violence achieves nothing but further disruption.

If we cannot use violence, or speaking truth to power, or by petitioning that power change using civil disobedience, then what are our options?

Especially when the powerful begin using technology against us in increasingly more threatening ways. It is precisely here as the techno-feudalists threaten us most aggressively that we begin using peaceful tactics which will slowly, methodically, beat them at their own game.

It is the very nature of the Socratic question and dialogue which bring about personal agency and independent well-being. This methodology offers the time and space for reasoned dialogue and for peaceful resolution.

When we ask someone a question, we signal that we wish to know what they think, creating the opportunity for peaceful engagement.

While it is not a hard and fast set of rules, and may be manipulated unfairly, it offers a much greater chance of an actual meaningful dialogue than the alternatives.

It is Socratic methodology conducted over time which offers the best alternative to our current method of standing at odds with our fellow humans.

For it is in realizing that our former tactics:  violence, speaking truth to power, and petitioning power to change using civil disobedience, are useless, that we discover the truth. The truth, that although we are taught that these methods work, they simply fail in practice. It is only by recognizing what has failed, and what the alternatives may be, that we become motivated to try other methods. Socratic method is that failed alternative at this point. It may not be monolithic, there may be others to try, but it offers a way of arriving at other alternatives.

Power Corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

A corruption exacerbated by the perceived actions of the techno-hamlets as they couch the technology in paradoxical terms of apocalyptic and utopian fantasies. They target these to attempt to appeal to the most base and unrealistic of human desires.  These promote unworkable utopian visions. Imagining engineered intelligence as a Fountain of Youth & as the path towards a utopian society. A utopia set against an apocalyptic vision of  engineered intelligence as a Terminator - threatening human extinction

This utopian fantasy is sold by catering to both fear and fascination - targeting the sales pitch to the basest of human desires. Cheap salesman’s tactics to make the customer an offer they cannot refuse. In this case the offer they cannot refuse is a heady mix of a science fiction fantasy. A science fiction fantasy of an apocalyptic socialist utopia.

Sparking a formidable backlash as humans overwhelmingly begin to believe that Super Intelligence will threaten all human creativity and native intelligence. A threat resulting in generalized human insecurity and feelings of inadequacy.